The Pre-Millennial Return of Jesus Christ

In American history, it's simply known as the Great Disappointment. You can look it up on the Internet, you can buy books about it. It was a certain time period in American history, and it was a religious movement. And what it was, was back in the 1820s, William Miller, who was a farmer from Vermont, had done some in-depth Bible study. And he came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ was returning in 1843. And so what William Miller did was he began to tell people about it, he began to chart it all out. He took Bishop Usher. Bishop Usher was a bishop in the Catholic Church, who in the 1600s had created a chronology of the Bible. In fact, some people still use that chronology today, although it doesn't fit, but they try to use that chronology today. And he made a chronology of the Bible, and William Miller took all that information, and he put it together, put it together, until he came out with Jesus Christ as coming back between certain dates. He didn't have the exact date, but within a few weeks, he was coming back in 1843. Well, William Miller met a man named Joshua V. Hines. Joshua Hines was a Baptist minister who bought into William Miller's ideas, but the amazing thing about Joshua Hines was this man was a promoter. And he was able to take this information, and he created two magazines. One was called The Midnight Cry, which was published in New York, and The Signs of the Times, which was published in Boston. And what happened is that he used the phrase, advent, which means coming. Christ's second advent is at hand. And so Christ is going to come, so he has to be prepared. And people begin to believe it. They begin to see it. They begin to look at the teachings. Now, you have to realize that for most Christians at this time, the most common teaching throughout Christianity was called Amillennialism. It was the belief that the thousand years was not to be taken literal, and that Christ would come back at the end of the thousand years. The thousand years was a period in which the Church prepared was prepared. Amillennialism reached its peak around 1000 AD, between 1000 AD and 1035 AD. Because, why? Well, that's a thousand years after Christ's first coming. It's one of the reasons for the first Crusades. They launched a crusade to take Jerusalem so that the Christians could have Jerusalem when Jesus came back. They didn't come back. But Amillennialism did not die. The idea that the thousand years was not to be taken literal, that the thousand years was just a symbol. And here's the man who comes along and says, no, no, no. It is a millennium. It is a thousand year reign on earth by Christ. And he's coming back. And so, people began to say, you know, that's what the Bible says. And so, millennialism, which had been, you know, at times throughout Christian history when something was taught, had this revival in the United States. And people began to believe in the second advent, and that the thousand year period was after the second advent. And so you have the Adventist movement.

It's not the seventh-day Adventist movement at this point. It's the Adventist movement. They're Baptists. They're Methodists. They're people from all over, especially the Protestant world, are beginning to believe in this crisis coming back.

At one point, it is estimated, now you realize the population of the United States at this time was, I don't know, 30, 230, 40 million? I'm guessing, but it was probably about that. There was maybe 50 million at the Civil War period. This is decades before. 50,000 people were part of the Adventist movement, and it is estimated that a million other people were associated with it. This was huge. It was a movement that affected the entire northeast part of the United States and the Midwest, as people began to believe the millennium, which was a new idea for most people, because there were only small pockets of Christians that believed in the millennium.

So they began to get ready, they began to prepare themselves, they began to declare that Jesus Christ was coming back. The time came in March when He was supposed to come back, and it didn't happen. Well, He extended it out. There was some time between March, 1943, and March, 1944.

March 1844 came along, and He didn't come back. So in 1844, Miller said, I miscalculated. And he began to accept that the date, picking the date, wasn't such a good idea.

But the whole movement now began to fall apart.

People began to be so disillusioned that all kinds of things happened.

Some people just gave up their face. And of course, 1830s, 1840s is the second great awakening in the United States. And you have whole new religious ideas coming along.

Emerson and those people with these new philosophies, a sort of American philosophy being mixed in with religion. And here you have this historical event happening. In the middle of it, you have tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who are disillusioned.

Christ didn't come back.

Well, L.N.G.Y. came along and she said, well, we miscalculated not the date, but what happened. And so she claimed that there was an event that happened in 1844 in Heaven. And this whole doctrine formed, it's now part of the Seventh-day Adventist. Some people started to believe in the Sabbath, because there were Seventh-day Baptists who had become Adventist. And so now you have a Sabbath-keeping movement beginning, along with other doctrines. People began to believe and realize the Bible doesn't teach you the immortal soul. So people began to give up the idea of an ever-burning hell.

So some people began to say, okay, we don't have an immortal soul, and there is no ever-burning hell. And they started to keep the Sabbath.

But that was actually not a majority of the people that had been Adventists. The disillusionment became almost overwhelming.

And they began to promote all kinds of ideas.

One group believed that because what happened in 1844 was something in Heaven so great that God was no longer calling anybody else. It was called the shut-door doctrine.

God had shut the door and nobody could receive salvation now.

So it was a sin to try to divert anybody. So if anybody knew who came to their church, they literally shut the door on them and told them, you cannot come in because God is not saving any more people. Others believed it became wrong to have children.

