What is the Millennium and When Will it Start?

John was given the vision of the coming Thousand Years of Peace, commonly called the Millennium, back in the first century AD. The resulting book of Revelation tells us that Jesus Christ will return as King of Kings, Christ’s faithful disciples will be transformed and resurrected into everlasting bodies, Satan will be bound for the thousand years, and we will help Jesus restore the earth into the Paradise it was first created to be. Christians have been eagerly waiting for, praying for, and often expecting this glorious Kingdom of God to begin soon. Let us look at some key verses that address the beginning of the Millennium and what it will be like:

Then I saw Heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. And He who sat on it was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and He makes war. His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns. And He had a name written that no one knew except Him. He wore a garment soaked with blood, and His Name is called The Word of God. And the armies in Heaven followed Him on white horses clothed in linen, white and pure.

Now from His mouth came a sharp sword, by which He will kill the nations. And He will shepherd them with a branch of iron and He will tread the winepress holding all the wrath of God. And on His garment, over His thigh, a name is written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Revelation 19:11 to 16

He, of course, is Jesus Christ, also called Jeshua the Messiah, this is His Second Coming, and He will begin by bringing an end to war. This is followed by imprisoning the great instigator of hatred, lies, wars and corruptions:

And he seized the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years; and he cast him into the depth, and shut and sealed the top of it, that he would not seduce all the nations again. After these years it is allowed to release him for a little time.

And I saw seats, and they sat on them, and judgement was given to them and the souls of those who were cut off for the testimony of Jeshua and for the word of God, and because they had not worshipped the beast nor its image, nor received the mark between their eyes nor on their hands. They lived and reigned with Messiah for one thousand years. And this is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are they who have their part in the first resurrection, and the second death has no authority over them, for they will be priests of God and of the Messiah, and they will reign with Him for one thousand years. Revelation 20:2 to 6.

But what will life be like in the Millennium? Will it really be a great time to live?

Jehovah’s Spirit will rest upon Him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of Jehovah. His delight is in the fear of Jehovah, and He will not judge by the sight of His eyes, nor decide by the hearing of His ears; but with righteousness He will judge the poor, and decide with equity for the gentle of the earth. He will strike the earth with the branch of His mouth, and with the breath of His lips He will slay the wicked. Righteousness will be the belt of His loins, and faithfulness the belt of His waist.

The wolf also will dwell with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the young goat, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow and the bear will graze; their young ones will lie down together; and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The breastfeeding infant will play by the cobra’s hole, and the weaned child will put his hand in the viper’s den.

They will not hurt nor destroy in all My sanctified mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of Jehovah, as the waters cover the sea. And in that day there will be a Root of Jesse, who will stand as a banner to the people; for the gentiles will seek Him, and His resting place will be glorious. Isaiah 11:2 to 10

He will judge between many peoples, and rebuke strong nations afar off; they will beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they learn war any more. Instead, everyone will sit under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one will make them afraid; for the mouth of Jehovah of Hosts has spoken. For all people walk each in the name of his god, but we will walk in the name of Jehovah our God forever and ever.

“In that day,” says Jehovah, “I will assemble the lame, I will gather the outcast and those whom I have afflicted; I will make the lame a remnant, and the outcast a strong nation; so Jehovah will reign over them in Mount Zion from now on, even forever. Micah 4:3 to 7

For the people will dwell in Zion at Jerusalem; you will weep no more. He will be very gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when He hears it, He will answer you. And though Jehovah gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your teachers will not be moved into a corner anymore, but your eyes will see your teachers. Your ears will hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” whenever you turn to the right hand or whenever you turn to the left. Isaiah 30:19 to 21

So everyone will live in peace, and the disabled will all be healed. And whenever someone is about to make a disastrous decision, we will be guided to the best choice. It will be a time of such joy that we can not truly imagine how good it will be.

When Will the Millennium Start?

“Now learn this parable from the fig tree: When its branches become tender and it brings forth its leaves, you know that summer is arriving. So you also, when you have seen all these things, know that it is arriving at the door. Truly, I say to you, this branch will not pass away until all these things happen.1 Heaven and earth may pass away, but My word will not pass away.

“But which day and which hour no person knows, not even the envoys of heaven, but My Father alone.

“But as the days of Noah, so will the coming of the Son of Mankind be. For as they were before the Great Flood, eating and drinking, and taking their women and giving them in marriage to men,2 until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the Great Flood came and took them all, so also will the coming of the Son of Mankind be.3 Then two will be in the field: one will be taken and one will be left. And two will be grinding at the mill: one will be taken and one will be left.

“Therefore be alert, for you do not know in which hour your Lord will come.” Matthew 24:32 to 42

So we will have a general idea of when it is coming once the things that Jeshua had just previously mentioned to his disciples happen: wars, famines, plagues, earthquakes and more specifically, when they again begin to persecute and kill us for being Bible-believing Christians4 and false prophets arise.

