The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 3 – 8
The pattern is clear; a thousand year Sabbath of rest for the world, a promised rest from the wars and suffering that have so abounded since man first ate the forbidden fruit almost six days ago. And we have read again and again the saints will be given that kingdom at the beginning of the millennium. But what sort of a world will we inherit? We have depleted the soils, killed off most of the wild game, utterly wiped out many species, polluted the oceans, the air, the land, wrecked the ozone layer, messed with the climate, created the deserts – yes, the deserts weren’t always there, in fact they are only about 4,000 years old and growing every year. And that’s before God punishes the world with the various plagues in Revelation (for example, Revelation 8:7-9)! So the world will be a mess – totally wrecked by sin.
If Jesus doesn’t return when He does, will ANYTHING be saved alive? Matthew 24:22. How will we change things? Isaiah 2:2-4 [Remember: A mountain is always a Bible symbol for government; hills are symbols for less powerful governments]. What is the beginning of wisdom? Job 28:28. And how will God teach that to the nations? Psalms 96:9-13 (And all of Psalms 97 continues the thought). What does God call this period when He “strikes through kings”? Psalms 110:5-6. How long is it? Acts 17:31. “The day of His wrath”. “A day in which He will judge the world”. Notice that word – “day”. How long is a day? That’s right – 1,000 years. Literally hundreds of times in Bible prophecies, you’ll encounter phrases like “the day of the Lord”, “in that day”, “in the day” – nearly all of which refer to the same day. The same thousand year day. It’s one of the biggest keys to understanding Bible prophecy, in fact.
WHY THE MILLENNIUM?
God is doing this for our benefit. His plan is to save mankind. But God must be just when He judges. Even in our human courts, if the judge has a conflict of interest or is in any way involved in the matter, he cannot preside over the trial. So God must be absolutely beyond reproach, so that NO ONE can go to God and say, “But God, if you’d only done THIS”, or “but God, I’d have done it right if You hadn’t given me that worthless Old Covenant law that I could not keep. I COULDN’T please You no matter what I did! It wasn’t my fault!” Is it important that God be justified when He judges? Psalms 51:4. And has God Himself admitted the Old Covenant was not the best it could be? Hebrews 8:6-7. So then, if someone came to God and said, “But God, if you’d only have given me the New Covenant, I’d have been a perfect saint!” – what can God say? How can He answer, and be beyond reproach?
How can He be justified in His judgments against a person to whom He gave an inferior law? At the moment, He can’t. And so God must prove, beyond all question, to all beings for all time, that His law was not flawed. That it would indeed have allowed any person who obeyed it to receive salvation if only that person had truly obeyed it! What did God find fault with in the Old Covenant? Hebrews 8:7-8. Was the fault with IT (the covenant) or THEM (the people)? (Same verse). What was wrong with THEM? Hebrews 8:9. If they had kept the Old Covenant, would they have lived? Ezekiel 20:11. But what happened? Ezekiel 20:12-13. And after God begged them to change (Ezekiel 20:14-20), what happened? Ezekiel 20:21. So what did God do?
Ezekiel 20:23. And once they were scattered, what did God give them? Ezekiel 20:25-26. Many preachers use these last verses to try and prove the laws (meaning the Ten Commandments) “were not good”. And yet several times in the immediate context God said His laws WERE good, and if they had only KEPT them, they would have lived! He tried again and again to get the people to obey them, and KEEP the covenant they had made with Him at Sinai, but they wouldn’t! Since they wanted to serve idols so badly, God let them follow the laws of their idols, those laws that “were not good” – the laws of Baal, the laws of Molech, and so on, and serve them they did, with a fervency and dedication they never displayed toward their true God, even to causing their own children to pass through the fire to be burned alive to their idols – and God says He permitted them to do this, “that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the LORD”.
The Old Covenant was never given an honest chance, because in every single generation they followed after other gods; a good king would come along, and all the people would praise God; then a bad king would show up, and all the people would praise Baal – the nation NEVER kept God’s covenant for more than a few years! But the problem wasn’t the covenant – not the letter of the covenant anyway. The problem was the covenant was made with an entire NATION of people. And no nation of physical beings, managed by physical beings, will ever keep a covenant very long (look at our own nation’s record of keeping treaties with the Indians, for example).
So God made the covenant a PERSONAL thing – involving only two people, you and Him. That’s the New Covenant He has offered to you and me. But God still needs to prove to all of those people that the Old Covenant wasn’t a bad idea all along – and during the Millennium He will do just that. Will the priesthood of Levi return? Isaiah 66:21. Back up and read the context to see that the return of Christ, hence the Millennium, is the time frame of that verse. Will the Levites be offering burnt offerings then? Jeremiah 33:14-22. After God gathers Israel back together and builds a new temple, will there still be Levites? Ezekiel 44:10-16. The whole rest of that chapter describes the physical priesthood after the return of Christ. Will Jesus purify the sons of Levi so they can do this? Malachi 3:1-4.
