Pedants can now relax. Whether last year was the first year of the new millennium or the last year of the old, by now we are firmly within the third millennium.
But wait! Wasn't there something in the Bible about the millennium? Wasn't something supposed to happen? Well, no. To start with, a thousand years is not a very precise time: "A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday" (Ps 90:4) is not a basis for calculation! The Bible can be precise about figures - Methuselah's 969 years, the 153 fish the disciples caught, the 2300 evenings and mornings the temple lay desolate in Daniel's vision (Dan 6:14). But a thousand means a large number (just as seven often just means a perfect number).
The millennium in the Bible just means an unimaginably long time. In John's vision in Revelation 20:2-7, it is the time after God's rule has been finally established. Satan is shut up in a bottomless pit, and the martyrs for Christ reign with him. At the end of this time, John in his vision sees Satan released and thrown into a lake of fire, along with those who have no good deeds written in the Book of Life ("the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars" (Rev 21:8)).
John's vision is just that, a vision. It is an insight into the way the world is going - the insight of one man, led and inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is a stupendous description of something that words cannot describe - the joy and glory and awesomeness of God's presence, and the terrific power of God's righteousness.
People who treat John's revelation as a recipe book for foretelling the end of the world have missed the point. If anyone tells you that the United States government is planning to tattoo its citizens with bar codes bearing the number 666, tell them they have been caught up in a curious form of hysteria. The book of Revelation is prophecy, yes, but the prophecy is directed at John's immediate readers (Rev 1:4), to the Ephesians, the Laodiceans, the people in Smyrna, in Pergamum, in Thyatira, in Sardis and in Philadelphia (Rev 1:11).
Each of these seven churches gets a special message (thank heaven St Ursula's wasn't around at the time!), before John goes on to describe his vision. But John's hearers would have recognized the threatening beast in chapter 13 quite clearly - not as the U.S. government, but as the Emperor Nero, whose persecution had challenged the faith of many.
The Greeks wrote their numbers as letters - A was one, B two, and so on, counting later in tens up to a hundred. Was it coincidence that if you replaced the letters of Nero's name with numbers, they totalled 666? And that, while seven expressed perfection, six was just the opposite?
This, or something like this, was certainly the case, and we should stop looking at bar codes (or recalculating the letters to make them imply Napoleon, or Martin Luther!). The Book of Revelation was written for Christians in crisis, Christians whose faith was being challenged. It held out the promise of glory for those suffering persecution, and the hope of evil being finally overcome.
We too live in times of challenge and of crisis, although the threats to our faith are not as acute as in Nero's time - at least here in safe, solid Switzerland. Perhaps we need to see this more clearly, so that we can make this message of glory and of hope into a message for us today.
HD