That group died off within one generation. Some of them actually joined the Shakers. You've probably all heard of the Shakers, which is a religious movement that happened in the United States in the early 1800s. And the Shakers died off because they believed it was wrong to have children. There was another group that was very interesting. This group believed that there had been a pouring out of God's Spirit and since they were filled with God's Spirit, they could not sin.

They began divorcing each other. People began... there was a sexual revolution in the 1840s among some of the Adventists because there was no sin. They could not sin. In fact, some of them claimed they already had immortality.

All kinds of prophetic magazines sort of just pop up all over the country. Many of them had the title, Trumpet, in it.

One man, Mr. Schnoe, claimed that he was the Elijah to come.

And anyone who did not follow him did not have salvation. That he was the Elijah to come.

They began to fragment and hate each other and rip each other apart.

And some of the strangest doctrines that we can imagine now, but at that time, if you believed the Sabbath, how did you not know this was okay or that was okay?

Almost no group started to keep the Holy Days, although the keeping of the Passover, some groups started to keep the Passover.

So you have this fragmentation and this remarkable scattering of these people.

Remember, at one time, they estimated a million people interested, and in one way or another connected, which out of 30 million people is a huge part of the population, especially when you figure most of this movement was in the Northeast and the Midwest.

So among that population, it was very, very concentrated. There was one night when they thought Christ was coming back that they believed tens of thousands of people dressed in white went outside and waited to be taken up.

And of course, they weren't. So you can imagine the enormous disappointment these people went through.

In this movement, two interesting churches came out of it.

For one thing, by the way, you'll see most Baptists today, Methodists, many Protestant churches are, at least in the United States, are, they do believe, in the Millennium.

They're called pre-Millennialists. They believe that Jesus was coming back before the Millennium. That started from this movement. There were two other groups that started very interesting. One is called the Seventh-Day Adventists. The Seventh-Day Adventists also believe, wait a minute, okay, we're supposed to keep all ten of the Ten Commandments, so yeah, we have to keep the Sabbath. But they started to look at things differently. They started to say, well, there is no, you don't have an immortal soul. There is no, you don't die and go to heaven. There are resurrections. You, there is no everlasting burning hell. We shouldn't eat pork. I mean, the Seventh-Day Adventists started to create a whole systematic set of doctrines. There was another group that did the same thing, but they rejected Ellen G. White and they became known as the Seventh-Day, or the Church of God Seventh-Day.

And they formed two Sabbath-keeping groups that became very, very big throughout the 1800s. Now, of course, what's interesting in that movement is that the Church of God Seventh-Day, which was very influential in the United States in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was a man in the 1930s named Herbert W. Armstrong, who was a minister in the Church of God Seventh-Day. And he began a church called the Radio Church of God, which I remember because I used to be part of it.

And so you see this history that goes clear back to this great disappointment and how shattered people were because they didn't understand some basic core concepts. One is, we can't set dates.

Anyone who looks forward to the return of Jesus Christ holds for it, wants it, feels disappointed when it doesn't happen when they think it should or that it would.

I've said by many people that are dying who have said to me, the only thing about my life I feel disappointed in is that I wasn't alive to see Christ come back. But that's okay because I'll be resurrected at the time. It doesn't matter. But they still feel this, oh, I wish I could have seen that.

We want it to happen, although what's funny is we all want it to happen, but we don't want the bad things that have to happen before he comes. We want Christ to return without the tribulation. So what we do is we keep saying we want him to return, but sometimes we really don't because we're all panicked about the tribulation. We're all upset about the tribulation. We're all upset about the fact that the world's going to collapse. Well, why did he told us it's going to collapse?

He said, just keep looking to me coming back and you'll be okay.

Just keep looking to me coming back and that he will be with us. God's going to be with us, and Christ is coming back.

But I think many of us in our lifetimes, I mean, I can remember as a child that there were many people I knew who believed that Jesus Christ was coming back in the 1970s.

And when he didn't, many of those people gave up on their face. They gave up their face.

Well, the Bible doesn't say he's coming back in the 1970s. They didn't say it was coming back in the 1830s either, or 1840s.

It didn't say that. That was just an attempt to put together a chronology that is deliberately, by God, deliberately confusing so that you and I cannot set the exact date.

It is not possible for you and me to set the exact date. That's on purpose by God.

But we go through time periods where we want it to happen. And here's what we do. We get so caught up, and we want it to happen, that sometimes we ignore other spiritual aspects of our lives.

Then, it sort of wanes. We lose the vision of Christ coming back. And what we do is then we begin to get out into the world. And so we go back and forth between this excitement to this sort of numbness. You know, putting us in half the world, half doing God's way. Oh, Christ is coming back. So every time something bad happens in the world, right?

It's not a shame, though. When times are good, we don't think much about it.

And there's the great shame.

Because we're only involved in Christ coming back.

Many times we're in a panic.

