The Age of the Kingdom, No. 3

DS10B

© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1974)

We are looking now at the dispensation of the kingdom which is a world arrangement which is to be established at the Second Advent of Christ. The Kingdom Age, of course, is very distinct from the three previous dispensations: that of the gentiles; of the Jews; and, of the church age. We have a more specific timetable for the Kingdom Age than we have for the other dispensations, and it will be an age of great divine blessing on all of mankind. So it will be man's golden hour. One of the things that will be unique about that age will, of course, be that perfect environment will be once more restored upon the face of the earth as Adam and Eve enjoyed in the Garden of Eden.

The Conditions of the Kingdom Age

We have begun to look at the world conditions that would exist during the Kingdom Age.
  1. No Religion

    We saw, first of all, that one of the things that would be true is that there would be no religion on the face of the earth during the reign of Christ here in that 1,000 years. Since Satan and his demons are removed from the earth at this time, there can be no religion. There can be only genuine worship of the visible Christ. There will be none of this seeking to approach God on the basis of human merit.
  2. Spirituality

    Secondly, there will be an ecstatic expression of spirituality which will be in order. Joel tells us about this. This passage in Joel is not something that took place on the day of Pentecost, but rather, as is indicated by the context, it is something that will take place when certain fantastic effects will be seen in outer space and in the planetary world. These have not yet taken place. At this time during the millennium there will, again, be no Satan to distort a person's emotions, and so there will be true expressions of emotions because they will be guided by the knowledge of the Word of God which will be widespread.

    We have mentioned for you the fact that the premillennial interpretation of Scripture, which we hold to in this church, believes in a literal reign of Christ for this 1,000-year period on the earth. It is called premillennial because Jesus Christ comes before the millennium; and, then comes the golden age. The amillennial interpretation of Scripture rejects the idea that there will ever be any 1,000-year rule of Christ upon the earth from an earthly throne. In other words, amillennial means we don't anticipate any kingdom at all. The vast majority of people who attend churches; the vast majority of churches; the vast majority of pastors; the vast majority of congregations; and, the vast majority of theological schools hold the amillennial position. The vast majority of Bible departments, for example, in colleges which are evangelical hold this position. I'm not talking about the liberals, although the liberals would hold to the amillennial position also. All of them hold that there is no millennial future for the Jewish people and that the earth will never be ruled by Jesus Christ from an earthly throne.

    So this is a very vital question, and we will probably will be looking at that particular phase of it a little more in the future. However, what we are studying in this session is what the Bible reveals about a very special era in human history, and you don't have to read very long before you have to say to yourself, "These things have never happened. Mankind has never enjoyed conditions which are here described. Obviously, this has to be in the future." Well, even the amillennialist will say, "You are right. This has never been true in human history." So he converts this into an experience in heaven. He says that these wonderful things are symbolic language for man's marvelous dwelling with God in heaven. Of course, that is spiritualizing the Word of God.

  3. Israel Restored as a Nation

    The third factor that will be true in the millennium is that Israel will be restored as a nation. The Bible in many places predicts this: Isaiah 5:26-30; Isaiah 10:21-22; and, Zachariah 8:20-23 all refer to the Jewish people coming together as a nation on the earth once more. When the Jewish nation is under divine blessings, the nations of the world are blessed also. When the Jewish people are not in a position where they are a nation under the blessing of God, the gentile nations also lack the real genuine blessing of God in the fullest sense of divine blessing. Esther 8:10-17 reveals to us that when the Jews are blessed, the gentiles are blessed.

    However, when the Jew is restored as a national entity in belief--not in unbelief, as they are today--Jerusalem will become the worship center of the world. This will be the position it holds in the millennium (Zachariah 8:20-23). Obviously, never in human history has Jerusalem been the worship center of the whole world. This has to be predicting something that must yet be in the future. Today, the Jews which have gathered in a limited area of the land of Palestine are not the fulfillment of this regathering of the nation because they have come together in that nation in rejection of their Messiah Jesus Christ--not in acceptance of Him. However, it is a preview of what is going to happen of the Jewish nation being brought together once more.

