Danny Taylor: Skinny Guy Thinking it Through

I love the city.  I love tall buildings.  I love wandering downtown streets, discovering new restaurants, getting lost in the hustle-and-bustle of people being out and about.  I love the convenience of not having to travel too far to find a grocery store, gas station, mall, or hospital.  And while some cities are certainly more preferable than others, in general, city life is for me. Once, when visiting family in rural Montana, my wife and I told new acquaintances that we were then from Chicago.  A woman replied, “Chicago?  Who would ever want to live there ?” to which I thought, “Funny—people in Chicago ask the same thing about those who live in Montana!” So since I am a city-boy, when I get to Revelation 21 and see the picture of Paradise as a “Holy City , Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven” (Rev. 21.10), I can’t help but get excited.   Yet, for as much as I love city-life, I can appreciate this Montana woman’s remarks.  Deep dow...

I think I was a teenager when I had first heard the word “millennium.”  The 1990s were coming to a close and the world was on the brink of a new era: “AD” would now begin with a “2” instead of a “1”.  All sorts of people and groups were predicting the end of the world at the stroke of midnight, not the least of which was Prince whose pop-culture prophecy “1999” was played and re-played on the radio in exponential fashion as December 31 drew closer (I know because I graduated high school in 1999 and got very sick of hearing that song!).  All this coupled with the threat of the supposed “Y2K” computer glitch that could have potentially sent the first world back into the Dark Ages, “Millennium” became a buzz-word for feeding the “End-of-the-World” anxiety.   It wasn’t until college that I understood “Millennium” as a theological concept.  Revelation 20 introduces “thousand years” as a frame of time in which Satan is “bound” (20.2), after which he would be sub...