The Millennium!
Part 2. Continued from part 1
Back to the Garden!
Another major change that will occur during the Millennium is that the curse will be partially lifted, which will mean a lot of different and better conditions, thank the Lord! The Earth will be like it was during the days of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden! The curse and the results of the curse will be removed and things will be partially restored to pre-curse conditions.
The earth will blossom like a rose and all God's creation will be in perfect peace and beautiful harmony and at peace with one other.--No more of man's cruelty toward man, no more of man's inhumanity to man, but all will be peace and beauty, like the Garden of Eden restored!--Heaven on Earth once again as it was in the Beginning, but even better, because we'll have Jesus! PTL!
"For in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water. And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by. And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the Garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, and are inhabited." (Is.35:6,7 ; Ez.36:34,35 .)
"Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof!" (Ps.96:11 .)--Are the Heavens rejoicing and is the Earth glad today? Paul tells us that the whole Earth is groaning today, not rejoicing!--"The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, waiting to be delivered"! (Rom.8:22,23 .) The whole Creation, in a sense, is under the curse of sin and the Devil and his demons and his pests and vipers and thorns and thistles and sin and sickness etc. But in the Millennium, it will be partially delivered and greatly restored!
"Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice!" (Ps.96:12 .) Nowadays, whenever you hear the wind blowing through the trees, does it sound like the trees are rejoicing?--It's more of a moaning, sighing sound, sometimes almost enough to give you the willies! You never hear it sounding happy, do you? Well, I don't know how the Lord's going to do it, but when He comes and takes over the World, the trees are going to be glad and rejoice!--They will actually sound happy!
Did you know that right now, all the sounds in nature are in a minor key and have a little sad note to them? Even the birds are grieving over what man has done! All nature, Paul says, is groaning and grieving over the sins of man. All of God's creation is groaning, and man's certainly doing some groaning too! Well, the day's coming when the field and the trees are going to rejoice!--"Before the Lord: for He cometh, for He cometh to judge the Earth: He shall judge the World with righteousness, and the people with His truth." (Ps.96:13 .) Hallelujah!
At last the Lord is going to redeem the earth and cause the beautiful Garden of Eden to blossom again as we rule and reign with Christ for a thousand years! The natural unsaved people who survived the Tribulation and Wrath-of-God periods will be so amazingly blessed to be able to live during this Millennial period at all, as the Earth will be relieved of the curse and the curses that have beset it, including the thorns and the thistles and the brier and all kinds of beasts and critters and creatures that are poisonous, even the poisonous flowers and grasses and so on. All these cursed things will be eliminated!
"The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den." (Is.11:6-8 .)
You never hear about a wolf lying down with a lamb nowadays, do you?--Unless the lamb is inside the wolf! Or a leopard lying down with a kid, a little baby goat?--They usually lie down with the kid inside of them too! And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together?--Usually the lion is tearing'm apart and eating'm! Neither have you heard about a little child leading them all!
Well, there was a day before the Flood when animals were the pets of man and he could talk to them and they could talk to him!--Man and the animals were at peace with each other. They didn't fight and they didn't kill and they didn't eat each other as they do today. Well, the day is coming again when there will be peace between man and the animals and you'll be able to call them by name and they'll come running like your dog or your cat, like pets, playfully. Even a little child will be able to play with them, think of that!
So it's evident that a great deal, if not all, of the curse is going to be removed. The animals will go back to being herbivorous again and won't eat each other, much less us! Isn't that beautiful? Apparently man won't eat flesh then either, we'll all be herbivorous again! Both man and beast will return to vegetarianism during the Millennium, because apparently they won't need the extra strength of animal flesh to survive. The curse will have been at least partially removed and man will no longer be suffering the ill effects of whatever it was that shortened life after the Flood.
From creation until the Flood, man was strictly vegetarian, because God said specifically at the time of Creation that He had given them every green thing, the herbs and plants and so on, to eat--just vegetables--no meat or flesh of any kind. (Gen.1:29,30 .) But after the Flood, that pre-Flood cloud covering that enveloped the Earth disappeared and those deadly cosmic rays began to come through. Instead of living eight, nine hundred or a thousand years, all of a sudden their lifespans were greatly reduced, as they are today. And man's body apparently needed extra help to survive the ravages of both the judgements of God and the toll of sin, so God mercifully gave him meat to eat. (Gen.9:2,3 .)
