Broad meadows

The Millennial Reign will be a time of great renewal for a world ravaged by its own evil and the punishment commensurate with that evil. At the beginning of the reign of Christ here on earth, mankind will be much smaller in population. However, with the abolition of the culture of death rampant in this age, mankind begins to recover and thrive. The tyranny and lies of the previous age will no longer be in place. The debate over which worldview is correct will be over. And as it says in Isaiah 9, “the government will be upon his shoulders.”

But despite the machinations of mankind, in my lifetime the reported population has nearly tripled, going from about three billion people worldwide to over eight billion. So when those artificial constraints on life expectancy are removed, what might the population of the earth reach? The living near the end of the millennium would laugh at how ridiculous we are in this age thinking that there are too many people on the planet and worse, something needed to be done about it.

The people who think that way now almost invariably live in densely populated areas. But as someone who has driven a great deal over the course of a lifetime that it only takes a short drive from those places to see wide open spaces of trees, meadows and farmland. None of that takes into account large landmasses like the North Pole or Antarctica or incredibly lightly populated Canada or Greenland as available space. The people at the end of the millennium would laugh, had the consequences not been so grave, at such an assertion, given how closely they will be living together then.

Despite the peace and prosperity offered during his earthly reign, the people complain as it is said in Isaiah 49:20, “The children born during your bereavement will yet say in your hearing,
‘This place is too small for us; give us more space to live in.’” This gives rise to what is written in Revelation 20:7-8, “When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth —Gog and Magog —and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore.”