01.02.05. The Mock Millennium

Part II Chapter V. THE MOCK MILENNIUM

Antichrist and Antichurch, —these two reign­ing together have brought on an anti-millennium, the dazzling caricature of that which is promised to appear at the second coming of Christ and the marriage of the Lamb. An eminent exegete, in a recent symposium on the pre-millennial advent, replies to those who query whether the present may not after all be the long-predicted millen­nium, that it might be more correctly called “the millennium of Satan.” This saying sounds ex­tremely harsh and pessimistic, but it has the ad­vantage of conforming to Scripture. “The age to come” — o aiwn mellwn—has its unmistakable characteristics as set forth in Scripture: it will be the age of the resurrection of the just (Luke 20:35), with all the glorious triumphs and rewards which belong to that consummation; and it will be ushered in by the visible appearing of the Lord from heaven (Matthew 13:39); it will be Christ’s millennium, during which Satan shall be bound and shut up so that he can tempt the na­tions no more (Revelation 20:1-5). The present age, —‛οnun aiwn— spanning the entire distance from the first to the second advent, has also its distinctive characteristics: it is called the “present evil age,” (Galatians 1:4); Christians are exhorted to “live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present age,” (Titus 2:12), to “be not conformed to this age,” (Romans 12:2), and they are admonished that Christ “gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this pres­ent evil age,” (Galatians 1:4). So far from Christ being Lord of this age, as He should be was it His millennium, we are distinctly told that Satan is “the god of this age,” —o qeoV tou aiwnoV toutou , (2 Corinthians 4:4). Till this dispensation ends, therefore, and the sway of its god is broken, there can be no millennium of universal righteousness in which Christ shall reign with His saints upon the earth. Multitudes will be taken out of this age to form the Ecclesia, the called out, the Bride of Christ, to be presented to Him at His coming; but the Church will never so transform the dispensation as to turn it into a blissful millennium. The clock of the ages runs true to the eternal order, and however impatient the Church may be for the consummation of all things, she cannot move forward the hands of that clock a single hour to bring in the Sabbatic rest before the fulness of time be come. But this was really what was attempted by the Church after her elevation to an earthly throne under Constantine. She grasped for her glory in the time appointed for her humil­iation, and vainly thought to reign in the earth while her King is still absent in heaven. With the historical school of interpreters we find in the twelfth chapter of Revelation a graphic portraiture of this critical era. The sun-clothed woman figures the Church in her investiture with rule and authority under Constantine; her travailing and bringing forth the man child who was “to rule all nations with a rod of iron,” ex­hibits her compassing earthly dominion and sov­ereignty, which dominion and sovereignty are, however, caught away from the true Church, whose portion is for the present the wilderness and rejection, and reserved with Jesus Christ on the throne where He is “expecting till His foes be made His footstool,” when the promise shall be fulfilled to Him and to His reigning Bride: “I will give thee nations for thine inheritance, and for thy possession the ends of the earth. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron, like a potter’s vessel shalt thou dash them in pieces.” But in the conflict between paganism and Chris­tianity, in which the former is overthrown, as symbolized by the casting out of the dragon, the deluded Church imagines that her millennial triumph has arrived, and the cry is heard: “Now is come salvation and strength, and the kingdom of our God and the power of His Christ,” (Revelation 12:10). Mr. Pember, though not following this interpretation of the Apocalypse, has most ad­mirably sketched its historical counterpart. He says: “When the Christians were relieved from persecution by the policy of Constantine, and came into honor after having been so long reck­oned as the filth of the world and the offscour­ing of all things, the cry was straightway raised that the kingdom had come. But the result of this vain Lo here! was the introduction of two pernicious doctrines, that the kingdom is possi­ble without the personal presence of the King, and that the Church can become mistress of the world during her widowhood and while Satan is still reigning prince. Further mischief followed, for there being nothing to support such views in the New Testament, those who entertained them were compelled to have recourse to the Old, and to cite from thence the prophecies of Israel’s fu­ture glory, in order that by a false application of them to the Church they might justify the pros­perity which had accrued to her through her alliance with the pagan world.” 1

Satan, who is the god of this age, is an anti-god, and as such he is the great caricaturist of all holy persons and things that he may the more effectually delude and destroy. And having seen the counter Christ and the counter Church which he created for leading men astray, we shall now consider how through these two he brought in a counter millennium, an astonishing parody of the true Sabbatic era and the real kingdom of God on earth which are promised in connection with Christ’s Second Advent.

