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There is so much talk of the 3rd millenium, of its not really starting next year, but of the 3rd thousand coming up, and what this may mean, and of new vision, new hope or new sickness, that it is really time to put the record straight. It is past already, the millenium which relates to its BEGINNING. THAT END is already here.

Let us elucidate this. The MILLENIUM has meaning when it starts, has it not ? A thousand years is a space of action availability, for process; but that is of no historical interest until we know when it BEGINS. The beginning is not equivocal. It relates to Jesus Christ, the Prince of Life and Lord.. the One this earth delivered to death, and on account of whom it drives, negatively geared, to death with a dynamic which is already quite impressive. It is  BECAUSE it rejected and still rejects HIM that it is in reverse to ruin. He only is the Prince of LIFE. This way is unsuitable for life; since HE is IT.

Thus the birth of Jesus Christ is the start of the millenium. In this, amazingly, the world agrees. It is AD and BC, in the year of our Lord, and before Christ. Now as to that, 4 BC as has been shown in SMR (pp. 886ff.) appears the birth date of Christ. Hence the 2nd millenium was finished somewhere in 1996. How is this significant ?

First, it matters because the actual series of one thousand years started unquestionably for our dating system, with His birth, however inaccurate some renderings were - though not grossly so. Second it is well to remember beginnings when you consider ends... Third, when you get excited in some mystic or idealistic sense about a NEW MILLENIUM, it is well to consider WHEN IT IS. It WAS somewhere in 1996, it seems quite certain. GOD is NOT on record that in a given millenium stage HE WILL ACT IN SOME NEW WAY. How then is it significant at all, apart from the geysers of popular sentiment, naturally excited in view of the way the world scene is lurching like the state room on the Titanic shortly after impact ?

It is not so really; except that it so HAPPENS that the SIGNS for HIS RETURN, FOR WHOM the dating system was put in place, are ALSO HAPPENING .... NOW.

The purist may now ask: HOW is this NEWS ? News ? There is no greater news than this: HOW the world is to live if it is not to die! There is none beyond this: HOW a man or woman or child is to have peace of heart, truth of mind and joy of soul, in the love of God. There is none above this: WHO is the one who gives the HOW! The answer - Jesus Christ; and the GOSPEL is from a Greek word meaning a good sending, or good news. It still is; but it won't be for those who reject it in this life of pilgrimage, of millenia, of developments, of temporary things. Why not ? Because, their preference known, it will be honoured; and there is small honour in divorce from your Maker, confusion without the only Saviour and a bed in alienation from Him, commonly known, and rightly, as hell.

Hell has a big mouth and a disagreeable stomach. You see preliminaries to it in the world systems which torture their prey and seek to play God with them, forcing their labour and seeking to squash their souls like oranges into some sort of juice, which however, is not fresh. Jesus spoke much of it and in particular, did so in Mark 9, making 3 double edged and acute references to it. You SIMPLY CANNOT have a lie and live in the truth, reject peace and yet find it, ignore God and yet be in the way of life. You see this clearly and decisively from the lips of Christ in John 3:17-21, followed by the undeviating pronouncement by the prophet, John the Baptist (3:36):

HE WHO BELIEVES IN THE SON HAS EVERLASTING LIFE; AND HE WHO DOES NOT BELIEVE THE SON SHALL NOT SEE LIFE, BUT THE WRATH OF GOD ABIDES ON HIM.
 
 

First, let us look at the good side.

There is STILL the love of God. It is not revoked. If you can read this, and want the truth, there is still hope in that love. He DOES want to redeem, to save; He IS willing to act. He WILL NOT reject you if you come to Him in faith, in His covenant of blood, offered in His life-giving sacrifice for sin, and taking Him resurrected as your LORD without addition or subtraction, according to His word, follow Him (Romans 10:9, 3:23ff.).

That love is like a hill covered with violets, suffusing the air with delight, delicate, not for bulls, not for roaring, but for savour, for fragrance, for grace. But what is it like ? It is like a wall of roses, mounting high in profusion to the skies, covering it and abounding upon it, in hundreds and thousands, with arms here and there, buds, blooms, exquisite variety but all roses. It sends out its scent which arrests, never cloys, which refreshes and amazes but speaks with the face of many folds, many petals, arranged but free, lavish and little, grand and overwhelming.

There is STILL the mercy of God. What is it like ? It is like the ever pure water which comes from the far melting snows on vast mountain tops, exposed to the light in the radiance beyond pollution. To abandon this is folly without parallel. What does Jeremiah say on this (for the truth is not new, merely newly manifest with the payment for sin now complete at the start of the millenia now finished to the number of two) ? This (2:13):

For My people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,
And hewn themselves cisterns - broken cisterns that can hold not water.