Instead of it being a driving force in how we live our lives every single day, I think there's a great book, I don't know if it's still a print, it's called, Millennial Fever.

And it's about, it's the most researched book ever done, I think, about the whole Bill of Right movement. And it's just fascinating. What happened to those people?

And when he didn't come back, you know, the people who became part of the Shakers, the people who just went out and became drunkards and, you know, divorced, and just things that you would have never dreamed people would do.

People who gave up their faith. And some of the strange doctoral ideas. One of them I thought was interesting. One group decided that every, they had a whole list of words in the Bible that were really secret words, and what people really get into is secret knowledge.

See, their hopes were dashed, so they got into secret knowledge. Their secret knowledge was a whole list of words in the Bible that were code words for the church. Even the word David was a code word for the church. So you had all these code words, and if you knew the secret words, things happened between you and God that didn't happen to other people.

So they're into all these code words. And their final conclusion was, Jesus did come back. He came back into all of us because Heaven, the word Heaven, was a code word for the church. So Heaven is in us. We are Heaven.

The people are Heaven. That's the conclusion they came to.

And there was a movement of people that believed that, that bought into it, and would walk around telling people, I'm Heaven. I'm Heaven. I'm David. I'm Heaven. I'm Israel. All those words are code words for me. The thing I find really interesting is how many guys started claiming they were prophets. I mean, the guy that claimed he was Elijah, and that salvation depended on following him.

Or you did not have salvation.

But what I'm going to do today, I'm going to go through some real basic Scriptures about the pre-millennial return of Jesus Christ, the pre-millennial return of Jesus Christ, and what the millennium is. Because many Adventists today, many Seventh-day Adventists today, believe in the millennium. But you know what they think the earth is like during the millennium? Void. Nobody even lives on it. It's totally void of people for a thousand years.

That's what they think. In other words, what happened in 1844 brought to light the truth of the millennium, the pre-millennial return of Jesus Christ, but it spun off in all different directions. So that by the late 1800s, you have a whole new doctrine come up. I say new, and it had sprinkled throughout Christianity, but it never had really taken root like it is now. You know what it is? The rapture.

The rapture was a spinoff of this.

As, okay, there is a pre-millennial coming of Jesus Christ. People started to really study, well, if that's true, this tribulation is real.

But we don't want to go through the tribulation, so they had to come up with what happens to God's people during the tribulation.

Well, in Revelation 3, it says to the Church of Philadelphia that God will protect them during the time it comes upon all the world. They said that there must be a way that's done, and they used that to create what is now the rapture concept.

So what happened in 1844 spun off all kinds of things that is common in Christianity today. It spun off two churches that actually bought in and lived by now the whole Ten Commandments, including throwing out idols and the Sabbath. And here we are today. You and I are a product of the Millerite movement, the Adventist movement.

It's interesting to look through history and see how things happen and how God works through certain things. It was because of the Millerite movement that the Seventh-Day Baptist, which nobody knew much about at the time, began to introduce the Sabbath to all kinds of people. The people began to accept the Sabbath in larger numbers throughout the United States. So let's look at some basic scriptures about Christ's Second Coming.

Matthew 24, of course, is the Olivet prophecy. I'm just going to look at a couple of verses because what we're looking at here is Pre-Villennialism 101. We're going back to just the building blocks. So if we take Matthew 24, we say Matthew 24 and 25, Jesus tells us about His Second Coming in great detail.

He talks about how times will be beforehand. He calls it the Tribulation. Then in verse 29, verse 29 says immediately after the Tribulation. So after the world gets to the place where it's almost destroyed, in fact, in the same prophecy He tells us that unless Christ comes at the moment He does, humanity will be totally destroyed. If you look through the book of Revelation, the earth will be in such a state, plus the massive war that's about to take place as all the armies of the world gather together with all the nuclear and biological weapons and things that we have today. As they come together, who knows what weapons we'll have then, as they all come together in the near future, at least I believe. But what if it's not? I can't imagine it's not. It doesn't matter. You and I have to live every day right now as if it is. That's the point. That's what the people who came out of 1844 and became right with God and learned all these new truths and doctrines of the Bible and began the new Sabbatarian movement in this country. They were motivated by, whoa, He is coming back. We had the date wrong, but He is coming back. And that is to determine how I live my life today, right now, today. And so they became focused on that. And they died, and their children died, and their children died, and their children died. I believe Christ is coming back in the very near future. But if He doesn't, it won't change a bit of what I do when I get up every morning. It won't change a bit. We have to live every day that way. Not with fear, but with anticipation. I mean, there's some anxiety when you think about the tribulation, but with anticipation of what God is going to do and how we can be part of it. So immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be dark, and the moon will not give us light. The stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be shaken. And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn. They shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. This is very important because it can't be in secret.

As the prima linea idea grew, you have in the early 1900s, the Jehovah Witnesses movement began, and now you have a secret coming of Jesus Christ.

