Paradise on Earth

7. Teachers of all Nations

"Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations...and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares (ploughshares), and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." (Isa.2:3‑4)

This is only one of the fore views of the Millennium to be found in the Bible. A time of universal peace, ensured by the administration of the Kingdom of God upon earth. The laws of that Kingdom will not be oppressive; they will be beneficent, just, considerate, devised for the well‑being of all people, conducive to a contented and prosperous life. In this same passage Isaiah speaks of the people coming willingly to God, saying, "he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths," an indication of the readiness with which the majority of humanity will align themselves with the principles of righteousness and set themselves to know the way of the Lord more perfectly.

In several Scriptures (Psa.2:9; Rev.2:27; Ezek.20:37) there is a statement, referring to the rulership of the Millennial Age, to the effect that "he shall rule them with a rod of iron," from which the impression has arisen that the rulership of Christ will be hard, ruthless and oppressive. Nothing can be farther from the truth. The true nature of his rule is best expressed in Isa.40:11 "He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young." The allusion is taken from the everyday life of the shepherd. The "rod of iron" (Heb. "shebet") is the club which the shepherd used both to defend his flock from the attacks of marauding wild beasts and to beat down the undergrowth or force a way through the jungle in the process of finding fresh pasture for the sheep. Thus the expression is indicative of the shepherd’s care for his flock. In the New Testament the word "rule" in Rev.2:27 (poimanei) has the significance of shepherding in the sense of feeding and the expression is perhaps better understood "he shall shepherd them with the shepherding rod." Where Jesus said "Feed my sheep" (John 21:16) and Peter "feed the flock of God" (1 Pet.5:2) and in other instances, this same word "poimaino" is used. Again, in Micah 7:14 the expression "feed thy people with thy rod" is this same iron club, the shebet.

The new administration, then, will be a benevolent autocracy, in which the King is sovereign and all people his loyal followers. Overt acts of evil, violence, injustice, will be restrained. "They shall not hurt nor destroy." (Isa.11:9) Men may or may not accept Christ as King and Saviour in their minds but they will be unable actively to rebel against him. The time for democracy and self‑government is not yet; that will come at the end of the Millennium when people will have had personal experience of the practical out‑working of a righteous world with universal observance of Divine law, and have liberty to make their own choice, for right or wrong, for good or evil, for Christ or Satan—and for life or death accordingly. For, because sin is inherently destructive of life, it must always be true that "the wages of sin is death." (Rom.6:23)

So then, right at the start of the Millennium, the rule of Christ is imposed on the world, which at that time will comprise only the living nations, for the dead have yet to be raised. The question naturally arises, who are the King’s agents, his ambassadors, his executive staff, so to speak, through whom his laws and his Gospel will be promulgated and who will be entrusted with the task of teaching all nations. Whether or not the Lord will be visibly manifest leaves unaffected the fact that He will need many missionaries active in the work of teaching his ways to men and women who know him not and leading them to conversion and acceptance of him as Saviour. Such workers will have had their training for this arduous task in this present life and will be ready at the inception of the Kingdom to take up their ordained task.

There are three such distinct groups. First, those disciples of Christ during this present Age whose lives have been wholly devoted to his service and have eschewed all earthly interests and pursuits in their utter consecration to him and his service. Not all Christians have gone to this length and that is not necessarily to their discredit. The true church, the Bride of Christ, is composed of those whose earnest desire is to be associated with him in the after‑life in all that he undertakes and accomplishes. The immediate and at the present time the most important of such activities is the superintending of the work of the Millennial Age, the evangelical appeal to all, the assisting of those who respond to that appeal to come to a true and complete knowledge of the principles of righteousness. Such will be well qualified for their mission because they themselves will have in the past learned aright the lessons of life. They will be able to say to the man or woman struggling against the effects of sin in the past life "I understand, for I have trodden this path myself. See, this is the way out." Only those who have learned such things in consequence of a close and unremitting adherence to the teaching of Christ will have attained the standard which will enable them to say this, and that is why Jesus said of such "Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." (Matt.7:14)

