3203.—Future Conditions
By Editor
We do not understand that it does in just the way it is expressed there. On the new earth we do not believe that there will be nursing children or children just weaned. Our Lord explicitly tells us, Luke 20:35, "But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage." Many of the prophecies of the Old Testament are what might be called double prophecies. They refer to things close by as well as far away. If God's children had yielded to the Lord Jesus Christ when He came, absolutely and wholly, all these conditions and other prophecies in the Old Testament would have come to pass, and there would have been a gradual conversion and conquering of the earth on the part of the Jewish people. There would have been peace in all their borders, and that very spirit of peace which was in the hearts of God's children would have extended to the animal kind, just as is predicted in this prophecy under consideration. But they did not do this; consequently the prophecy can only be fulfilled in harmony with the new covenant, and with God's purpose toward all the nations of the world, not through the Jews, but through Christ alone. But just as peace is predicted in Isaiah 11 of the happy state that would have been if the Jews had wholly yielded to Christ, the same and even greater conditions of abundant peace will be manifest in the new earth.