Joy to the World...at Last!, Part 1

The Bible describes a future period of time that we call the Millennial Kingdom, and that kingdom will have a king. Who is the coming king? He is the Messiah. He is the Son of Man who came to seek and to save those who were lost.

He is the one claimed by his apostles to be, in Matthew 16-16, Jesus the Christ that is the Messiah, the Son of God. That's who the king is. We don't know when this will happen, but one day Jesus will return. And when he does, he will literally rule over this world for a thousand years. We call that the Millennial Kingdom. Now, there's a bit of confusion and even some misinformation about that time. Today on Wisdom for the Heart, Stephen Davey is going to open God's Word and show us what it says about the Millennial Kingdom.

That's really what matters. We need to base our views on the Bible, and we'll do that today. We're in a series called Thy Kingdom Come.

This message is Joy to the World at Last. The reason we believe in the second coming of Christ and a literal physical kingdom and a king on a throne is the same reason we believe in the first coming of a literal physical Lord. The Bible tells us so.

That's about as simple as it gets. The Bible tells me so, which is good theology. If we believe the Bible's 109 prophecies related to the first coming of Christ, and they did indeed come true, we certainly shouldn't have any problem believing then in the remaining 220 prophecies of our Lord's second coming and believing they will also be literally physically fulfilled. The kingdom and the king is coming to planet Earth.

Now, we answered the question in our last discussion, and I'll review very quickly who is the king exactly. The prophets declare that he is the Old Testament Messiah. He is prophesied and those prophecies fulfilled in the New Testament person of Jesus Christ, who in fact most often called himself the Son of Man, thus tying himself back to the prophecy of Daniel in that messianic title. In Psalm chapter 22 verse 16, we're even told of the Savior in his suffering and his crucifixion. Isaiah wrote of his coming humiliation.

The first time he came, he was humbled. He accepted death, even death on a cross. Isaiah tells us in that wonderful text about how he was pierced for our transgressions, and it pleased the Father to lay upon him the iniquity of us all.

That was the plan. That was the plan of God for the redemption of mankind. Of course, he did not lie in a grave and become corrupted and decay. Psalm 16, 10 tells us of the resurrected Messiah who was not abandoned by the Father but rose from the dead. There is a coming kingdom of God on earth, and the King, if there's any doubt, David in Psalm chapter 2, informs us in that text with a capital S. He refers to the Son. I have installed my King upon Zion, that is in Jerusalem. I have given my Son the nations as an inheritance. Listen, O kings of the earth, do homage to the Son, that he not become angry.

How clear is that? Psalm 2, up through verse 12. Revelation 19 reveals for us that dramatic event where these Son descends and the hosts of heaven with him, and he has that royal robe on and embroidered on the cloth at his thigh is his name, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Who is the coming King? He is the Messiah of Isaiah and Daniel. He is the Son of Man who came to seek and to save those who were lost. Luke chapter 19, verse 10.

He is the one claimed by his apostles to be, in Matthew 16, 16, as Peter serves as spokesman, Jesus the Christ, that is the Messiah, the Son of God. That is who the King is. Then we also answered the question, how long will the kingdom last? We weren't quite sure, were we, how long it would last? And so we went to Revelation chapter 20 and over and over and over again, if you weren't with us, a thousand years, verse 2. One thousand years, middle part of verse 3. One thousand years, the last part of verse 4. One thousand years, verse 5. One thousand years, verse 6. And the sixth time, verse 7.

One thousand years. I mean, that's pretty clear, isn't it? If your wife told you to take out the trash, you could possibly tell her later you didn't hear her. If she told you twice, you could say, well, I didn't hear you. And that'll work for two or three weeks, from what I'm told.

Not personally experiencing that. But if she told you four times, you'd be running out of options. If she told you five times, you'd be in trouble.

If she told you six times, you'd be dead meat. Spiritually speaking, of course. And you'd run to the city of refuge in order to survive, right? You have to tamper with every hermeneutical principle that takes anything seriously from the Word of God related to any kind of timing and just sort of chuck that out. God probably isn't serious. Do you really want to tamper with God's references and revelation of time periods? The book of Revelation tells us that heaven lasts forever.

You want to mess with that? God probably isn't serious. That's such a long time. Now, as we talk about the Millennial Kingdom and this 1,000-year reign, there are other views of the Millennium. And the first view is Preterism, or the Preterist view. This is the belief that most of the prophecies in the Old Testament and Revelation and the Tribulation period took place at the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. In other words, it already took place. Problem is, John wrote Revelation in about AD 95. He's talking about things that have yet to come to pass. Revelation 1, verse 1 clearly says, these are things that are yet to happen.

This is going to happen. It didn't happen. So I said, where's the record of 100-pound hailstones and millions of them pummeling the earth?

