Paradise on Earth

2. "The World passeth away"

The promised establishment of Paradise on earth demands that the present world order, based on selfishness and ignorance, productive of injustice, cruelty, disease and death, be brought to an end. If the Lord Jesus Christ is to assume the rulership of the world and bring about peace, happiness and life where at present there is only war, misery and death then it follows that earth’s present rulers will vacate their positions. It is probable that at the end they will do so thankfully. Despite the enmity and bitter feelings which now exist between the great Powers, it is only logical to suppose that most at least of earth’s politicians desire only peace and security within their own borders. If the new order to be instituted by Christ can show them a better prospect of attaining that desired object they may well, after some initial resistance, hail it as the solution they have been seeking. Zech.8:20‑22 gives a very vivid picture of the leaders of the nations coming together to seek and consult with the new rulership. "We will go with you:" they are depicted as saying "for we have heard that God is with you." (v.23)

The world will be in a sorry state, the result of human selfishness down the ages, a selfishness which has been accentuated by the modern drift away from God. It is already in a sorry state, politically, commercially, socially and from the ecological standpoint. One wonders if it could possibly get much worse and few there are who see any hope of it getting any better. Human society is disintegrating into lawlessness. The Apostle Paul foresaw this when, writing to Timothy, he told him "in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God." (2 Tim.3:1‑4) It is a terrible indictment, but who can dispute its truth in the world of today.

During this present century man has advanced immeasurably in scientific knowledge and mastery over the elements but that advance has been at the expense of his knowledge of, and his faith in, God. In the past all believed, and were the better for their belief. Today only the few really believe, and the rest are the poorer for their lack. Hugh Miller, the Christian geologist of more than a century ago, pointed to the evidence that to the extent a community or a generation rejects God, to that extent they relapse into barbarism and eventually die out and become extinct, just because the natural instinct inherent in man to strive for better things and rise to greater heights, has become stultified so that at last there is nothing left that lives. That process is going on today in the world and there is no power or influence capable of calling a halt. The present generations, raised on superficialities and bereft of any real purpose in life, proceed on the path of degeneration and slow suicide. Man sorely needs salvation from himself and that salvation can only come from God. It is time for a great change.

The philosophy of the Bible displays not only the certainty but also the nature of that change. Putting it perhaps a little more crudely and yet just as reasonably, it foresees the end of this Age and describes what it will be like. The twelve disciples, sitting with Jesus on the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem and listening to him talking about all this, asked him "Tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming (presence), and of the end of the world (Age)?" (Matt.24:3) In answer He told them not to expect this very desirable climax at once; there was to be a long catalogue of wars and rumours of wars, nation fighting against nation, famines, pestilences, all manner of calamities "but the end is not yet." (v.6) Nevertheless it would come eventually, and those then living would, if they properly understood these Bible foreviews, recognise the significance of the "signs of the times," and begin to expect the coming of the new order accordingly. The Gospel must first "be preached in all the world, for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come." (Matt.24:14) Not until the middle of the 19th century could it justly be claimed that the gospel had been preached to "earth’s remotest bound" but by then, or very soon after, the combined labours of churches and missionaries could be shown—and have been shown—to have fulfilled this element of Jesus’ words.

Our Lord was not the only one to see in prospect this cataclysmic ending of the present world order in preparation for the Advent of Christ. Many of the Hebrew prophets, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, did the same. Joel, and Isaiah, and Zechariah, to name but three, in the 8th to 5th centuries before Christ, waxed eloquent with their pen‑pictures of this condition of the world with which men are faced today and the coming of Christ to restore order out of chaos. The prophet Daniel, for example, five centuries before Christ, speaking of this time, predicted that "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." (Dan.12:4) The celebrated scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, in the year 1670, writing about this, ventured the opinion that in some future day human achievement would make it possible "to travel at the tremendous speed of forty miles an hour," for which he was derided. At a time when the most rapid rate of travel possible was by stagecoach at about ten miles an hour that was natural enough. Within two centuries the advent of steam railways fulfilled the prediction. But not even Sir Isaac dreamed that only one more century would see Concorde crossing the Atlantic at a thousand miles an hour and man travelling the quarter of a million miles to the moon in a few days. As for knowledge being increased, the rapidity of one discovery following another, and one invention superseding its predecessor—there seems to be no end to the inventive genius of the human mind.