Of course the sceptics always make fun of these Scriptures about "the cow and the bear shall feed, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox." (Is.11:7 .) They say, "They couldn't possibly do that, they're carnivorous beasts, that's impossible, blah blah, blah blah!" Well, nothing's impossible with the Lord! (Lk.1:37.) And I have such confidence in this Book, the Word of God and the Words of Jesus and every book and every Chapter and every verse in it--I have proven so many of them to be true and have found none of them to ever fail or to be false--that I believe it means exactly what it says and that's exactly what's gonna happen! Because if they're not going to eat each other or eat us anymore, what are they going to eat?--They're going to have to graze like the ox and the calf!
"They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain (kingdom): for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea!" (Is.11:9 .) Since there's nothing that will hurt nor destroy, there will be no venomous insects or beasts or serpents or scorpions or any of those Devil's pests!--I think a lot of them will probably just be completely eliminated! But those that will still be here will become our pets!--Not pests! Even the once-deadly asps and vipers will almost be like toys for the children to play with!--No bite, no sting, no poison, no venom!
There will be no more thorns or thistles or any of the sort of thing that came after the Fall of man when God said the ground would be cursed and produce thorns and briars etc., to keep fallen man busy and out of trouble. (Gen.3:17-19 .) This, of course, will be a great blessing to the natural flesh-and-blood men of the Earth who are still going to till the land and build houses and marry and be given in marriage, etc. No doubt they will proclaim, "Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other! Truth shall spring out of the Earth; and righteousness shall look down from Heaven. Yea, the Lord shall give that which is good; and our land shall yield her increase!" (Ps.85:10-12 .)
What a wonderful place to live!--The curse will be removed, all viciousness gone, and all killing and hurting stopped! That's why I know that there aren't going to be any more cars there, no automobiles: "For nothing shall hurt nor destroy in all His holy mountain!"--Cars are one of the greatest destroyers of mankind today and kill more people than anything else.
The only forms of transportation that are going to be left will be the God-given, God-created, God-ordained ones--horses, camels, mules, wagons, etc.--which were good enough for the World for more than five thousand years before they ever heard of anything else! Most of the World lived in peace and plenty without all these God-damned, gasoline-powered, pollution-spouting, environment-hurting and life-destroying automobiles!
in the Millennial Kingdom of Jesus Christ there won't be any of these stinking automobiles belching fumes anymore, or any of these big smokey smoke-belching factories! So they won't have to worry about oil anymore! They're not going to have all of this modern destructive machinery and smoke and oil and nuclear power and whatnot! The World is going to go back to animal transportation and carriages and wagons etc.! They'll sure appreciate the animals then! Perhaps for transporting heavy loads of raw materials, foods, etc., they'll go back to sailing vessels, powered by God's Own good clean winds and currents!
The world's going to go back to those beautiful days with only the beautiful creation of God around them and the wonderful creatures of God to help them plow and power and transport what little they have to supply their meager needs, even as the poor of the World still do to this very day in the most remote parts of the Earth!
In fact, today's poorer, so-called "under-developed" nations are going to be a lot better off! They're going to be the ones that will be ahead of things then, the Third World. They'll already have their beasts of burden and oxcarts and wagons, and even their sailboats! The Third World will hardly know that anything has even happened! Life is not going to change very much for them, except it's going to be better, because they won't be oppressed by the First and Second World anymore!--Everything's going to be much better! PTL!
There will also probably be much less disease, much less sickness, etc., because in Isaiah it says that if someone dies when he's 100 years old, he'll be considered merely a child! "There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old." (Is.65:20 .)
Life is obviously again going to be lengthened to great longevity, as it was before the Flood, when men lived to be nearly a thousand years of age! If somebody died at the age of 100 you would have thought, "Poor fellow, just a babe!" And that's what it means in that Scripture, "for the child shall die an hundred years old."--In other words, anybody dying at 100 will be considered just a child!
