4/17/07
The website http://www.religiousstudies.uncc.edu/jdtabor/why2k.html has some useful information concerning the ‘millennium’ referenced in scripture. Here are some excerpts from the article:
“Few of us realize… that our concept of marking time in thousand-year segments is rooted in six verses in chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation, that mysterious final book of the Christian Bible. In the fearsome imagery that marks the Book of Revelation, the words God gave to Jesus Christ are made known to "his servant John,"… who testifies "to all that he saw" (Revelation 1:1-2). Five times in chapter 20, John speaks of the final thousand-year period:
Then I saw an angel coming down from Heaven ... He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit ... Then I saw thrones, and those seated on them were given authority to judge. I also saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection ... Over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him a thousand years.
Revelation 20:1-6
Revelation's thousand years is not just any thousand years. It is the final one thousand years, culminating in the resurrection of the dead and the last great Judgment. But we must go back to apocalyptic Judaism in the troubled times of the late Second Temple period (200 B.C.E. to 70 C.E.), and even earlier to the Psalms, to find the germ of the idea of dividing time into eras or periods of one thousand years. This notion was picked up and made central by early Christians, who gave it an apocalyptic cast in the New Testament.
Dividing time into thousand-year segments occurs first in Psalm 90:4, where it is said that for God, "a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night." The New Testament epistle Second Peter echoes Psalms yet is even more explicit: "With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day" (2 Peter 3:8). Various ancient Jewish and Christian sources have suggested that the Book of Genesis anticipates later divisions of time into millennia. They see an analogy between the six days of Creation in Genesis 1:1–2:3, which are followed by the final seventh day, the Sabbath, upon which God rested from his work, and the periods of human history that would last precisely six thousand years, followed by a final seventh "day," or millennium—a final thousand years, which like the Sabbath day, would be characterized by peace and rest. In the Christian view, the Sabbath came to mean relief from the toil and domination of Satan's evil grasp upon the planet. Among Christians, millenarianism refers specifically to a "millennial reign of Christ" and more generally to any utopian view of a transformed New Age.
Despite its Christ-centered formulation, Revelation clearly tapped into a concept that had been developing among Jews for centuries.(2) A division of 6,000 years of human time is described in the Babylonian Talmud in a conversation between two rabbis.
Rabbi Kattina taught:
Six thousand years shall the world exist, and one thousand, the seventh, it shall be desolate, as it is written, "And the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day." ... Just as the seventh year is one year of release in seven,** so is the world: one thousand years out of seven shall be fallow.
To which Rabbi Eliyyahu replies:
The world is to exist six thousand years. In the first two thousand there was desolation [no Torah]; two thousand years the Torah flourished; and the next two thousand years is the Messianic era, but through our many iniquities all these years have been lost.
Sanhedrin 93b
Many Jewish groups in and around the first century C.E. believed that the appearance of the Messiah was imminent. This Talmudic passage from about the sixth century C.E. looks back on such a hope and considers it postponed as a consequence of the Roman defeat of the Jews: the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E., and later, the disastrous Bar-Kokhba Revolt in 135 C.E. which led to a second decisive Roman triumph. These rabbis did not believe Jesus was the Messiah, yet it is their scheme—giving biblical history a chronological logic—that became, in the hands of Christians, a powerful concept culminating in Jesus Christ. “
Information such as above has been part of the reason I have guessed that the ‘millennium’ described in Revelation 20 will commence in the coming decades, even as I indicated in such books as Let My People Go. Jesus Christ initiated the Christian (or Messianic) era approximately 33 AD with His resurrection. Two thousand years later is 2033 AD, which is when I have guessed the millennium could well begin. I have guessed that Creation occurred in 3967 BC, such that in 2033 AD the world will begin its seventh day (i.e., millennium). Time will tell.