Now, it is visible, and if we know, we listen, we talk about the trumpet calls of Revelation. It is audible. People will know this is happening. It won't be secret. Christ is coming back, and it is both visual and audible. That's important. That's our first point. As I said, this is the coming of Christ 101.

But sometimes we've got to go back and refocus on the basics to give us our mind back to what's really important in all this.

Now, the second thing that's going to happen now, this visual coming of Christ, is in verse 31, He will send His angels with the great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect for the four winds from one end of heaven to the other.

He's going to gather His saints together. Those who are alive will be changed, and those who are dead will be resurrected.

First Thessalonians 4. You know, I've been going through the doctoral classes, and I'm trying to catch up on some of those, and some of them are going to be here to get them all done. Why we believe in the resurrections? By the way, the understanding of multiple resurrections became much more clear and taught much more clearly after 1844, as people began to work back through the problem of the millennium in an amillennial society, or I mean, a millennial Christianity.

How does that all fit? How does that all play out? How do you take these different passages and put them together? First Thessalonians 4. You know, it's funny. I talked about how when I was a child, many people believed that Jesus was coming back in the mid-70s. It didn't matter to me. I was a kid.

That didn't mean anything to me. You know, I was more worried about lunch. But I do remember something I had experienced I did as a child, and even as a teenager. I anticipated that this would happen. And I figured out long before the mid-70s, even as a kid, that it wasn't going to happen in the mid-70s.

As a teenager, I figured that much out. But it did take away from the anticipation of it. What I find amazing is I look back and I didn't fear, of course, when you're a kid you don't know how much you should fear things. I didn't fear the tribulation. I just anticipated Christ's return. The tribulation was just a big action movie I was going to get to live through. Now, that's the stupidity of a kid, right? But that's sort of how I visualized it. The action movie. I was going to get to watch all this stuff, and then God was going to send Christ back, and boy, was that going to be great.

I'd say we should all be that naive. I am saying we should be a little bit more that way. First, that's something that's forward. I read this at every funeral that I do. But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. After 1844, people began to believe, and churches began to teach, that death was sleep.

It wasn't immediately going to heaven or hell. Now, there were those who believed it beforehand, but it wasn't a lot. This began to be published. This began to be spread throughout the United States in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, because of what had happened when Christ didn't come back and people started looking at their Bible differently. For if we believe, verse 14, that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. 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, which I don't understand.

Well, I don't understand how you get the rapture with that verse. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we are alive and remain, shall be caught up together with Him 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. Notice the power of comfort here. This is supposed to be an anticipated event. We are to anticipate these things. You know, the first thing that comes to mind when I read this is when Jesus is taken as a baby into the temple. Remember, there are two people that have to see Him. Two older people. One man says, I can die now because I've waited all my life.

I knew the Messiah was coming in my life. I knew it. And he runs up because he says he's inspired by God. God's Spirit inspires him. He runs up to Mary and Joseph and says, it's Him! And I get this little baby. I can die now because I've waited my whole life.

I've anticipated this my whole life, and that's Him. Now, you think about that. That should be our approach to this event. Now, we're to be running towards this event and saying, I've waited my whole life for this. That's the kind of anticipation, and we can't let the evil of this world sap this anticipation out of us, because it will. But you know what? It's always been a mess. Can you imagine being a Christian in the Dark Ages? Can you imagine being a Christian in 100 AD? It's never been easy. It's always been hard. And the world's always been in Satan's world. Every Christian that has ever lived has lived in Satan's world.

You and I just have to live in the time when it's going to fall apart completely. But every Christian's always lived in Satan's world. You can say, oh, it would have been so much easier to be a Christian in 1950 because the United States was such a better place. It was just as hard to be a Christian in 1950. Oh, things weren't in some ways quite as evil. In other ways, they were worse. You have to understand it's never been easy to be a Christian in Satan's world.

We just have to live in the really bad part. Remember, it's not that bad yet compared to what it's going to be. Be happy. Be concerned. But be focused. Or the anxiety will kill you. It will drive you away from God. We can't live at this level of anxiety. You can't live at this level of fear. You can't live it. We can't do it. We have to put our hope in God. That's where we have to go.

This is such an encouraging set of verses. See, he resurrects the saints. He then stands on the Mount of Olives. And this is where we begin to realize, let's go to Zechariah 14, that when we look at his return, there are people on this earth that he is not coming here to simply take the saints to heaven and leave the earth unpopulated.

Christ is coming to stay. Zechariah 14, verse 1, Behold, the day of the Lord is coming, and your spoil will be divided in your midst, and I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem. The city shall be taken, the house is rifled, the women ravished. Half of the city shall go into captivity, but the remnant of the people shall not be cut off from the city. And the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations as he fights in the day of battle. And in that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem in the east, and the Mount of Olives shall be split in two from the east to the west, making a very large valley.

