The New Millenium and God's Clock

by Ivan Maddox

West End Bible Fellowship

Atlanta, GA

Not long ago I mentioned to one of my friends that I was thinking about writing an article on the spiritual significance of the new millennium. My friend looked at me sharply and asked, "Is there one?" I immediately replied, "No."

As I write, the world has just finished celebrating the beginning of the year 2000. While some spoilsports have correctly pointed out that the new millennium doesn’t begin until next year, most people have regarded that minor detail as irrelevant, and have joined together in celebration as the nineteen hundreds were ushered out, and the two thousands were welcomed in.

With not only the century changing, but the millennium as well, the minds of many Christians have naturally turned towards the end of this age, and the hope and promise we’ve been given of Christ’s return. There is nothing wrong with this. The New Testament scriptures repeatedly encourage us to look forward with hope and joyful anticipation to the return of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, in some cases this hope has been combined with some wrong ideas or misinformation. This has caused some people to expect some things that God’s word has not promised, or to place a significance on certain events that God has not placed on them.

God has warned us in the scriptures that He does not think the way we think.

If we are to have any hope, then, of understanding what God is doing in this world in our day and time, we cannot rely on our own logic or our own intuition. We must look instead to what God’s word says on this matter, and let it speak for itself instead of reading our own ideas into it.

It is important to remember that while God is the author of our methods of keeping tracks of days and months and years, in that these are based on the movements of the earth, the moon, the sun and the stars that He Himself created and set in motion, God had nothing to do with our system of keeping track of years. Our years are measured from an arbitrarily chosen starting point: the year of the birth of Christ. Moreover, it is now generally recognized that the date chosen as the year of Christ’s birth for the sake of the calendar was the wrong year. God is certainly not bound by our choice of which year to count from; much less is He bound to honor our mistakes.

One reason for the excitement over the millennium in some circles is the "year/day" theory of biblical interpretation that has been espoused by some. Briefly, this theory begins with the scriptural statement that "a thousand years are as a day" to the Lord (II Peter 3:8), and adds to this the six days of creation, and calculates that after six days (six thousand years) of labor will come a thousand years of rest (Christ’s Millennial Kingdom). A variation on this theory argues that every two thousand years something monumental happens. Approximately six thousand years ago man was created; the flood took place (it is said) about four thousand years ago; the birth of Christ took place about two thousand years ago; and it is presumed from this that the Millennial kingdom will begin approximately two thousand years from Christ’s birth.

The problem is, all this is conjecture and supposition. God has nowhere promised to send Christ back on our timetable and according to our calculations.

Jesus warned his disciples that the day and hour of his return were known only to the Father.

Again, just before his ascension, he warned them:

While we cannot know those things which God has kept hidden, we can know those things that God has chosen to reveal in His written word. And one of the things God has chosen to reveal to us is the way He counts time leading up to the return of the Messiah to establish his kingdom on earth. In seeing what God has to say about this, we will see something very important about the time we are living in now.

God revealed His method of counting down the years until the coming of the Messiah in the book of Daniel.

This may look complicated at first, but it is not. The countdown is to begin "from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem" (verse 25). At the time this was revealed to Daniel, Jerusalem lay in ruins, destroyed by the Babylonian conqueror Nebuchadnezzar. God had revealed to the prophet Jeremiah previously that the captivity of Judah in Babylon would last for seventy years. Daniel knew about this prophecy, and had kept track of the years in captivity. The seventy years were over, but Daniel saw little evidence of a return to Jerusalem. It was in this context that God revealed these things to him, beginning with a reassurance that Jerusalem would indeed be rebuilt.

"Seventy weeks" should more accurately be translated "seventy sevens." A "seven" usually refers to a period of seven days, or a week; but in this case, it refers to a period of seven years. The "seventy weeks," then, is a period of "seventy sevens" of years, or four hundred and ninety years. God revealed to Daniel that a period of four hundred and ninety years had been appointed for Judah and Jerusalem before "everlasting righteousness" and all that went with it would be introduced into Jerusalem.

But God revealed more. The countdown would begin with the "going forth of the the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem." From that point there would be a period of seven sevens, or forty nine years, and a period of sixty-two sevens, or four hundred and thirty-four years, until the Messiah was "cut off," or killed.

This portion of the prophecy has already come to pass. The first four hundred and eighty-three years of the countdown have already passed, and the Messiah was indeed "cut off, but not for himself;" he died, instead, for your sins and mine. Not many years after this, the city of Jerusalem and the sanctuary, which was part of the Temple, were destroyed by "the people of the prince that shall come."

When Jesus Christ died, God’s countdown clock stopped, with only seven years left on the clock.

For the past two thousand years, while men have been trying to calculate the time until Christ returns to set up his kingdom, God’s countdown clock has been stopped.

And today, as we finish celebrating the dawn of a new millenium, God’s countdown clock is still stopped.

The clock will start ticking again when another event takes place: a coming prince, or ruler, will make a covenant for "one week," or seven years, with Israel. That ruler is the man commonly referred to as "the Antichrist." Once the countdown starts again, it will not stop until Christ returns to establish his kingdom.