Where's the record of the Euphrates River drying up? When was the mark of the beast ordered? Another metaphorical view of the Millennium is post-Millennialism. They believe the Kingdom will actually be brought about gradually by Evangelism and the Christianization of this planet, that everybody's going to just buy into it over time and the human race is going to get better and better and more Christian, more civil. There's going to be peace and prosperity. You can call post-Millennialism as that belief that is incorporated by the optimist club.

Things are going to get better and better. Mankind has the power through the gospel to Christianize the world. Listen, the church is getting further and further behind as it relates to the population of the earth.

There are so many dialects that have not one scrap of scripture and that's why I believe during the Tribulation period, the angel will circumnavigate the globe, delivering to everyone the gospel. Post-Millennialism was primarily developed, this optimistic view of the human race in the 16th century as they saw inventions and development and everything looked like it was just getting better and better, but it fell out of favor. Some believe it today, but it fell, for the most part, out of favor when?

After World War I and World War II and the Great Depression. How one could ever believe that we'll just get better and usher in the kingdom, I do not know. Another view is Amillennialism. That believes the church simply inherited the promises of the kingdom. Christ is simply ruling in our hearts.

There will be no literal 1,000 year reign. You take passages like Revelation 20 and you say, well, that's just a nice idea, it's spiritual, it's some sort of metaphysical truth and these prophecies must be taken at least figuratively instead of literally. Enough of that view. The view that we're talking about is we take prophecy and face value and we believe that those prophecies of Christ's first coming happen physically and literally. Why not the prophecies of his second coming?

You have to put your hands over your eyes, close up your ears in order to somehow discount it all. For today, let's answer some more questions. Who will be the subjects in the coming kingdom? Very quickly, Daniel 7 promises that Old Testament saints will reign in the kingdom. The New Testament saints or the church will also, of course, reign. We have here in Revelation 20 verses 4 and following a third group, that's the martyrs, those who died during the tribulation, they're resurrected, glorified, and they will also reign. In fact, look back again. Then I saw thrones, verse 4, and they sat on them and judgment was given to them and I saw that is among them the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received the mark on their forehead and on their hand and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.

That is so clear and obvious. In other words, Jesus Christ is going to keep his word and his promise, even to these who resisted the agenda of the antichrist, refused the mark, they will indeed reign with him. By the way, the phrase in verse 4, they came to life, cannot refer to some sort of spiritual resurrection or simply a reference to the new birth through salvation.

That word is ezison. Whenever it is used in reference to somebody dying and then rising, it is always used in reference to somebody literally, physically, bodily resurrecting from the dead every time. The fourth category of the subjects of the kingdom would be living mortals who survived the tribulation without dying. They accepted the gospel and they entered the kingdom in this way.

Let me summarize it this way. Let me give you two categories, then, of people occupying the earth during the millennial kingdom. Those with glorified bodies, we'll call them in the language of the Apostle Paul, immortals, and mortals, those with natural, earthly bodies.

Now, the immortals are made up of three different categories of individuals. The first are Old Testament saints who were resurrected, who reign Daniel 7, Daniel 12. They will include both Jewish and Gentile followers of God by faith in his plan of atonement. In the Old Testament era, he looked forward to the fulfillment of that one who would die as the final sacrifice.

Jews and Gentiles. There are many Gentile followers in the Old Testament era who believed, left their false gods and believed in the atoning work of God's plan through the coming Savior. For instance, Ruth would be one. Remember her? She was a pagan, a foreign god worshiper, and she heard, evidently, the truth through Naomi, and when her husband, Naomi's son, died, she chose to go back with Naomi to Bethlehem. She'll be resurrected.

She'll be one of those reigning as immortals. She happened to marry a guy named Boaz, whose own mother, also a Gentile, was an unbeliever. She was a former prostitute who lived in a town that Israel would invade, and they knew Israel was coming. In fact, they sent spies ahead. Rahab, the prostitute living there in Jericho, hid them, and she decided that she would follow Israel. You've heard the song. The walls of Jericho came, what, tumbling down.

She heard that song, knew that something was going to happen, and she needed to get out of there, right? She left, accepted the gospel, delivered to her, and married a Jewish man named Salmon. They had a boy named Boaz who married Ruth. So you have Rahab, and you have Ruth, not only in the genealogy of Jesus Christ, but immortalized and reigning with Christ in the coming kingdom.

Second to that, you have the second category. You have the New Testament believers. Clothed, Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15, with immortality.

That would be you and me. The church today, by the way, is composed of Jews and Gentiles, is it not? In fact, the first church created by the Spirit of God was primarily Jewish, and it all got started in what city? Jerusalem. Like the prophets of old, the 12 apostles were all Jewish men.