Everything which belongs to that blessed age has been, and is still, claimed by the apostate Church as already here. Was not Christ to usher in the millennium by His personal coming? “On thee, most blessed Leo, we have fixed our hopes as the Saviour that was to come,” — “Salvatorem venturum.” 2 So spake an adoring bishop to the pope at the fifth Lateran council. In his sover­eign vicar, Christ has already appeared and is already ruling, says Rome. “In the person of Pius IX., Jesus reigns on earth,” exclaims Car­dinal Manning, “and he must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet!” 3 But was it not appointed to the Church to suffer with Christ during this dispensation, that she might reign with Him in the age to come? “Nay, but now is come salvation and the king­dom of our God,” replies the harlot bride. Hear the Bishop of Medrusium at the fifth Lateran council again: “But weep not, daughter of Zion, for God hath raised up a Saviour for thee; the Lion of the tribe of Judah (alluding to Pope Leo), the root of David hath come, and shall save thee from all thy enemies.” 4 A “little flock” wait­ing for “the Chief Shepherd” to appear; an es­poused bride looking for the Bridegroom’s re­turn, —such we had supposed to be the character of the Church in this present time. But the un­faithful spouse has found her Chief Shepherd and Bridegroom in the pope. Marcellus, in behalf of the Church, speaks thus to Leo X.: “I come to thee as my true Lord and Husband, beseeching thee to look to it that thy bride may be renewed in her beauty; and see to it that the flock com­mitted to thee be nourished with the best and spiritual aliment, the fold united in one which is now divided, and the sickness healed which has afflicted the whole world: for thou art our Shep­herd, our Physician, our Governor, in fine, a sec­ond God on earth.” 5

Christ foretold the condition of his true Church— “the children of the bride-chamber” —during His absence thus: “But the days will come when the Bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.” The Church of this false kingdom, this pseudo-millennium, is thus pictured in the Apocalypse: “For she saith in her heart, I sit as queen and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow,” (Revelation 18:7). How literally was this prediction translated into history when the in­fatuated Eusebius, glorying over the triumphs of Christianity in his day, exclaimed: “Whereas the Church was widowed and desolate, her chil­dren have now to exclaim to her: ‘Make room! Enlarge thy borders! the place is too strait for us.’ The promise is fulfilling in her: In right­eousness shalt thou be established; all thy chil­dren shall be taught of God, and great shall be the peace of thy children.’” Nay, more: so far from fasting, and waiting the time when they should sit down with the Lord at His table in His kingdom, this historian rejoices that after the enthronement of Christianity under Constan­tine, when “the bishops sat down at the emperor’s table, and the rest all around him, it looked like the image of the very kingdom of God.” 6

Though “a name above every name” is given to Immanuel, He still waits for every knee to bow to Him; He still waits for His promised throne, “the throne of His father, David.” He still waits for His royal title, “King of kings and Lord of lords,” which title, as the Scripture shows, belongs only to the day of His glorious coming. But not so with Antichrist. “There is but one name in the world,” he declares, “and that is the pope; he only can use the ornaments of empire; all princes ought to kiss his feet; he alone can nominate and displace bishops, and as­semble and dissolve councils. Nobody can judge him; his mere election constitutes him a saint; he has never erred, and never shall err in time to come; he can depose princes, and; relieve sub­jects from their oaths of fidelity.” 7

