As we keep the upcoming Feast of Tabernacles, we will look ahead to the prophesied Millennium—and, as we keep the Last Great Day, we may look back at the Millennium from the perspective of the White Throne Judgment that will come afterward. But what lessons can we glean from an additional perspective? In this article, we’ll strive to picture the Millennium from within—from something like the halfway point, after the turmoil of the Great Tribulation is long past, but before Satan is briefly released from his captivity.
Zechariah gives us a vivid picture of the Millennium. We read, “Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each one with his staff in his hand because of great age. The streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing’” (Zechariah 8:4–5). Old men, old women, and children in the midst of the Millennium—the picture will be prevalent in our cities, as generations of children will have been born by 500 years after Christ’s return. There will be happy families, happy people, and successful nations.
At that point in the Millennium, we’ll be right in the middle of fulfilling the purpose of this millennial Sabbath rest. Let’s remember that, for the first couple hundred years of the Millennium, we will have been helping Christ reign over a world still recovering from the traumatic 6,000 years of Satan’s rule.
As long as there are human beings who knew others—parents or grandparents, perhaps—who lived through the Great Tribulation, there will be a sense of great relief, and it should be very hard for people to become spiritually complacent. People will be glad to honor God, remember Him, commune with Him, and focus on Him as Creator and Sustainer. Every weekly Sabbath rest will be a reminder that they are living in the wonderful seventh millennium of His plan for mankind.
But what is the purpose of a rest? It isn’t an end in itself. The Millennium will be a rest and a joyous blessing, but it will also be a time of purposeful activity. Let’s picture our part in that activity.
Setting the Scene
Isaiah paints a vivid picture of the Millennium as a time of regathering. Those who have been trampled under the feet of their enemies will be gathered together in safety. Israel will again take the lead, physically speaking, in this world to come:
The Lord will utterly destroy the tongue of the Sea of Egypt; with His mighty wind He will shake His fist over the River [the Euphrates], and strike it in the seven streams, and make men cross over dry-shod. There will be a highway for the remnant of His people who will be left from Assyria, as it was for Israel in the day that he came up from the land of Egypt (Isaiah 11:15–16).
We should note that this prophecy is very much future; it has not yet taken place. Those who do not understand our prophesied future cannot explain this scripture. And where will you and I be, as firstfruits, during this time? We read, “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thessalonians 4:15–16).
Christians who lived and died in this age will be alive again, born into the God Family in all their vibrancy—not in their struggles, sufferings, sickness, and weakness. He says, “Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words” (vv. 17–18).
Elsewhere, Paul writes, “There remains therefore a rest for the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9). Every seventh day of the week, we enjoy a rest pictured by a Sabbath day that goes all the way back to Creation, yet also pictures something far beyond, in the future. We know that the weekly Sabbath is a foreshadowing of what we might call a macro-Sabbath, the Millennium—the thousand-year time when the weekly Sabbath will picture what will then be the present reality. And it will be a glorious time in human history.
Stability and Prosperity
What will that time be like? We read, “The Lord is exalted, for He dwells on high; He has filled Zion with justice and righteousness. Wisdom and knowledge will be the stability of your times, and the strength of salvation; the fear of the Lord is His treasure” (Isaiah 33:5–6).
In our present age, our world desperately needs wisdom, knowledge, and stability. Stability is something we’re lacking governmentally, politically, and economically. If you had to pick just one word to describe our nations, that word could very well be instability. So, what can we say about the wisdom and knowledge that will give the Millennial world the stability we now lack?
One of the first characteristics that will provide that stability can be called the economics of faith. And it is very different from any of the world’s systems today. How? Think back to the last time we faced a shortage of some basic item that we all need—maybe toilet paper, or hand sanitizer, or eggs. Money is chasing goods, and this dictates prices. In man’s economic system, limited resources lead to price wars, and those with the greatest need for resources are often the least able to afford them.
Expectation of scarcity is what drives our system. It drives prices—if you expect a high price for a bushel of wheat, what do you do? You plant more, and the more you plant, the less money you get, because everybody’s planting more. Our system is based on supply and demand, and we can think, Oh, that’s perfect. Yet is it perfect? Has our system provided prosperity for everyone? No—but we almost can’t see any other way. We might say, Well, supply and demand—isn’t that just normal?
It may be normal, but that doesn’t make it biblical. Consider God’s system, which is not based on mankind’s laws of scarcity, of supply and demand. When God provided manna for the Israelites, He promised, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a certain quota every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in My law or not. And it shall be on the sixth day that they shall prepare what they bring in, and it shall be twice as much as they gather daily” (Exodus 16:4–5).
We see how God was going to deliver manna to them. “And when the layer of dew lifted, there, on the surface of the wilderness, was a small round substance, as fine as frost on the ground. So when the children of Israel saw it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’ For they did not know what it was” (vv. 14–15). We find a perfect system of timely and sufficient delivery here. “Let every man gather it according to each one’s need, one omer for each person, according to the number of persons; let every man take for those who are in his tent” (v. 16). This certainly involved human faithfulness—they had to obey, to go out and work, certainly enough for themselves, for their family, and for others in need.
