The Third Millennium​—Will It Fulfill Your Hopes?

THE countdown has begun. A digital clock on the front of the cultural center of Beaubourg in Paris, France, shows the number of seconds remaining. It will continue its relentless countdown until midnight of December 31, 1999. At that time, something witnessed only once before in our Common Era will occur: the ushering in of a new millennium, the third millennium.

“2000 is, in a way, ‘the largest expected event’ in human history ever,” suggests social researcher Bernward Joerges of Berlin, Germany. Why such anticipation? After all, the year 2000 is just one more date in the stream of time. Besides, the date is recognized only by those following the Western calendar. According to the Islāmic calendar, 2000 C.E. falls during the Islāmic year 1420; according to the Jewish calendar, 5760 A.M.

But in an interview in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, Professor Joerges explains: “Because of colonialism and imperialism, our Gregorian chronology, starting with the presumed birth of Christ, has gained ground in large parts of the world.” The year 2000 will thus be a global epoch marker for a sizable portion of mankind. Says Professor Joerges: “All people will relate their private biography as well as everything else to this event.”

Yet, many have more in mind than simply marking time. “Large-scale projects and programmes to ‘mark’, give significance to and celebrate this event are already underway in all spheres of life and on all social levels,” claims Joerges. He adds that “all over the globe, the big entrepreneurial projectmakers and ‘show masters’ are dreaming up and designing large events.” Other forecasters say that “we will drown in the flood of books on the past century. All mass media will go mad about the millennial turn. A West German TV station is planning a 24-hour broadcast of sunrises around the earth.”

The media will also be sure to make much ado over the last infant born in 1999 and the first one born in 2000. Journalists will be eager to locate the few remaining ones born in the 19th century to ask how it feels to have lived in three centuries and two millenniums! Some even feel that all this millennium hype will generate a kind of mass hysteria. According to one grim prediction, at the stroke of midnight that New Year’s Eve, many will commit suicide.

Despite such obvious excesses, it is understandable that the event arouses fascination. For many in our trouble-weary world, the new millennium is viewed as a beacon of hope, a gateway to a better future. Some look to science and technology to produce a future in which we will eat better and live longer, work less and stay home more; where robots will free us from boring tasks; where controlled fusion will transform water into fuel. They envision a future of holograph TV, Picturephones, color fax machines, and instantaneous-translation telephones. They dream of exploring the Moon, Mars, or other celestial bodies, mining their wealth.

But not all are so optimistic. Some researchers see the new millennium as ushering in a time of uncontrolled world population growth and environmental breakdown. Air pollution will turn the earth’s atmosphere into a steaming greenhouse. Ice caps will melt and seas will rise, flooding the productive, populated areas but transforming millions of acres of farmland into deserts. They foresee a world economic collapse, political instability that will rock governments and societies, runaway crime, and worst of all, a nuclear holocaust that will extinguish all human life.

Forecasters are long on speculations though they are short on certainty when it comes to the approaching millennium. Simply too many unforeseeable factors are involved to predict the future accurately. A professional futurist likens doing so to playing chess: “Before I make my next move, I look as many moves ahead as I can. But after my opponent makes his move, I do it all over again.”

Just what the year 2000 holds, only time will tell. This does not mean, however, that your future has to be uncertain. The Bible provides ample evidence that we are near the approach of a far more significant millennium than the one beginning in less than a decade. This approaching Millennium will far surpass any human expectations! What exactly does this mean? What will it involve? We invite you to consider our next article and learn what the Bible has to say.