But most of this is misused and turned to base ends. The marvels of surgery have lengthened and made more tolerable many blighted lives, but world pollution and commercial food manufacture is shortening many more. Research into the atom has made possible the manufacture of many useful chemical substances, the production of increasingly useful food plants and the treatment of baffling diseases: but it has also given us nuclear fission and the nuclear bomb, with all the horrifying possibilities inherent in that creation. The benefits of the one are more than overshadowed by the menace of the other. It was in foreseeing this that the Lord Jesus, knowing that such a day would surely come, described it in words burning in their intensity. "There shall be signs…upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity;…men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth:...and except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved but…those days shall be shortened." (Luke 21:25‑26; Matt.24:22) But as though to assure those who in the end of the Age find themselves face to face with these dark events, He went on to say "and then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption (deliverance) draweth nigh." (Luke 21:27‑28) It is the recognition that the state of society and the nature of the events of which Jesus and the prophets spoke are those existing today which gives confidence that the great deliverance which they foresaw is in absolute fact imminent. The Day is at hand.

The nature and magnitude of world conditions and recent world events is such that Christian observers familiar with the Divine purposes no longer doubt that the time of the transition from human rule to Divine rule on earth is upon us. Our Lord characterised the principal features of this transition time as comprising universal war, famine and pestilence. Elaborated to a global scale this is just the situation confronting humankind. Since the first world war of 1914‑18 the world has never been free from war in one place or another. The destructiveness of military weaponry has increased a million‑fold. For the first time in human history the human race has it within its power to wipe itself off the face of the earth and this not only at the behest of a few politicians ensconced at the top, but almost in the power of every terrorist and, perhaps, experimenting student. Also there are terrorist groups seeking to bring about their own systems of control by force. Individuals with their home computers are already finding it possible to "muscle in" on the sophisticated defensive and offensive systems of the nations, and who knows, could perhaps "trigger off" a cataclysm of nuclear attack which could not be stopped. The final irony of the long history of human invention and achievement could be the destruction of it all by someone irresponsible—if the Lord allowed it. But he will not. That is why He said that except those days be shortened—cut short—there should no flesh be saved. But "those days shall be shortened."

It is possible that the nuclear threat is not the most serious one in the modern world. Increasing alarm is being voiced at the progressive increase in the pollution of the environment. Over half a million different types of pesticides, detergents and poisons, all inimical (harmful) to animal and vegetable life, have been identified in the world’s rivers and seas, all put there by modern man. These substances are steadily destroying marine life and so upsetting the balance of Nature. Acid rain, rainfall contaminated with sulphur dioxide and other toxic chemicals emitted by power stations and large industrial plants, affected farm crops and destroyed buildings in the late 20th century. The steady deforestation of the world at the behest of powerful financial interests, greedy for the timber, and the minerals lying below the forests, has its adverse effect in rainfall and world climate and leads to the creation of vast deserts where life is impossible. The last of the world’s great rain forests, that of the Amazon region in northern Brazil, is now being systemically decimated and few in authority or power cares. Two thousand years ago there was no great desert in northern Africa; there were forests and grasslands teeming with life. The Romans commenced the destruction of the forests and the process has gone on ever since, resulting in the present vast Sahara desert which is already as large as the United States is increasing in size.

Now there is another threat: the climate emergency. The climate has warmed and continues to warm since pre‑industrial times. During this century we have noticed milder winters and hotter summers with more flooding caused by heavy rainfall and wind damaging buildings as well as fires and rising sea levels affecting coastal areas. The Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2016 was to keep temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius above pre‑industrial levels and preferably under 1.5 degrees. This increase is partly driven by increasing carbon emissions which have a central role in how the planet warms and cools according to research by St. Andrews University. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says, "we’ll need to drastically reduce fossil fuel emissions while also removing up to 12 billion metric tons of carbon a year from the atmosphere by mid‑century." At COP29 in Baku in 2024 an executive said "We are a long way off course."

