33-CHAPTER XXVII THE SILENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT WITH REGARD TO A COMING VISIBLE KINGDOM OF GOD

It is also not to be expected in advance that the New Testament shall give a repeated and detailed setting forth of this doctrine. For the chief theme of the New Testament is the church, not Israel and the nations. Therefore it is quite intelligible that in it the message as to the Millennial kingdom is in the background, and that Christ and the Apostles refer to it only occasionally without setting it forth in detail.

Nevertheless these few references in the New Testament are quite enough to confirm the expectation of the kingdom of the Old Testament prophets. Thus the Lord Himself said:"ye who have followed Me, in the regeneration 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). And when, after His resurrection, the disciples asked, "Lord, dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israeli" (Gr. basileia, kingly rule), He did not rebuke them for "fleshly con­ceptions," or give a general denial of such a visible kingdom of God as they had in mind, but said only, "It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has reserved in His own authority" (Acts 1:6-7). But precisely this prophetic expression "times or seasons" proves that the kingdom of God will be dulyand actually set up. (See more fully TheTriumphoftheCrucified, p. 144 ff.).

Moreover, it was entirely unnecessary that the New Testament should give detail instruction upon this subject. For the existing Old Testament pictures were so many and detailed that it was quite needless that the New Testament should repeat them often.

Nor is it to be overlooked that, although this passage in the Revelation is the only detail passage in the New Testament dealing expressly with the subject, yet such heavy emphasis is placed upon this message as to the Millennial kingdom that the number "one thousand" is given no less than six times (Revelation 20:2-7). Thus it is most powerfully intimated that here is something of great importance, worthy indeed of the highest consideration.

Finally we remark—mentioning this of course only by the way—that the Revelation of John was by no means the first or only book of that period in which an intermediate kingdom of the end time, to last for a thousand years, is mentioned. Al­though it is no Biblical book, and therefore no inspired text, which we now have in mind, it is yet of interest that the doctrine of an intermediate Messianic kingdom was announced in con­temporary Judaism and that its duration was to be exactly one thousand years. The Jewish synagogue as early as the first century distinguished between the days of Messiah and the final perfecting in " Olamha-ba," that is, in the world to come. The former were regarded as being limited in duration, the latter as being eternal. Over the duration of that Messianic pre-perfecting the opinions of the Jewish theologians were from the first divided. Rabbi Eliezer of Hyrcanus about a.d. 90) is the oldest rabbinical authority to maintain that the rule of Messiah will last for one thousand years. Eliezer was one of the most tenacious defenders of ancient tradition, so that he said of himself, "I have never made a statement that I have not taken out of the mouth of my teacher." Thus it is evident that the duration of the interim Messianic period had been taught before Eliezer in the Jewish synagogues and so among the Jewish contemporaries of a Paul or a Peter. Therefore it cannot be justly asserted, as it often has been, that the doctrine of a Millennial kingdom is nowhere found apart from the celebrated passage in Revelation 20:1-15.