The reign of Jesus Christ during the Millennium is going to be a mixture of Heaven on the earth that now is, and over the unsaved who now are, or who will be at that time. It will be a reign of Jesus Christ and His children over what is left of this World and its unsaved populations. We, the born-again, saved, resurrected saints will be in our new supernatural bodies, but the rest of the World, those who have been spared and blessed enough to survive into the Millennium, are going to still be in their old natural bodies. Therefore life is sort of going to go on as usual in a lot of ways for them!
The Millennium will be almost like an extension of this age now, because the World and its people will still be living in time. But to us who are resurrected and raptured at the Coming of Christ, time shall be no more! (Rev.10:6 .)--We will not be bound by time any longer! But those who still remain on the Earth, having survived the horrors of the Wrath of God upon the wicked, will still be bound by time.
The earth will still be living in time.--The unregenerate, unsaved people who survive the holocaust of God's Wrath, first of all the Antichrist's wrath and then Armageddon and Christ's Wrath--who by some miracle manage to survive it, who are blessed by being allowed to survive it--will still be bound by time and space here on Earth just as we were before we left with Jesus.
But for us, time shall be no more!--And in some ways, space will be no more! In other words, we will not be bound by time or space! We will be able to just wish ourselves anywhere and we will be there with the speed of thought!--And of course we'll only wish to do God's Will and we will be messengers of His Will.
But the normal, natural people are going to be the same then as they are now!--Human beings still in their mortal bodies whom God's blessed by allowing them to live through the horrors that preceded.--And they're going to feel blessed, too, when they realise that they managed to be Millennial survivors! But they will live almost exactly like they are living now: They'll still have to go out fishing, they'll still have to raise food, they'll still have to make clothes, they'll still have to live in a normal natural World--in fact, the same World they're living in now!
The natural men are going to be just what they are now, only they will be under our government. So for them, things are going to be exactly like they are today, except for one big difference: We'll be the top dogs, the officers, the supreme rulers! We'll be in charge, Jesus and His Kingdom will be the government, and we'll be His governors, His officers, His leaders, His rulers of the World! "We shall be kings and priests unto God," He says (Rev.1:6), and we will rule the Earth!
So in some ways, the Millennium will be almost like a repeat, like a movie you've seen before, but there will be quite a few big differences!--Mainly, that we're going to be running the World instead of them, and we're going to have a lot of supernatural help and advantages! We'll have supernatural bodies and wisdom and skill and power and protection and we'll change a lot of things for the better!--PTL!
In order for the Lord and us to establish a nice, beautiful, good, clean heaven on earth, we'll first have to clean up the hell on earth that the Antichrist and his demon-possessed people left behind!--And the horrible slaughter left behind by God's Own judgements and our Battle of Armageddon against them! So there will certainly be some cleaning up to do! In Israel alone, it's going to take seven months just to bury all the dead, and seven years to clear away all the wreckage of the instruments of war, to clear away and burn the weapons and vehicles of war, etc.!--Seven years to clean up the rubble, debris and wreckage left behind by the terrible Battle of Armageddon! (Ez.39:9,14 .)
So that will be our first job during the first seven years of the Millennium: Directing the worldlings and the survivors in this big clean-up operation! It sounds like it will be a pretty big assignment and a tough job, and I'm sure it will be!--But with supernatural bodies and supernatural power and the wisdom of God and the Lord's direction, organisation and Heavenly government, I'm sure it won't be too difficult for us!
It'll be a wonder that the Lord and us will ever be able to straighten things out!--But we will, according to His Word! PTL! "And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. And ye shall be named the Priests of the Lord: men shall call you the Ministers of our God: ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves." (Isa.61:4-6 .)
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! (Continued in part III)