    The political capital of the millennium will also be Jerusalem, just as the religious capital of the millennium will be Jerusalem. Isaiah 2:1-3 tell us about that. The King, Jesus Christ, will take up his actual physical residence in Jerusalem (Joel 3:17). The presence of God will again be evidenced by the cloud and the pillar of fire hovering over the city of Jerusalem (Isaiah 4:5). From this center, the Word of God will go out throughout the world (Isaiah 2:3). It's obvious that none of these conditions have ever been known in the world, and they're certainly not known today. So the doctrine of dispensations is a fact. You either have to accept the fact that you have predictions in the Scriptures such as these concerning the nation of Israel that are yet to be fulfilled, or else you have to dismiss the whole idea of an earthly kingdom.

    That, of course, is what the amillennialist does. He says, "I'm just going to interpret all these things in a spiritualized sense. I'm going to apply all these things to heavenly blessings. I'm not going to talk about a throne on earth. I'm going to talk about God's throne in heaven. I'm not going to talk about God residing and ruling over the nation of Israel. I'm going to talk about God residing in heaven and ruling over the born again people there. It's just a total distortion of the normal meaning of words.

    So the doctrine of the dispensations is in the Scriptures because it reveals to us, obviously, conditions which have never existed. You have to do some real distorting to get rid of that.

  4. Peace

    Another feature of the Kingdom Age will be certain universal worldwide results. One of the most happy results will be peace. It's difficult for us to imagine a world of perfect peace where there is not one single conflict. The Word of God tells us that during the Kingdom Age, armaments will simply be destroyed. Every gun and every instrument of warfare will be destroyed. They won't have to hold any disarmament conferences. One of the first things the King is going to do is disarm the whole world. All weapons of warfare will be turned into useful instruments of agriculture and other things so that the result will be worldwide peace. There will be no brushfire wars. There will be no wide-scale battles. There will be no nation threatening another nation with military activity against them. It'll be absolute peace all over the world. We have this taught in Isaiah 2:4 and in Micah 4:3.
  5. Prosperity

    Another thing that will be achieved is prosperity. Psalm 72:7 and Psalm 72:16 describe a condition of worldwide prosperity. If there's anything that the world is interested in today, it's prosperity. If there's anything that the unbeliever seeks today, as well as the Christian, it's material prosperity. Yet, look at the economic life of the world today. Here again is an indication of how wrong the amillennialist is. One of the things that is to accompany the golden age of mankind is prosperity, where a person lacks nothing. He has everything he needs to eat; he has everything he needs to possess; and, he has all the physical factors that he needs for comfort in his life. Everything in a material way that he needs is provided, and luxuries along with them. This will be prosperity in its finest sense.

    But how are we today? Let's just look at this feature in itself for a moment because it's an excellent example of the problem that the amillennialist faces when he says, "We've had all this. None of this is going to come to pass. We are currently experiencing these good times." Well, you could look at a nation like the United States, and an amillennialist would say to you, "Don't you think God has prospered and blessed us as a nation? Don't you think the Lord has prospered and blessed you? Look at how some of these poor people live here in other nations." You know how your mother used to say when you didn't want to finish a bowl of cereal or something and she would say, "The children in Russia are starving. And you want to throw out your food? Once when I said that to one of my kids, he said, "Well give it to the Russians." That was a very gracious attitude on his part. Compared to other nations, we are prospered.

    In college I once spoke to a student who was a proponent of the amillennial position. I said, "What do you think the Bible means when it says that God is going to give a land to the Jewish people, and he will bless that land?" He said, "Well, don't you think God has given you a land of blessing in the United States?" Being a good professional Bible student headed for the seminary, he was real good at getting emotional over the land that God has blessed us with. Well that's not what it's talking about. It's talking about a prosperity such as we have never experienced. However, considering how prosperous we are in this nation today, let's take a look at what our condition is economically.

    For one thing, the economic life of all nations is increasingly a cause for alarm to anybody who's got any brains at all. We see that the economic condition of nations is bordering on chaos, and one kind of crisis after another. We ourselves have been through energy crises which is the most ridiculous thing on the face of the earth. It is the direct result, in large measure, of government policy and intervention. The government leaders in this country know it, and that's why they're pointing their fingers at you and saying, "You're a bunch of energy hogs." They're saying all kinds of disreputable things about the American people. Why? Because we use a third of the world's energy, and we're only 6% of the world's population.

