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Theworld to come,age to come,heaven on Earth, and theKingdom of God areeschatological phrases reflecting the belief that thecurrent world orcurrent age is flawed orcursed and will be replaced in the future by a better world, age, orparadise.
The concept is related to, but differs from, the concepts ofheaven or theafterlife in that heaven is another place or state of existence generally seen as above the world, and the afterlife is generally an individual's continued existence after death.[citation needed]
The following section reviews religions chronologically by date of the composition of various religious texts, from oldest to most recent, although the chronology of ancient religions is not known with certainty. Later dates are more certain than earlier dates.
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InZoroastrianeschatology, the world to come is thefrashokereti, where thesaoshyant will bring about aresurrection of the dead in the bodies they had before they died. This is followed by alast judgment. TheyazatasAiryaman andAtar will melt the metal in the hills and mountains, and the molten metal will then flow across the earth like a river. All humankind—both the living and the resurrected dead—will be required to wade through that river, but for the righteous (ashavan) it will seem to be a river of warm milk, while the wicked will be burned. The river will then flow down tohell, where it will annihilateAngra Mainyu and the last vestiges of wickedness in the universe. Thesaoshyant is first mentioned as a savior in the Yashts written around 625 and 225 BCE, according to some interpretations.[1]
HaOlam haBa (Hebrew:העולם הבא,lit. 'the world to come') is an important part of theafterlife in Jewish eschatology, which also encompassesGan Eden (the Heavenly Garden of Eden),Gehinom andSheol.[2]
According to theTalmud, any non-Jew who lives according to theSeven Laws of Noah is regarded as a "righteous gentile", and is assured of a place in the world to come, the final reward of the righteous.[3][4]
There is muchAggadic material relating to this topic. Much of this has been collected in popular form inLegends of the Jews, byLouis Ginzberg, discussing esoteric and mysticalkabbalistic concepts such as Paradise, and the "higher"Gan Eden.[5]
In Christianity, the phrase is found in theNicene Creed (current Ecumenical version): "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."[6] It is also found in theKing James Version of theNew Testament atMatthew 12:32,Mark 10:30,Luke 18:30,Hebrews 2:5,Hebrews 6:5. Other related expressions are "age to come" which is typically found in more recent translations,Kingdom of God,Messianic Age,Millennial Age,Golden Age, theNew Earth andNew Jerusalem, anddispensation of the fulness of times and possibly alsoeternal life.
In Hindu eschatology the current age is theKali Yuga, a period of decline.Kalki will appear to purge all evil, beginning agolden age ofSatya Yuga.
There have been a range of dates predicted, purportedly from different methods of calculation.[7]Pothuluru Veerabrahmendra, for example, wrote 400 years ago in hisDivya Maha Kala Gnana, orDivine Knowledge of the Time, that Kalki would arrive when the moon, sun, Venus and Jupiter entered the same sign. This is not a rare occurrence and last happened in early 2012, passing without event.[8] The time of arrival of Kalki has not been consistently asserted by astrologers.[7]
The earliest copies of theMahabharata that exist dates from 200 CE and is the first text to mention Kalki but was likely written in its final form around 400 CE. Kalki is also mentioned in theVishnu Purana which has a contested date of composition ranging from 400 BCE to 1000 CE.
BothSunni Islam andShia Twelve Imams beliefs hold that before theLast Judgment, theMahdi and Jesus appears and defeats theAntichrist False Messiah (Al-Masih ad-Dajjal). The Mahdi's rule will be paradise on Earth, which will last for seventy years until his death, though other traditions state 7, 19, or 309 years.[9]