But look at this:
 

Will a man leave the snow water of Lebanon,
Which comes from the rock of the field ?
Will the cold flowing waters be forsaken for strange waters ? (18:14).

These waters do not forsake the person who finds the Lord, but rather they come to be IN HIM, a fountain of water springing up into eternal life, as Christ told the woman at Samaria, by the well (John 4:14). Indeed, the one who drinks of this water WILL NEVER THIRST AGAIN (John 4:14a).

That is the fact.

There is STILL the peace of God. What is this like ? It is like the beauty of the massive ranges, as at Mt Buffalo Park in Victoria, Australia, which spread before you in a delicate scene of grandeur, exquisite, unending, without furlough, merging one on the other, profound and provided. Paul says this (Philippians 4:6): "the peace of God which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus" - and Isaiah, in 26:4 ? This:

• "You will keep his mind in peace, peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in you. Trust in the LORD forever, for in YAH, the LORD, is everlasting strength."

There is STILL the truth of God. But what is it like ?

It reminds one of the heavens for depth, the oceans for life, the skies for intimacy and artistry, the mountain peaks soaring to the empyrean of profundity, above: stark yet sure, delightful yet majestic, personal but not manipulable, grand and enveloping, when one's heart is for it. "I am the way, the truth and the life," said Christ. What to this did He add ? This: "No man comes to the Father except by Me." THAT is why He was sent (see Matthew 11:27).

The marvellous majesty of God is STILL here, and His royal presidency of one's life is still to hand, for Christ and His Gospel still live, though the 2nd millenium is now past.

And with what signals it went. We have before (SMR Ch.8) often looked at the array of signals profoundly and surely indicating that the long predicted time for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ - like that for His first arrival, a notice given with 1000 years of detailed prophecy to prepare for it, just as for His return we have had 2000 years, and THAT, it is significant, not arithmetically, but in terms of His patience. Yes the PATIENCE of God is still here (see II Peter 3:9, where you see that a space of thousands of years was quite within the scriptural picture of the time to pass before Christ's return - cf. A Spiritual Potpourri, Ch.18.).
 
 

There was

the rumble in the GULF, early  in the decade of the nineties. It held much drama, involved a shameless betrayal of the Kurds, a vicious power putsch from Saddam Hussein,

highlighted the fact that his land was till at war with Israel

(since 1948 when according to promise, God brought it back into existence as a Jewish entity - SMR pp. 755ff., 786ff., 510ff., 806ff.) , back where God put it according to promise (SMR Appendix A, Ch.9),
 

• while Israel was for the 4th straight time, massively delivered, her land small, her deliverance vast, her foes menacing and multitudinous (as in 1948, 1967,1973 cf. SMR  pp. 814-815, 775-788). Then there was
• the splash in Bosnia,
• the crash in Kosovo,
• the tension with free China, in Taiwan, menaced again (1996 and 1999).
• Rockets began to fly, from North Korea, and now just days ago, from China.
• Words fly constantly.
• A land in the name of Christianity, but wholly contrary to it, talks of purging and ethnic cleansing of a place where the religion relates, chiefly, to the days of another purge, centuries ago, wrought by the Moslems. But this is not Christian, for as Christ said so clearly,


"My kingdom is not of this world.
If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight!" (John 18:36).

If they were not to fight for HIM, you may be sure they need not fight in bloody massacres for anything less! HE WAS CRUCIFIED and crucified ... none! He is offering salvation, not rifles.

Other frenzies of the place called 'this world' ? other avenues of action as the 2nd millenium was passing, and 1996 came on scene ?

• Constant preoccupation with Mars, with finding life, with avoiding the realities of life and observation, of logic and truth, of God, in the grandeurs of space. What is this like ? It is like a naughty little kid who worships his play pen and ignores his dad.

 
• Africa has been convulsed, tribe upon tribe; and with scarcely more dignity or regard for life, throes of folly wrangle and tangle nation upon nation, war upon war, war rumour upon war rumour till it is almost comic. This it can never be, for it is lives amiss and souls in peril; but the shameless shambles is so great, one cannot but sense the profound mockery of human grandeur, found in this incessant littleness.

 
• South Africa is delivered from one misplaced scourge only to find another, in AIDS, in her new 'liberty'. It rocks the land till grave commentators almost wring their hands in apprehension and helplessness.