    However, the thing that these same idiots we have in Congress fail to mention is that we also produce 50 percent of the world's goods. That's why we use more of the energy. Because we can produce that much, we have a higher standard of living, and that's why we can use more energy. Most people in the rest of the world couldn't use the energy if they had it. That's why we're going over to Russia now, and we're going to help her to develop her oil fields. This is because under their system, technology simply does not blossom. This is the basis of prosperity--technology. All of the technology that Russia has, basically, has come from the Western world.

    A professor at Stanford University has written four excellent books--three of them are together, and one is a separate book. Three of them are a monumental work in which he has shown in detail how since 1917, the progress in the development of Russian technology and in the technology of the communist world has come entirely from the Western world. We have handed it to them, and we're doing it today. We're giving them vast information of a technological nature that they could never secure. Then they learn it; they copy it; and, they try to reproduce it. A communist country simply is not capable of producing a basis of prosperity. Our technology has, in part, been the reason we have been able to protect ourselves in every war, and why (when we were out to win wars) we'd always win the war. This technology is what is going to make our enemies equal to us and capable of defeating the United States of America so that the power of the world can swing over to Western Europe where it must reside under the rule of the man of sin.

    Well, prosperity today is terrible in this nation. The cost of living is constantly on the rise. We have had years when it was 16% above what it was a year earlier. We hope to slow inflation down, but they say it's going to be there. Private and public debt in this nation are forever rising. Welfare and wage demands are skyrocketing. The government deficit is at an all-time high. Our deficit spending is out of control. It's unbelievable the amount that we are going to spend in this country today through our government--money that we just do not have, nor will we ever have. Unemployment is a recurring problem. Many Americans are straining to live on more than one paycheck in a family, and it's a hassle to do that.

    Yet, there have been a series of sophisticated economic systems that have been tried out by mankind, and every one of them has been a failure. If there's anyplace that mankind prides itself, it is to be able to handle the economy of a nation. Man is very arrogant concerning his ability to handle his material things. Yet, what has been the history of mankind on bringing prosperity to the world? That's the cry: "These underdeveloped nations--these have-nots--we are going to see that they get something. We are going to share with them that which we have in this country."

    Well, the science of economics is one science which is not exact. Everybody knows that--most of all, the economists. Consequently, they're helpless in the theories they come up with. The reason for this uncertainty is the fact that human nature is greedy and unpredictable. Therefore, all of the theories of the economists come to naught. There are a few important power structures in this country (decision-making structures in this country), that can sway the whole economy. These lie in business, labor, and government. The whole nation's well-being can be determined by those decisions. The energy crises that we have had are the result of decisions that our government made. The attempt to restrict the cost of things, for example, caused energy companies to discontinue exploring, and caused them to sell to foreign nations. We live in a prosperous nation. It's a prosperity that's hanging by a thread. Yet, this is not because we lack these things, but because mankind has never been able to come up with an economic system that works. And we've had all kinds of them.

    The major causes of the disrupting of a nation's economy are war, drought, and political unrest. A major cause of inflation, of course, is overspending--particularly on armaments and on war. What the governments do is that they print money to cover, and yet there are fewer consumer goods. And when you print more money than you have production, then inflation goes up. The more money you print, the more it costs.

    I was in China during World War II, and the Chinese yuan would be like what we would call a dollar, though it wasn't equal to that, even before the war. When I was there, I would go downtown to a Chinese barber shop to get a haircut, and I would have to pay 1,200 yuan. I would have to hand the guy a great stack of bills. I'd ride a rickshaw, and I had to give him 500 yuan or something like that. I would say, "How much for the haircut in American money?" He would say, "Three pennies." 1,200 Chinese yuan was equal to three American pennies. This is one of the things that broke the back of the Chiang Kai-shek government. When they needed money, they just printed it. And when they ran out of it, they printed more. You would see people riding along the streets of Shanghai on their bicycles with a basket on front piled high with money. They were going out to do the shopping with huge sums, just to buy small amounts of things. This was because they had printed the money, but they had not made production.