And underlying all of this is an ancient understanding of when these things may happen. It is based on this passage:

as you knew from the first: that scoffers will come in the last days, who scoff while they walk according to their own lusts, and they say, “Where is the promise of His Coming? For since our forefathers fell asleep, everything continues as it was from the beginning of creation.”

For this they choose to disregard: that by the Word of God the heavens and the earth began and the land arose from the waters and in the water, by which the world that existed then was flooded with water and was destroyed. But the heavens and the earth which exist now are preserved by His word, and they are reserved for fire on the day of judgement and the destruction of the wicked children of men.

And you must not disregard this fact, beloved, that to Lord Jah one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day. Jehovah does not delay His promises, though some people consider them delayed, for His Spirit is long-suffering toward you, for He does not desire that any person should perish but that every person would come to repentance. 2 Peter 3:3 to 9

It is a simple matter to correlate this to Creation Week, with the Thousand Years of Peace being equivalent to the seventh-day Sabbath Day of Rest. So this suggests that after suffering under Satan’s ‘ruling’ of the world for six of these thousand year ‘days,’ we finally have a thousand years of Peace while Satan is bound.

This is what Edward Gibbon wrote about the early Christian beliefs relating to the Millennium:

“The ancient and popular doctrine of the Millennium was intimately connected with the second coming of Christ. As the works of the creation had been finished in six days, their duration in their present state, according to a tradition which was attributed to the prophet Elijah, was fixed to 6,000 years.5 By the same analogy it was inferred that this long period of labour and contention, which was now almost elapsed, would be succeeded by a joyful Sabbath of a thousand years; and that Christ, with the triumphant band of the saints and the elect who had escaped death, or who had been miraculously revived, would reign upon earth till the time appointed for the last and general resurrection.” (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1, p. 403).

This seems simple enough. If we know when the universe was created, or perhaps more specifically when Adam and Chavvah (Eve) fell and Satan was given authority over earth, we should have a good idea of when Satan will be bound and the Millennium starts.

All we need to do is follow the Bible’s chronology back to Creation. A piece of cake!! Well, having attempted to do this, along with many others, it turns out it is not that straight-forward. First, there are some problems in the Father-Son Chronology. Though we have a complete list of Jeshua’s ancestors through Mary’s line (Mat 1:1-16 -see the Aramaic- and Luke 3:31-38), from the time of the Babylonian captivity to Christ we rarely know the age of the father when the son was born. And there are also some ambiguities in the known dates, as it seems that the age of the father when he begets his son(s) is sometimes his age when his first son is born, who is not necessarily the son through whom the chronology to Christ is traced. One extreme example of this is Abraham. In Genesis 11:26-29, we are told that Abraham and his brothers are born when Terah is 70, but in Acts 7:4 we are told that Abram was 75 when he left Harran after his father died at 205, meaning Terah was 130 when Abram, his youngest son, was born. And all of this is using the Masoretic Hebrew dates. The Septuagint often has its own dates.

Because of these possible variations, different Creation Years can be calculated, and from them, different possible starts to the Millennium. As you can see in the Table, these can vary wildly.

This Table gives a broad range, and there are dozens of others within this range. Most of the Masoretic based chronologies place Creation within two centuries of 4000 BCE. And of course, each generation of Christians wants to think they may be the ones that live to see the beginning of the Millennium, though few relish living in the preceding Great Tribulation. And as shown below, we are not exceptions!!

However, this statement of Jeshua makes some of the earlier predictions for the Millennium unrealistic:

“For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, nor will ever be again. And if those days had not been limited, none in the flesh would live; but because of the chosen those days will be limited. Matthew 24:21&22.

It is only during my lifetime that humanity has “achieved” the ability to turn our entire planet into a lifeless cinder. Nor was it plausible to assemble an armed force of 200 million until quite recently. But now we are in the unenviable position where, if Jeshua does not intervene and stop us, we will destroy everything, and there is some evidence that our self-destruction has already begun. But on the positive side, Jeshua’s statement also shows that the earth will in fact BE INHABITED during the Millennium.6 We will become priests and administrators over a devastated world, and we will help Jeshua restore it into a magnificent paradise.

Our attempt at the chronology was based on the Masoretic Hebrew, and we came up with the same Creation Year as Ussher. This year appeared to be confirmed by these items: 1: Abib 1 in 4004 BCE was a Sunday, resulting in a Saturday Sabbath. 2: the calculated Flood year, 2348 BCE, had the required 150 days between the 17th of the second month and the 17th of the seventh month (Gen 7:11 & 8:3). 3: The Jordan Crossing in 1510 BCE had the Passover on the Sabbath, making the Wave Offering the next day (Jos 5:10-11 & Lev 23:9-14). 4: Jeshua’s death was on Wednesday in 31 AD. And it was the 4000 year link from Creation to Christ’s human birth that made us think the 4004 BCE date was likely correct. Though we knew we couldn’t be certain, we were expecting the Great Tribulation to begin during early 1994, and hoping the Millennium would start three and a half years later in 1997 (Daniel 7:23 to 27, Revelation 12:13 to 17).