What wonder that with such assumptions all the sublime promises of the millennial glory should have been counted as now fulfilled! So it was; and we read of the ambassadors of the Portuguese king bowing down to Pope Leo, and, after addressing him as “Supreme Lord of all,” blasphemously adapting to him the words of prophecy: “Thou shalt rule from sea to sea, and from the river Tiber to the ends of the earth; the kings of Arabia and Saba shall bring gifts to thee; yea, all princes shall worship thee, all na­tions shall serve thee.” At no point has the Messianic glory been more brilliantly mimicked than here. The profusion of offerings which have poured in upon the royal priest of Rome from the kings of the earth is astonishing to recount. No monarch that ever reigned has been the recipient of such sumptuous gifts from the princes of this world. And the spell of fascination which has ever evoked such tributes, although long weakened, seems to be again reviving, as indicated by the published list of royal presents to the pope on his recent ju­bilee. The soft adulation toward Rome, which many Protestant clergymen have learned to culti­vate during the last half century, is now being matched by a renewed subserviency on the part of kings. Bishop Cox, one of the compilers of the Liturgy of the Anglican Church, writing from England to friends on the Continent in 1559, while Elizabeth was reigning, said: “We are thundering forth in our pulpits, and especially before our Queen Elizabeth, that the Roman Pontiff is truly Antichrist.” Such thunder has so far subsided among those employing this lit­urgy that now a great company of priests are laboring to bring about organic union with Rome, and the present successor to Elizabeth on the English throne sends one of the most princely of the anniversary gifts to Leo XIII. Luther, after his eyes, long holden of superstition, were opened to discern the Scriptures, looked at prophecy and then at the papacy and exclaimed: “It is most manifest, and without any doubt true, that the Roman Pontiff, with his whole order and king­dom, is the very Antichrist.” But instead of Luther’s mitre of malediction upon the head of this usurper of Christ’s millennial throne, Germany now sends, as the tribute of King William to the Roman Pontiff, “a jeweled mitre costing four thousand dollars.” So the masquerade goes on before the eyes of men and angels, that the unwary may still longer be deceived, and made to believe that this is He of whom the Psalmist wrote, “The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents; .. . yea, all kings shall fall down before Him; all nations shall serve Him.” Only those can unmask these pretensions who read the Scriptures diligently, and find that He of whom this is written has this honor, which the pope has never known: “For He shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper. He shall spare the poor and the needy and shall save the souls of the needy; He shall redeem their souls from deceit and violence, and precious shall their blood be in His sight,” (Psalms 72:12-14). Not merely the millennial reign but the mil­lennial splendors have been snatched by the faithless bride. Sober dress becomes the widow­hood of the Church; gaudy attire and jeweled fingers convict her of wantoning with earthly lovers; majestic cathedrals, hoarding, boundless wealth and adorned with costly furniture, imply that she has forgotten that here she has no con­tinuing city, but that her citizenship is in heaven, from whence she looks for her Lord. Cardinal Newman, in defending these lavish splendors of the papacy, declares that their presence “as little proves that the Church is Antichrist as that any king’s court is Antichrist,” and then cites the following passages in their justification: “I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and thy foundations with sapphires, and I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of precious stones.” “The glory of Leb­anon shall come unto thee, the fir tree, the pine tree, and the box together, to beautify the place of my sanctuary.” 8 But this is only a piracy of Messianic prophecies, all these texts being descriptive of the age of glory yet to come. To quote them in this connection is simply to justify our charge that the apostasy has ravished the Church millennial to get building materials for the Church militant. It should be soon enough to walk on golden streets when the New Jerusa­lem descends from heaven “as a Bride adorned for her Husband;” but the harlot must needs seize the paving-stones of the Holy City to beau­tify the streets of “that great city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified,” (Revelation 11:8).

Let it not be implied that we should be so shut up to sackcloth and ashes in the dispensation that now is, that we can have no happy glimpses of that which is to follow. Most expressively does the apostle, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, speak of Christians as those who have “tasted the towers of the age to come,” (Hebrews 6:5). Fore­tastes are graciously permitted, but immediate and full appropriation is forbidden. “Be not con­formed to this age, but be ye transfigured by the renewing of your mind,” says the Scripture. The transfiguration was a pre-libation of the age to come; the cup of glory tasted for a moment by our Lord to strengthen Him to drink the cup of His vicarious anguish. But it could be only a taste as yet, not a complete fruition. Yet Simon Peter, whose mistakes are always significant as fore-typical of the permanent errors of his self-styled successors, exclaims, “Let us make three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias, not knowing what he said,” (Matthew 17:4). As though a momentary visitation of the coming glory could now be prolonged into a residence! As though this foretaste of the mil­lennium could be made a permanent repast! In his epistles; however, the same apostle three times speaks of “the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow,” showing how clearly now the succession and characteristics of the ages had been revealed to him by the Spirit. We are still in the dispensation of Christ’s sufferings; and if we have the patience of the waiting bride we shall covet no richly adorned dwellings until the dispensation of glory shall be ushered in and the word of prophecy be fulfilled: “Behold the tabernacle of God is with men,” (Revelation 21:3). Not only did the Church preempt the glories of the age to come, but also its retributions. And in this her presumption exceeded all bounds. “Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?” asks the apostle. Well might the lowly disciple of Christ be startled and staggered at such a suggestion! But it is only an illustration of the reversals which will be effected at the set­ting up of the kingdom of Christ. They whose portion it was to stand before the judgment-seat of kings will now sit in the judgment-seat with the King of kings, “to execute upon them the judgment written: This honor have all his saints,” (Psalms 149:9). But this exercise of judicial honor is limited most rigidly to the age to come. “Ye which have followed me, in the regeneration,” — “in the renovation, paliggenesia, being the res­toration of this world of ours on the appearance of the new æon,” (Lange), — “when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of His glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel,” (Matthew 19:28). It is only in association with the glorified Lord, present in the body to judge men according to the deeds done in the body, that this office can be exercised by the redeemed. Therefore the Scripture is very explicit, and saith: “Judge nothing before the time until the Lord come,” (1 Corinthians 4:5). But see what the Church was left to do so soon as she began to glorify herself and live deli­ciously, and to commit fornication with the kings of the earth. She snatched both the throne and the sceptre of God, and began to deal out con­demnation to His saints. The centuries of Anti­christ’s career have constituted one long judg­ment day, in which justice has been outraged as never before in the history of the ages; one prolonged assize, in which popes, and cardinals, and bishops have sat in the bench with Chief Justice Apollyon, and administered sentence according to the statutes of the Prince of Darkness.

