By Nathan Bierma
December 30, 1999 

In a way it's too bad the twentieth century fell at the end of a millennium. The way it went, the century warrants more isolated attention, rather than yielding to the four-digit distraction of a whole millennium. 

The twentieth century sure got a lot of bang for its buck.  What it lacked in time (while the nineteenth century as an era began with the American and French Revolutions and lasted till World War I, the twentieth picked up there and left off after the fall of the Soviet Union to make but a 75-year century) it made up for with exponential leaps and bounds in industrialization, communications, and egalitarianism. 

In those three categories, as well as in population growth, wealth, technology, and culture, measurements in the form of a line graph slowly slant upward for most of this millennium before shooting skyward right around this century.  With the combined weight of all these relatively sudden developments, it seems we could discuss all of human history up until the Great War, and spend equal time meaningfully discussing the twentieth century alone. 

The furnace-blast of change in this century leaves us dizzy when we try to extrapolate to the next one. It seems hazardous to usefully predict anything far past the next decade or two.

This is why we Christians are gripped by the question that has hovered over believers the whole of the Church Age: When will Jesus return? How long will be too long before the curtain falls on this sad world? Does not this concert of historical climaxes point to an unmistakable denouement?

The answer, of course, is not necessarily.  You could supply several printings of a Sunday newspaper with prognosticators' rough drafts over history of when the world will end.  And even though these climaxes -- most significant of all, perhaps, being the recent development of atomic, biological, and chemical weapons -- seem to indicate an apocalyptic age, almost every generation since Jesus's ascension has surmised the same thing. Even now, with the seemingly can't-miss monumental date of 2000 looming, the sobering reality is that it's actually been about 2,005 years since Jesus' first coming.

Add to that the subtle note that Jesus first came quietly, tiptoeing to this earth, taking most by complete surprise. He showed up in the arms of a poor teenage virgin in a forgotten corner of the Roman Empire.  And while the Bible says that the sequel will have a global audience, and that glory, not suffering, will mark the second coming, nonetheless it asserts Jesus will come like a thief in the night, when we least expect it.  Thus it would be somehow appropriate if he came, say, in November 1999, during the planning of several New Year's Eve celebrations. Or, perhaps more appropriately, on a non-descript Tuesday in March of, say, 2037.

But it could just as likely be 3037, or farther away still.

And so we press on no less dilligently to spread the gospel in the next millennium.  Jesus said the end will come when the gospel reaches all peoples. Not knowing exactly how to satisfy that requirement, we undertake the difficult task of working as though it were equally likely (which it is) that Christ will come back tomorrow and that he will let a few more millennia play out.  

It's daunting, but it's also a note of calm comfort amid the Y2K frenzy seizing too many people this New Year's Eve.  As dramatic as the year 2000 is, the world isn't in control of the calendar. It's in God's.

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