What the Bible Really Says About the Millennial Kingdom

Hello and welcome to Through the Bible with Les Feldick. An Oklahoma rancher and farmer, Les Feldick has been teaching homestyle Bible classes for 20 years in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas. Les Feldick's unique style of Bible teaching has made the books of the Bible come to life. When Les is teaching, it's so interesting that people say time just seems to fly by. And now, here is Les Feldick. Okay, good. All set to go, we're glad to have everybody back again this afternoon for another session of taping. And again, we like to invite our television audience to do as we do here, just find your Bible and some notes and study with us, because after all, that's all this is, just an informal Bible study. I'm not going to stand here and preach at anybody, but I'm amazed at the comments we get in our letters and phone calls, that the little things that I say that I didn't think anybody would catch, those are the things that people are really hearing. So anyway, we trust that the Lord is blessing what we're trying to do, and hopefully we can get you into the Bible. For sake of announcement, remember that all the past programs, for those of you who have just tuned in recently, are all available on videotape. We have a very reasonable cost on them. And the girls are busy they can be trying to get these into print. So far we still have only the first 36 programs in print, and hopefully within not too long a time we'll have the next one, and others are already working on them. So ere long we'll have all the programs not only available in video, but also in the printed book. All right, let's get right back to where we've been talking the last several months, really, out of the book of Revelation and the prophecy concerning the end time. And the last program or two, we've been talking about the Kingdom in particular, that last thousand years of human history on the planet, pretty much as we know it, except of course the curse will be lifted, and everything will revert back as it was in the Garden of Eden. It's going to be a time of true glory, a perfect government with Christ the King, no sin, because Satan is locked up, and it'll be the utopia that all of human history has been looking forward to. Now in our last lesson, I'm quite sure, we closed with the surviving people of the Tribulation period who will go into the Kingdom. Now that's always been a big question among a lot of my class people, is who is going to be in the Kingdom? And remember, no unbelievers will go into the Kingdom, it'll only be believers. And first of course, we had that remnant of Jews that we pictured as fleeing the area of Jerusalem at the midpoint, and they went down into the mountains to the southeast. And then in our last program, I think it was, we talked about the few survivors in Isaiah chapter 24 that are going to actually survive the horrible events of that seven years. And out of those survivors, of course, there's going to be a percentage that will have heard the Gospel from the 144,000, become believers, and so they will be ready for the Kingdom. The survivors who rejected the Gospel from the 144,000 will be, of course, removed from the scene. Now Jesus depicted all that from His own lips in Matthew 25, when He separated the sheep from the goats. Now those were all Gentiles, there are no Jews involved in that judgment of Matthew 25. So there we have, again, the two classes of people that will be going into the Kingdom. That remnant of Israel, which of course will be the largest single segment nationally speaking, and that's why Israel will be the greatest nation in the Kingdom Age. And then out of all those surviving Gentiles, there will be a small number from each one of the Gentile nations, and I feel, I can't prove this from Scripture, but I feel that each one of those Gentiles will go back to their homeland, and again be the seed stock, as believers of course, for that new generation of people that will come on the scene during that thousand year reign of Christ. Now you want to remember, Satan is locked up, there is no sin, and Christ will be the absolute ruler, a benevolent dictatorship, if you want to call it that. And it's going to be a glorious time, but since there is no sin, no sickness, and no death to speak of, it's a possibility of course, you're going to have a population explosion like I don't think the world has ever known. I think it will even rival the population explosion between Adam and the flood. And remember, they lived 900 years, and the Bible never tells us exactly how many children some of those women had, but we know they had quite a few. And I usually shock the women in my class when I tell them that during the Kingdom, since the curse is lifted, and all the pain and travail associated with childbirth today as we know it, was brought in by the curse. So if the curse is lifted, that means that childbearing will no longer be the painful experience that it is now, and I have to think that under those circumstances, women will have a lot of children, because they're going to be living for the whole thousand years with no sin, no curse, and so I think the potential is tremendous for a population explosion like we can't believe. Now with regard to other aspects of the Kingdom, I've had so many people over the years who love animals, and especially their pets, a dog or a cat, whatever the case may be, and they will ask me point blank, you know, and this is what I appreciate with people, they don't have to feel embarrassed to ask me something that a lot of people would think is a dumb question, because I always tell people, no one has ever asked me yet a stupid question. I consider every question that people ask a good one. Well anyway, so many have asked, well, will