The people over whom we rule will still be living in their natural physical bodies and will still be having children, still dying and so on. But because the curse will be removed and things will be so natural and it will be such a slower pace, they're going to live like they did before the Flood.--Everybody will live like Methuselah!--For a thousand years! (Gen.5:27 .) So the people who enter the Millennium alive are going to look like they're almost the same age at the end of the thousand years! They just won't seem to grow old anymore, or very little.--How wonderful!
Why the Millennium?!
It appears that the Millennium could be an additional period of grace for those who didn't have a chance to really hear the Gospel or really know the Lord during this life, perhaps even because of our own failure and the failure of the Church to reach the whole World with the Gospel, or at least to reach everybody we should have.--Particularly lots of children and young people who never had a chance and never knew any better, maybe lots of natives in the deepest jungles who never heard, or in the wildest wilderness--to give them a chance to hear and see and know the Lord!
But during the Millennium, everyone will be reached!--"For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." (Hab.2:14 .) How do the waters cover the seas?--Completely! So the World will be completely covered with the knowledge of the Lord and the righteous Kingdom of Jesus Christ! Hallelujah!
So it sounds like this thousand years of the Millennial rule and reign of Jesus Christ on earth will be another testing time for those worldlings who remain, the unsaved who survived the horrors that have gone before whom God has blessed with another chance, or perhaps their first chance. They may have never really heard the Gospel before, they may have never really felt the Love of Jesus before or known God's Will or His ways before! So it will be a time of learning His laws and His ways and His Love.
It's obvious from the Bible's description of the Millennium that the survivors from the age of man will be given another chance to obey through the personal rule and reign of Christ and His Children and the universal knowledge of the Lord and His Love. In fact, I think that's what the whole Millennium is all about, to give these people such a chance, otherwise there would be no point to it! If it's as some of the churches teach, just to give us a chance to wreak vengeance on our enemies and be mean to all the people who were mean to us, what good would that be?
If it's just to show how the world should have been run and just to demonstrate what man will be like under us and the angels and Jesus personally and just to kind of show-off, what purpose would there be to that?--Unless it's going to save souls or make some people better in some way or improve things somehow.
During the Millennium, His Word says that "He will destroy in this mountain (kingdom) the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations." (Is.25:7 .)--What vail?--The vail of misunderstanding, the vail of unbelief, the vail of non-comprehension of spiritual things.
In the face of the visible rule and reign of Christ on earth, His personal appearance to man, His Second Coming in mighty power and glory, His wiping out of the Antichrist and his kingdom and the imprisonment of Satan, and His obvious visible rule and reign of firm love with a rod of iron, forcing people to be good whether they like it or not, I think some are going to believe and receive who perhaps never heard before! And maybe there will be some who might even have heard, but didn't understand or couldn't believe until they saw something.
After all, that's pretty strong, powerful persuasion!--To see the Coming of the Lord and His taking over the reins of this Earth to rule and reign--that's pretty strong persuasion and enough to convince almost anybody to believe and receive! So I think the Millennium will be the time when God gives what I would call not a second chance, but a first chance to a lot of people who didn't have a chance before, because the church failed and even we failed to give'm all the Gospel!
"For in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness. The meek also shall increase their joy in the Lord, and the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. Behold, a King shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgement. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it!" (Is.29:18,19 ; 32:1 ; 40:5 .)
Everyone on earth will see His glorious power and kingdom, and everybody will believe then!--He even says, "And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord." (Jer.31:34 .)
There won't be any unbelievers then, but I'm afraid there will still be some unreceivers who won't yield and won't obey and will still be stubborn and disobedient and rebellious and iniquitous and wicked at heart and defiant--still! It's obvious from the Scriptures that there will be many who will receive it and obey and will be blessed of the Lord!--And others who will still rebel.
So it looks to me like the Millennium is going to be another testing time or trying time, a proving ground. We, the saints, who heard the Gospel and voluntarily received the Lord, will be running things under the direct supervision of the Lord. And all of the people who survived the Tribulation, the Wrath of God and the Battle of Armageddon, we're going to govern and rule over and judge and organise and teach them!