These, at the time of the Advent, will have been translated into the heavens, raised from the dead in what the Scriptures term the "First Resurrection" (Rev.20:5,6) to be with their Lord in his celestial glory, citizens therefore of the celestial world. As such they will be normally not capable of discernment by the human senses, which are adapted only to this terrestrial, material, world. Their communication with people must be, as was the case with heavenly visitants in Old Testament days, by the expedient of assuming human form and speech—almost, it might be said, a case of changing the wave‑length. It can be expected that such communication between members of the Church of Christ from heaven and the rest of humankind upon earth will be a frequent and familiar occurrence in that day.

The second agency the Lord will use to convey his message of salvation to men will be through the medium of those who in Old Testament days manifested the same spirit of dedication and loyalty to God as has been the characteristic of the Church in New Testament days. These are to be found among God’s ancient people Israel. At Mount Sinai, in the days of the Exodus fourteen centuries before Christ, Israel was constituted a "royal priesthood and a holy nation," with a commission to preserve the oracles of God until such time as Christ should come and thereafter, in the days of the Millennial Kingdom, to declare his salvation to the ends of the earth. In other words, a missionary nation to act as priests and ministers in disseminating the Divine word and taking an important part in the evangelical work of that Age. It is to be feared that many of Israel through the centuries proved themselves unworthy of that calling, but as with the Christian community of this Age, a proportion did remain faithful and will be found ready to play their part in turning men from sin to serve the living God. These will be headed by people of themselves, heroes of faith some of whom, like Abraham, have had Divine approval recorded in Holy Writ; under their leadership the faithful of Israel will go out into the world to be what their prophets of old declared they should be but never in olden times fully realised, a "light to the nations." (Isa.49:6)

Thirdly, and finally, there are those Christian believers in Christ whose faith is full and sincere, and works to match their faith, whose hearts and minds have never been touched with the realisation of, and desire for, the celestial salvation which is the destiny of the true Church. They love the Lord devotedly and would fain do him service, but here upon earth as terrestrial creatures rather than in heaven as celestial. The Lord honours their faith and desire, for in his Father’s house there are many mansions, a great variety of life forms and environments, and when it comes to this Millennial work which has as its object the conversion and reconciliation of "whosoever will," there are many corners in his vineyard and a place for every worker. So, these too will be busily employed as missionaries at home and abroad, seeking those who heretofore had known of Christ but only in a distorted and misleading form, and those who had never known of him at all. There will be those of the living nations carried over into the next Age at the very inception of Christ’s reign who might well be in this category when the last members of the celestial Church have left this earth to be joined with Christ. These will take up the witness and proclaim with no uncertain voice the meaning of the events which are happening and that the new world order has commenced. For these, already instructed in the Christian faith and the significance of the change in world affairs which has taken place, there will be missionary outreach beyond their wildest dreams, for there will now be peoples of all faiths, Muslim, Buddhist, Naturist and those of no faith at all, potential converts in the greatest evangelistic enterprise of all time.

This leads to consideration of the other side of the coin. How will all this be received by those same potential converts? What will be the attitude of the non‑believing world at large to this greatly increased appeal of the Gospel?

One must realise that there will be distinct areas of contact when it comes to dealing with the entire human race. There have been for more than a thousand years past Christians, Jews. Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, beside the semi‑superstitious faiths. Each of these have their own religious background and conception of God, largely mutually contradictory. Prior to that there were Christians and, earlier, Jews, two monotheistic faiths in a world of pagan gods and goddesses. The question might well be asked, how is the Christian evangel going to be presented effectively to people influenced by such a welter of differing theologies and outlooks, and the answer has to be that, as it has been since the dawn of history, God has to speak to each community or people in a language they can understand, and to a great extent inside the framework of their individual intellectual limitations. Christian missionaries who have spent many years in remote regions teaching primitive tribes will well understand what this means.

