Compiled from the writings of David Brandt Berg
When you pray the Lord's Prayer, have you ever really thought about the part, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven"? -- Luke 11:2. We who know and love the Lord already have Heaven in our hearts, thank God, but is there really much Heaven on Earth today? -- No! There is mostly confusion and selfishness and unhappiness and war and fighting and Hell on every hand!
But one day soon, the Lord is going to wipe away all of today's Hell on Earth and He's going to set up His Own Kingdom of peace and goodness and fairness and mercy and love! Then His Kingdom won't only be in our hearts, it will be all around us! God's Kingdom really IS going to come in all of its power and glory, right here on Earth! -- And then it's at last going to be "on Earth as it is in Heaven"!
But before Jesus' wonderful Kingdom is set up on Earth, there are some other things that have to happen: First, the evil Antichrist World leader and his kingdom of the Devil will come to power, and the last part of his reign will be a time of trouble called the Great Tribulation (Matthew 24:21), when the Antichrist and his forces will be fighting against God's children. -- But we will keep preaching the Gospel and doing mighty miracles to protect ourselves from him and his evil, Christ-hating Red forces! -- Revelation 13:7; 11:3-5.
Then Jesus will return "in the clouds of Heaven, with power and great glory" (Matthew 24:30), to resurrect and rapture all of His children, and we will all join Him for the wonderful Wedding Supper of the Lamb in Heaven, while the wicked anti-Christ people back on Earth will be suffering the awesome Wrath of God! -- Revelation 19:7-9; 16:all.
They will finally gather together under their Devil-possessed Antichrist leader to try to crush all their opponents -- entire religions and nations who have refused to worship the Antichrist or receive his Mark of the Beast! (Read about his wars against his opponents in Daniel 11:21-44.) Just as the Antichrist's armies think they're about to win, we will come riding down out of Heaven on flying Heavenly horses to rescue those resisting the Antichrist! We will return to Earth to win the biggest war that ever happened: The Battle of Armageddon! -- Revelation 16:14,16; 17:14; 19:11-15. In this gigantic Battle of Armageddon, the forces of God will win a glorious victory over the forces of the Devil and his Antichrist Devil-man and his whole wicked kingdom! Not a single one of the Mark-of-the-Beast-branded members of the Antichrist's kingdom will survive into the following Kingdom of Christ on Earth! -- Revelation 19: 19-21. It is then, after this big battle, that we, the saints of God, along with our King, Jesus Christ, will take over this World and set up the Kingdom of God on Earth, to rule it and run it the way it should have been run if Man had obeyed God! -- Revelation 5:10; 20:4.
This amazing period of God's Kingdom on Earth is called the "Millennium", which is an old Latin word meaning 1,000 years. -- Which is exactly how long this period will last -- for 1,000 years! The Bible says that all those who were resurrected and raised to meet Jesus at His Second Coming will be very blessed during the Millennium, because "they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years!"-Revelation 20:5-7.
During the entire 1,000 years of the Millennium, the Devil will be chained up as a prisoner and held in God's prison, the bottomless pit! For a thousand years he will no longer be able to bother us and no longer be able to lead the other fallen angels and evil spirits across the Earth to bother Mankind! -- See Revelation 20:1-3.
Jesus Himself is then going to rule the Earth in Person, and we will help and rule and reign with Him! He will reign from shore to shore, and we, His children, will no longer be the poor, persecuted few as we are today! -- We, together with the resurrected Christians of all ages, will then number in the millions and the billions, and we are going to rule with Jesus over the remaining good people. These people, even though they weren't saved, resisted the Antichrist and refused his Mark, therefore God mercifully allowed them to live through the Antichrist reign, and even survive the following period of the Wrath of God and the Battle of Armageddon! They are the "blessed" whom the Bible speaks of in Daniel 12:12 who live on into the Millennium.
All the evil Gospel-rejecting people who received the Mark of the Beast will have been slain in the Battle of Armageddon, but millions of people will live on into the Millennial Kingdom of Jesus Christ where they will have their chance to hear and know the Truth under the loving rule and reign of Jesus Himself and us, His resurrected followers! Multitudes will turn to Jesus in those days!
Under the mighty and powerful rule and reign of Christ and God's children, there will be no wars and the World will be ruled fairly and well with true fairness, freedom, peace, plenty and happiness for all! The Bible says, "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more!" -- Isaiah 2:4.
Just think, there will be no more war! -- No more weapons of the wicked or horrible fighting or bombing or killing like there is in Man's World today! In that day, when Jesus is King and we are His law enforcers, they will remake their weapons of war into tools of peace! PTL!
