Please help me to understand something about the Millennial Kingdom. According to descriptions of the Kingdom in Isaiah and elsewhere, it will be ruled by Jesus Himself from Jerusalem. It will be characterized by peace, and “they will neither hurt nor destroy…”. How can that be if the people will be mortal and still have their sin nature to the degree that, when Satan is released 1,000 years later, the people will rebel again, bringing about a new Gog-Magog war? When do they begin to “hurt and destroy” again? What does omniscient/omnipotent Jesus do about it? This would seem to be a time when we, the Church, will be called out of the New Jerusalem to police the people (about which Scripture is silent).
For years I wondered about the Millennium and its purpose. Finally I concluded that it’s the final chance to show whether humans, on their own, can live up to God’s standards. People have always offered three excuses for their failure to do this, so in the Millennium those excuses will be taken away. The first excuse is to blame the devil, so for the entire 1,000 years the devil will be chained in prison (Rev. 20:2). The second excuse is to blame the bad influence of unbelievers, so at the outset of the Millennium only believers will be allowed to occupy the Earth (Matt. 25:34). And the third is to blame the absence of the Lord, so all through the Millennium the Lord will be King of all the Earth, ruling in person (Zech. 14:9).
Even in this perfect environment natural humans will fail, progressively sinking once again to a level so low that when Satan is released he can immediately mount a huge army to try one more time to defeat the Lord.
The Church will never be called out to police the Earth because the goal is not to enforce order. The Lord would need no help in doing that. The goal is to demonstrate once and for all that there is no circumstance or condition where natural humans can live a life that’s pleasing to the Lord, even one as ideal as the Millennium starts out to be.