    Wars in U.S. history have had this effect almost inevitably: Within five years after a war, all prices have doubled in this country. Furthermore, in other parts of the world, it has been much worse. The borrowing of money to fight a war creates huge interest payments that the government has to make. Our interest payments will soon be measured in the trillions of dollars. That's how prosperous we are as a nation. Wars ruin the industrial and the agricultural base of the nation where the wars are fought.

    Furthermore, there has been the gradual moving of people from the country to the city. When people do that, it creates vast economic problems. Governments cannot control urbanization. The result is that welfare demands rise. Low production stems from the fact that a person has a monotonous job. A person has to show up for work in the morning and he has to tighten 1,343 screws on something that comes by on an assembly line. All day long, he just takes a screwdriver, and when that screw comes by, he tightens it. The next one comes, and he tightens it. When he gets to 1,343 for the day, he can go home. That's monotony, and consequently, there's low production. However, the man who produces like that wants more pay all the time. Consequently, he wants more pay for producing less, and also he wants money to be able to buy the good things of life. And how does he get money? With credit. So this nation has a fantastic public and private credit debt.

    Suppose that tomorrow morning, everybody in this country would say, "That's all. I'm not buying anything more on credit. From now on, I'm paying cash." What would happen? The nation's economy would collapse before the day was out. We are so hung into credit now that we can't get out of it. It is credit that is destroying the nation. There are all kinds of plans that have come up to try to solve this thing. The free nations are now so desperate that they are trying to maintain their standard of living.

    One of our men who is in business recently pointed out to me that they recognize the inherent dangers of doing business with a communist country. He pointed out that his company is just handing over vast valuable technological information to the communist world so they can do business with them. He said the reason the company feels it has to do business with them is to maintain the standard of sales and to maintain the standard of living in this country. Americans have so much, we can't sell it to them anymore. We've stretched all the credit we can, so we can't sell them anymore on credit. If we don't go someplace else to sell it, we won't be able to maintain our standard of living in this country. So we're helping the enemy who is out to destroy us. This is a vicious circle.

    The average American does not know and does not understand how if it was not for the United States of America, communism would have long since been dead in the world. If it had not been for the United States of America, communism would have been ended with World War II. Stalin sat up in his office, Khrushchev told the world, and he shook like a scared rabbit when the Germans came sweeping across the border. However, the Germans, because they were arrogant fools, did not recognize that every time they came to a Russian town, the Russians met them with flowers. This is a custom in those Eastern European nations. It's a sign of respect and of welcome to give you a bouquet of flowers. They came out and welcomed the Germans, but the Germans abused the Russians because they looked down upon them. Consequently, it turned the population against them. Had it not been for that, they would have welcome what freedom and liberty could have come to them, of all things, through Nazi Germany. And Stalin thought he was finished.

    Who saved it? The good old USA. We wiped out the whole debt that saved the Russian hide. We saved them in the 1920s when they were starving. If it had not been for the food program that we sent under President Hoover's direction, they would not have survived. Now we're doing it in technology. Almost all that they know about computers, which is the key to technology, they've learned from us or from Western Europe. This is the kind of a prosperous time we live in.

    Adam Smith

    Well here are some of the plans that mankind has tried. Back in 1776, there was a man named Adam Smith who wrote a book called The Wealth of Nations. In this book, Adam Smith proposed the concept that there was an invisible hand that worked in the nation's economy to balance its wages; its production; its land; and its rent, and if the economy was left alone everything would stay in balance. What people needed, that's what industry would provide. What industry would provide, industry would charge as much as people would pay. When people would not pay more, then industry would not charge more. Employment would be guided by the fact that companies were always producing what people wanted. If people stopped buying something, a company would quit making that thing, and it would employ its people in something else. This invisible hand would constantly balance wages, desires and the law of supply and demand.

    Well this led to a policy called "laissez faire." This simply meant no government interference. Adam Smith's idea was that governments would stay out of it, and they don't disturb the economy of a nation. This is basically a true principle. However, the problem was that the old sin nature in man fouled this up. This was because the wars--particularly the French and American Revolutions--created widespread disastrous inflation. People suffered terribly under the laissez faire principle.