 
• Jerusalem is not only restored to Jewish hands, a MUST before His return (Matthew 23:37-24:2, Luke 19:42ff., 21:24): but leader Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear that Jerusalem was indeed the indivisible, eternal capital of the Jewish nation (in which Barak, the new leader, has followed him in most decisive declaration, joined, oddly enough, by Hilary Clinton). It is not for surrender. This emphasis of Netanyahu, now amplified again, this  too is the message as the millenium ended. The Jews are back, Jerusalem is again in their hands, and the crucible is heating.


Yet the Jewish nation has not yet had that momentous returning of great magnitude and massive significance (Zechariah 12:10), predicted to come when the armies seek, marauding to molest, molesting to destroy, overcome, overpower, re-possess for themselves what God has unconditionally granted to the Jews, NOT for merit, as He so stress (Ezekiel 36) but for purity and faithfulness to His word, to His promise. THEY TOO, like all the rest, must return to the Saviour, theirs and ours, for there is in Him neither Jew nor Gentile. The truth is the same, and these wounds in His hands predicted around 500 B.C., must avail now for Jew as well as Gentile, for there is of Saviours, no other.
 
 

• Communism has fallen. Having fed on German scientists after the war, on East European rolling stock and equipment, transported to Russia, on stolen atomic advancements built on the American discoveries with their European partnership, built on oppression, on myth, its myth is forsaken, its atheistic pretension absurd. Beijing now follows totalitarian rule but not Communism, also apparently aided by stolen Western atomic advancements, finding power in the power of liberty from abroad, in Western expertise commercially unleashed, in free enterprise under State guardianship within, squeezing the souls of its people, selling, if it were possible, their souls for them. This it does, while it pursues its nationalistic aims: frightened by religion, oppressing it, seeking its control, while it pursues with CONDITIONED minds (according to its ideological boss) the truth it therefore CANNOT know.

 
• This high absurdity has gone on to its mammoth extinction, arising with new ideology, new ways, new power sources, not least from abroad, while it oppresses very much as before, and now makes a major burning of books, arresting of religious leaders, re-education, that soulless instillation of spent forces of a formal kind, into the arrested mind, as if man were a mere mental site, for industrial drilling and pouring of the thick-setting concrete of the dead, unlovely mixtures that cover the victims like radioactive dust from Chernobyl. So is the mind of man prostituted by man. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago takes on new death, as it means circulate again amidst the arrested. They indoctrinate, but their doctrine is dead.


Communism - much vaunted but vicious, man playing god to man without the truth - is fallen. Only chicanery remains - now open, as before contained. The dust from its fall has populated the nineties, as the 2nd millenium ended, just as that from Chernobyl helped to bring the point home to Europe, even to its northern fastnesses, as if to explode all hope of any remnant, while the world whirls in oblivion of the truth. This too is the message as the 2nd millenium ended. It will need to be played better than this, or Rome or Mecca, for the antichrist to make sufficient appeal with sufficient duplicity to give his paranoia a gloss for a lost moment. He has New Age to play on, like a harp, the ecumenical establishment to manipulate like trowel, while he applies the plaster and sends out the sound of his advent. It will not be long now, since he is the prelude to the final judgment on this Age.
 
 

• And all this ? You have liberty from the truth, in your thought; but it is there, nevertheless, the question being whether you join it or choose to ignore it. HE, the Christ who DID WHAT IT TOOK, He was crucified, is risen, and will RETURN. He is giving fair warning (cf. Matthew 24:45ff., Luke 21:34ff.), and meanwhile, to His people, great encouragement (Luke 21:28).

 
• Still the living waters bring balm, the absolute truth brings its own continual, consistent verification, the God who made our capacity for truth, our spirits, minds and system schematics, our bodies, brings His own peace, showers His own power, controls His own history, as Communism so ludicrously failed to do, the events contradicting continually the arrogant claims of its illogical lampoons of failures, made into a book as if the humour were to be taken seriously, the mockery would work.

 
• Christianity and Communism have these things in common: both predict history, the former with entire and intense accuracy, the latter with total and amazing failure; both seek the souls of men, one by truth and reason, reality and spiritual appeal, the other by a sodden force which pulverises what it captures, imprisons what it cannot control, brainwashes what it cannot answer - where it gets the chance and the stakes are high enough. This, it is mere fraud, which cannot answer without the gun, the torture chamber. It uses what it can, and fails where it must. It is a conspiracy indeed against the mind of man, it is a sale of the soul, in a market, almost the ultimate in ugliness, which the State seeks to control.