Half of the mountain shall move toward the north, and half of it towards the south. There's going to be great human resistance. Revelation 19 talks about how Jesus Christ will destroy. You know, there's this idea among some people that somehow the God of the Old Testament is evil and bad and angry, and Jesus came to show us the real God.

And there is a growing belief among Christian churches that the God of the Old Testament is a misconception. What we see in the Old Testament is human definition of God, which is wrong, and Jesus came to correct it. You know, you read Revelation 19. It is Jesus Christ who fights and destroys the armies. It is Jesus Christ in Matthew 7 that says, that He will come to me saying, Lord, Lord, and I will say, I do not know You. In fact, the Scripture says that the Father gives all judgment to Christ.

It is Christ who will put people into the light of fire. So we must understand that Christ isn't coming back as the baby this time. He's coming back as King of Kings.

There will be human resistance. But in that human resistance, there's not going to be the total destruction of all people. In fact, if you read through the rest of Revelation 14, He talks about how He will set up so that people observe the Feast of Tabernacles. And the people of Egypt won't want to come do the Feast of Tabernacles. So He won't set any reign on Egypt until they do. There are people on this earth. Now, we do know from the Scriptures in Revelation, once again, that a huge part of the earth is killed.

The earth is devastated. You know, Christ comes back and begins to heal the environment. So one of the first things He has to do is heal the environment. What's fascinating, and we won't have time to do it today, is go through the Scriptures that describe the Millennium. Many of them describe this beautiful earth, restored earth. But we're not really going through the description of the Millennium today. We're just going through, you know, pre-millennialism 101. Showing Christ is coming back. It's visible. It's audible. There's a war against Him.

He saves humanity, and then He doesn't go away. He just doesn't take the same to leave, and everybody else dies. He stays here to bring the world to His Father. He stays here to bring the world into the family of God. Everybody. Hindus, Buddhists, atheists. He will come to bring everybody. And people aren't going to understand it. And at first, because of the beast power, not only the beast power, but the hordes of armies that come out of the east. Plus, if you read through the Spider-Province, there's going to be some Arab resistance to Him.

So you have all this resistance to Him. But He wins, and He establishes. He gets to establish God's Kingdom on this earth. This is the true story of pre-millennialism, which was not understood. You have to understand it was not understood in 1844. They just began to understand pre-millennialism. There were very few people who actually believed it before then. Just little pockets of people. People began to realize, wait a minute, there is a great tribulation. The book of Revelation is to be taken literal, because the book of Revelation up to this point has been taken where it's all...

Now, there are symbols in it, but everything is symbolic. So they didn't get anything out of it. Except symbols. Now you begin to have this understanding. And where we are today, it's a remarkable understanding you and I take for granted. As if somehow this was believed by many people throughout the centuries. So the truth is, it was only believed by a handful of people throughout the centuries. Just a handful. So we have this remarkable understanding. So we have this resistance. But once Christ comes, puts down the resistance, He now begins to convert the world.

You know, I mentioned here in Zechariah, let's go to another minor prophet. Let's go to Micah. Isaiah, there's lots of passages in Isaiah to talk about this. I'm just going to read the one from Micah.

Micah 4, verse 1. Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord's house, the mountain, that is a Hebrew symbol for kingdom, the kingdom of the Lord's house shall be established on top of the kingdoms, and shall be exalted above the hills, and people shall flow to it.

Many nations shall come and say, Come and let us go to the mountain of the Lord. This is that time, the latter days, when the Messiah stands on the Mount of Olives and splits in two, and that river runs out. And the whole world begins to be healed because it'll be to the point where a kiddie is sustained, and he's saved life. And these nations are destroyed, and these people die by the tens of thousands as they try to fight against Christ. And he begins to bring peace. And the resurrected saints begin to help him do that.

And he begins to bring Israel and Judah back together. He begins to bring them back together as a people, and then unite them together with their Arab cousins. And he begins now to spread that kingdom all over the world. That is the future of those who are following God today.

And it really doesn't matter what the beast power does. He can't stop this. You see? It doesn't matter. Satan can't stop this. It's going to happen. And the fear that we live with and anxiety—I can't say we all have some anxiety. If you don't have some anxiety, you're not paying any attention to anything. So we all have some anxiety with what's going on in the world. But we shouldn't be overwhelmed with it, because this is what God's doing. You and I live in this incredible time. There may have been some easier times to live in. It may have been easier to be a Christian in the late 1880s.

1890s. It's peaceful in the United States. Most people left you alone. You can live on your farm. It's a great time to live and be a Christian. You keep the Sabbath and nobody cared. Right? You and I live in a lot more exciting time. Wow. We're living in a time when this is all just beginning. It's all just beginning. Still a lot of things have to happen.

We know what God's doing. He says, Come, let us go to the Mount of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and He will teach us His ways. humanity will finally be prepared to say, Okay, He is God. Remember that famous scene in the Ten Commandments where Yule Brenner playing Pharaoh says, Moses God is God?

