THE HOPE OF ISRAEL - The Preterist Archive

246 The Hope of Israel: What Is It?
hence it was reckoned that the year 1000 A. D., would
terminate the current age and witness the Lord's Advent
and the final Judgment."
As to this Dr. Stafford comments as follows :
"That there was a Jewish expectation of a millennium
of some kind, and that it has had some
influence upon Christian eschatology, is freely
admitted. But that this Jewish notion is found
in the New Testament is denied. This false idea,
like many other false ideas, has come into Christian
thought from Judaism, but does not belong
there."
In proof of this Dr. Stafford points out that our
Lord Himself was a martyr to His outspoken "nonconformity
to Jewish notions," and to the fact that He
was a complete contradiction to their ideas of the Messiah;
"that Paul's life-long fight was against Jewish
notions"; and that he "saved Christianity from the
ruin which the Jewish party in the first churches would
have brought upon it." And rightly he says
: "The idea
of a civil government on earth for a thousand years is
not found in a single utterance of Jesus, Paul or Peter ;
much less that Christ is going to 'set it up' when He
returns." ,
It is very signficant indeed that, in the various passages
that refer to Christ's second advent, although a
number of things He will do are specified, not a word
is said about the setting up of a civil government on
earth. Indeed, as will be shown later on, some of the
things that are definitely predicted to happen at that
time,
effectually exclude the possibility of the millennium
which many are now expecting.