I see my dog or my cat in Heaven? And they want me to say, yes. But I have to say, well, not the one that you had here, but there are going to be animals in the Kingdom, and I'm sure that among those animals, people are going to have pets. Now I'm, for one, I'm also, I'm a dog lover. I just love dogs, have ever since I was a kid, and I had one special little dog for 15 years, and I mean, I got attached to her. Now I know I'm not going to see that little black dog in the Kingdom economy, but there are going to be animals. Now that's why I've had you turn here in the studio to Isaiah chapter 11, because you see, we have to show everything from the Scripture. When I have an idea, I usually express it as that. I can't prove it from Scripture, it's just my own idea, but when we can show it from Scripture, then I trust that people will look at it, read it, and believe it. Because after all, this is the inspired Word of God, and I take it literally, and I'll be explaining a little more of that, either later in this program or in the next one, how that, when you take the Scriptures literally, you satisfy a lot of questions. And why not take it literally? Over the years I've asked people, when you read the account of Washington crossing the Delaware on that cruel winter day back there during the early days of our nation, do you spiritualize that and try to dream up something totally different? Of course not. You read the account of Washington crossing the Delaware with his poor old barefooted and whatever boats they could muster, you take it literally. And you take it so literally that you can almost feel the cold and the pain that they went through. Now you've got to do the same thing with Scripture. You don't just read it and then try to dream up something that it must have meant. You say, well, this is what it says, and this is what I believe. All right, now look here in Isaiah chapter 11, and let's begin with verse 1. And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem, or the family tree, of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. Now remember that the word branch is capitalized, and if you happen to have a good reference Bible or if you want to use a good concordance, you pick up that word branch, and you'll notice that throughout the Old Testament it will be capitalized, which means it's in reference to the Messiah, the Christ. And so the word branch here is in reference to the Lord Jesus in His Old Testament situation because He is referred to, of course, as the son of David. And David, of course, came out of the line of Jesse. Then verse 2, speaking of this branch, which is Christ, the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, and the fear of the Lord. And then as we mentioned in a previous program, and here again is an instance where I was so surprised that several picked it up, and I didn't think anybody would, I just made a casual statement that here we have a reminder of the Beatitudes just from the language. Now watch it. With righteousness He shall judge or rule, what kind of people? The poor. Now what do the Beatitudes say? Blessed are the poor. All right, you come on down to the next statement, and He will reprove with equity for the meek of the earth. Another reference to the Beatitudes. So in reality then, the Beatitudes, as Jesus spoke them there in Matthew, are the Constitution of the Kingdom. The Beatitudes will come into full bloom when He sets up this Kingdom. All right, then you come on down to verse 5. Righteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, and faithfulness the girdle of His reins. These are all qualities now of Christ's absolute and perfect rule as He reigns over this thousand year Kingdom. And then we come down to verse 6. Now I think this is interesting. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the little baby goat, the calf and a young lion, and the fatling together. Now can you picture all that? Now just take it literally. Here you have the animal kingdom as we know it today who would be in total opposition. That lion would eat that little lamb in a second, but here they're lying down together. You see the difference? And a little child shall lead them. Now I'm always trying to get people to read their Bibles carefully and don't just read to be reading it. Now land to live in. Here we have wild animals all of a sudden cohabiting with domestic animals, and then unbelievable as it may seem, who is in the midst of them? A child. Well now immediately you should ask yourself a question. Well where does this kid come from? Where does this child, I better use the word child. So you won't get it mixed up with that baby goat. But where does this child come from? There's a child. Well, like children of the day, came from parents, a father and a mother. All right, let's read on. The cow and the bear shall feed, that is together in the same locale. Their young ones shall lie down, what's the next word, together. See, not in separate areas eyeing one another, but they're going to lie down together. And now here is the secret of the whole thing. The lion, in other words, these animals of prey that are carnivorous, that are meat eaters today, what's it going to eat? Provender, in another word in our language would be forage or grasses, herbs and what have you. So the lion shall eat provender like an ox or like the cattle. Now, you've got to compare Scripture with Scripture. We may have done this before, but I don't think we've done it on television. I don't remember that we did. Come all the way back to Genesis chapter 1. And that's why I say that the kingdom will be a reversion back to the economy before Adam sinned, before the curse came in. So you come all the way back to Genesis chapter 1 and make the comparison now. Isaiah says the day is coming when these