Will there be physical sacrifices in the Millennium? Zechariah 14:21. Will even the heathen Egyptians bring sacrifices to God “in that day” (something which has never happened)? Isaiah 19:21. Will ALL people bring sacrifices to God’s holy mountain (His future government)? Isaiah 56:7. How will God bring peace to the world? Psalms 72:1-5. Will God restore the system of judges He had in the promised land after Joshua? Isaiah 1:26. Who will these judges be? Matthew 19:28. There are other verses that say the same things, but the point is made; in the future, sometime after Jesus returns, the Levitical system will be reinstated, and the sacrifices and hence, the law of Moses, will be reinstated.
But there will be one key difference – the covenant will be the same as Israel had. The people will be the same sort of people. But now, instead of having a government run by fallible kings, the government will be under King David (Hosea 3:5), with the apostles as judges and the saints as kings and priests! The people always followed where the king led; into righteousness, or into wickedness. That has little to do with the covenant, and more to do with the fickleness of the people and the quality of their leaders. With that kind of a test, there’s no way of telling if the law was good or not, because the people were so easily led away from the Truth!
But under the saints, the law will have a real chance to work – to see that “the law is not of faith: but, The man that doeth them shall live in them” (Galatians 3:12). This is the righteousness that will create peace; will make the deserts blossom; will bring happiness to mankind. It did, in those few, brief moments when it was obeyed – 2 Chronicles 9:7 for instance. Gentiles should have been saying that about Israel all along (Deuteronomy 4:7-8). The only reason they didn’t was Israel’s lack of faith. Their unbelief which kept them from keeping the law “with their whole heart”. Which, Paul said, is why they didn’t enter into God’s rest – why they won’t be in the first resurrection.
THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM
God will at no time override free will – if man chooses to defy God during the Millennium or any other time, he will be free to do so. Of course, he may be executed according to the laws God gave Israel, or die in the rebellion at Armageddon, but he will always have free will. Even the most evil man is deceived, and as Jesus said, “knows not what he does” (Luke 23:34). As God’s new government gradually spreads over this world (Zechariah 14), as the spirit of God flows out from Jerusalem (Zechariah 14:8), and they go up to Jerusalem to learn God’s way and receive His laws (Micah 4:2-5), the world will achieve peace, and even those evil among them will see that yes, this really does work better. That even they, themselves, are happier helping others than they were being selfish. And as the Millennium goes on, people will become more and more righteous, crimes will be more and more rare, and the world will gradually return to the way it was in Eden – only better (Isaiah 51:3). And yet something will still be lacking.
Because the Old Covenant is merely a PHYSICAL covenant. When kept perfectly, it brings happiness, long life, and untold blessings – but only PHYSICAL blessings! Even when administered by SPIRITUAL rulers! Remember we used to be allowed to kill our enemies, but the New Covenant forbids us to even want to kill them in our hearts! The laws were moved INSIDE us, so that the blessings can likewise be placed INSIDE us! And yet the people in the Millennial version of the Old Covenant will have these laws written only outside them, on stones! They will only be obeying the PHYSICAL, OUTWARD portion of the law. And why isn’t that good enough? That’s the whole point! Perfect external obedience cannot be distinguished from perfect internal obedience! From outside, you can’t tell the difference! Neither would ever hurt their neighbor, and so how can you tell which is which?
After 1,000 years of the Old Covenant being properly enforced and obeyed upon this Earth, the Earth will be a glorious place indeed. No one will be able to imagine why these people are not good enough for immortality! So God must prove why physical obedience alone is not enough – why the people MUST allow Him access to their heart in order to receive eternal life. He must test them and prove to everyone that men must change not only their actions, but their thoughts as well, to be worthy of salvation. For 1,000 years they’ll have been righteous, but that external righteousness was never challenged by a powerful adversary. What must God do to test the quality of the people? Revelation 20:3, 7. And what will Satan do? Revelation 20:8-9. And then what happens to the devil? Revelation 20:10. Understand! After 1,000 years of righteous habits, a Millennium of proper government. Ten centuries of progress and complete recovery from the damage sin did to this world, then Satan is loosed for only “a little season”, and IMMEDIATELY the nations are deceived and go up to make war with Jerusalem, and fight against the saints!