The world will be saying, Jacob's God is God. Abraham's God is God. Jesus is the Son of God, and He's there. Let's go. Let's learn. Let's get saved from this mess that we live in. There'll be a ragged, hungry, decimated, brutalized people. Hundreds of millions of them. People from Africa, people from Asia, Philippines, people from Russia, people from Syria, people from Egypt, people from the United States. Brutalized, starving, sick, afraid people. That's what the world's going to be. That's not what we will be. Those who will follow God, and those who will change the Christ's return, that's what we will be. This hope has to drive us in this time. This vision has to be alive in this time.

We'll be swallowed up by it. We just watched something on the History Channel the other day. It's very interesting. The best I can tell, some of them were secrets. There's at least a dozen bunkers in the United States that some of them, one of them will put 5,000 people in it. Some of them are luxury bunkers.

They're like a high-class luxury hotel. If you throw down $50,000, I think it was 50 grand, you get a year in this when things start to get bad. They live underground in these bunkers. They show them they have huge movie rooms and beautiful bedrooms and enough food for everybody. When you get your room, there's enough food in there to last each person a year, depending on how many people you sign up at 50 grand each. And it's full! It's full of people!

I don't mean there's anybody living in it now. They're waiting for the word. They receive regular updates on when you see, this happened, this happened, and this happened, run to the bunker. Because once they shut the doors, nobody gets in. They get to live underground. One of them is an RV park. It's the biggest underground bunker in the world. It was built by the U.S. Air Force, I think, and they finally sold it. And they're turning it into an RV park. You have to have a map. It's so large. There's so many miles of tunnels and rooms or anything. If you don't have a map, they say you can get lost in there for weeks.

And people are paying thousands and thousands of dollars to be able to bring in their RV and park it in there and ride out the apocalypse. Watching John Wayne movies and eating free-stride food. See, that anxiety level is throughout all of society. It's part of what's driving what's going on in the world. The more fearful people get, the more they will self-fulfill the prophecies about destruction and chaos. The more angry and fearful people get, the more they will do what the Bible says they're going to do.

But look at what it says here. The middle of verse 2, For out of Zion the law shall go forth, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, and he shall judge between many peoples and rebuked strong nations afar off, and they will beat their swords and the plowshares and their spears and the pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. There's not going to be a need for armed forces at all. There's not going to be a need for armed policemen at all.

What's it going to be like? Again, I said we could go to all kinds of verses in Isaiah, to describe it. One passage I want to read very interesting is in Zechariah, verse 8. Zechariah, verse 8. You know, it's interesting. During the Jewish dispersion, for century after century, there was a saying that people would say, you know, when they'd say goodbye to somebody, they'd say, next year in Jerusalem.

Next year in Jerusalem. You know, maybe ours should be next year. Well, no, we can't say that because Christ can't come back. Christ can't come back next year. Enough things haven't happened yet. He could come back real quick. I mean, Christ can't come back tomorrow.

He can't come back next year because the tribulation hasn't happened yet. So people are fearful that Christ can come back right now. He can't, according to the Scriptures, his own prophecies. A lot of bad stuff has to happen before he comes back. But, you know, all that stuff could happen real quick. Maybe our goodbyes should be in the Kingdom. Maybe that should be our vision. But we need to articulate it more. Our hope more.

Our faith more. Because the world we live in is crushing. And I'm not a pessimist, but I have to tell you, it's only going to get worse. But your life doesn't have to get worse. Right? I mean, if God's going to take care of us, I'm not saying it won't be easy. Your life might get harder, but it doesn't have to be worse. There's a difference. Sometimes some of the greatest moments in life is when you're in a difficulty and you see God working in your life.

Look what it says here in Zechariah 8, verse 1. And the word of the Lord of Hosts came saying, that says the Lord of Hosts, I am zealous for Zion, of course, and he's coming back to Zion, he's going to rule from Jerusalem, with great zeal, with great fervor, I am zealous for her. And thus says the Lord, I will return to Zion, and in the midst of Jerusalem. Jerusalem shall be called the city of truth, the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the holy mountain. He returns the physical Jerusalem, but also to spiritual Jerusalem, which is the church, to be resurrected and be with him, to help him fix the world, to help him fix the world.

And I've had people say, boy, I can't wait until Christ comes back, because I want to be a king. And I said, I just want to make sure that one child doesn't starve to death again.

That's what I want to do. I don't have a lot of interest in being a king. I do have a lot of interest in that. It is our hope. Is this real to us? Because if it's not real to you, these times are going to get hard, and what will be real to you? If you ever have a vision beyond the bad stuff that's going to happen, what's going to be real to you? Only the bad stuff.

That's all that's going to be real to you. Thus says the Lord of Hearse, verse 4, 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. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets. Thus says the Lord of Hosts, If it is marvelous in the eyes of the remnant of the people of these days, it will also be marvelous in my eyes as the Lord of Hosts. He goes on and he talks about all through Zechariah, how he was going to save the people of, of course, Israel and Judah, but this goes to the whole world.

