What is the Millennium? 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 millennium?

Most of them would look at you as if you just ask 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. Many 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'd 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, milay meaning thousand and anum meaning year.

So the millennium, when used as a theological term, refers to the thousand years that are mentioned in Revelation chapter 20.

If you look at verses 1 to 6 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 language, Christians historically have spent a lot of time mulling over its precise meaning.

Does this millennium represent the reign of Christians who are in heaven during this current age?

Or does it refer to the reign of Christ on earth with or through Christian believers.

There are basically three views that people hold.

Firstly, A-Millennialists, A-Mills to their friends,

believe that the entire Gospel Age is the Millennium.

In other words, the millennium began when Christ came and has continued

ever since then. It's not a literal thousand years, clearly. The reference to a thousand years

...