What is the Millenium?

This is one of those areas where Christians in the UK seem very different from Christians

in the US.

In the UK, if you ask a Christian what's your view of the Millenium, most of them would

look at you as if you just asked them to name the world's greatest entomologist.

It's just not something most of us have ever thought about.

And yet, when I came to live in the States, some Christians were very opinionated about

it.

Some of them identified themselves as pre-millennial, post-millennial, or a millennial, often

about three seconds after we'd met.

Then they'd inevitably asked me what my view was, and I'd look at them as if they just

asked me to name the world's greatest entomologist.

Maybe somewhere in between the British approach and the American one might be the healthiest

place to be.

The word millennium comes from two Latin words, melee, meaning thousand, and annum, meaning

year.

So the millennium, when used as a theological term, refers to the thousand years that I mentioned

in Revelation chapter 20.

If you look at verses one to six in that chapter, you'll see that it refers to a thousand

year period in which Christ reigns with his saints.

Because this is the only passage in the Bible that speaks of this thousand year reign,

and because it occurs in a part of the Bible which contains a great deal of figurative

...