Another problem is that of over‑population. From the beginning of the Christian era to the year AD 1700 it is estimated that the world’s population increased from one hundred million to five hundred millions. In the next two centuries, to AD 1900, it trebled to some 1700 millions. Since then, in just over a century, it has shot up to over eight thousand millions, of whom 10 percent today do not get enough to eat and 30 percent are moderately or severely food insecure according to the WHO. The fault does not lie in the land; there is enough potential food‑growing land in the earth to feed a great many more than this present population. The fault lies in the present economic system under which food is grown for private profit and those who cannot pay cannot eat. That leads to the existing immoral system in which Europe and other productive lands build up huge stocks of foodstuffs which cannot be sold and are ultimately destroyed whilst in Africa sporadic famines occur and millions starve to death. Nothing can or will change this system until the coming of Christ to organise earth’s resources on a right and just basis.

So, after the first factor in our Lord’s prediction, war, this fulfils the second, famine. All these things mean famine on a world‑wide scale; famine, a sign of the End.

There is a third factor—pestilence. The word usually conjures up visions of typhoid, yellow fever, bubonic plague, raging unchecked through whole communities and carrying many of them away. In past times and among primitive peoples destitute of medical knowledge, that was a fairly frequent occurrence. Modern medicine prides itself on having eliminated many of these scourges. But there is a greater menace which modern medicine is finding increasingly unable to combat, and that is the progressive physical and mental degeneration of the human race. Seven million people died from COVID‑19. It took one year for scientists to find some vaccines and longer before vulnerable adults could be fully vaccinated. That may seem a strange thing to say in this day of advanced scientific knowledge and the wonders that doctors and surgeons can do in combating the ills of humanity. But the odds are against them. Men and women, in the so‑called civilised lands anyway, are living longer, but they are becoming increasingly susceptible to ill‑health and disease. National health services are being stretched as never before. New and alarming "killer" diseases are making their appearance, diseases not heard of in former times, and the doctors have no antidote. And the reason is becoming apparent. God ordained that food grown in the unpolluted earth should be sustenance for humans, to maintain strength and vigour and life. But the land is no longer unpolluted, and the food it does grow is passed through a long series of manufacturing processes in which it is converted into "convenience foods" or "processed foods" involving little or no labour for its presentation to the table but no one really knows what harm is done by the additives and preservatives and colourings which have been added to it in the process. Now, perhaps too late, official investigation and action is being instituted to decide upon and rectify these demerits, but even so the complexities of the modern competitive system and the sheer magnitude of the problem would seem to offer little hope of righting the situation whilst humans rule themselves. With men and women finding themselves less and less able to cope, relying more and more upon the never‑ending stream of drugs which are proffered to cure or alleviate human ills, it may no longer he unthinkable that unless intervention comes from above the prospect before humanity on the score of physical vitality alone is a slow decline from civilisation to barbarism and finally extinction.

Plenty of Christian thinkers and students have known these things. Even in the days immediately after the Apostolic Church there was an eager looking for the promised Second Advent and the dawn of the Millennium—for the two were always associated in Christian minds and for four centuries there was general belief that the event would happen about the year AD 500. Then the Council of Rome under Pope Damascus in AD 382 denounced belief in the coming Millennium as heresy and it was not until the 16th/17th centuries, following the Reformation, that it came to light again. But from then on, although never formally endorsed by the established Churches, Catholic or Protestant, it began to come into its own, and with that men began to look for those signs in the events of history which would herald its approach.

