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Imagine the construction of a large apartment building. I mean really large, like 432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential building in New York. Or five of the ten tallest buildings in the world, found in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. One of these buildings can house 25,000 human beings.
The idea that tens of thousands of human beings can live in one apartment building is provocative. There are seven billion human beings on earth today. The entire population of the earth can be "squeezed" into one-third of the state of Texas, each one enjoying a home with the population density of the home in which I grew up, with one-third of the state given to business and industry meeting all human needs, and one-third of the state given to parks and recreation. That leaves the other 49 states empty. The entire African continent would be uninhabited by human beings. Asia and India, with their billions of people, could live much more comfortably in Dubai-style apartments in one-third of the state of Texas. And thousands of years from now, when mankind has fulfilled God's command to "be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:26-28; 9:1) and population has grown from a mere 7 billion people on earth to 700 billion, or a 1,000 billion (trillion) human beings on earth, the vast majority will be Christians. David Chilton writes:
6while it is fashionable for modern Christian intellectuals to speak of our civilization as "post-Christian," we should turn that around and make it Biblically accurate: Our culture is not post-Christian - our culture is still largely pre-Christian!
and he adds,
The actual number of the saved, far from being limited to mere tens of thousands, is in reality a multitude that no one could count, so vast that it cannot be comprehended. For the fact is that Christ came to save the world. Traditionally -- although Calvinists have been technically correct in declaring that the full benefits of the atonement were intended only for the elect - both Calvinists and Arminians have tended to miss the point of John 3:16. That point has been beautifully summarized by Benjamin Warfield:
You must not fancy, then, that God sits helplessly by while the world, which He has created for Himself, hurtles hopelessly to destruction, and He is able only to snatch with difficulty here and there a brand from the universal burning. The world does not govern Him in a single one of its acts: He governs it and leads it steadily onward to the end which, from the beginning, or ever a beam of it had been laid, He had determined for it. ... Through all the years one increasing purpose runs, one increasing purpose: the kingdoms of the earth become ever more and more the Kingdom of our God and His Christ. The process may be slow; the progress may appear to our impatient eyes to lag. But it is God who is building: and under His hands the structure rises as steadily as it does slowly, and in due time the capstone shall be set into its place, and to our astonished eyes shall be revealed nothing less than a saved world."
Benjamin B. Warfield, from a sermon on John 3:16 entitled "God's Immeasurable Love," in Biblical and Theological Studies (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1968), pp. 518f.
[New York City contains not just residences, but businesses (e.g., "Wall Street") and parks (e.g., "Central Park"). The "Texas" link we provided above does not make this distinction.]
Then there are other planets.
People who want Jesus to return and set up a 1,000 year kingdom (when He's already/only been reigning for twice that long) and then end the whole "earth" business are quitters with no vision. That's probably most church-going Christians.