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Whose Millennium Is It, Anyway?

by Tim O'Hearn

So we’re going into the year 2000 by our reckoning. Almost everyone is mistakenly equating the potential problems with computers (which are overrated) to the coming of the millennium, even though that won’t come for another year. They are further equating the coming of the millennium to prophecies supposedly about Jesus’ return. (Actually, the bimillennium of Jesus’ birth passed about four years ago and nobody noticed.) There are others who believe we need not worry for another thirty-three years, since any millennial prophecies should date from Jesus’ death and the start of the church. In a TV interview a few months ago, a rabbi and a priest were asked about the doomsayers of the millennium. The rabbi replied that since to him it was the year 5760, he had no real opinion on the matter. Considering that Jesus was born in 750 or 751 of the founding of Rome, we’re still about 245 years from the start of the Roman fourth millennium. So whose millennium is it anyway?

Considering all this, it becomes obvious that every day is a millennium, or bimillennium or trimillenium of some past event. This being so, if a millennium has any dire significance, then we should live every day as if it was the end of the world. And guess what! That’s just what the scriptures say we should be doing.

"But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called 'today,' so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partners of Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end. As it is said, 'Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.'" (Heb 3:13-15)

James reminds us that the only millennium we see may be the one that ends today. "What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 4:14) How many people who were worried about Y2K never got that far? "You yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night." (1 Th 5:2)

As one preacher put it, "We need to worry less about Y2K (Year 2000) and more about J2C (Jesus’ second coming)." Is today the end of your millennium?