By then these people will have been happily obeying God for FIFTY generations! And after having tasted the sweet fruits of righteousness for all that time, Satan’s song of rebellion will quickly fill their ears and turn their hearts! How is this possible?? What does the spirit in us want – bottom line? James 4:5. Is there anything good in us? Romans 7:18. Did even Jesus, as a man, object to being called good? Matthew 19:17. What is the heart of man like? Jeremiah 17:9. Did God make man upright? Ecclesiastes 7:29. But what did man do? (Same verse). The heart of man is not basically good, it is basically selfish. Left unchecked, that means man’s heart will always become evil in the end. And no amount of external, Old Covenant righteousness will ever change that.
You can keep the external law in the flesh for a thousand years, or a billion, and your heart will still be swayed by lust the minute someone comes along and offers you a way to rebel against God. Because the mere habit of righteousness is not enough to overcome the temptation of sin!
The Millennium will prove, once and for all, that for man to be saved, his heart must die. It will prove man is not fit to live forever, no matter how well he is trained, unless his heart is changed. Unless the laws of God are written on that heart, and the spirit of God dwells in his mind, man will ALWAYS sin eventually – it’s only a matter of time. This is why Satan must be loosed – to prove that man cannot be trusted unless God’s seed remains in him, so that he cannot sin (1 John 3:9). To prove once and for all that the fault was with man’s heart, not with the law itself (Hebrews 8:8). When that has been proven, God can at last be justified when He judges the OC people, for He will have iron-clad proof it was a great covenant!
It was great because even in the OC, many who truly loved God did succeed in advancing to the NC – Abraham, Joshua, Job, David, Daniel, and many others all passed beyond that covenant and voluntarily chose to write the laws of God on their hearts and thus put themselves under the New Covenant and received the spirit of God. You’ll remember from the article on Lazarus and the Rich Man – available in your packet history from lesson 1–13 – that Abraham pictures the Father, Lazarus pictures Jesus, the rich man was Caiaphas (the high priest who had Jesus killed), and his five brethren were other one-day high priests.
With that in mind, what did the externally-super-righteous High Priest (who had failed to find salvation, in this parable), ask the Father to send to his unrighteous brethren who had failed to keep the OC? Luke 16:27-28. And what did Abraham/the Father tell him? Luke 16:29-31. The law is supposed to be the primer, the schoolmaster which teaches you about Christ! (Galatians 3:24). It’s supposed to lay a foundation of understanding of the golden rule so that when Jesus teaches you the more advanced concepts, such as loving your enemies, you’ll be prepared for it! But if you rebel against the 1-2-10 law, will the schoolmaster EVER bring you to Christ? If you have failed to obey earthly, external things, will God reveal heavenly, spiritual things to you? John 3:12. So if you couldn’t even follow the laws of Moses, it would be impossible to follow the far stricter laws of Jesus!
If you can’t hear Moses and the prophets, you won’t listen even to someone who rose from the dead – Jesus! Can you hear and obey Jesus without hearing and obeying Moses? John 5:46. They could have heard Moses and learned about Jesus – others did (John 1:41, 45). It was possible to start in the Old Covenant, and see beyond it – see the meaning underneath the laws, and follow the spirit instead of the letter. Men did it, or Noah, Daniel, David, Joshua, Elijah, and Job wouldn’t be saved! 2 Corinthians 3:13 says this, but it’s hard to see it because all the translations are confusing – because the translators themselves didn’t understand this. The meaning of the passage is obvious, when you do. What Paul is trying to say is that Moses put a veil on his face so that Israel couldn’t see beyond the Old Covenant, and see the New Covenant – symbolized by the glory on Moses’ face – behind it!
Moses wore the veil to keep it from being obvious to everyone that these rituals and sacrifices must be abolished in the end. A fact that was evident as soon as the Old Covenant was created. The veil over Moses’ face was put there to shield the people from seeing too much of God’s truth, to protect them – just as you learned in Lesson 1–12, deception exists to protect rebellious people from the unpardonable sin. And “to this day”, Paul said, the veil is over Moses’ writings! (2 Corinthians 3:14-15). But when THE HEART turns to the Lord, God removes the veil! It was possible to peer around Moses’ veil and see the truth, that this covenant was only the surface and must one day be abolished – and that the real truth lay behind it, inside it!
But only by obeying the laws IN THE HEART, and not just in the body! Internally, not just externally! Only by studying how the laws fit together, what they mean – the things you’ve been doing in these lessons – that’s how David became wiser than all his teachers, and earned a place in the first resurrection! (Psalms 119:96-104). By doing that, he made his heart like Christ’s (2 Corinthians 3:18, Acts 13:22) and became a part of the NC – by pondering and keeping the internal laws, which transform your nature into a copy of Christ’s own nature! And anyone from Ahab to Herod could have done the same, if he had wanted to – if his heart had truly loved righteousness. Those obedient men proved that. Everyone else, God shielded behind the veil – which veil remains TO THIS DAY over their hearts!