Probably the first impact will be in the so‑called "Christian" world, the assemblage of nations which at least profess one or another of the various forms of the faith which exist. Even this is debatable for a far smaller proportion of people have any belief in or even any knowledge of Christ and his teachings than was the case only a century ago or so. The Lord’s query "When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" comes home with impressive emphasis in these latter days and constitutes one evidence that these are indeed the latter days of this Age. Nevertheless, it will be difficult for the atheists and the agnostics and the frankly indifferent to deny the existence and the power of God in face of the manifest evidence accumulating before their eyes. The Divine restraint of outward evil and, above all, the resurrection of the dead to stand, alive, upon earth again will need a lot of explaining away; probably some "die‑hards" will be busy looking for a rational explanation which leaves God out of it but they are not likely to get very far. Even atheists must have dead parents and relatives whom they will eventually meet again, face to face, alive, and without God that will take a lot of explaining.

It can be expected then that the initial harvest of this new Pentecost will be among the professedly Christian nations, those who are the most easily capable of understanding the nature of the power which has taken control of the world and initiated this worldwide reformation. In this new world in which the true gospel of God is preached and there is no longer room for ambiguity and misunderstanding, the old denominational differences must needs vanish and so, too, will those theologies which present the Deity as a vengeful autocrat intent only on saving a few favourites and consigning the rest to an eternity of penal separation from him. The keynote of the new faith will be that God is Love, that He has created humankind for a purpose, and the achievement of that purpose will mean eternal life and happiness for all his creatures, if they will. Even though the Christian nations constitute but a relatively small proportion of the total population of this planet, the conversion and entry into this understanding of the Truth on the part of so many of these will enormously increase the number of available missionaries eager to go out and take the knowledge of Christ to the larger number who have never even heard of him.

As a kind of side issue, the scientists and evolutionists and others who for so long have held the field of explaining how the universe came into existence and how man came to evolve upon it from amino acids and inorganic chemicals with the aid of a little ultra‑violet light from outer space will be doing a little hard thinking and probably come out with the sentiment expressed by the ruler of the wedding‑feast of Cana at Galilee, "thou hast kept the good wine until now." (John 2:10)

There will be a rapid rewriting of theories, papers and textbooks. Parallel with this process will be the complete return of the House of Israel to God and their acceptance of Christ as their promised Messiah.

All the old Hebrew prophets were sure that this would come, and they depicted in glowing terms the glories of that day when the Lord would receive Israel’s loyalty and never again be separated from them. To a great extent this conversion will have been already effected as the closing event of this present Age, when Israel, confident of Divine protection within her own borders, the bounds of the Holy Land, but menaced by the powers of evil in the world, are miraculously delivered by the Lord Jesus Christ, their Messiah from heaven, accompanied by his own, his Church. That event marks the full end of this present Age and the beginning of the Millennium and reveals the existence upon earth of a compact body of people who straightaway understand the significance of the times and their place in those times. It is probable that the first earthly missionaries of the Millennium will be those children of Jacob who experience that marvellous deliverance at the end of this Age, together with other nationalities who also have been looking and working for this day. Speaking of this event, Isaiah records the words of the Lord "and I will send those that escape of them unto the nations...to the coastlands afar off, that have not heard my fame, neither have seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the Gentiles (peoples)." (Isa.66:19 KJV RSV) As the resurrection proceeds, and their fellows of preceding generations are awakened to join them, it is tolerably certain that, as Zechariah says, "I will sow them among the people: and they shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their children, and turn again." (Zech.10:9) Jerusalem, the Holy City, will speedily become the focus toward which all will turn their eyes.

