Like most new Christians do, I read numerous books on the end times immediately after my born again beginning. Because the popular books on eschatology all leaned in one direction, I inclined that way as well. It took many years before I discovered teachers of a different mold from sensationalist sellers of millenarian books. It took a long time before my application of certain interpretive principles led me out from the cave of misunderstanding on this topic. The propositions in this article started to come together as I became comfortably convinced of how one single subject about the end times ought to be interpreted. The article itself is the outcome of an idea that I had for a hilltop meeting on the subject of the millennium. I don’t remember how it did it (for Jonathan Edwards was postmillennial in his belief), but his book called ‘A History of the Work of Redemption’ is what first made me suspect, twenty years ago in 2004, that premillennialism might be indefensible. I never wanted premillennialism to be unfounded. Because of this, I can honestly say that this article contains the fruits of years of independent education and unbiased investigation. These results, moreover, have not been allowed to stand except after frequent periods of meditation. The acquired input, in the exercise of meditation, has been held loosely aloft to sort itself out before settling into certainty. Note that Premillennialism, Chiliasm, and Millenarianism are terms that are used interchangeably in this article.
Introduction
As is often the case with controversial subjects or subjects that are more on the margins than mainstream, the proper belief concerning the apocalyptic millennium is, I believe, not the popular one. The popular belief about it has been, since at least WWI, dispensational premillennialism. The premillennial teaching has occupied more shelves in the twentieth century, probably, than any other one found in Christian bookstores. And doubtless it has made its authors more money in the last fifty years of that century than any teaching propounded in all of Christendom. This teaching is the belief that the one thousand years that are mentioned in Revelation 20 are literal years and that Jesus Christ will return bodily to set up a kingdom of peace lasting for that exact amount of time and that he will then rule the world for this duration from Jerusalem with a rod of iron. Christians are united in believing that his second advent will be personal, physical, visible, and sudden. But not all of us believe that he is coming back to set up a paradisiacal thousand years of peace before the final judgment takes place.
After end times enthusiasts have shamed themselves as deeply as their piles of cash are high from selling melodramatic books, the time has come to look at how amillennialism is shamelessly conceivable. If the end times aficionados would have been correct, each one of us Christians would be under his own fig tree right now with pet lions lying down beside oxen carelessly chewing their cud. This would be our situation because that is how literally most premillennial advocates interpret symbolic language; and this would be our situation right now because they (not all of them) have predicted the time of the rapture, and, consequently, the return of Christ and the start of the millennium, albeit cleverly and not in so many words. Each reader who has read books on the end times, if he has read them critically, has noticed that. Now that these predictions have failed, and because some readers remember their being made, a subset of these readers are reduced to believing that no prophecy whatsoever awaits, which position, of course, is heretical, for the actual in-person second coming of Jesus Christ is a capital doctrine of the Christian Faith. Millenarianism, if it is false, can cause frustration in the person who discovers it to be false, resulting in a recoil and unbelief. There are negative consequences to harping on or hyping up a teaching that might happen to be imaginary. There is an alternative to premillennialism that is more sobering than sensational and that, because of this temper, does not lead to a letdown or to unbelief. This alternative may be drawn straight from the chapter that millenarians depend on the most for the kind of millennium that they espouse.
First, I will present three inducements from Revelation 20 to disbelieve in millenarianism and to believe in amillennianism instead. Then I will present specimens of millenarian incompetence and underhandedness as two further inducements. Each one of the three inducements collapses the idea of a literal millennium of peace on earth; and the specimens of incompetence and underhandedness reinforce the likelihood that millenarianism is a falsehood.