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
The best way to conclude is by letting the Bible lay out the sequence of events in order in its own words – read Isaiah 34:1-7 This describes the period around Armageddon and the last plagues. What does Isaiah 34:8 call this? Notice the word “day”! Isaiah 34:9-12 describe what will happen to the great kingdoms of this world that stand against God at Armageddon; Isaiah 34:13-17 are about how these kingdoms will be places for the wild animals to flourish. Then reading on into the next chapter, in Isaiah 35:1-2 you see these deserts will actually blossom – abundantly! Why? Isaiah 35:3-6. The blind will see – not just the physically, but the spiritually blinded, the mentally blinded will SEE! This world has been destroyed because man did not properly dress and keep it! Because man ignored and suppressed scientific breakthrough after breakthrough that would have led to health and prosperity for all, and chose instead quick profits for themselves.
But after Jesus returns, that blindness will be removed! And the water will spring forth in the deserts, when man understands what he has done wrong and starts dressing and keeping the Earth the way God intended! Read Isaiah 35:7-8 in at least one other translation to get the true meaning of the awkward verse. This “highway of holiness” is the WAY of obedience to God! And over this highway no unclean person or sinner can go! And those who DO walk this highway, choosing God’s way over their own lusts and greed “will not be turned out of the way by the foolish” – will not be deceived by the foolish men and women who have deceived the world today!
They will have lost their power to deceive because their angelic king will be bound in the bottomless pit, and their chieftains will have been slain at the return of Christ! Isaiah 35:10 – this will indeed be a day of REST and rejoicing! The seventh-day Sabbath of the seven-thousand year plan of God! God said in the Sabbath commandment we are to labor for SIX days doing OUR pleasure, doing what WE think is best – and look at the horror and suffering that has resulted from our decisions! But the seventh day belongs to GOD; on it we will be doing HIS pleasure (Isaiah 58:13), doing things HIS way, which is why that day is called the day of the LORD, the LORD’S DAY.
Not Sunday! Sunday is your day, my day, to do with what we please; so are Monday and Thursday. But God has claimed the Seventh day for Himself every week, and for a thousand years at the end of this age. On HIS day we will be seeking HIS pleasure. The beginning of that “great and notable day of the Lord” will be a period of great upheaval as the nations battle to keep doing things their way; as they struggle to break God’s Sabbath, like so many do today! But God will smite them with a rod of iron if necessary, because on the millennial Sabbath “every knee shall bow to me” (Romans 14:11). They will keep His Sabbath! If you back up now and read Isaiah 32 NLT, you’ll see the same story told again from a slightly different angle (notice how Isaiah 32:14 NLT compares to Isaiah 34:9-17 NLT), and notice what changes it: Isaiah 32:15-18 NLT !
Get that! God isn’t going to return, wave a magic wand, and suddenly the Earth will be Eden again! No! Man destroyed the Earth by breaking the laws of God, and by keeping those laws man will REVERSE the damage! It plainly says, “And the WORK of righteousness shall be peace; and THE EFFECT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS quietness and assurance for ever” (verse 17). RIGHTEOUSNESS – keeping the commandments – will CREATE this quietness on the Earth! It will CREATE this rest we will enjoy! The WORK of righteousness will cause PEACE! And that is the ONLY way we will ever get peace! And when this happens, it will prove once and for all God’s law was a GOOD law – not only did it produce peace, but it was able to UNDO all the damage Satan has done, with our help, for the past six millennia!
Many times now I’ve said you must OBEY God before you can UNDERSTAND God. This lesson proves my point. If you believe Sunday to be the day of rest, you’re looking for these prophecies to be fulfilled on the first day, not the seventh – which makes no sense! So this enormous pile of understanding is hidden from you, because you didn’t believe or obey God when He said, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” Nor can you understand this if you believe some ridiculous catch-phrase like “Jesus is my Sabbath”. And you won’t understand it if you think the seventh day of creation never ended, and therefore this is still the Sabbath – when Hebrews plainly says the Sabbath is yet FUTURE, even for us – not in the present, but something in the future that we HOPE to one day enter!
To understand God, you must obey Him. The Bible leaves no doubt which day is the true day of rest – your friends and neighbors keep Sunday because of habit, tradition, and ignorance. Your preacher probably knows the Sabbath is the true day of worship – this is no secret – but he also knows if he teaches that, he’ll lose his job, his flock, and be kicked out of his own church. If you ask him, he may tell you this is true, but that sometimes you must sacrifice a bit of the truth for the sake of the church. And then you’ll have to decide if you want to join him and all the other deceived billions who, for lack of faith and trust in the word of God, will not enter into God’s rest.
Matthew 7:21-23 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
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