    Malthus

    Adam Smith was followed by David Ricardo who was a student of Smith. David Ricardo debated economic theory with another man called Robert Malthus. Robert Malthus had a very awesome and frightening theory concerning population explosion in which man would destroy himself by over-populating the earth. In any case, Malthus pointed out that laissez faire was not working. Ricardo showed that it should work beautifully, but that depended upon a peacetime situation. While these two men were debating these issues, along came the Industrial Revolution in 1815 through 1848. The result of the Industrial Revolution was that there came a few giant economic barons. They were called robber barons.

    In their hands was concentrated the economic power of the nations of the world. They had cheap labor to draw upon because people started leaving the farms in the country and going to the city. Also, they were able to work children who were sometimes less than eight years old. They would work a child for 15 hours a day. If the children work for 15 hours a day, as well as the adults, you can figure out that they had no time for anything else in life except to eat and get rested to go back and do it again the next day. The material benefits from this policy of economics was not widespread. By 1848, the exploited workers began rising up in revolt against this kind of an economic system.

    Marx and Engels

    So in 1848, the time was ripe for a new economic idea. This is man trying to bring his prosperity. I just want to give you a brief outline as to how man has fruitlessly struggled to do this. In 1848, along came Marx and Engels. They wrote the Communist Manifesto. They wanted all political and economic power in the hands of the people or the workers called the proletariat. Marx and Engels promoted the eight-hour day--that a person should have an eight-hour day, and that's what he should work. They promoted the idea of social security. They promoted several things which have now become accepted patterns in many nations. Under communism, however the old sin nature again cropped up. Workers demanded more and more--more than they were producing. They had no incentive to produce. They were cogs in a machine locked in. So they did as little as they could, and consequently, a low standard of living is characteristic of a communist nation. One of the things that plagues the communist nation is that it never can feed its people. It never can raise enough food.

    When this happened in Russia the first time, while Lenin was still alive, do you know how he solved it? When the nation was starving, and they were trying to salvage the communist system, Lenin came up with what he called the new economic policy. The new economic policy was simply a pseudonym or a cover name for capitalism. He permitted the Russian peasants to grow on their own plots and to sell in the free market. It wasn't very long before there was plenty of food in Russia. This was humiliating to him. However, when he got things back under control, it was out to the collective farms again. Stalin killed millions of Russians who rejected and dragged their feet about being put on a collective farm.

    Mill

    Well, socialist and communist theories (without pressing this here), obviously, do not work either. In the process of it, they destroy personal liberty while trying to make everybody equal. Well in 1848, another man came on the scene named John Stuart Mill. He wrote a book called Principles of a Political Economy. John Stuart Mill was one of these very brainy people. He had a 200 IQ. He was a British economist, and he came up with the idea of salvaging the laissez faire principle of no interference from government, but with a little bit of interference. Instead of Adam Smith's invisible hand running government, Mills came along and said there should be a visible hand slightly directing the economy of a nation.

    Under the influence of Marx and Mill, there were certain improvements, obviously, for the workers. Wages and benefits grew, but at the same time, depressions and unemployment continued. Mill died in 1873 which was the year of the worst depression of the nineteenth century. This was in spite of the fact that his economic theories were widespread and favored. From 1879 to 1928, unemployment averaged 10.2% in the industrial world. In prosperous times, it was 6 percent. Today, in this nation, if we have 6 percent unemployment, we consider the nation to be in the grips of a recession. Here, under these economic theories propagated by Marx, Engels, and Mills, the average unemployment was 10.2%, and along with this came panic and periods of depression, all of which were considered to be acts of God that should not be interfered with.

    Well, the economic theories of Mill continued to be taught by a professor named Alfred Marshall until Marshall's death in 1924. So the theory of Mill, along with that of what Marx had interjected on how to make the world prosperous, was the biggest thing on the scene. However, following the great stock market crash of 1929 that sent the whole world into a depression, the idea of laissez faire was completely collapsed, and the ideas of the economic theories of both Marx and Mill had proven to be again incapable of bring prosperity to the world.