How visibly can the form of this black magis­trate be seen behind this mock tribunal; how almost audibly does the chuckle of his infernal laughter break forth over this monstrous parody of the court of God which he has seduced the apostate Church to set up! With unfathomable ingenuity he has opened, before the time, the lake of fire to which he is doomed, and made a channel for it from the apostate Church; and thus to the astonished “world-rulers of this darkness” he has shown a lurid river of the water of death proceeding out of the throne of the Beast and the Harlot, with millions of Christ’s true saints writhing in its flames on account of the testi­mony which they bore to the faith of Jesus: fantastic cruelties burlesquing the calm justice of God; the throne of iniquity supplanting the throne of grace, and impaneling the princes of this world, who crucified the Lord of Glory, to sit in judgment upon His faithful witnesses! If we knew of no other age than this, we might verily believe that the Father of Lies had outwit­ted the Father of Mercies. It was the contem­plation of just what we are describing that is said to have drawn forth from Voltaire the bitter re­mark: “If this is the best the Almighty Author can do, He deserves to be hissed rather than worshiped.” No, philosopher! and we may add, no, theologian! This is not the best that God can do; this is not Christ’s millennium: it is Satan’s mock millennium. For some inscruta­ble reason, the Lord has permitted a demon­stration to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places of the worst which His arch­enemy can do. Wait a little and the Lord shall descend from heaven to usher in the real millen­nium, the true Sabbatic consummation for which the ages have sighed, and for which the whole creation, until now, is groaning and travailing in pain; then our Immanuel will show us the best He can do.

It is regretted that our Protestant Christianity, in its separation from Rome, never passed en­tirely out of the baleful shadow of this pseudo-millennium. For many to this day confound the Church with the kingdom, and apply the prom­ises of the glory of the age to come to the present triumphs of the gospel. God forbid that in the slightest degree we should undervalue the missionary and evangelical victories which have so signally marked this century; but if we are tempted to predict the speedy conquest of the whole world to Christ through these successes, we need to be admonished to speak according to the Word. The present is the dispensation of election; the declared purpose of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles in this age is, “to take out of them a people for His name,” (Acts 15:14), and it is a premature grasping of the kingdom to apply to this period those glorious predictions of universal righteousness in the age to come, with which Scripture abounds. If it be said that this conception of preaching the gospel “for a witness,” and “to gather out,” is a narrow and disheartening one, we reply that it is in harmony with the universal testimony of Scripture; and we shall be far safer and more successful to work according to God’s schedule of the ages than according to man’s timetable. Indeed, if we would be intelligent laborers for Christ, we must not fail to discriminate rigidly between the sphere of the militant Church and the sphere of the millennial Church. There is an ancient saying of great significance: “Distinguite tempora et concordabunt scripture:” “Distinguish the pe­riods and the Scriptures will harmonize.” Fail­ure at this point has worked vast misconcep­tion. The theories of Christ’s parousia having already occurred, of the resurrection already accomplished, and of judgment already going on in the unseen world, all rest upon that confusion of the dispensations which makes “the world to come” signify the present time or the disem­bodied state. Here, again, is a premature snatch­ing of the coming glory; and to effect it the ages have been telescoped, and their distinguishing events huddled together in one promiscuous jumble. The result is, prophecy without perspec­tive; dispensations without distances intervening; the divine vision of things to come blended with the present scene; and the whole turned into a Chinese picture, with all the objects in the fore­ground.

Cross-bearing, patient endurance, diligent ser­vice, —this is our present calling, while we ever pray our absent Lord “that it may please Thee shortly to accomplish the number of Thine elect and to hasten Thy kingdom.” Meanwhile we are “to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present age,” if by any means we may be “counted worthy to obtain that age and the res­urrection from the dead.”

Endnotes:

1 Antichrist, Babylon, and the Coming Kingdom, p. 145.

2 Harduin, 1651.

3 See closing pages of Vatican Council, by Henry Edward, Archbishop of Westminster, 1871. It is an exaltation of the pope as “the supreme judge and infallible teacher of men,” end­ing with a warning to his enemies that “whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind him to powder.” It is an amazing exhibition of eloquent blasphemy.

4 Harduin, 1687.

5 Harduin, 1687.

6 V. C. iii. 15.

7 Dict. Pope, Greg. VII.

8 Essays, ii. 184.