The Kingship of the Lord and His Anointed has begun. For a thousand years the ‘old earth’ had already experienced what it means to have Christ reigning publicly. His Church and His people Israel were fully involved with Him in that. Paul wrote to Timothy: “we will also reign with Him.”1 The twenty-four ‘angelic leaders of the Heavenly Hosts’ sang: “You have made them to be a Kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.”2 And Daniel prophesied: “The ‘holy people of the Most High’ will receive the Kingdom and will possess it forever—yes, forever and ever,”3 as the NIV translates. The NASB translates more correctly: “But the ‘saints of the Highest One’ will receive the Kingdom and possess the Kingdom forever, for all ages to come.”—the ‘Kingdom of the holy people of the Most High’.4 ‘Forever’ should be read as ‘from century to century’, from ‘age to age’, from ‘aeon to aeon’, with reference to the thousand years. It does not stop after the ‘thousand’ years, though, for it will never stop. It will continue and flow into ‘eternity’’ after the 1000 years. Even when the New Jerusalem has come down from Heaven we also read: “And they will reign for all ages to come.”5
Nevertheless, two distinct ‘aeons’ seem to be referred to, because the ‘first period’ has emphatically ‘passed away’.6 Revelation 21:4 “…and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” The judgment before the great white throne has since taken place. When that judgment is about to take place, ‘Heaven and earth’ flee from Him Who sits on the throne. This final judgment had already been preceded by a ‘judgment of the nations’ (Matthew 25:31-46) that were to be ‘herded with an iron rod’, Psalm 2; Revelation 2:26-27; 12:5. That was a judgment of the last generation on earth, of the followers of the anti-Christ, of the rebellious nations. These final judgments have considerably thinned out the population of the world. Isaiah prophesied about this: “I will make people scarcer than pure gold,7 and yet some gleanings will remain, as when an olive tree is beaten.”8 Nations were crushed with a rod of iron, a club, and anyone who survived was ruled over by an iron sceptre. Christ was to herd and to rule them.9 Herding is the positive aspect of ruling10—until the final rebellion under Gog and Magog, after which fire consumed the rebellious nations.11 Judgments in time are nevertheless different to judgments in eternity. Those judgements in time took place before the final judgement at the white throne.
Space, the Universe as we know it, was then no longer found for earth and Heaven, “earth and Heaven fled away, and no place was found for them.”12 They disappeared, or were dismantled to the core of their elements, to provide the raw materials for the New Heaven and the New Earth, the New Universe.
The dead have risen from death, not as souls without bodies, but as souls/living persons with incredible resurrection bodies. They have absolutely no point of reference or support base in the old Creation however, for ‘Heaven and earth’ have disappeared. They find themselves before the ‘white judgment throne’ in a space we are completely unable to imagine, in unfathomable dimensions that we human beings, belonging to the four dimensions of our space-time continuum of length, breadth, height and time cannot even start to understand! They stand eye to eye before God, more naked than ever, outside and without our world of time and space. The condemned were cast into the ‘lake of fire’,13 and a New Heaven and a New Earth appear—a New Universe, with immortal and imperishable people. Decomposition, slow death, entropy, decay and putrefaction are impossible, for ‘death’ as a principle has itself gone into the ‘lake of fire’. Everything is new, on a cosmic scale.
• There was no more ‘sea’. This does not necessarily mean that there will be no sea consisting of water on the New earth. The ‘corrupt’ sea14 has disappeared of course. The ‘sea’ of ‘rebellious nations’ will no longer be there. The sea was an image of the nations in turmoil, where Leviathan rages15 and from which anti-Christ arose.16
• The nations will live in perfect harmony on the New earth. The Universe ‘exploded’ or ‘dissolved’ into every direction. Or like a scroll: rolled up and rolled out again. That will happen then—but whether an ‘explosion’, a ‘Big Bang’ took place at the beginning of Creation, remains a controversial question. For it is not very likely that order will come out of disorder, out of an explosion!
• Order comes by intelligence. Software is not part of the hardware – compare your computer – but has to be added to it. Intelligent programmes direct the hardware, like a rider rides the horse, giving his horse directions, steering it how and where to go.
Bible References:
1.2 Timothy 2:12 NIV 2.Revelation 5:10 NIV 3.Daniel 7:18 NIV 4.Daniel 7:27 5.Revelation 22:5 6.Revelation 20:5,7; 21:4 7.Isaiah 13:12 8.Isaiah 17:6 9.Revelation 2:27, 12:5 10.Matthew 2:6; Luke 17:7; John 21:15–17; 1 Peter 5:2 11.Revelation 20:7–10 12.Revelation 20:11 13.Revelation 20:15 14.Revelation 8:8, 11:6, 16:4 15.Isaiah 27:1 16.Revelation 13:1
