Jerusalem Temple model.
MILLENNIAL KINGDOM PRIESTS. In the millennial temple, resurrected and glorified believers will serve as priests. For “they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will reign with Him for a thousand years” (Rev. 20:6). The priests who serve in the temple will offer blood sacrifices every morning and on sabbaths, new moons and feast days until the end of the thousand years (Ezek. 45:13-46:15).
After the Millennium, God will make a new earth, where they will have no sun to count days or nights or years. “[B]ecause the Lord God shall illumine them” (Rev. 22:5). God’s covenant with the Levitical priesthood will not end until then.
“Thus says the Lord, ‘If you can break My covenant for the day and My covenant for the night, so that day and night will not be at their appointed time, then My covenant may also be broken with…the Levitical priests, My ministers” (Jer. 33:20-22).
To Jews and non-Jews
Priests mediate between God and men. Unbelievers who refused to receive the mark and survived the Great Tribulation will come to these millennial kingdom priests to learn the ways of the Lord. The surviving unbelievers will include both Jews and non-Jews. Some priests will become as Jews to the Jews to win their souls. They will use the law as a tutor to lead them to Christ (1 Cor. 9:20; Gal. 3:24).
They will teach Jews the difference between the blood of animals which makes them ceremonially and outwardly clean, and the blood of Christ which cleanses their conscience (Heb. 9:13-14). For in the new covenant “I will put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it” (Jer. 31:33).
To non-Jews who are without the law, they will teach the “law of Christ” (1 Cor. 9:21). That is, the law of loving God and loving others, which fulfils “the Law and the Prophets” (Mt. 22:36-40). They will have anointed versions of the “Four Spiritual Laws” that many Christians teach today.
The law will go forth from Zion
Nations will stream to the Temple Mount to learn His ways and His judgments, for “the law will go forth from Zion”:
“Now it will come about that
In the last days
The mountain of the house of the Lord
Will be established as the chief of the mountains,
And will be raised above the hills;
And all the nations will stream to it.
Many peoples will come and say,
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
To the house of the God of Jacob;
That He may teach us concerning His ways
And that we may walk in His paths.’
For the law will go forth from Zion
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He will judge between the nations,
And will render decisions for many peoples”
(Isa 2:2-4).
Despite the priesthood of believers who want to lead them to Christ, many will come for justice and for decisions, but not for Him. They will seek prosperity and peace for their nations, but not His presence. They will be fruitful and multiply. And they will live in a vastly improved world for hundreds of years. But many of them will join the final futile Gog-Magog revolt led by Satan the end of the Millennium (Rev. 20:7-10).
Priests and evangelists of His glory
Christ will know which Gentiles are coming for their own selfish purposes, and which are coming to learn His ways. He will choose which ones to send back to the nations to cause His glory to fill the earth. But some Gentiles He will keep with Him as priests in His temple.
“’For I know their works and their thoughts; the time is coming to gather all nations and tongues. And they shall come and see My glory. I will set a sign among them and will send survivors from them to the nations: Tarshish, Put, Lud, Meshech, Tubal and Javan, to the distant coastlands that have neither heard My fame nor seen My glory. And they will declare My glory among the nations… I will also take some of them for priests and for Levites,’ says the Lord” (Isa. 66:18,19,21).
Those who stay in or near the Temple will learn many mysteries of heaven, of which the temple is only a copy. They will learn to bring heaven to earth and live in the glory of God (see Ps. 27:4). Others will keep releasing His glory to the nations.
Read more in Ever Increasing Glory from Temple to World
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Keyphrase: Millennial kingdom priests
