What does the Bible really say about the Millennium, the prophesied 1,000-year reign of Jesus Christ? Is it a fantasy or a promise on which you can stake your future?
by Darris McNeely
In 1972 President Richard Nixon stunned the world with his historic trip from Washington to China to meet with Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong. President Nixon observed, "The chairman's writings moved a nation and have changed the world." Chairman Mao more realistically replied: "I have not been able to change it. I have only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing."
This was the assessment of one of this century's most powerful rulers about the lasting effect of his ideas and reforms on the world's most populous nation.
In a later publication President Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, reflected that Mao "could not escape the nightmare that shadowed his accomplishments and tormented his last years: that it might all prove ephemeral, that the exertions, the suffering, the Long March, the brutal leadership struggles would be but a brief incident in the triumphant, passive persistence of a millennial culture which had tamed all previous upheavals, leaving little more in their wake than the ripples of a stone falling into a pond."
What a commentary about one of the century's most influential political ideas. Communism, like so many others, has risen and fallen on the tides of time. Like many other movements, communism may yet see itself consigned to the dustbin of history. Another effort at creating a utopian world will have been tried and found wanting, joining the many other political and governmental systems that failed to last even a few centuries, much less 1,000 years or more.
Yet there is one idea, first put to writing a few thousand years ago but not born of human imagination (2 Peter 1:21), that promises a world of peace and prosperity for all. It is the biblical teaching of the 1,000-year reign of Jesus Christ on earth. We call it, appropriately enough, the Millennium.