We won't have to say "Know the Lord!" because everybody will be able to see Him and they'll all know He's there! But they'll need to know a lot of other things, and we're actually going to be doing a lot of what we're doing right now! Our main job now, as Jesus put it, is "Feed My Sheep!" (Jn.21:15-17 .)--They'll all "know the Lord" and will actually see that He and His Kingdom are real, but they may not know Him as well or as personally as we do, because we already knew Him in this life and learned to know Him well and communicate with Him and love Him and live with Him and serve Him throughout this life.
So I think it will be part of our job to re-educate them and train them in the ways of the Lord! They're going to be just as human as you and I are right now.--They won't be any more supernatural in their intelligence or in their mental capacities or their learning capacities or the ways they have to learn than we are in this present age.
And the scriptures definitely confirm that the Millennium is going to be a period of learning for them: "Many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem." (Micah 4:2 .) How will He teach them His ways and give them His Word?--The same way He's trying to teach and feed them now!--Through us, His children, His "kings and priests"! (Rev.1:6 .)
"He shall rule the nations with a rod of iron!" (Rev.19:15 .)
In spite of all that visible evidence of the power of God and the people of God and the Government of God and the Son of God, Jesus Christ Himself personally ruling the Earth in the flesh from His capital at Jerusalem, there will still be people who won't like it!--The really carnally-minded and evil-minded people will still rebel against the Lord!
Sad to say, some of the people who survive into this wonderful period of the Millennium will be so stubborn and so rebellious of heart and mind and so Satanically and diabolically conditioned that, even with the Devil and his demons gone, they're going to still be of the same evil mind just naturally--natural carnal evil men! Even without the help of Satan or his devils, they're still going to be mean and we're still going to have to deal with them!
Even though the Devil and all his demons will be bound in the bottomless pit during this thousand-year period of what is going to be like heaven-on-earth, there will still be plenty of devils left behind in human form, human beings who are devils at heart and who still reject the King of kings and His Kingdom, who still resent our rule over them and their punishment and just deserts which we mete out to them, and who still rebel against our reign and power--sometimes whole nations which will rebel and refuse to obey the commandments of Christ and the dictates of His Kingdom and His officers.
That's why we'll have to rule with a rod of iron! He said He will dash the nations and their power to pieces, into shivers like a piece of pottery! (Ps.2:8,9 .) It's going to be an enforced rule, a strong iron dictatorship over the wicked. It will have to be, otherwise the wicked would never obey! So it's going to be a tough, hard, strong, forceful government!
"God is love" (1John 4:8), and today He's showing His love to the world--His patience, His mercy, His longsuffering, His forgiveness! He's showing love to the World to try to get them to love Him! But the day is coming when, if all else fails and they reject His Love, He will rule them with a rod of iron and of force!--Not because His Love failed, for Love never fails! Jesus never fails, God never fails, and God is Love, so Love can't fail! (1Co.13:8 .)
But the Christ-rejecting, love-resisting wicked of this world failed!--It's they who failed to receive His Love who cause the failure, their own failure!--The fall of the kingdoms of this Earth and the final collapse of their last great one-World Government, etc.!--Because they rejected the Love of God and the Love of Jesus Christ! So since they failed to appreciate His Love and to obey Him in love voluntarily, He is going to rule the World with a rod of iron, of force, and they are going to be compelled to serve and worship and obey Him whether they like it or not!--By force!--The force of the great God of Heaven and His Kingdom on Earth and His great World Dictator, Jesus Christ!
Talk about a dictatorship, talk about authoritarian rule, talk about totalitarianism!--The Earth has never seen and there will never be any totalitarianism as total as is going to be the Kingdom of God on Earth and the rule and reign of Jesus Christ over the World through us! That's going to be the most total, totalitarian government the World has ever known--absolute dictatorship!
They will all be compelled and forced to obey whether they like it or not!--Absolutely no democracy, absolutely no freedom of man, of wicked man!--No more wicked democracies with wicked majorities voting for wicked governments and wicked rulers in a wicked World--but a completely total totalitarian dictatorship of the righteous with Jesus Christ as Dictator!
