The Kingdom Age of Christ is predicted to be a 1000-year time of peace when Jesus himself will rule over all the nations in perfect righteousness. This new age starts immediately after Return of Christ, as he removes all evil out of this world, including those in the Last Days who were literally destroying the world in a fiery nuclear war. The Kingdom Age will be a completely transformed world much like the Garden of Eden, wherein even animals will be peaceful and the conditions of the Earth will be made to be supportive of all life rather than harsh and life threatening. This section will investigate the Biblical predictions related to the Kingdom Age and how the Reign of Christ will be unlike anything the world has ever experienced before.
The Cleanup
With the Return of Christ, the dark time of war and death in the End Times is finally over and the everlasting peace and life of the Kingdom Age is beginning. The confusion and horror of the Great Tribulation has ended in the complete destruction of the Antichrist’s empire. All the armies of the world have been destroyed at the Battle of Armageddon, and from this point on the nations no longer will have wars or have any need for militaries of any kind. The entire history of the evil reign of man on earth is now finished forever. The Second Coming has brought the world to a time of unparalleled rejoicing as everyone breathes a sigh of relief while the Lord prepares to usher in the splendor and tranquility of a thousand years of bliss during the Kingdom Age of Christ’s rule. As we will soon see, the entire world is destined to become like the Garden of Eden, and everyone who enters the Kingdom will be extraordinarily blessed by God.
But not so fast. Unfortunately, the very world that the Lord has returned to save has also just been decimated by the ravages of evil run amok, including the devastation of World War III and the Battle of Armageddon along with the aftereffects of a global nuclear exchange. The Bible may have prophesied of an age where the earth will look like the Garden of Eden again, but the immediate conditions that Christ and his people will encounter will be much different. From burned-out cities and charred forests to the dead bodies of animals and humans that will cover the Earth and the seas, the clean-up job that will have to be done will be enormous.
So will the Lord just use His supernatural powers to instantly transform the world back to perfection? Yes and no. While God will certainly cause the growth of new vegetation to make the countryside green again—probably to an extent never before seen on the earth—he will also rely to a large degree on his followers to do most of the initial cleanup work. Just as the Bible describes in great detail the events that will happen in the last days before Jesus Returns, so too does it provide a detailed picture of the first few years of kingdom Age activities. As we will soon see, most of the events predicted to occur in this period are very logical and necessary, especially considering what the world just experienced at the End of the Age.
As was discussed in the sections on World War III, the prophet Ezekiel saw the attack of Russia and the major battles of the Last Days. He also went on after those prophecies to describe what would happen in the time period immediately after the Lord returns. Much of Ezekiel’s Kingdom Age prophecies deal with the massive cleanup which will directly result from the Battle of Armageddon. This is what Ezekiel says that the Lord’s people will do in those initial days of the Kingdom:
“And they that dwell in the cities of Israel shall go forth, and shall set on fire and burn the weapons, both the shields and the bucklers, the bows and the arrows, and the handspikes, and the spears, and they shall burn them with fire seven years,
“So that they shall take no wood out of the field, neither cut down any out of the field, neither cut down any out of the forests; for they shall burn the weapons with fire; and they shall spoil those that spoiled them, and rob those that robbed them, saith the Lord God.”
Ezekiel 39:9-10
The Jezreel Valley is where the Battle of Armageddon will be fought and also where hundreds of millions of soldiers will fall at the Return of Christ.
Can you imagine the wasteland of weapons that will be left over from the final years of all-out war during the End Times? Innumerable weaponry of every type will litter the countryside as decaying relics of an age of indescribable evil. In the final frenzy of battle, hundreds of millions of warriors will besiege the nation of Israel to fight in the Valley of Jezreel and ultimately fall by the power of the Lord. All of their weapons will be left where they fell to cover the land. But these former instruments of destruction will not be totally useless to the new nations of the Kingdom Age—except useless with respect to their military potential. The fact is, mankind will nevermore find a purpose for weapons of war or even for military defense. When the Lord returns, he will change the Earth into a planet of such absolute peace with no fighting among the nations or violence of any kind that there will be no need for armed forces or weapons ever again.
For this reason, the weapons left scattered across the Middle East will not be salvaged for future battle; but neither will they be thrown away like garbage and buried. Ezekiel predicts that the people of the kingdom will find a much more practical use for them. He says that for seven long years the weapons will be gathered, and the people will actually burn them for fuel and energy. In this way, Ezekiel says that the rejuvenation of the forests in and around Israel will not be impeded by the people’s need for firewood.
With hundreds of millions of people battling in Israel during the final days of the End Times, there will be hundreds of millions of weapons left over. We can easily see how this part of the clean-up could easily take seven years, just as Ezekiel has prophesied.