In fact, the great ambassador to the Gentile world is a converted Jewish rabbi named Paul. And Paul will remind the Corinthian believers composed of Jew and Gentile converts that the church will one day, he writes in 1 Corinthians 6, 2, be judging or ruling the world, a reference to the kingdom. The third group of immortals, again, are these tribulation martyrs.

Now, on the other side of the column is the second category of kingdom subjects. They are the mortals. They enter the kingdom having believed the gospel during the tribulation. They are still in their natural, non-glorified, earthly bodies, the ones they were born with.

They haven't died. They will become the population of the world, and their children and their children's children will populate the earth over whom we, the immortals, will reign. At the close of the tribulation, those believers who'd survived, according to Matthew 25, will be able to enter the kingdom of Christ. Matthew chapter 25 reveals the great judgment, the nations, and Christ separates the two, those during the tribulation who didn't believe. He sends to await their final torment those who did believe. They simply enter this new epic, this new era of the kingdom of Christ on earth in literal, physical form.

By the way, if the church is not raptured at the beginning of the tribulation but goes through the tribulation, then merely goes up to meet Christ and immediately comes back down as post-tribulationalists believe. There is a problem. There are several of them.

One of them is you have the kingdom immediately populated by earthly, mortal people who haven't died, who come out of the tribulation, and according to Matthew chapter 25 and the prophetic descriptions, they are the beginning part or segment of the world's population. They physically enter. How'd they get there? Who are they?

They have physical bodies. Now, they will be healed of their diseases. Isaiah 33, they're going to be given the ability to live for a long time.

Isaiah 65, but they're still going to die. They're going to need to be glorified one day. Now, according to the prophets, these mortals will marry, have children. They're going to flourish. They're going to enjoy all of the kingdom benefits. The children will have to accept the gospel of Christ. They will be sinners. There will be crime. The good news is there's going to be a just system of jurisprudence. Nobody will be bribed.

Everything will be honest because we will reign and we will rule over them. But they will be sinners in need of salvation. Just because their parents are confirmed, having believed in the tribulation, who enter the kingdom, that doesn't give them a free pass. God doesn't have grandchildren.

He doesn't have grandchildren or great-grandchildren. I've asked people before, are you a Christian? Well, yeah, my father was a preacher.

That might actually be a bad sign. I've had people tell me, yeah, my grandfather was a preacher. I asked you, are you saved? Have you been born again? Have you personally received the merits of Christ on your behalf?

Have you asked him to forgive your sins? Without it, you will not enter heaven, and certainly not the kingdom before that as an immortal one who will reign. So these who grow up in the kingdom, and there will be probably several billion of them flourishing over this thousand-year reign, they will have to accept the grace of God through his atoning plan of salvation. David wrote in Psalm 48 of this coming kingdom, Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, his holy mountain. Now notice this, beautiful in elevation.

Something's gonna change. Beautiful in elevation. The joy of the whole earth is Mount Zion in the far north, the city of the great king. So David refers to it as God's mountain to an elevated place, and he references universal joy. What about this city? You go all the way back to Abraham, and we understand that these patriarchs, and even before to Adam, before him were given revelation about the atonement system and the kingdom so that Abraham way back there is waiting, he's looking for this city. And it isn't the Jerusalem that you think of now. It's a city made without human hands whose architect is God. Doesn't exist yet in this fashion.

There's something different about it. It's elevated, it's magnificent, it's divinely designed and created by God's own power, which leads me to another question. What will Jerusalem, what will this capital city look like? One author in his work on the millennial kingdom refers to all the prophecies that allow us to understand the topographical changes that are gonna take place at the end of the bowls as Christ returns, and we've already studied that, and we don't have time to repeat it, but the changes of the earth's surface that are gonna take us back to Eden-like conditions. Listen to Zechariah describe Jerusalem and the surrounding area. He says in Zechariah 14, 10, all the land will be changed into a plain level south of Jerusalem, but Jerusalem will rise and remain on its site.

It's literally gonna come up and be elevated. What exactly, he says, from Benjamin's gate as far as the place of the first gate to the corner gate from the Tower of Hananel to the king's wine presses. In other words, Jerusalem proper inside the city walls. Then Zechariah adds, they will live in it and there will no longer be a curse, for Jerusalem will dwell in security and peace.

So a lot of things change. The city will be inhabited on its ancient site and it will be inundated with this attribute that we know it does not have, peace, security. The prayer request of the Jewish nation for centuries has been pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Peace will genuinely and finally come to pass in the millennial kingdom as Christ rules on planet earth. And beyond that, around the globe, marked by this wonderful rule of our Lord who rules the nations. Our world does not know security or peace.