 
• Christ still, never remiss, as for thousands of years, so now seeks the lost with the provision of spiritual gain, mental peace, logical splendour, discipline that has back of it the doctrine of truth. Thus, in and through Him, is demonstrated the power of millenia of attestation from prophecy, heart and life, from logic and testimony in rescued lives which live in the highly necessary presence of the One who came and showed us HOW it is to be done, this living, WHERE it is to be found, this life, attesting His power by His works, and His love by His deeds. (See SMR Ch.6, 5, Ch.4, Chs. 8, 9, pp. 755ff., Repent or Perish Chs.7, 2, Barbs, Arrows and Balms30, Appendix I, II, IV, Biblical Blessings Appendix 4.)

 

 
 



NOW the FUTURE
already laid out like a garden

"THIS SAME JESUS, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11).

It thunders down the tracks of prophetic stations as organised and set on the map of the Bible, with a speed which our current communications and knowledge greatly facilitate, the spirit of the Age sunbaking shamelessly at its stations, in the light of its contributions as it looks oh so knowingly, to the splendour of what it hopes.
 

• Turning its back on the folly of what it has wrought with a world so seemingly expansive, but in fact so very limited in its confines -

 
• when the power tools of hostility and hate, are, as now, so well thrust into the walls of the planet, rammed in hard by the thoughts of Mao, fostered in disregard of the Almighty who has commanded what is despised -

 
• it proceeds on its own, lost in the thoughts of New Age (SMR pp. 866ff.), lavish in the ways of follies unspeakable: superstition without gods, gods without power, religions without reason, propaganda without any Christ whose works attest and whose power evidences who He is.

But what does the word just quoted, Acts 1:11 tell us ? This:

His return will thus be PERSONAL,
with the SUPERNATURAL power which He used in such solicitude and love, displayed for His coming.
 

First, He has announced for so long His plans, just as for the ARRIVAL in Bethlehem,
so for RETURN, that there is no excuse. It is prepared as for a great parade, but this parade is all-powerful, when the Prince whose murder left the world in artless inability to govern itself, restores His own people to Himself, and prepares for that government of which there will be no end, first here, then hereafter. There is however a gulf between now and then, and much will occur in the exposure of the travesty of flesh, the bombast of lost theories, the aspirations of demi-gods in their giddiness.

This, in the midst of terminal developments, He will send His angels to collect His own, (Matthew 24:24-31) as the intensity of human folly reaches internationally to a new height of conspiracy (II Thessalonians 2:7-9), well past the current models. He will leave the rump, the remnant, the residue, like mud on filter paper when one filters the turgid liquor.

As to this, it will go to its own place, but not before it finds its own level, in the absence of the Christians thus removed, whose braking and light, from the Lord, has tempered the follies of the Age (cf. II Thessalonians 2:7).

The NEW ANTICHRIST, arising like a boil on the neck of humanity,  will then love himself to delusion (II Thessalonians 2:4), even parading about in the temple, to show himself that he is God - the paranoia reaching new heights and depths of depravity, self-congratulation, that a man should think himself god - but then, Mao came close and there are others whose deluded cries make mockery of their pretensions; for in religion as in all else, one must test, check, consider the logic of the case, one must where one may, apply scientific method, consider the verifications and continue till one sees clear, the truth in all its majesty and dominion, inimitable, unique, untouched by valid criticism, unmatched by any validity at all (cf. SMR Chs.3, 10).

It is true that one's eyes, before conversion, blinded by sin, need opening; but it is true no less, that fraudulent hypotheses are condemned for what they are. It is enough that God has done what was needed in the vast and deep universe tour and triumph of Jesus the Christ Colossians 1:19ff.), and would have all to repent and come to a knowledge of the truth (I Tim. 2:1ff.), though not by violence, not through hypocrisy, not with brain-washing and manipulation producing artificial and contemptible substitutes (cf. Isaiah 29;13). Truth has majesty, and it rules in its beauty, even amid lies, like pollution which cannot dim the sun, merely the atmosphere of the soul.

But the will-o' -the-wisp century continues like a child in the things most essential, while the bullies continue to seek to control it. In the end, its antichrist agent of destruction will himself fall with his pride, and the pomp of his limited knowledge, into that very destruction which all unreality courts. HIS will be a reign to make the French Revolution's Reign of Terror seem almost pallid. (They did of course turn on each other, in that adventure, when the lust to kill was not spent, and the ignorance swelled into a torrent of self-will, like the wall of a mountain lake cracking, and leaving first a spill then a raging flood to consume those below. Stalin did much the same like a monolith to murder, whom Krushchev did much to expose).