Ezekiel’s prophecy, however, does seem to present a problem. For one thing, he uses in this description examples of weapons which were only common in his day, not ours. This fact alone would not be so much of a problem seeing that a man living in the sixth century B.C. could never be expected to accurately describe the weapons of today, but how could the prophecy of the burning of modern weapons possibly come true? On the surface, it’s difficult to imagine the burning of rifles, tanks, artillery, and aircraft, because many weapons consist mainly of metal, an obviously nonflammable material.
One possible answer to this dilemma might be found in the large numbers of combatants that will engage in the final battles. Since many of the Third World nations simply don’t have the capability to provide every man with a modern rifle, let alone any of the more advanced weapons, many of them may indeed have to resort to carrying some form of primitive arms. With literally hundreds of millions of soldiers marching toward Israel this may not be as farfetched as it first sounds.
Even today there are still cases where armies have attempted to attack opposing forces using sticks, clubs, spears, and any other weapons they could get their hands on. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, for instance, Iran sent huge waves of soldiers against Iraqi fortifications while being armed with nothing more than primitive weapons. The reasoning behind this seemingly ridiculous fact was Iran’s basic lack of sufficient military supplies to fight the war with modern arms. Reports at the time said that they even sent children armed with only sticks against Iraqis armed with automatic weapons.
When the Kings of the East send a 200 million-man army to march toward the Middle East there is no way that they will be able to fully supply this number of troops with 200 million rifles and other personal equipment—to say nothing of tanks, artillery, and aircraft. In fact, the 29 largest armies in the world today (according to World Atlas) have a total of only 15,194,034 soldiers (data published in Oct. 2015). However, we can expect that in the demon-induced frenzy of war in the Last Days (Rev. 16:13-14), every evil person that is enticed to come to Armageddon will do so with whatever weapons they can get their hands on. In this crazed atmosphere of world conflict, the nations will fight with anything, even if that means wooden spears, clubs, and sticks.
There may also be tremendous quantities of leftover oil, diesel fuel, and gasoline which will have been used to supply the armies in their attack at Armageddon. Likewise, many modern weapons have wooden or plastic parts that can be disposed of by burning. Thus, the total quantity of combustible items remaining after the battles are over could in fact be enough to supply fuel for Israel for seven whole years during the beginning of the Kingdom Age.
In addition, there may be another viable explanation to Ezekiel’s prophecy. Not only will the people of the Kingdom Age be able to collect and burn primitive weapons, fuel, and any other flammable items they find, but they may also be able to burn a significant percentage of the newest generation of advanced weapons themselves. Some of today’s high-tech instruments of destruction are not being made of metal alone, but also of exotic synthetic components and light carbon fiber composites.
Due to the shortening supply of strategic metals, many of which come from unstable countries or U.S. adversaries like China, there has been a concerted effort to find replacement materials which could hold up to the strength and weight requirements of modern weaponry. Many years of research into material science and polymer chemistry has finally paid off. Several companies are now producing high strength, lightweight carbon fiber, graphite, or polymer composites which can actually outperform metal on a pound-for-pound basis. Great Lakes Carbon Corporation has said that “although natural graphite has been known for centuries, it is the modern synthetic graphites that are helping pave the way for tomorrow’s breakthroughs”. These graphites are so strong and versatile that they’re currently being used in such critical and high stress environments as metallurgy (as casting molds), in furnace and heat treating applications, as part of the core elements in nuclear reactors, in circuit board construction, as major structural components in airplane manufacturing, and even in rocket nozzles, nose cones, and re-entry shields on spacecraft. In every area that metals have held an exclusive role in the past, graphite as well as other types of plastics and composites are now making significant inroads.
In an early advertisement by DuPont Company on this technology, a slender 10-inch square, 11 pound honeycomb of NOMEX, a aramid polymer, was shown supporting a 27-ton excavator. Because of its tremendous strength, polymers like this quickly found increased use in ships, aerospace applications, and even in land transportation.
Many other forms of such synthetic materials are being used with more frequency. In particular, synthetic polymers are being designed for replacing metal parts in auto and truck bodies. The technology of injection-molded plastics has progressed to the point that it is now possible to make large car-body panels in one piece. The way the whole field is advancing, it will soon be possible that almost every vehicle could be composed of a majority of synthetic materials instead of mainly metal based construction.
The move toward synthetics has been especially significant in the aircraft industry. Graphite composites revolutionized the construction of modern airplanes due to its inherent strength and lightweight composition. When Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager made their historic around-the-world flight in late 1986 the deciding factor that actually made the feat possible was graphite composites. They flew in a plane with a wing-span equal to a Boeing 727, but with a total weight without fuel of less than even a compact car. The use of thin sheets of graphite for the skin of the plane ultimately made the flight possible.