wild, carnivorous, meat eating animals are going to eat the same diet that cattle do today. They'll eat grass and so on and so forth. All right, now if you come back to Genesis chapter 1, where in verse 28, I think is maybe where we can start. Verse 28, God is now speaking to Adam and he says, be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air and over everything that liveth and moveth upon the earth. Verse 29, And God said, Behold, I have given you, that is to Adam and Eve and the human race, I have given to you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, every tree in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed, to you it shall be for food. Now in the King James it's meat, but the word should be food. Now verse 30, And to every beast of the earth, that includes the lions and the tigers and everything else, to every beast of the earth and to every fowl of the air and to everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food, and it was so. Now isn't that plain? Now you will not see that God gives permission, I don't think even to the animal kingdom, to kill and eat of other species until long after the curse. In fact, I'm going to put it as far as probably after the flood when Noah was also instructed that now he could kill and eat the meat of these animals. But definitely before Adam sinned, none of the animal kingdom ate anything except the stuff that grew naturally. And so that's what we have here in Isaiah chapter 11. You can flip back to it again if you will. And so the whole animal kingdom, including the most ferocious, carnivorous, meat-eating species, are going to cohabit the same pasture with the lamb and the goat and human children. Now read on in chapter 11, verse 8, Isaiah 11, verse 8. And the nursing child shall play on the hole of the asp, which of course was a very poisonous serpent in the Middle East in particular, and the weaned child shall put his hand on a cockatrice. Now here we've had three children mentioned in just two verses, three times. So it wasn't just a slip of the pen. It wasn't some wild idea that somebody had, but the inspired Word of God tells us that when this kingdom is set up, all the ravages of the curse will be gone, and it's going to revert to the beauty and the glory and the tranquility that you had before sin entered. And these little children now then give us proof that there are going to be human beings coming in at the front end of the kingdom who are going to reproduce. They're going to have families, have to, because we know that by the time we get to the end of the thousand years, there are multitudes and multitudes of people on the scene. Well, where'd they come from? Well, they came from believing parents who started at the beginning of the kingdom. And that's why in our last program I delineated that maybe I can go back to the board again and put some of these things up that we've had before, coming out of the Old Testament of course, and we came to the time of the cross, and now we're in that undetermined period of the church age, and it's going to end when the church is called out. And then began that seven years of what we've been calling the tribulation, and then after Christ returns at the end of the tribulation, we come into these thousand years of what we call the kingdom, honor, in which these things are going to take place that we're reading about. And so all through this period of human history, everything has been under the curse, and we have no question about wild animals and their behavior, and children could certainly never play with them, but as soon as we come out of the tribulation and this escaping remnant of Jews, remember, who will leave the area of Jerusalem at the midpoint of the tribulation, and I called them the escaping remnant, that was in Matthew 24, beginning at verse 15, and that was a mixed group, you remember? It was workers in the field, it was young mothers, it was pregnant ladies who were about to be delivered, so it was a mixed group of Jews who come down here to the mountain. Alright, then in our last program, just last week, we saw that during the tribulation most people of course will lose their lives, but when they come to the end, there would be a few left. We even put some figures on the board, if I remember right, and we said, well now what if the world's population is something like 5 million or so, and 2 or 3 percent survive? You remember all that? Well alright, of that percentage of survivors, we took you to Matthew 25, the sheep and the goats. Alright, to the sheep, who were the believers then of this few, they come into the Kingdom, and they will become the parents then of these children that we're now seeing in Isaiah chapter 11. And as I said, there will be no death, no sickness, no curse, no Satan, and Christ is going to be in total control, a perfectly perfect rule and government, and so there will be a tremendous population explosion. Alright, then verse 9 of Isaiah 11, goes on to say then, that they will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain. Remember I've told you before, a mountain in the Old Testament especially is a Kingdom, and so there will be no hurting or no destroying, there will be no death to speak of in His Kingdom. And then here's the reason, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the water covers the sea. Alright, now let's just skip through the Old Testament a little bit, and let's go to Amos chapter 9. I'm just hitting a few of the highlights, there are of course many, many more references to this earthly Kingdom. In our next program I'm going to explain the opposition to this line of teaching, which we call Amillennialism, how it came about, and hopefully show you that we're not just throwing you a bunch of smoke, but that we can rest assuredly that even in the