But he, the antichrist: though he has had many preliminaries where folly has pushed people to new follies, in Germany spent from war, in Russia, troubled with failure, in France, chagrined with oppression, only to oppress: yet his is an international operation to rejoice the heart of the cruel, to intoxicate the unwary and to doom the ungoverned.

He is not in operation yet, in his manifest format. Yet the way is open, the call is clear and the nations are busy assembling themselves into control groups, into more united fronts, ready for the hand which is to rule beyond anything any Pope has contrived, tyrant achieved or aristocracy, whether autocratic or communist, has done. Nevertheless, it will not last long; indeed, in its setting,  it could not (Matthew 24:22-23): but its testimony will be shown for ever, as if not the bones of mammoths but of men, were to speak; and the speech will be eloquent.

THAT is where it is heading. But past all that short time of folly, the Christian church of believers ONLY, the real one, having been removed to Christ, the flash of declared war against God become most obvious (Revelation 19:19 - 1919 interestingly reminding one of the 'flu epidemic following World War II, which slew more than did the war) - then HE RETURNS WITH HIS OWN (II Thessalonians 1:7,10, Zechariah 14:1-5, I Thessalonians 3:13, Revelation 19:8,14).

No play was so scripted; no action was so counselled, nor any achievement so complete: what He says has gone, will go and does go, and here Act V brings the latent forces to their full expression, and all is declared.

Are you ready ? The millenium 2 is past, the signs are present. It is nothing to do with the millenium, as such; but since it is being so noticed, let us remind us to notice what is happening, now we are in the 3rd millenium already: for the signals are saying it loud and clear, the time for the return of the SANE ONE, the SAVIOUR, the TRUTH, the PEACE BOWER, the RESTING PLACE, the PRINCE OF LIFE, the LORD OF GLORY, the author and finisher of the faith, it is near.

Are you near to Him ? Why not ? There is no romance, no grandeur, no peace, no beauty, no reason, no delicacy, no profundity, no necessary power for good things, which is like Him; and all of it,  it is His, who made us. HE  is the King of the universe, whose Eternal Son, the Christ, leads to the Father, as eternal light to its boundless source; and without Him, you are as space flotsam and jetsam, space debris in the vortex of a whirl-pool, the whirl-pool of this world.

The millenium 2 is past, but the salvation in Christ Jesus is present, for the time. It is still here, and  the need to receive it is pressing. There is NO NEWS LIKE THAT. Certainly it has been out for thousands of years; but just as the atomic bomb was at last on site, after decades of concerted research, in 1945, and THIS was significant as the cumulative outcome with many steps on the way, and so indeed, ALL THE MORE SIGNIFICANT FOR THAT: so with this return of the Lord, once crucified, now to reign. It is not some mere cataclysm, as if God had lost patience (II Peter 3:9); no more is it some ruthless substitute for mercy. IF EVER MERCY has shown PATIENCE, it is here.

Constantly He forbears, but not for ever, for truth will be manifest. Meanwhile consider His grace, shown in the prophet Habakkuk:
 

• "O LORD, revive Your work in the midst of the years!
• In the midst of the years make it known;
• In wrath remember mercy" - 3:2.


He has long done so, and shortly with the Jewish people He will assuredly do so (Romans 11, SMR Appendix A), and many will indeed be made white, and be purified; but He would have it so (Daniel 12:1-3,10); and the epoch of His return will be just that for those who have seized its magnificence and relished its reality, being washed by faith in Christ, whose it is, who purchased its way for man on the Cross, and through His righteousness (II Cor. 5:19-21, I Thessalonians 4).

PATIENCE !

What 2000 years of it already ? (II Peter 3:9). If that is not patience, what is ! I do not mean laxity. THIS has been a magnificent exposure of truth in the face of inveterate, but ever changing follies, constantly exposed, as constantly sought again, like vomit.
 

• The matters are sound, sober, sovereign, attested, incomparable, steady, progressing in stately certainty to their just conclusion. It is judgment, not some frightful vision, which awaits, judgment according to truth (Romans 2:1ff.); and the truth is that God is and is not mocked, but rather a rewarder of the one who diligently seeks Him, believing that He is (Hebrews 11:6), by faith, that instrument, in the covenant mercies of grace which moves in the presence of the Saviour like a zephyr on the Summer hills. Faith, it PLEASES HIM! (Hebrews 11:6).

That ? It is round about now. The flag is already held up, ready.

Are YOU ready ?