Manna provided them with what they needed—for the day, because what happened if they tried to go out and store more? We read, “So when they measured it by omers, he who gathered much had nothing left over, and he who gathered little had no lack. Every man had gathered according to each one’s need. And Moses said, ‘Let no one leave any of it till morning.’ Notwithstanding they did not heed Moses. But some of them left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and stank” (vv. 18–20). They were forced to rely on God’s providence every day. They gathered what they needed, and it indeed supplied all their needs, even for the Sabbath day when they weren’t to gather.
This is the first principle of the nuts and bolts of God’s system: the economics of faith. We will be responsible for teaching people to live according to this way, not to hoard or gouge or exploit.
Homeland as Capital
Another key principle of God’s economics is the economics of land as capital. Notice God’s description of the division of the land of Canaan:
Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: “To these the land shall be divided as an inheritance, according to the number of names. To a large tribe you shall give a larger inheritance, and to a small tribe you shall give a smaller inheritance. Each shall be given its inheritance according to those who were numbered of them. But the land shall be divided by lot; they shall inherit according to the names of the tribes of their fathers. According to the lot their inheritance shall be divided between the larger and the smaller” (Numbers 26:52–56).
The fundamental principle here is that the land ultimately belongs to God, who can give it as He wishes. And He placed it in the care of families as a heritage—not like the Oklahoma Land Rush, with somebody shooting a gun and thousands of people in buckboards and on horses racing across the land to try to stake their claim and then fight off other people who want the same property, only to have somebody else come along and steal it. It’s not “every man for himself.”
And God gives some specifics as to exactly how the land is to be cared for. Consider the principle of the seventh-year land sabbath. We read, “Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather its fruit; but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath to the Lord. You shall neither sow your field nor prune your vineyard” (Leviticus 25:3–4).
Yes, there’s a physical aspect to resting the land instead of soaking it with man-made chemicals to squeeze out maximum production, increasing the yield while ruining the soil. But it’s also tied to an economic principle that is very unlike what we see in the world today: “At the end of every seven years you shall grant a release of debts. And this is the form of the release: Every creditor who has lent anything to his neighbor shall release it; he shall not require it of his neighbor or his brother, because it is called the Lord’s release” (Deuteronomy 15:1–2).
Can you imagine what this principle would do to our nations if we implemented it today? Our system is built on debts, credit, and interest. God’s system would destroy that system. Think about your mindset when you loan money if you have the understanding that it will be forgiven at a certain point in the future. It changes everything, doesn’t it?
Consider: “Of a foreigner you may require it, but you shall give up your claim to what is owed by your brother” (v. 3). Why is that? Because God was not going to allow foreigners, who lived by their own laws, to come in and “borrow” money that they could get away with never paying back. People were to treat each other mercifully and help each other.
The Economics of Jubilee
Let’s add another layer to this, the Jubilee year: “And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you; and each of you shall return to his possession” (Leviticus 25:10). The word translated here as “possession” has to do with ancestral heritage. What a blessing to have a generational home. Today, if you live on property that your parents lived on, it’s quite an anomaly. But in years gone by, for much of history before the industrial revolution, it was the norm for property to be held for generations. When you planted a tree, your grandchildren would benefit.
Today, we’re not attached to the land. We’re not attached to specific places. As part of our system after the industrial revolution, we’re used to labor being like pawns on a chess board, moved around to where the work is. But God intended mankind to be attached to the land and for the capital to be the land—not in a bank somewhere, or in Bitcoin, or in stocks and bonds that can lose their value in a fraction of a second.
Oh, but we’re so much more sophisticated, some would respond. Are we? Recent studies have shown that wealth disparity in the United States has escalated over the last 45 years. In 1979, the top tenth of a percent of America’s wealthy owned about 7 percent of the nation’s wealth. Today, that share has roughly doubled, to around 14 percent. The top 1 percent now controls nearly a third of all U.S. wealth—almost as much as the entire bottom 90 percent of Americans. And what about those who seek higher education? About 43 million Americans now carry student debt, amounting to more than $1.7 trillion. It shouldn’t be hard to see that this present economic system is far from God’s way.
It may be instructive to look at this through the economic principle known as the Kondratiev wave, named for a professor in the Soviet Union whose execution was ordered by dictator Josef Stalin in 1938 because he foresaw that the U.S. economy would recover from the Great Depression. The Kondratiev wave shows that our economic history has followed what have basically been 50-year cycles that bottom out in a redistribution of wealth—sometimes through an internal upheaval or revolution, other times through war with neighboring countries. Somehow, about every 50 years, everything turns over economically.