    Keynes

    So the time was ripe for another man who came on the scene, and his name was John Maynard Keynes. He published a book called The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. He had been trained in the classical economic theories of Mill and Marshall. However, the great depression of 1929 severely weakened this kind of thinking, and it invited a change. So the economists, at the time of the Great Depression, were trying to encourage workers to keep accepting lower wages. They told the workers, "This is just temporary. Things are going to get better. If you will just keep accepting lower and lower wages, pretty soon everybody will be employed. It's just a temporary imbalance." But in this country, there were 13 million Americans unemployed, and they were starving, and they were wandering around--many of them--homeless.

    So the result was that Keynes came up with a new idea. The idea of Keynes in economic planning was simply this: He said that the government should spend more than it takes in. That's called deficit spending. He said, "If we will spend more than we take in, we will prime the pump, and then everything will get going." That wasn't as idiotic as it might seem, because Keynes said, "Some years, we'll have a planned deficit, but then the next year we'll have a planned surplus." He meant to have deficits sometimes and surpluses sometimes. Well, Franklin Roosevelt was enamored with idea. He faced the Great Depression and he said, "Professor Keynes, you have an idea, and we're going to incorporate that in this country."

    So we started passing budgets, in order to make this country prosperous, that spent more money than our government could possibly take in. That was called "Planned Deficits," but he also recommended "Planned Surpluses" to cool the economy, and "Planned Inflation" to prevent unemployment. So he suggested that we would have deficits half the time and surpluses half the time. Do you know how it's worked out since 1931? Since 1931, the Congress of the United States has passed six budgets with deficits to one with surpluses. In practice, we've had six deficit years to one surplus year. Why? Because human nature and government--business and labor--have caused this economic theory also to fall. People are greedy. Politicians want to keep their office. There are few politicians in Congress today who would dare stand up and say, "We will not pass a budget that spends more money than this nation takes in. We don't care how many people have to get cut out of welfare. We don't care how many super duper programs have to be cut out, or anything else. We will spend what we receive." That person would not be returned to office and they know it.

    So, are we prosperous? This nation is getting worse on the disaster road all the time. Consequently many state and many local economies face bankruptcy, as well as certain national economies. Until there's a change in the world society and until somebody can control the greedy old sin nature, this kind of economic crisis is going to continue. The world cannot reform its major economic errors, such as credit and deficit spending, without a monstrous worldwide depression. So the whole system of economics as it exists in the world today is broken. Of all of these systems that have been tried, all of which were so promising and all of which collapsed, none of these will work, and there is none that man can come up with because he cannot control the variable factor of the old sin nature.

    So the whole economic system of the world as we know today has to be scrapped. What does it need? It needs a strong hand who can bring about this change and who can control the economies of the world. That's exactly what Jesus Christ is coming to do. So when we say that one of the things that will characterize the condition of the millennium is prosperity, this is what we're talking about. Man has demonstrated that he cannot create a prosperous world, but the Lord Jesus Christ is going to come and provide that kind of an economy. Satan is going to try to do it in the tribulation. He's going to try to imitate this, and it's going to be a disaster of all times. This is because inflation (we find in the Word of God) in the tribulation will be more rampant than it is today.

  6. Knowledge of God

    Another thing that will be true in the millennium is that there will be a knowledge of God everywhere (Isaiah 11:9).
  7. Blessings

    Then also there will be certain super grace blessings upon all the nations of the world. The nations of the world will still exist as national entities (Isaiah 2:4). This is a divine institution based on Genesis 10:31-32, and the people of the world will still live during the millennium in nations. Satan is seeking international controls in order that he can destroy national sovereignties. Many leaders upon the face of the earth today are deliberately moving toward one-world controls. They want to gradually bring about a universal understanding; a universal communication system; and, universal controls. This again proves how wrong the amillennialist is. The world is trying to bring blessings that the Bible says can only come when Jesus Christ is here.

    Well, the millennium is going to saturate the world with doctrine and with the message of the Word of God. There will be no open opposition to the divine viewpoint. Satan, with his religion, is gone. True worship will be restored. Sacrifices will be practiced in the temple as memorials to the grace of God (Ezekiel 46:4, John 1:29). There will be a perfect world government instituted (Zechariah 14:9). Jesus Christ Himself will be our ruler throughout the whole world.