During the Millennium, all of us, God's saved children, will have new, powerful, supernatural resurrected bodies! But the rest of the World -- those who were blessed enough to live through God's judgments on the World and the Battle of Armageddon into the Millennium -- are going to still be in their old natural bodies. So life is sort of going to go on as usual in a lot of ways for them! A lot of them will live almost like they are living now: They'll still have to grow food and make clothes and live in a normal natural World, the same World they're living in now! -- Only all the big cities, industrialization and pollution will be destroyed! Everyone will live much more naturally and close to the land, as God intended Man to live!
One big difference is that the curse which came upon Man and on the Earth because of Man's sins will be partly lifted, so that a lot of things will be a whole lot better, thank the Lord! The Earth will be almost like it was during the days of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before they sinned and God had to curse things to punish them. (See Genesis 2:8-15; 3:17-19.)
We who love Jesus now will be like supermen then, like Angels of God, with new miraculous bodies that will never get hurt, weary, weak or sick! But even the normal Earthly people that we will be ruling over, who will still be in their natural fleshly bodies, will have much less disease and sickness. It says that anyone who dies at 100 years old will be thought of as just a child! -- See Isaiah 65:20. People will again live to be hundreds and hundreds of years old, just like they did before the Flood! Some people back then lived to be nearly a thousand years of age! -- Genesis 5:27.
The Bible says that not only Man, but all of Creation will be made free from most of the Curse and everything will be much better than today! -- Romans 8:19-21. It even says that "the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the baby goat; and the calf and the young lion will lie together also; and a little child shall lead them! -- And the cow and the bear shall feed together; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat grass like the ox. The nursing child shall play on the hole of the poisonous snake, and the toddler shall put his hand on the viper's den!" -- Isaiah 11:6-8. You never hear about a wolf lying down with a lamb today, do you? -- Unless the lamb is inside the wolf! Or a leopard lying down with a little baby goat? -- They usually lie down with the goat inside of them too! And what about the calf and the lion together?-Usually the lion is tearing them apart and eating them! Neither have you heard about a little child leading them all! The day is coming when there will be peace between Man and the animals and you'll be able to call them by name and they'll come playfully running to you like your pets, like a dog or a cat does now!
All the animals will eat only plants and vegetables and fruit, and they won't hurt each other or us! -- Isn't that beautiful? And Man won't eat them for meat either! "For nothing shall hurt nor destroy in all My Holy Kingdom!" -- Isaiah 11:9.
And do you know how the normal Earthly people will travel during the Millennium? -- On horses, camels, donkeys, wagons, sailing ships and things like that! Because all that will be left is what God has created and given Man to use, God's creations and Man's good inventions, which were good enough for the World for almost six thousand years before they ever heard of anything else!
Just think! -- There won't be any more stinking cars or trucks belching out smoke and fumes and killing people, or any big smokey stinky factories! They're not going to have any more evil machines and motors that destroy things with all their smoke and oil and pollution and evil weapons! The World is going to go back to animal transportation and carriages and wagons! -- They'll sure be thankful for the animals then! For moving large and heavy loads of materials, food etc. they'll even use sailing ships, powered by God's Own good clean winds and breezes!
Why do you think the Lord is going to have this 1,000-year rule of His Kingdom on Earth over normal, natural men? Well, it will give a chance to be saved to all those who survive and live into the Millennium who never really got to hear the Gospel or know the Lord during this life. -- Especially lots of children and young people who never had a chance, and also lots of natives in the deepest jungles and hard-to-reach places and "closed countries" who never heard. It will give them all a chance to hear and see and know the Lord! During the Millennium, everyone will be reached with the Good News of Salvation! -- "For the Earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea!" -- Habakkuk 2:14. How do the waters cover the seas?-Completely!
It will be much easier for people to believe and receive Jesus during the Millennium, because they will be able to actually see Him and His mighty power and have proof that He is real! Instead of just believing in the Lord and accepting Him by faith as we do today, they will then be given the chance to believe by actually being able to see the Kingdom of God and Christ on Earth and His Saints in power and ruling the World! But, like "Doubting Thomas" in the Bible, they will probably not be blessed as much we who are now believing and receiving and obeying by faith alone, without seeing! (See John 20:29.)
The Millennium will most likely be the time when God gives a first chance to a lot of people who didn't have a chance before, because the church failed or maybe even we failed to give them all the Gospel! everyone on Earth will see the Lord's glorious power and Kingdom, and everyone will believe then! The Bible says, "No longer shall every man teach his neighbor and his brother, saying, `Know the Lord', for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them." -- Jeremiah 31:34.
We won't have to say "know the Lord" then! -- Because everybody will be able to see Him and they'll all know Him! But they won't know Him as well as we do, because we already know Him in this life and are learning to love Him and live with Him and serve Him now. So it will undoubtedly be part of our job to teach them and train them in the ways of the Lord!
Even though there won't be any unbelievers then, there will still be some unreceivers, sad to say! Even though they will see the power of God and the people of God and the Kingdom of God and the Son of God personally ruling the Earth, there will still be some wicked people who won't like it, who will refuse to submit to our loving rule!
