Is a Millennium of Peace Just a Dream?

“The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would endure for a thousand years, and in Nazi parlance it was often referred to as the ‘Thousand-Year Reich.’”​—The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by W. Shirer.

YOU know what happened. Hitler’s thousand-year (or, millennial) dream never became a reality. But do you know that many people have looked forward to a real millennial reign of peace? Dr. W. Lee of the University of Dublin observed: “Worldly as well as religious speculation has its Millennial dream.”

Often that “dream” has included belief in a past Golden Age that will be restored in the future. For example, if you visit Iran you could hear of an ancient “Golden Age of innocence, without disease or death.” Bushmen in southern Africa speak of a past time when humans and animals lived at peace with one another. Reporting on these beliefs, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics says that the idea of a “Golden Age in the past, lost through man’s fault,” often was tied in with “hope that things will be better in the future,” such as in a future millennium of peace.

But are such hopes just wishful thinking? Reflect on what assails you daily​—reports of crime, inflation, pollution, social unrest and war. Few persons would see in these things any basis for believing in a coming era of peace and prosperity. A September 1976 report on the International Institute for Strategic Studies meeting in Baden, Austria, stated: “The people who spend their time studying the hard facts that lead to war no longer [have] even theoretical solutions for achieving what was once promised as a generation of peace.”

However, you can read something in the Bible that gives serious reason to think that a millennium of peace is not to be dismissed as just a dream. More than that, it offers promise of things that, if realized, would make our lives vastly richer and more pleasant. Near the end of the Bible you will find this:

“And [an angel] seized the dragon, the original serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years . . . that he might not mislead the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended. . . . And [God] will wipe out every tear from [mankind’s] eyes, and death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore. The former things have passed away.”​—Rev. 20:1-3; 21:4.

Delightful as such a description sounds, why do we have more reason to expect it to come true than any of the other millennial hopes that men have entertained, including the Nazi Thousand-Year Reich? There is one impelling reason. This millennium of peace is promised by Jehovah God. Once, when a man told Jesus that a certain matter seemed impossible, God’s Son replied: “The things impossible with men are possible with God.”​—Luke 18:27.

But does the Bible really say that God will in the future bring a literal thousand years of peace to the earth? Is that how we should understand what the Scriptures say? Out of interest in the possibility of grand blessings for ourselves and our family, we should find out whether such a millennium of peace is more than just a dream.