Like earthquakes, there will be wars and rumors of war (Matthew 24:6) during the seven-year rebellion that follows the Holy Spirit’s lifting of His restraints on His subjects after centuries of government. Today, they continue to occur as they have for centuries. They therefore cannot serve as prophetic signs today. The occurrence of earthquakes will, however, be significant after centuries of their nonoccurrence.
But what about buying and selling? Any room for that in the Kingdom?
I recently chanced upon Otis Q. Sellers’s concatenation of Biblical verses that lists some blessings of God’s prophesied global government (Psalm 67:4), that is, during the future manifest Kingdom of God. It will be a centuries-long period of time . . .
. . . when the whole earth is filled with His glory (Psalm 72:19); when the heavens declare His righteousness, and all the peoples see His glory (Psalm 97:6); when God opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145:15-16; my emphasis); when God’s judgments are in the earth and the inhabitants of the world are learning righteousness (Isaiah 26:9); when no inhabitant of the earth shall say that he is sick (Isaiah 33:24); when God opens rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of valleys (Isaiah 41:18); when the desert shall blossom as the rose bush blossoms (Isaiah 35:1) . . .
Otis Q. Sellers, “Inheriting the Earth,” Seed & Bread, No. 73
The italicized passage implies global abundance, the opposite of scarcity. We normally don’t pay for air, and that’s because it’s abundant in the economic sense: we can all breathe as much of it as we want without depriving anyone else of breathing as much as they want.
Scarce goods can be traded on markets for other scarce goods. One does not have to trade, however, for what’s not scarce. And scarcity is impossible when God is satisfying the everyone’s desires.
Jesus’ many miracles, such as when He fed multitudes with a few biscuits and fishes (e.g., Matthew 14:13-21, 15: 32-39) were “foretastes” of the Kingdom; indeed, they were the Kingdom in its blade and ear stages; Mark 4:26-29.
Sellers’s distinctive claim is that God suspended His Kingdom purposes at the close of the Acts period, which purposes He will resume when He assumes sovereignty.
Now, if there’s no scarcity, there’s no use for money prices. (No occasion, therefore, for the root of all evil, the “love of money,” to grow in the human heart.) And, therefore, no buying and selling. Yet we are told that during the revolt (apostasia, ἀποστασία, 2 Thessalonians 2:3) against the Kingdom (before the Day of the Lord, which will come like a thief in the night; 2 Peter 3:10) . . .
. . . no man might buy or sell, save he that has the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Revelation 13:7 (my emphasis).
So what we have, by hypothesis, is the return (from the bad, ol’ pre-Kingdom days) of buying and selling. Along with earthquakes and wars, trading in scarce goods will signal the dictatorship of the Antichrist, who seats himself in the (restored) temple of God and gets away with murder and mayhem for seven years. He’s the leader of the conspiracy against the Lord’s rule to which Psalm 2 refers:
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. Psalm 2:2-3
Before He so breaks them, however, the conspiracy and its eventual suppression must play out along the lines Jesus outlined for His disciples. They had asked Him about the sign of His “coming” (that is, His personal presence, παρουσίας, parousias) and of the “end of the world” (that is, the consummation of the eon, συντελείας τοῦ αἰῶνος, synteleias tou aionos, the aion (or “eon”) in question being the pre-Millennial (pre-Parousia) Kingdom. (See Matthew 24:3ff).
This sequence of events presupposes a centuries-earlier return of the prophet Elijah who will restore all things (Malachi 4:5-6), including the Temple. By the time that future Temple is desecrated, the Spirit will have already lifted the restraints of God’s government.
Jesus’s prophecy of the “abomination of desolation” (τὸβδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως, to bdelygma tēs erēmōseōs, Matthew 24:15) highlights Daniel’s הַשִּׁקּוּץ מְשׁוֹמֵֽם, ha-shikkuts meshomem, Daniel 9:27, 11:31, 12:11.
I conjecture that the lifting of those restraints, which gives free rein to the rebels, comes with a diminution of Kingdom blessings, including abundance (and safety, and perfect health). That will entail the return of scarcity and, with that, money prices.
The Kingdom’s faithful subjects will have need of suddenly scarce goods. Without the “mark of the beast,” however, they won’t be allowed to buy them. This is the time of Jacob’s trouble (Jeremiah 30:7), of great pressure (θλῖψις, thlipsis, commonly translated “tribulation”).