Can you imagine? -- All men on Earth will have the chance, under Jesus Christ Himself in person, to learn to do good, and will have every advantage under our loving Heavenly administration, yet some will still willfully, defiantly rebel. Isaiah 26:10 says, "Let favor be shown to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness; in the Land of Uprightness (the Millennial Kingdom of Christ on Earth), will he keep on behaving unjustly, and refuse to behold the majesty of the Lord!"
In fact, at the end of the Millennium, God is going to test all of the Earthly people to see who has really received Him and who has rejected Him. He will let the Devil out of prison for just a short while, and all of the rebels will follow the Devil again and try to fight against all of the good Earthly people who have received Jesus and His Kingdom! -- But the Lord will be so angry with them that He will just get rid of them once and for all and burn up them and the whole surface of the Earth in a flood of fire called "The Battle of Gog and Magog"! -- Revelation 20:7-9; 2Peter 3:7,10.
All of the people who received Jesus will be spared, and God will then reform the melted surface of Earth by creating a New Earth, which you can read all about in our "Here's Heaven" article! -- Revelation 21:1; 2Peter 3:12,13. So another purpose for the Millennium is to serve as a time of sifting, to sift the good from the bad, so when it comes time for the final "Great White Throne Judgment" at the end of the Millennium, they will have clearly made their choice and be either worthy of Heaven or Hell. (See our article, "Heaven, Hell and In-between".)
Many of the people during the Millennium will still be so stubborn and slow to change that they're still going to disobey, even with the Devil gone, and the Bible says that we will have to rule over them with a rod of iron! -- Revelation 2:27; 19:15. It's going to be a forced rule, a strong iron rule over the rebellious and disobedient. -- It will have to be, or else many people would never obey!
Thank the Lord, we'll have great supernatural powers which will make our job of ruling them easier, powers like you've seen in some science fiction movies! We'll be able to just look at them or think or point our finger at them and they will be frozen, pushed back and stopped from doing evil or completely destroyed! And they won't be able to touch us or do a thing to hurt us!
We will be like the Angels of God: Able to appear or disappear whenever we want, fly from one place to another as fast as we can think it, or have such a rod of God's power that, if we need to, we can smite God's enemies and rebels with the lightning of God! So there'll be very little crime or evil, no more riots and no more war! -- Just total peace under the government of the Lord, in which you and I will be His supermen with super-powers!
The Kingdom of Jesus Christ in the Millennium will be a perfect Kingdom, a perfect government, with anointed rulers -- you!-You're going to run it! The Lord said that He would make you a ruler over many cities! You can rule a city or a whole country or a whole continent, whatever you are able to handle, depending on the training you've already had and depending on your faithfulness and your obedience to the Lord while here and now!
Jesus said that "He that was faithful with very little, will be faithful also with very much." -- Luke 16:10. He even said, "Because you have been faithful in a very little, I will make you ruler over ten cities!" -- Luke 19:17,19. We're going to rule real, down-to-Earth, Worldly cities, countries, nations and continents, and teach and train real, physical, down-to-Earth people just like you and I are now! It's all going to be very real, and it's all going to actually happen!
But it seems like the Lord has so few Christians today who really give all their lives to Him, forsaking all to Jesus, really loving Him and only wanting to do what He wants, that He will probably have a hard time finding enough people to fill all the jobs that will need to be done! Thank God He will be able to use a lot of those faithful ones who have gone on before, all the millions of dedicated Christians from past ages who will be there with us, as well as good people of the Earth.
There are going to be all kinds of grades and classes and levels of Christians! I'm sure the great Prophets and Apostles and heroes of the Bible and of History, who were so faithful to the Lord in their lives on Earth, will be trusted with a lot of big jobs in the next life! -- And just where each of us is going to be and just how much each of us will be trusted with will depend a lot upon how faithful we are to Him and the job He's given each of us to do here and now!
Right now we are in training for the days when we will rule the Earth! -- But before we can do that, we must first learn to rule ourselves! So God is now having us train and practice for what is going to be the real thing, and how well we do now is going to have a lot to do with how well we will do in the future.
So remember, everything you're being taught now and doing now and the decisions you're making now and the lessons you're learning now are all a part of your schooling and your training here and now so you can be greatly used by the Lord there and then! -- If not, a lot of what we're doing now would be a big waste of time, except for what little we get done here, which isn't very much compared to what we will do then! So let's really try to learn our lessons today and learn to be faithful and obedient servants of the Lord now so He can trust and bless us with a place of blessing and usefulness to Him and others tomorrow, in the beautiful Kingdom of God on Earth during the Millennium! -- When you and I will rule and reign with our King of kings, Jesus!
-- Are you preparing now to rule with Him when He comes?