    Certain radical changes will take place in nature. The curse will be removed from creation (Romans 8:19-22). This went into effect at the time of the sin of Adam (Genesis 3:17-19). Well, that curse is going to be removed. Weeds will disappear from the earth. Everywhere land will become fertile. Plant life, consequently, will abound (Isaiah 35:1-10). That's going to be one of the reasons that population will greatly expand in the millennium, yet there will be plenty of food. Natural disasters will be terminated because the King will be here to control them. Flood problems will be solved.

    Nutrition will be vastly improved. Consequently, people will be considerably more healthy. After all, you sit there in your body today and remember you're nothing but a handful of chemicals. Your body functions upon certain chemical relationships. If you get the right chemicals in the right way under the right conditions, that body is going to continue to function. That's the case in the millennium.

    Animals will no longer be vicious. Their ferocity will be changed. They will be tame (Isaiah 11:6-9, Isaiah 65:25). There'll be no more poisonous snakes around. There will be no more animals to bite you and chew you up. This is a real problem for the amillennialist, isn't it? Where have we ever had the time when you could stick your hand into a cobra's den and say, "Nice cobra?" When has this ever been true? When has a child, as the Scripture says, ever been able to play with a snake? When has the lamb ever been able to lie down with a lion out in the jungle without ending up inside the lion? The amillennialist is in real trouble when he reads these Scriptures. He sits there and he shakes his head and he says, "Heaven is going to be a wonderful place. Everybody's going to be nice. This lamb speaks about my little child. This lion speaks about his father. His father now is real mean to him and bites him. But in heaven this little boy will be able to lie down by his daddy, and he won't be afraid anymore." It is something as erratic and idiotic as that--some symbolizing of language in order to stretch it out to somehow make it fit into heaven.

    The lifespan will be greatly expanded (Isaiah 65:20). People will live for hundreds of years again. Death will probably be mainly as discipline in the form of capital punishment. Along with this, there will be maximum health and complete healing for everybody.

    Perfect justice will be administered by a perfect judge all over the world (Isaiah 11:3-5). He has all the facts. His viewpoint on crime will be perfect. Crime will be rare because it will be dealt with instantly. Full power and authority will be there to enforce the judgments. Capital punishment will be there for capital crimes.

    This is going to be a great period to be alive in human history. Christians, such as you and I, are going to be ruling in this period along with the Lord. It's going to be a world that's going to be filled with righteousness (2 Peter 3:13). 2 Peter 3:14 says, "Wherefore, beloved, seeing that you look for such things, be diligent that you may be found of Him in peace without spot and blameless." Verses 17-18 say, "You, therefore, beloved, seeing that you know these things before, beware lest you also, being led away from the era of the wicked, fall into your own steadfastness, but grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be glory both now and forever. Amen.

The Lord has taken us into His confidence. He has revealed these fantastic things of the world tomorrow as it really is going to be. This will be a world that has characteristics and qualities to it that have never been true before. This is what men dream of. Every one of these things that we've mentioned, people are working toward producing. Every one of these things, the governments of the world and the leaders of the world are, in all sincerity, seeking to bring about.

Who doesn't want to see universal health? Who doesn't want to see death removed and decreased? Who doesn't want to see all nine babies live who are born, instead of just eight out of the nine? Who doesn't want to see ample nutrition? Who doesn't want to see a world in which nobody goes to bed hungry? Who doesn't want to see a world in which there is universal peace--where nobody learns war and nobody is threatening? Who does not want to see a world in which there is ample opportunity for education? Who doesn't want to see a world in which there is complete freedom to pursue your own capacities which God has given you? Who doesn't want to see a world that has animals in it that are not a threat to you?

All of these things certainly we look for now. However, without the Lord Jesus Christ, it is not possible to produce them. People want prosperity. A lot of thinking is given to making the people of the world prosperous and sharing the wealth. Every system is going to be a failure because man cannot come up with controls on the old sin nature. That's what's going to be different about the millennium. It's not only going to be that Satan is tied up and he's in prison. It's not only that all the demons have been knocked off the face of the earth. But it is going to be the fact that Jesus Christ is here to enforce. We know a lot of things today that are right and wrong, but we are not capable of enforcing them. In the millennium, our King will be able to enforce them, and you, who are believers, will be there to help him.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1970

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