Of course we all know now that it didn’t eventuate. And when many Christians got all excited about the year 2000, we were totally sceptical, as they never even made any attempt at a chronology to support their expectation, relying only on the year 2000 on a highly dubious calendar which was not correctly linked to Christ’s birth, as He was born was in 4 BCE.7

However, I am currently restoring an English translation of Thielem J. van Braght’s 1660 Dutch book, The Bloody Theatre, or Martyrs Mirror Of The Defenseless Christians. Braght, an Anabaptist, makes this startling statement in it:

About three thousand, nine hundred and seventy years after the creation of the world, in the forty-second year of the reign of Augustus, the second Roman emperor, when the whole world was at peace, Jesus Christ was born of the virgin Mary, (p.147).

Which is, of course, another way of saying that Creation, and specifically Adam’s fall, was 4000 years before Christ was crucified.8 And Christ’s impalement and resurrection were the two most significant events to ever happen since Creation. And it links well to the next most significant event: Christ’s return 2000 years later to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth, which begins with the destruction of Satan’s armies, ushering in the Millennium of Peace. On the downside, I am, so far, having difficulty matching Braght’s creation date with an Abib 1 Sunday, and with the corresponding matches for the Flood and Jordan Crossing.

There are also a number of significant days on which Jeshua could return during the year, but it seems likely, based on Jehovah’s Holy Days, that the great battle between Satan and Jeshua’s armies will begin on the Day of Trumpets, and Satan will be cast into the Great Deep on the Day of Atonement. It is likely that God’s Anointed Son, Jeshua, will have returned before then, thus forcing Satan to assemble his human armies at Megiddo to confront Him. (Revelation 16:16). Even with modern transport systems, it will still take some time, perhaps many weeks, to get two hundred million soldiers and their equipment there from all over the world. (Revelation 9:16).

So even if it turns out that 2031 is the year of Jeshua’s Return, we cannot predict the actual day of his return. But we can have a stab at guessing when the Great Tribulation might begin. Assuming the Tribulation ends on Atonement 2031, which is likely to be 28 September, and a time is 360 days (the length of a pre-Flood year), then three and a half times is 1260 days (Daniel 12:7, Revelation 11:1 to 15). This takes us back to April 16, 2028. And on God’s Calendar, this day is Abib 20, and it is the Sunday during the Week of Unleavened Bread, which is the day of the Wave Offering.9 The Wave Offering is the day which commemorates Jeshua’s resurrection, and was the day that He took his blood to heaven and revealed himself, transformed, to some of his disciples.

However, it is now June, 2023, and April, 2028 is less than five years away. And Daniel 12:11 tells us that before Christ returns, the daily sacrifices must be taken away. And they are not happening now, so they must be restarted before they can be taken away. Yet there is not enough time to get permission and rebuild the Temple of God before then. The answer to this problem may lie in the actions of the Jews when they returned to Jerusalem after their Babylonian captivity. We are told in Ezra 3:1 to 6 that they built an altar to Jehovah and began offering the morning and evening sacrifices on it even before the foundations of Jehovah’s Temple had been laid. It is possible that this could happen again.

Though this is all interesting, and seems significant, it is only speculation, not prophetic revelation. But we must stay alert, and it may be that something astounding will happen on April 16, 2028 which confirms that it is the beginning of the Great Tribulation and/or God’s two prophets appear. As always, all we can do is wait, pray and keep serving our Lord Jah. And always remember our Messiah’s warning: He will come at a time that we are not expecting Him (Luke 12:46).

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Scripture quotations are taken from the Central Highlands Congregation of God version.

The Holy Bible-CHCoG Version-This translation from the original Hebrew and Aramaic is accurate and readable, giving you a clear understanding of how the New and Old Covenants are interlocked and God’s message to you.

Everlasting Life is God’s Gift-Does the Bible teach that you have everlasting life? If not, how can you receive God’s gift of immortality as His child?

Books of Moses-Fact or Fiction Series-Are the miracles recorded in Genesis and Exodus our true history? Do the facts support Special Creation or the Big Bang & Evolution scenarios? What about the Flood, Babel and the Exodus?

Spirit, Soul and Body-What does the Bible teach about the nature of human beings? Do we have a soul? What is our spirit? What happens when we die?

Eastern Meditation and Jeshua the Messiah-Recounts the experiences of a CHCoG member who became a Christian while practising Eastern Meditation.