Interestingly, if you look at where the U.S. is now in the wave that has been charted for the past 200 years, it should be coming out of that wave right about now, and we might wonder if that means America has more years left. Yet we see its economy rotting from the inside out and the oppressiveness of debt and financial ruin. Indeed, we see from prophecy that there will be an entity that rises from the next total collapse, and that entity will achieve economic greatness right before the end of this age—but it’s not the U.S., it’s not Great Britain, and it’s not Israel. And it’s all because we’ve rejected God’s way, which treats land as the fundamental capital that underlies His economic system.
Godly Business Ethics
A third principle of the system that Christ will establish in the Millennium involves what we can call the economics of godly business ethics. This is a rather large piece of the picture that involves a number of different components, but there is one in particular that you may not have noticed.
We see in Numbers 35:1–8 that the Levites received 48 towns, each of which was surrounded by open land that was 2,000 cubits wide. It’s a fascinating pattern, with pastureland that was used by everyone—and all kinds of regulations, even regarding the size. Even that size has implications, because what we see as cities grow larger is that there are benefits that are accrued until a certain point. The economist E.F. Schumacher in 1973 published a book titled Small Is Beautiful, in which he described the optimal size of cities. He found that as cities get bigger, the effort required to keep roads and services from deteriorating is economically more than can be sustained. Constant growth creates logistical problems that become economic problems, requiring increased taxes to support decreasing services. In this regard, it’s interesting to note that, in Numbers 35, God established that the Levites’ inheritance of cities would be a fixed amount and no more.
And the Levites played a key role in resolving controversies. We read, “Then the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come near, for the Lord your God has chosen them to minister to Him and to bless in the name of the Lord; by their word every controversy and every assault shall be settled” (Deuteronomy 21:5).
Why does this matter? The Levites, tasked with making these decisions that involved disputes over money and property, had nothing to gain for themselves when making their decisions. How different from what we see today, and indeed in most of human history, where the people who make the decisions are often the ones who can gain the most from those decisions—unlike the Levites, who were not allowed to accumulate land and wealth.
Prosperity and Complacency
God’s system works—and it will bring prosperity the world has not yet seen. But, as memory of Satan’s world recedes from the collective mind of mankind, will complacency set in? History gives us amazing stories of how easily mankind can forget God in the midst of blessings. We think of Adam and Eve, of course, and of the Israelites in the midst of the Exodus. But even in our generation, we see how the complacency of God’s Church led to apostasy after Mr. Herbert Armstrong’s death.
As a result, even while we are teaching God’s way and the people of the Millennium are experiencing amazing blessings, we’ll also be preaching a warning, because we know the end of the story. We know that Satan will be released for a brief time at the end of the Millennium, and we know that while he won’t topple God’s system, he will find enough rebellious interest to cause great suffering for a short time for those whom he deceives. We read, “Now when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle, whose number is as the sand of the sea” (Revelation 20:7–8).
So, as we pass that halfway mark and we’re in the latter 500-or-so years of the Millennium, a big part of what we will be doing will be saying, Folks, listen! Don’t forget where this all came from! This established system that we all enjoy so much can be destroyed for you—by a spirit being who is more influential than you can imagine!
The lesson is that a system of government only brings prosperity and peace if the hand of God is in that system. And while you are prospering under a system, you shouldn’t think it’s because of your own skill or goodness. One of the great lessons that those who prosper in the Millennium will need to internalize is that the glory must go to God, for He is the one who will have done all that we’ve described in this article.
Preparing for the White Throne Judgment
As we find ourselves in the midst of the Millennium, we will need to remind human beings everywhere that God is the source of their prosperity—and that they are, in fact, prospering for a divine purpose. This brings us back to the question at the beginning of this article: What is the ultimate purpose of the Millennial Sabbath rest?
The answer is simple: to prepare for the next phase in God’s plan. That’s the way God works—He builds to the next phase. And we’re going to need lots and lots of help—human and angelic, as well as divine—for the next phase of God’s plan. We’re going to need to train a lot of people to help deal with that final episode of mankind, the White Throne Judgment, pictured by the Last Great Day.
Estimates suggest that around 100 billion people have lived and died over the course of human history. We don’t know exactly how God will distribute the workload, but it seems clear that however many Spirit-being are serving under Jesus Christ at that time, they will be far outnumbered by the human beings who come up in the second resurrection. One way or another, it will be a big task. And we will have spent the years of the Millennium preparing for that task.
Yes, the Millennium will relieve planet Earth from a time of great devastation at the end of this present age of Satan’s rule. And it will usher in the White Throne Judgment that will bring most of humanity its first opportunity to learn God’s way and receive salvation. But between those great events, as we are in the thick of things in the midst of the Millennium, each year will be a time of doing.
We will be teaching human beings the Way that we learned and practiced ourselves in this life. Together, we will be preparing for the next step in God’s plan, the White Throne Judgment—and there will be a sense of urgency as we prepare. Let us have that same sense of urgency even now, knowing that we are preparing to help literally billions of people learn and practice God’s way. Let’s not become complacent as we prepare for our part in that wonderful time to come!