He's not just interested in those people. He's interested in everybody. And he will rule from there. And he will change everything. So that was the fifth point, that Christ will rule from Jerusalem. He will be on this earth. It won't be desolate. As one of the ideas that came out of the great disappointment, he will rule this afternoon. And of course, he will rule for a thousand years, as it says in Revelation, chapter 20. That's where we get the word millennium. Millennium means a thousand years.

That's all it means. That's all it means. So you'll see someone say, well, you can read in a book where it says, Christianity has been around for two millennia. What does that mean? What's been around for two millennium? That's millennium plural. It's been around for about two thousand years. So the word itself just means a thousand. It's all really all things. But when we talk about millennium, capital M, we're talking about the exact time period where Christ is on this earth for a thousand years. Now, that's not the end of it.

When we talk about the resurrections here in the Bible study, that's not the end of it. I gave the last doctor's class was on the kingdom, kingdom of God. The millennium, sometimes we think the millennium, that word, is a synonym for kingdom of God. It is not. The kingdom of God is God's rule. The millennium is a time period with Christ ruling on the earth. God's kingdom exists now, and it exists after the millennium.

God's kingdom has actually never gone away, right? Satan was allowed a little bit of time on this earth where he stole the kingdom from humanity. Satan stole the kingdom. God gave, told Adam and Eve, you have dominion over the earth. He gave Adam and Eve dominion. He gave them rule over the earth, and Satan came along and stole it from them. And God said, okay, you want to rule out, you want to live under his rule, go ahead. But I will fix this.

My first promise was I'm going to fix this. Christ coming back the first and second, or coming the first time, and then coming back the second time, it's just God's way of fixing this. And Satan's removed, and God says, good. He doesn't get a little piece of my kingdom anymore. I take, I get all of my kingdom. So the millennium is not synonymous.

It's not a synonym for the kingdom of God. It's a time period in part of God's plan in which God's kingdom is reestablished on this earth with people here, with resurrected saints and physical people on this earth. A sixth thing I'll just bring out here is, um, a lot of able idealism was based on a belief that all the prophecies about ancient Israel, or all the promises about ancient Israel, were now given to the church. All the prophecies given to ancient Israel were given to the church.

Israel had nothing to do with God anymore. And there were three things that really, in their minds, in the three hundreds, four hundreds, five hundreds, six hundreds, even up to modern times. For many people, many Christians, there's three things that make a Jew, or an Israelite. Circumcision will eat pork and keep the Sabbath. But those three things can actually be seen as sin. Why? Well, because anyone physically an Israelite, or physically a Jew, has been thrown away by God. In fact, there has been movements throughout the years to kill the Jews off by Christians.

I mean, Adolf Hitler got away with a lot of what he did, even though a large number of people in Germany were Lutherans and Catholics. Usually when you became a Nazi, you gave up religion. But there were still large numbers of people that were Lutherans and Catholics. There were large numbers of Catholics in Poland that turned in their Jewish neighbors.

There were large numbers of Catholics and Protestants in France that turned in their Jewish neighbors. Why? They were the murderers of Jesus Christ, and God had thrown them away. And in Amillennialism, you don't believe any promises made to the Israelites or Jews have any validity today. All those promises are now to the Church, because the Church is Abraham's seed, and those people can be hated.

If you want to read something, they read what Martin Luther wrote about Jews. Martin Luther tried, he thought God had called him to convert all the Jews to be Christians. So part of his Protestant Reformation was to get them to become Christians. When they did not become Christians, he set up rules that Lutherans should go through, burn down the synagogues, destroy the Torah, and actually drive the rabbis out. And you can give it violence against rabbis. William Shire, who wrote the famous book, Rise of Fall the Third Reich, said, if it would not have been for the teachings of Martin Luther, Hitler could have never done what he did.

But you had 400 years of Christians literally trained to hate Jews. Part of a millennialism, many times, I can't say in every case, but many times, a millennials believe that. Pre-millennialists, though, we see God working through the physical descendants of Abraham and working through the spiritual descendants of Abraham, and he has two different jobs for them. So we see the promises made to physical Israel as still being important today. That's why almost all...you see these Protestant groups that support Israel? John Hagee supports Israel, right? John Hagee is also a pre-millennialist. Most groups that you will find that support Israel today, Protestant groups, are pre-millennialists.

They believe Christ is coming back, and they believe that the promises made to Israel in the Bible are literal, and there has to be Jews in Jerusalem when Christ comes back. So they support having Israel there because, well, Christ won't come back to those Jews there. That's why you'll find so many Baptists, some of the Methodists, some of the others. Then you'll find other Protestant groups that are absolutely against Israel.