Talks about it, talks about it more and more as time goes along. It attempts to find it and that's a noble objective. But our world doesn't know peace. I laughed when I read one author, he said, whenever he hears of someone being arrested for disturbing the peace, he wonders where the guy found some of it. Where did he find peace to disturb?

Well, peace will one day come when the prince of peace comes. Now the prophet informs us that the Lord will make the wilderness like unto Eden, Isaiah 51-3. Her desert like the garden of the Lord, joy and gladness again have joy found therein.

Thanksgiving in the voice of melody or literally music. Now all the topographical changes around the globe are specifically formulated to create a high mountain or plateau upon which Jerusalem sits and commands with this rather commanding view. Not only from it but to it. In Ezekiel's vision, chapter 40 verse 2, God takes him to the land of Israel and sets Ezekiel on a very high mountain. And to the south he says there was a structure like a city. Now we can only imagine what the golden city will look like, the place where we will have residence as immortals and from there go out and serve the Lord wherever he puts us somewhere on the planet. But to provoke your imagination, I'll give you just a few sketches today drawn up by Janet Willis, the author of a study on the kingdom, but she then put her painter skills to work.

Janet and her husband Scott, Scott was a former pastor, he preached for me this past summer. Her creative work has done a wonderful job provoking certainly my imagination and I believe yours too and she's allowed me to show these to you. In fact, if I'm speaking to somebody right now who skipped church to stay home to listen to the live webcast of this service, you're wondering now what am I missing? You're missing everything, I want you to know that. If you're listening later on on some podcast and you're listening to me right now in the future yet, still to come on the radio, these pictures that you're going to hear me talk about that you cannot see will be in the manuscript.

She's allowing me to put them into the manuscript which will be downloaded from colonial.org or wisdomonline.org for free. All right, enough of the commercial. All right, here we go. Now, this particular sketch raises a healthy debate among evangelical scholars, all of them believing in the literal reign of Christ in Jerusalem. There are many scholars who believe this capital city will actually hover above the earthly Jerusalem during the kingdom and then come down after the new earth and heaven are created. Other scholars believe this divinely created capital city, this enclosed golden palace, so to speak, is planted on this high plateau which would then correspond with the need for the elevation of the city during the kingdom.

Either way, it's a win-win. Every immortal will have at least two residences. Every one of us who believe will have a residence inside this city of God and another residence wherever God has us serving as co-regents with Christ. But we're going to have a place in there what Christ refers to, I believe, in John 14 as the Father's house. We're told that in the Father's house are many monae, translated into King James mansions, NASB, dwelling places or rooms. We need to get the idea out of our minds that we've got this big palace and 40 acres and then we've got another mansion and 40 acres and you've wondered how close you'd be to God. And if you're like me, you think, I'm going to be like in China. That's how far away it'll be, right?

No, we're all in the Father's house and we have a dwelling place there. I believe it's this golden city. John Walvard suggested in his wonderful work on the Millennial Kingdom that this city would actually be built in the form of a pyramid, and that's how Janet Willis has described it here in artistic form, the river of life cascading down in a certain way over the levels and then causing the land of Jerusalem and beyond to flourish like a garden. I think there's a good reason for holding to this ziggurat view, this step pyramid view.

By the way, we don't know. There's one rather thin reference where it refers to the steps of God's creation that may refer to this. You travel around the world today, by the way, and you will find ancient civilizations building step pyramids as part of their pagan worship.

You go to Egypt, India, Mexico, China, North America. By the way, you also find these cultures have their own versions of the great flood and they have built into their worship systems with their step pyramids, animal sacrifices. Where do you think that all came from? It came from the gospel that had been delivered to Adam and the patriarchs twisted in the heart of men who would not worship God, the Creator, and so they mimicked the city of God with the building of their own pyramids. Even the Egyptian pyramids which they believed enabled the pharaoh on his way to meet with the eternal stars. Abraham was waiting for the true city of God.

We're told, of course, he didn't find it wasn't built yet and it still hasn't been. But it will be and it will be unbelievably magnificent. Aren't you thankful that we have the true and living Word of God to teach us and guide us? Parts of the Bible can be confusing, especially end-time prophecies.

But if we carefully and faithfully study and if we believe what God says, He uses His Word to teach us and guide us. This is Wisdom for the Heart, the Bible teaching ministry of Stephen Davey. You can learn more about our ministry by visiting us online. You'll find us at wisdomonline.org. We'd love to hear from you, so please consider writing to us. Our email address is info at wisdomonline.org. You can use that address for any correspondence you have. You can also write to us through the mail by using this address. Our phone number is 866-48-BIBLE and I hope we hear from you. I also hope you'll be with us next time. We'll bring you the conclusion to today's message here on Wisdom for the Heart. .