Q: How does the 1000-year Reign of Christ Jesus fit into the scheme of things?

A: Thanks so much for this interesting question to us here at TruthBook. Your inquiry about this “1000-year reign of Christ” was a new one for me, and sent me to Google! Here is what I found out from Wikipedia:

Millennialism (from millennium, Latin for “thousand years”), or chiliasm in Greek, is a belief held by some Christian denominations that there will be a Golden Age or Paradise on Earth in which “Christ will reign” for 1000 years prior to the final judgment and future eternal state (the “World to Come” of the New Heavens and New Earth). This belief is derived primarily from the Book of Revelation 20:1–6. Millennialism as such is a specific form of Millenarianism.

Among Christians who hold this belief, this is not the “end of the world”, but rather the penultimate age, the age just prior to the end of Satan’s worldwide system in anticipation of a New Heavens and a New Earth under Jehovah’s (i.e., God’s) kingdom reign (Rev. 21:1). Some believe that between the millennium proper and the end of the world there will be a brief period in which a final battle with Satan will take place. After this follows the Last Judgment.

A millennium is a period of one thousand years, and, in particular, Christ’s thousand-year rule on this earth, either directly preceding or immediately following the Second Coming (and the Day of Judgment).

The millennium reverses the previous period of evil and suffering; it rewards the virtuous for their courage while punishing the evil-doers, with a clear separation of saints and sinners. The vision of a thousand-year period of bliss for the faithful, to be enjoyed here on earth (“heaven on earth”), exerted an irresistible power. Although the picture of life in the millennial era is almost willfully obscure and hardly more appealing than that of, say, the Golden Age, what has made the millennium much more powerful than the Golden Age or Paradise myths are the activities of the sects and movements that it has inspired. Throughout the ages, hundreds of sects were convinced that the millennium was imminent, about to begin in the very near future, with precise dates given on many occasions.

According to this explanation, there will come a time when the forces of darkness will finally be defeated, followed by a “Golden Age” of peace; following that, the “Last Judgment” will take place. And this also all appears connected to Jesus’ sometime return to our planet.

One thing we know for for sure is that Satan will not be a part of any future age. Jesus, when he walked the earth, effectively defeated Satan and Lucifer that August day on Mt Hermon. The remnants of the Lucifer rebellion are still evident in our world, but Satan has been shorn of real power.

This is just one thing when thinking about where it might “fit into the scheme of things” in light of what we are taught through the revelation of The Urantia Book.

After a little more research, it now seems to me that the 1000-year reign of Christ may be an echo of some long-ago information about the Trinity Teacher Sons that filtered through civilization from some or all of the epochal revelations that have been visited on mankind.

Coincidentally, the 1000 year period is exactly the amount of time that the Teacher Sons spend on a planet:

20:9.3The Teacher Sons usually remain on their visitation planets for one thousand years of planetary time. One Teacher Son presides over the planetary millennial reign and is assisted by seventy associates of his order.

Of course, we have not yet gotten our Teacher Son, but his coming may be connected in some way to Jesus’ second coming (a part of Millennialism):

52:7.1The Sons of the next order to arrive on the average evolutionary world are the Trinity Teacher Sons, the divine Sons of the Paradise Trinity. Again we find Urantia out of step with its sister spheres in that your Jesus has promised to return. That promise he will certainly fulfill, but no one knows whether his second coming will precede or follow the appearances of Magisterial or Teacher Sons on Urantia.

If you read about the Post-Teacher Son Era, it seems to me as if it looks pretty much like this peaceful 1000-year reign of Christ that is spoken of in the Wikipedia article. The “New Heavens and New Earth” in the above article even sound like the ages of Light and Life. I suggest you have a look, for your own info; see if you might agree that these two events may have gotten garbled in translation over the milennia.

It is easy to see why people over the ages have tried to discern God’s movements and revelations regarding our planet. Since we were cut off from the celestial circuits, we were literally left in the dark after the Lucifer rebellion. But even though many thousands of years have elapsed since God first attempted to fellowship and uplift us, the amazing events of the epochal revelations have seeped into the consciousness of humanity, although in very distorted form. After all, they all occurred before the invention of the printing press, and so all information was passed down in oral form and artistic expression from generation to generation. In the retelling, details were lost, as you might imagine…but it could be that this reign of the Teacher Sons was revealed and promised to humanity in our long-ago past, just as it has been again revealed to us in The Urantia Book. And it has survived throughout the ages to become the 1000-year reign of Christ. And it is yet to be…

This belief arose during the first few centuries of Christianity, and it is easy to see how this tradition might have been influenced by Jesus.

Of course, this is my own take on it. I don’t know it is true, but it makes sense to me that the knowledge that came to humanity during the first four epochal revelations was so stupendous that it a lot of it has never been totally forgotten—just distorted over time.

Thanks to The Urantia Book, we can finally fill in all the gaps in our collective knowledge and effectively correct and round out our understanding of our planetary history and our relationship with God.

It also occurs to me (again, my own opinion) that we may be at the beginning of a particular 1000-year age of our own, concurrent with the appearance of The Urantia Book, as it appears designed to inform our spiritual, intellectual and cilivilizational evolution for the next millennium; we get a hint in this passage about the revelation of grand universe personalities; I found it in my research:

30:0.2It is not possible to formulate comprehensive and entirely consistent classifications of the personalities of the grand universe because all of the groups are not revealed. It would require numerous additional papers to cover the further revelation required to systematically classify all groups. Such conceptual expansion would hardly be desirable as it would deprive the thinking mortals of the next thousand years of that stimulus to creative speculation which these partially revealed concepts supply. It is best that man not have an overrevelation; it stifles imagination.

Thanks so much for your very interesting question. I hope you find this reply helpful. I had a good time thinking about it and researching it.