You'll find most of them are able-illenials. They don't believe that Christ comes before the thousand years and reigns for a thousand years on the earth. All I have to say is that if God took all the promises He made to those people and now gives them to someone else without telling them, He's very dishonest. Let me look at Ezekiel, just our last scripture here.

Ezekiel 37. The first part of Ezekiel 37 is the famous dried bones. We'll talk about that in Sathru's Bible study. But in Ezekiel 37, I'm going to pick it up on the second half of this passage in verse 15, because this part doesn't get read that often. Ezekiel 37 verse 15 says, Then join them one to another, for yourself into one stick, and they will become one in your hand. And when the children of your people speak, you say, will you not show us what you mean by this?

Say to them, that says the Lord God, surely I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel, His companions, and I will join them with it, the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they will become one in my hand. And the sticks of which you write will be in your hand before their eyes. Then He said to them, This is the Lord God, surely I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, wherever they have gone, and I will gather them every side, and will bring them into their own land.

And I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be over them, and they shall no longer be two nations, nor shall they be divided into two kingdoms again. They shall not defile themselves any more with idols, nor with detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions, and I will deliver them from all their dwelling places in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them, and they shall be my people, and I will be my God.

And David, my servant, shall reign over them. None of this has happened yet. Has David been resurrected? I say, well, this David means the Messiah, okay? Is the Messiah reigning over Israel yet? In Jerusalem, in the land? David, my servant, shall be king over them. They all shall have one shepherd. They shall also walk in my judgments, and observe my statutes, and do them. Then they shall dwell in the land that I have given to Jacob, my servants, where your fathers dwell, and they shall dwell there.

They, their children, their children's children forever, and my servant David shall be their prince forever. You know, if you're an able idealist, you think God just said, eh, yeah, I didn't really need it. This isn't based on Israel's obedience. This promise was based on God saying, I will do this, because look at the next verse. Moreover, I will make a covenant of peace with them, and shall be an everlasting covenant with them.

I will establish them and multiply them, and I will set my sanctuary in their midst forever. My tabernacle shall be with them, and indeed I will be their God, and they shall be my people. The nations also will know that I, the Lord, sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst forevermore. And so, the able idealists say, well, this means the church.

Remember one of the basic rules of interpretation we talk about all the time. What did it mean to the original audience? To the people Ezekiel went to, it meant them. You cannot deny who the people were that he was talking to. And the ableists will say, well, that's true. He was talking to them, and they thought he meant them. But after Jesus came, he just threw those people away and applied this to the church. It's just a viewpoint I can't grasp. When God told these people who was going to do this, He meant it. Now, there's other promises made to the church. You know, there's actually greater promises made to the church. Because they're promised a new covenant, you and I already live in the new covenant.

We already are participants in the new covenant. They're waiting for that new covenant to come to them. We already have it. Eternal life has already been offered to us. So the idea, as a pre-millennialist, we will believe, we will look at the Scripture and say God still has a place for the physical descendants of Abraham, and what He's going to do with him. That does not discount God's promises to the spiritual descendants of Abraham. In fact, the physical descendants of Abraham, in order to receive salvation, have to become the spiritual descendants of Abraham. Just like the Gentiles, just like everybody else does.

So what do we see here from this simple pre-millennial 101? Christ is going to visibly return to earth to rule for a thousand years. Two, the saints will be resurrected at that time to rule with Him on the earth. On the earth. Three, there will be resistance to Christ's coming. Massive resistance. Four, physical people will still exist on the earth at that time, and all nations will convert to the worship of God. All nations will convert to the worship of God as Christ rules on the earth. And then five, Judah and Israel will be reunited and given the land as promised to Abraham.

You know, anyone who waits for Christ to return from time to time, we all have experienced our own great disappointments, haven't we? Just like those people in Mass, some of you may have been part of the radio church of God, the early worldwide church of God, and some of you went through a great disappointment in 1975 when Christ didn't come back. Although most people figured out long before that, He's not coming back in 1975. So we didn't have the massive problem they had. Anybody here was around in 1975 in the church? Look how many hands. Probably 40%. So you know what I'm talking about. But the rest of you, you suffered your disappointment at the time, haven't you? You want Christ to come back and He doesn't? I mean, right? If you thought Christ was going to come back 20 years ago, you'd have taken better care of yourself, right? You thought you were going to live this long, you'd have taken better care of yourself.

But those great disappointments, or the evil in the world, cannot distract us from the reality of the vision God gives us, of the reality of what God is doing, the reality that this was always going to end in disaster. It was always going to be messed up. It was never going to work. If it was going to work, why would Christ have to come back anyways? So we live in it, with God's help, with God's love, with God's guidance. Christ is coming back to set up God's Kingdom on this earth.

Don't let the talking-head pundits on television, don't let all the news, don't let all the stories on the Internet, don't let that overwhelm any of us. Live every day, live every day with the knowledge and the understanding that you have been chosen by God to be part of that Kingdom, and that Christ is returning, and He's going to return soon to establish that Kingdom on this earth.