The Ten Commandments-What are God’s Ten Commandments? How do they guide us in our relationships with God, our family and our neighbours? Shows how obedience to Jehovah’s Instructions would result in true civilization.

What is God’s Name?-How can we know what God’s Name is and how to Pronounce it? Does the Bible teach us to use God’s Name?

God’s Calendar and the Sign of Jonah-Shows how God’s Calendar reveals that Jeshua truly kept the Sign of Jonah, His ultimate proof that He is the Messiah.

The Sabbath in Scripture-Has God’s Seventh-day Sabbath been ‘done away with’? What does the Sabbath mean, and does God want us to keep it?

Fifty Years in the Church of Rome-Charles Chiniquy’s classic exposure of the corruptions of the Roman church, and how he found God’s Gift of Salvation.

Unclean Animals and Food – What does the Bible teach about unclean animals? Does the New Covenant allow us to eat unclean meat?

Rome’s Challenge: Why do Protestants Keep Sunday?-This Roman Catholic article proves there is no scriptural basis for changing the seventh-day Sabbath to Sunday, and shows that the Roman Catholic church made the change.

Sex, God and Families-Article exposing the dangers of sexual immorality and outlining the benefits of following God’s sexual principles.

The Catholic Chronicles-Keith Green explores the meanings of the Roman Catholic Mass, transubstantiation, their concept of forgiveness of sin and salvation and what—if anything—Vatican II changed.

Free to Obey God – God’s Son Jeshua sets us free! But what does he set us free from, and how does He expect us to live our new life?

Jeshua the Messiah: Is He the Son of God or Part of a Trinity?-Explores the relationships between God the Father, our Lord Jeshua, the Holy Spirit and us.

The Two Babylons, or the Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife – Hislop demonstrates that Romanism is the Babylonian whore.

Calculated Biblical Calendar-Calculates dates of Annual Holy Days, Crucifixion, Flood, Creation: allows you to test the new moon visibility locally.

1 Based on Paul Younan’s ‘this branch’ in his Peshitta translation. It probably refers to the branch of Judah, which is still with us today. Alternatively, it could be ‘this generation,’ referring to the generation which will see all of these end-time things happening and then see Jeshua return as King of Kings, not to the generation that was alive when He spoke to the Apostles. Jeshua is pointing out how rapidly all these things will happen once they begin.

2 As in the Peshitta: it is unclear, but probably means the women were being given in marriage.

4 This is already happening in many nations. And even in the once ‘Christian’ western nations, numerous laws have been enacted in recent years that are available for use against Bible-believing Christians. One obvious example is the law making it a crime if we assist a person who asks us to help them overcome their gay, lesbian or trans-sexual aberrations. The popular media frequently portrays us as ignorant, hypocritical and violent bigots, and delights in finding nominal christians that exhibit these flaws.

7 Indeed, many of them expected to be whisked away from any test of their faith at midnight, on January 1, 2000, in their unBiblical ‘pre-Tribulation Rapture.’

8 If you assume Jeshua was thirty when he died. However, he was thirty when he began his ministry, and was roughly thirty-three and a half years old when he was impaled, so Braght’s creation year would be about three years off, though correct if one believed Christ was born in 1 AD, as the Roman Catholic church taught. As Creation Week logically began on the first day of the year, which is Abib 1, and as the Passover lamb, including Jeshua, was sacrificed towards the end of the fourteenth day of Abib, it suggests that Adam and Chavvah (Eve) fell at the same time: almost two weeks after the Creation began, and only eight days after they were created. And note that Jeshua was impaled on a Wednesday, in the middle of the week (Dan 9:27), and spent exactly three nights and three days in the grave as He prophesied in Matthew 12:39-40. This is all explained in God’s Calendar and the Sign of Jonah, at chcpublications.net, while more information on the Holy Days themselves, which portray Jehovah’s entire Plan of Salvation, are available at https://chcpublications.net/#Holy_Day_Services. Although feasible, Bragth does not given any details of HOW they determined their Creation Date.

9 The Calendar is indeed God’s, and is given to us in Leviticus 23, and we are told that they are to be kept forever. The calculated dates for these years are found with astronomical software, which is available at chcpublications.net, while tables for the Annual Holy Days from 2019 to 2038 are at God’s Holy Day Tables. This is not based on the inaccurate Jewish calendar, but instead uses accurate modern calculations to estimate the visibility of the new moon crescent to start each month and the ripeness of the barley in Israel to start each year.

Source	Creation (BC)	Millennium (Start)
Septuagint	5529	472
Septuagint	5336	665
Early Jewish	4339	1662
Masoretic (Scotus)	4192	1809
Masoretic (Ussher)	4004	1997
Anabaptist (Braght)	3970	2031
Septuagint (Bede)	3952	2049
Masoretic (Mercator)	3928	2073
Early Jewish	3761	2240

What is the Millennium?

When Will the Millennium Start?