Those signs began to gather thick and fast. Men began to set dates for the predicted events, based on Bible records and allusions, dates which usually failed. Others, perhaps more far‑seeing, drew attention to the historical events of the times and their relation to those predicted in Scripture. It is a remarkable fact that as far back as the 17th century, expectations began to focus around the late 19th and the entire 20th century. Almost every well‑known Christian minister and writer—and many others not so well known—had something to say on this subject. The result was the tremendous upsurge of Second Advent expectation of the 19th century, when on both sides of the Atlantic there were important conferences and the rise of movements devoted to the subject, books and periodicals innumerable. In the year 1880 it was found that in Britain alone seven hundred Church of England ministers were consistently preaching the imminence of the Second Advent from their pulpits. Three at least of these heralds of the coming event had their expectations fulfilled to the year: Dr. Grattan Guinness in 1888 declared ("Light for the Last Days") that the years 1917 and 1923 would be marked by important developments respecting the return of Israel to the Holy Land in fulfilment of prophecy. He did not live to see the day in 1917 when General Allenby captured Jerusalem from the Turks and the Balfour Declaration of the same year promising Palestine as a Homeland for the Jews, nor the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 which ended Turkish sovereignty over Palestine and opened the door to Jewish immigration. Pastor Charles Russell in 1890 in "Thy Kingdom Come" pointed to 1914 as the commencement of world disruption preliminary to the coming of the Kingdom of God upon Earth, beginning with a world‑wide war which would engulf and weaken the nations. He lived long enough to witness the realisation of his foreview. Earlier in time than either of these was the London minister Robert Fleming, who in his work on Bible Prophecy ("The Rise and Fall of the Papacy" 1699) predicted, based on certain Biblical allusions which nowadays may or may not be considered valid methods of interpretation, that there were three significant dates, then still far future, which would prove to be vital marking‑points of events associated with the end of this Age and the coming of the Millennium. To begin with, he considered that the year 1794, then still a century future, would mark the commencement of the progressive destruction of the secular and political power of the Papal dominion which ruled Europe for over a thousand years, and 1848 a further step in the process. No one took much notice of that until in the year 1793 the French Revolution broke upon an unsuspecting world, Pope Pius VI was taken captive to France where he died, and the sovereignty of the Popes over Europe outside Italy virtually ended. Political turmoil between France and the Italian States continued until 1848, when an Italian revolution drove Pope Pius IX from Rome and began a series of secessions of the various "Papal States" until by 1870 nothing was left to the Pope but the city of Rome. In that year the forces of King Victor Immanuel captured Rome and made it the capital of the new united Italy. In the short space of seventy years the Papacy had lost the whole of its thousand‑year old empire. The fulfilment of this prediction created profound impressions at the relevant times but the force of that has long since died away.

But in his book Fleming also predicted that "the Millennium starts immediately after the total and final destruction of Papal Rome in the year 2000." It is a fact that although, following the events of 1870, the Lateran Treaty of 1929 between Italy and the Pope gave the latter an area half‑a‑mile square inside the city of Rome, to be known as Vatican City, so that within this restricted space he could claim the status of a temporal sovereign, by a superseding agreement in 1985 this concession was abrogated. Vatican City is now itself part of the Italian Republic, Rome no longer to be designated the "Holy City," and there is no longer any claim of Papal sovereignty. He was not right.

Thus all the evidence of Christian students over the past three centuries is that this 20th century was part of the time of the end. That such an end, and such a change for the better in all the affairs of men must and will come, is stressed in the Scriptures. The outward evidence that the world condition foreseen so many centuries ago by the Bible writers is at this present time a reality gives reasonable grounds for certainty that "the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." It could burst upon the world at any time.

Perhaps one of the most telling descriptions of that coming day is that penned by the prophet Isaiah in his 32nd chapter. He speaks of Christ reigning as king over a restored and renovated earth in which the twin keynotes are righteousness and peace. "Behold," he says "a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule in justice. Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest…then the eyes of those who see will not be closed, and the ears of those who hear will hearken. The mind of the rash will have good judgment, and the tongue of the stammerers will speak readily and distinctly. The fool will no more be called noble, nor the knave said to be honourable...the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is deemed a forest. Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field. And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust for ever. My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places." (vv.1‑5,15‑20 RSV) For God has declared "As truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with [my] glory." (Num.14:21)

To be continued
AOH updated 2025