Perhaps the next sphere in which the evangelistic fervour of the times will find expression will be the Muslim world, millions of them, nearly as many as the professed Christians. It is not always realised that the God of Islam is the God of Jew and Christian. When Muhammad in the seventh century set out to convert his fellow Arabians from their idol worship it was the God of the Jews and of the Old Testament that he preached. Himself a stern monotheist, he misunderstood the New Testament presentation of Christ as the Son of God and as having come from the Father to take the nature of man upon himself and allowed Christ only the status of a prophet like the Hebrew prophets whom he venerated. Since the Muslims venerate Abraham as much as do the Jews, and look upon him as their ancestor and they the children of Abraham, it could be quite on the cards that the undisputed appearance upon earth of Abraham and others of the ancients will initiate a revolution of thought in the Muslim world leading to an effective work of conversion among them. They may not, initially, be so near the Kingdom of God as the Jews and the Christians, but nevertheless not so very far away either. Esau, Ishmael, Abraham, Nahor, Peleg, Joktan, Shem; these are all ancients of old time prominent in both Jewish and Muslim lore; their counsel and leadership will doubtless exert a great influence in the Muslim world and so lead them to Christ.

These are the three theistic religions, that is, forms of worship of a supreme God who has a relationship with man. There are other quasi‑religious faiths such as Buddhism which are not theistic in that sense. Buddhism springs from the teachings of Gautama Buddha, an Indian prince who lived six hundred years before Christ although Buddhism as a faith only came into existence a thousand years later. It is a religion of high moral tone and ethical values but there is no personal Saviour and no God in the Christian sense. The two Chinese philosophers, Confucius and Lao Tse (Laozi), lived at about the same time as Buddha and founded similar systems which found their adherents chiefly in the Far East. It could well be that the sincere follower of one or other of these faiths will have little to learn in the field of ethics and just dealing and right living; they are at the present time an example to the rest of the world in that direction. What they do lack, and will lack in that day, is the realisation, that as children of Adam they are alien from God, standing in need of the saving power of Jesus Christ, and reconciliation with God. These are farther away from God than are Christians and Jews and Muslims and it is in this province that the efforts of the missionaries must next be directed. One can expect this to be fertile ground; these are likely to be in much the same position as the rich young ruler who felt he had observed the principles of God’s laws in their entirety; "all these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?" (Matt.19:20) Like him, they will need to understand that despite all their good deeds and upright living, they need the Saviour. There is not much doubt that they will find him.

By far the most intense phase of the missionary work of the Millennium will be amongst the people who for generations have lived in primitive simplicity and who only in part have had the Christian gospel preached to them. These represent the greater part of the human race and have the most to learn. In most cases there is some idea of a God in heaven but usually confounded with numerous minor deities, evil spirits, and again with no idea of a Saviour who redeems from sin. As the generations return from the grave there will be more and more of these, minds dark with the fear of evil spirits and demons, vengeful gods and hostile powers innumerable, and the work of disabusing their minds of such things and replacing them with the conception of a God of love, who is planning good things for his creatures, will without doubt be an arduous work. It may well be that the reason the Millennium is to endure for a thousand years—which some have queried as seemingly an unnecessarily long time for the conversion of the world when one realises that evil is suppressed and the Gospel has unfettered freedom of expression—is that in his wisdom the Most High foresees that such time is necessary to reach all these millions who have got to start at the very beginning and be freed from so many elements of Satan’s power before they can begin to make progress in the things of God. In still earlier times there were men who had degenerated so far from the nobility of the first men that they had become little more than animals, living in caves and trees, almost bereft of intelligence; yet they are all God’s handiwork and destined in the Age of Christ’s reign to be lifted up out of their degradation into the "glorious liberty of the children of God." (Rom.8:21)

So, at the last, there will return to earth the oldest of the ancients, those who lived in the earliest days before idolatry had come upon earth and men had begun to make themselves many gods. These from that old‑time Golden Age had known and worshipped the God of heaven; even so they knew nothing of Christ, and his evangel will come strange to them. The Millennium may conceivably be well advanced by the time they stand again upon the earth but their ancient faith will stand them in good stead and their progress in the knowledge and faith of Jesus Christ be that more rapid.

To be continued
AOH