The same advantages of graphite are now being used in the construction of virtually every new generation of jet fighters. So significant has been their impact on performance and maneuverability that in the near future we will probably see every military aircraft made up of a large proportion of synthetic composites. In addition, the lightweight and strong attributes of designer polymers, graphites, and carbon fibers also has helped them find their way into even hand-held automatic weapons and military devices of every sort. In fact, the standard-issue army helmets have been made entirely of plastic for many years, including the incorporation of bullet-stopping fibers such as Kevlar. It seems likely that the old way of using expensive and hard-to-find strategic metals may soon become just a memory of the past in the construction of military hardware.
Thus, the percentage of new weapons being made today with synthetic parts is great enough to enable Ezekiel’s prophecy to come true exactly as stated. Most forms of graphite composites and plastics can easily burn, and the flammability properties of aircraft carbon-fiber structural composite materials have been thoroughly studied. While the best of the graphite materials can resist heat much better than plastics, once they reach their point of ignition they will burn and oxidize with much hotter flames and provide more energy than corresponding wood products. In addition, most of the designer fiber or polymer composites are further held together using various kinds of resins, which are all also quite flammable. Thus, in addition to burning the crude weapons, leftover fuel, and any other flammable materials, it is more than plausible that the most modern weapons of war will also be burned in the early days of the Kingdom Age, just as Ezekiel predicted.
Isn’t it amazing how the recent advent of synthetic fiber and composite polymer technologies have provided, just at the right time, the means to fulfill a prophecy that wasn’t predicted to come true until after the Lord returns? Once again, we find that key technological developments in this terminal generation are paving the way for the fulfillment of End Times Biblical prophecy.
But this is not all that Ezekiel predicted for the first few years of the Kingdom Age. After mentioning the burning of weapons, he also went on to predict another, rather gruesome, aftereffect of the wars of the end. This is what Ezekiel said:
“And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will give unto Gog a place there of graves in Israel, the valley of the travelers on the east of the sea; and it shall stop the noses of the travelers, and there shall they bury Gog and all his multitude; and they shall call it the Valley of Hamon-gog.
“And seven months shall the house of Israel be burying them, that they may cleanse the land.
“Yea, all the people of the land shall bury them; and it shall be to their renown on the day that I shall be glorified, saith the Lord God.
“And they shall set apart men for the continual task of passing through the land to bury, with the help of the travelers, those that remain upon the face of the land, to cleanse it; after the end of seven months shall they make their search.
“And the travelers that pass through the land, when any seeth a man’s bone, then shall he set up a sign by it, till the buriers have buried it in the Valley of Hamon-gog.”
Ezek. 39:11-15
In previous sections on the Great Tribulation, we saw that birds will be commanded to come and eat the bodies of the combatants who have fallen in the Valley of Armageddon. Although this will certainly help to cleanse the land by eliminating rotting flesh and preventing the stench of death, there will still be left strewn across the ground innumerable amounts of human bones and fragments of bodies. As the Kingdom Age begins to get organized and the world slowly returns to a hospitable place, one of the most important duties for those living in the Middle East will be to bury the remains of all these people. Ezekiel predicts that they will set aside an entire valley just to become a mass grave site for the fallen armies. He also states that it will take seven long months for most of the bodies to be found, gathered, and buried.
This is not so amazing considering what it would take to dispose of hundreds of millions of bones and cadaver parts. Even with an organized and concerted effort, though, the prophecy says that travelers passing through the land will still stumble on bodies for quite some time. Ezekiel tells us that whenever a body is discovered, the person finding it will mark the site, and then a special team of buriers will come to dispose of it. The place of this huge cemetery will become known as the Valley of Hamon-gog, or being translated, the Valley of the Multitude of Gog. The Bible tells us that it will stand throughout the Kingdom Age as a terrible reminder of the evil of man and how it destroyed the world. Isaiah even quotes the Lord as predicting that the people of the kingdom…
“…shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorrence unto all flesh.”
Isa. 66:24
It is obvious now that the first few months and years of the Kingdom Age will be primarily ones of preparation and cleanup. It is also not going to be an easy job to change the dark desolation of nuclear destruction into a glorious perfection similar to the Garden of Eden, but it will be done with time and coordinated effort. Most likely, within ten to twenty years after the Second Coming the world will not only be returned to the ecological balance it had before, but will probably far exceed even our wildest dreams, especially in terms of its natural beauty of plant and animal life. Between the Lord’s supernatural help and the efforts of the people who will inhabit the Kingdom Age, the earth will not only survive its brush with extinction, but will actually become more hospitable and beautiful than it ever was before.