But if God has stopped the clock in His countdown toward the return of Christ to establish his kingdom, what is happening now on the earth? What is the significance of this period of time between the stopping of the clock and the restarting of it for the final seven years of the countdown?

The apostle Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, mentioned two different aspects of the message that he taught about Jesus Christ. He opened Romans by talking about the gospel of God concerning His son, Jesus Christ.

The gospel, or good news, about Jesus Christ had been promised beforehand by God’s prophets, and had been written about in the Old Testament scriptures. In the many prophecies about the Messiah one could learn that he would be born in Bethlehem, that he would be a descendent of David, that the spirit of God would be upon him mightily, that he would go to his death like a sheep to the slaughter, that he would be raised from the dead, that he would be seated at the right hand of God, that he would one day establish on earth a kingdom which will have no end, and many other such things.

But Paul ends his epistle by another aspect of his message, which he refers to as "the mystery." A mystery , as the word is used in the New Testament scriptures, is not something that cannot be understood; it is something that has been kept secret. Once it is revealed, it can be understood.

While the gospel about Christ had been openly made known in the prophecies of the Old Testament, there was also a mystery pertaining to Christ which had been kept secret since the world began, and which was only then being made known by revelation, and in the New Testament scriptures which were then being written.

Why would God go to so much trouble to keep part of His purpose in Christ a secret for so long? Paul gives us the reason in I Corinthians.

The "princes of this world" (or rulers of this age) mentioned here are not only Pilate, Herod, Caiphas and Caesar. This term also refers to the evil spiritual beings who exercise dominion behind the scenes in this age. Jesus referred to Satan as "the prince of this world" in John 12:31, John 14:30, and John 16:11. In Daniel 10:20, two evil angelic beings are referred to as "the prince of Persia," and "the prince of Grecia." And in Ephesians 6 we are warned that our struggle here on earth is not against our fellow human beings, but is, instead, against evil spiritual beings with rank and authority.

The "princes of this world," both spiritual and corporeal, tried several times to kill Jesus before his crucifixion. When Jesus was born, an attempt was made to kill him by slaughtering all the children in his area who were around his age. When he tried to minister in his home town, the people there tried to throw him off a cliff. The rulers and religious leaders in Jerusalem sought repeatedly to put him to death. And in one instance, "the prince of this world" sent a sudden storm that threatened to sink the ship Jesus and his disciples were on (for Jesus would not rebuke the work of his own Father!); and before Judas left supper to betray Jesus, we are told in the scriptures that "Satan entered into him" (John 13:27). Yet Jesus' enemies only succeeded in killing him when it fit within the plans and purposes of God that they did so.

The earthly kings of this earth would probably not have changed their plans had they known what God was planning to do in Christ, for "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned." (I Corinthians 2:14.) It was primarily from Satan and his angels, who could appreciate the significance of what was being done, that these things were hidden.

So what was it that was so important that it had to be kept secret for ages? Satan already knew from the scriptures about the salvation of Israel and the establishment of God's kingdom on earth under the Messiah. Isaiah gives us a hint of what is to come.

But it is the apostle Paul who, in his epistle to the Ephesians, spells out for us what this secret is.

What is the secret? It is found in verse 6 of this passage:

The secret was that God, through Christ, was not only going to bring salvation to Israel and light to the Gentiles; He was going to open up to the Gentiles, who before were without God and without hope (Ephesians 2:12), the salvation and inheritance that God had promised only to the Jews -- and on an equal basis with the Jews. He would do this by bringing together in Christ both Jew and Gentile into one new body, separate from both.

Through Jesus Christ, God has opened up salvation to both Jew and Gentile on a scale unimaginable in Old Testament times. He has brought together both Jew and Gentile in one body in the Church, which He is building into His Temple, His dwelling place. In the Old Testament, God dwelt first in the Tabernacle, and later in the Temple. If you wanted to be in His presence, you had to travel to where His presence was. But today, God dwells in His people, the Church, by means of the spirit He has given to each and every one of us who has believed on His son Jesus Christ.

Because of what God has done for us in Christ, we do not have to fear Christ's return, as the world does. We are to look forward to Christ's return as our hope, for we have been saved from the wrath to come through Christ (Romans 5:9; I Thessalonians 1:10).

Christ will return for his Church, which is his body (Ephesians 1:23), before he returns to establish his kingdom on earth, and before the wrath of God is unleashed on the world. Only after we are removed from the earth will the man commonly known as "the Antichrist" be revealed. At that time, God's clock will start ticking again.

"He who now letteth," or "he who withholds," is Christ, who is present on earth now through his body, which is the Church. When the church is removed from the earth, the wicked man will be revealed. When Christ returns to the earth to establish his kingdom, his first order of business will be to destroy that wicked one.

Because we understand what God has done for us in Christ, because He has allowed us to live in a bubble of time where His countdown clock has stopped, and has already assured us that we have been saved from the wrath to come, we need to live our lives in thankfulness for the great love that has been shown us. How do we do that?

By living our life in such a way that it brings glory to God. It is by doing this that we joyfully await Christ's return.