So although in some ways life is going to be pretty normal and not so greatly changed for the natural men of this World, there is going to be one very big difference!--There will still be free will and there will still be choice, but God will not let man have his wicked way! If they choose to go their own way and try to rebel--Bam!--God is going to swat them with a rod of iron!--Bam, whammy, zap!--Whatever you want to call it!--And they'll get it quick!
Because the only thing the truly wicked and rebellious ever understand is force and violence and the rod! And God is really going to lower His rod upon them! He's going to lower the boom on them, as they say, and He's going to punish them for their sins. And we, you and I, are going to be the instruments of His punishment, the officers of His Law who are going to carry out His judgements against those who have troubled and tribulated us! For He says clearly and plainly that we shall rule and reign with Him as He rules on the Earth with a rod of iron!
"He that overcometh, and keepeth My works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations: And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of My Father." (Rev.2:26,27 .)
We'll be endued with tremendous supernatural powers to rule over them! We will be the power, we will have the force! And exactly what that rod of iron will be, God only knows! But there are instances in the Bible where people were made immobile, they were blinded, they were devoured by fire from Heaven and all kinds of things when God wanted to stop'm!--We'll have the kind of power that you see in some of these sci-fi movies, only we won't need any little ray-guns! We'll just look at them or think or point our finger at them or whatever we want to do! And they won't be able to touch us or do a thing!--We will be the power and the government in control!
We will have bodies like the angels of God which can appear or disappear at will, travel with the speed of thought or have such a rod of God's power that they can destroy God's enemies by the millions if they so choose, with the lightning of God! There will be no more crime, no more vice, no more drugs, no more riots and no more war!--Just perfect peace, total perfect peace under the iron-rule dictatorship of the Lord in which you and I will be His supermen with superpower!--Absolute Law and Order, with redistribution and sharing of the wealth and lands, etc.--Not at the point of a gun, but at the point of a rod of iron!
So the Millennium will be a period of dealing with such people and punishing them and forcing them to obey--whether they like it or not!--Or destroying them if they absolutely flatly refuse and cause us too much trouble!--That's the dark, sad side of the picture. But the happy side is that many in that day, having seen, will believe and will bow and will yield and will obey and will receive with gladness the Kingdom of God on Earth, and will become its happy citizens and members and cooperate and help us to rebuild and to reconstruct and to clean up, rehabilitate and give the World its last chance for salvation.
It's obvious from the Scriptures that, during that time, some people and nations will submit and obey and yield to the Kingdom of God on Earth, and therefore will be blessed.--But others will rebel, and therefore will be punished! "And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem"--survivors from the Battle of Armageddon--"shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles." (Zech.14:16 .)
"And it shall be, that whoso will not come up of all the families of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, even upon them shall be no rain." (Zech.14:17 .) This is going to be such a literal Kingdom on Earth and the wicked are still going to be so literally wicked that some of them are actually going to refuse to come up and worship, think of that! But if they don't obey and they don't do what they're supposed to do and they don't come up to pay homage to the King and the Kingdom of God, etc., He's going to withhold the rain from them and give them all kinds of diseases and plagues, just like He did the ancient Egyptians!--Any country that won't do what they're told to do is going to have nothing but trouble!
So there will definitely still be free will and choice during the Millennium. They won't have to submit and obey, they can rebel if they want to, but they'll be punished! And although the curse will be largely lifted and it's going to be a lot nicer World then--beautiful, wonderful, virtually Heaven-on-Earth in a way--there will still be some people there who don't belong in Heaven!--Therefore there will still be individual curses on individual people or nations who, even under those circumstances, will refuse to obey.
So again, it looks like the Millennium will be a testing time to give the survivors of Armageddon a chance to choose between the Kingdom of God and the sin already in the World since Adam and Eve!--That's the whole idea, to give'm a final test and chance! They're going to have a thousand years of another chance and mercy and goodness and peace on Earth and the very presence of Jesus Christ Himself!--Perfect government, plenty for all, peace on Earth!--A rule of Love as well as a rod of iron!--Love for those who obey, and the rod of iron for those who don't.--A thousand years to prove the Love and mercy and power of God!
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