very early days of Christianity, they all held to this premise. And I'll give you names and so forth in our next program, because even in my mail and some of the people in my classes are being handed books that are totally in opposition to what I've been teaching concerning the Kingdom and the Book of Revelation and so forth. But we'll do that in the next program, this one is too far along. Now in Amos chapter 9, we drop down to verse 13. In fact we can go up to verse 11, "...in that day," in other words, the day when Christ is setting up His Kingdom, "...in that day I will raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, close up the breaches thereof, and I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old, that they," the nation of Israel, "...may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen," the Gentiles, "...that are out there around them, which are called by my name, saith the LORD that doeth this. Behold, the days come," now here it is, "...behold, the days come," in other words, when this Kingdom is finally set up, "...saith the LORD," now this wasn't a figment of Amos' imagination, he was again inspired to write that the plowman shall overtake the reaper. Now what does that mean? It's going to be intensive reproduction. Now there will be no curse. They won't have to fight the weeds and the insects and the fungus and the molds and all the other things that hinder good crop production today, but it's just going to be an easy life of tremendous food production. And one crop will just be harvested, and they'll plant the next one. Now we see a little of that, of course, out here in our western wheat country. They call it double cropping, where they'll follow a wheat crop right after it's taken off in June, maybe with soybeans, and they'll harvest them before it's time to sow the next wheat crop. But here in the Kingdom, this will be universal, a just constant following of planting and harvesting and planting and harvesting, but without all the sweat and the toil that we have today. So the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth the seed, and the mountain shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And then God goes on to say that along with that, of course, in His dealing with the people of Israel, as we have here in the Old Testament, I will bring again the captivity of My people Israel, and they shall build away cities, and so on and so forth. Now in just a little bit of time that we have left, come quickly to Zechariah. Remember that's the next to the last book in your Old Testament. We refer to it quite often when we talk about these last days. But in Zechariah chapter 14, now I wish I had another 30 minutes yet in this program, but we don't. We're just about out of time. But in Zechariah 14, drop in at verse 8. Zechariah 14, verse 8, where it says, "...and it shall be in that day," and again we're talking about when the Kingdom will be set up, "...and in that day living water shall go out from Jerusalem, half toward the former sea," which is toward the Mediterranean to the west, "...and half toward the hinder sea," or the dead sea, "...in summer and winter shall it be." All right, now in order to pick up the thought of all this, you have to come back to Ezekiel and do that as quickly as you can. Just come back to the left to Ezekiel and turn to chapter 47. Ezekiel chapter 47. Now Ezekiel sees this same river, beginning here right in verse 1, but we're not going to take the time to read all the descriptions of this river and how it comes about, but it's going to have its source under the temple there in Jerusalem. And then come into verse 8 of Ezekiel 47, "...then said he unto me, These waters issue out toward the east country, and go down into the desert, and into the sea," that is the dead sea, "...which, when these waters are brought forth into the dead sea, the waters of the dead sea shall be," what? "...healed. And it shall come to pass, that everything that liveth, which moveth with it soever the river shall come, shall live, and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither," that is again from the temple area, "...and they," that is the water of the dead sea, "...shall be healed, and every living thing shall live wherever the river cometh." And now look at verse 10, "...and it shall come to pass, that the fishers shall stand upon it," now this is the dead sea, and we know that from the term, "...and Gedi unto Enaglaim," and when we were in Israel, we were there, and some of them went swimming in the dead sea, and this is all at the oasis you remember of En Gedi, "...and so the fishers will stand upon the shore of the dead sea, and there shall be a place to spread forth their nets. Their fish shall be according to their kinds, as the fish of the great sea," that is the Mediterranean, "...very many." So you see all the things that are going to happen in bringing about this tremendous, glorious Kingdom. Now I don't imagine I have time for you to look it up, but I'm going to look for it real quickly, I've already found it. In Matthew 19, oh you taken notes. And here again, here is the promise of this coming Kingdom, "...when Peter said to the Lord, Behold, we have left all to forsake you." What are we going to have there for? And in the next verse, that's verse 28 of 19, "...Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, those of you who have followed Me in the regeneration of the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of His glory. You also shall sit upon the twelve thrones, judging," or ruling, "...the twelve tribes of Israel." That's Route 1, Box 760, Kinta, Oklahoma, 74552. Through the Bible with Les Feldick is viewer supported, and your gift is appreciated. Thank you, and be sure to tune in next time, for Through the Bible with Les Feldick.