Several decades before Jesus arrived on the planet, the Romans were already talking about a “reset”. After all the centuries, humanity was still not content with itself. Even with an Empire, there was still the human condition to deal with. The men still couldn’t get along with each other. They kept dreaming of a time when all the evils on earth would be righted.

Virgil was one of those dreamers, a Roman poet who lived between 70 and 19 BC. C. Students of Latin all over the world know him by his Aeneid, passages that unfortunately they would be asked to translate.

Another of Virgil’s works contains a passage that has been with us in America throughout our history. In English it reads:

“Now has come the final age of the Sibyl’s song;

“The great age order born fresh.

“Now justice returns, the reign of Saturn returns;

“Now a lineage is sent down from high heaven.”

Many years later, Christians in the Middle Ages would see Virgil’s lines as a prophecy of Christ and his new “order of the ages.” God’s kingdom. The Catholic Church, perhaps.

And of course it wasn’t long after Virgil wrote that the King of all Kings was born in Bethlehem of Judea. Why not let it refer to Him?

Virgil was hoping that something good would come into the world system, something that would create an order of peace and beauty and everything else.

Jesus must have disappointed the dreamers who followed Virgil. His idea of ​​”world order” seemed to be something related to the hearts of men. Only the believing Jews to whom Christ appeared connected the inner kingdom with a visible one, foreseen by his prophets.

Yes, an external kingdom is still in our Book, but it has not yet appeared, and men have gone on fighting and hating each other. And looking for the perfect ordering of humanity.

After pagan Rome came the efforts of Papal Rome to unite everyone around their version of Christ. This Rome kept God’s people away from their own Scriptures and imposed empire-like rule over the people of those centuries we now call the Dark Ages. The Golden Age they dreamed of lived only in the hearts of the elite, that group that the kingdoms of men always seem to produce.

Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and all the other would-be order-makers in the world rose and fell without a final solution to man’s ills.

But wait. We passed something. A kinder and gentler nation. A town destined to be great and to a great extent good too. Surely they could bring this new world? Well, they evidently thought so. Have you ever looked closely at the great seal of the United States? Or on the back of a dollar bill?

There it is in plain sight. Virgil lives. His very words, taken in the 1780s from Roman history and forever placed in our nation’s lore: Novus Ordo Seclorum! “New order of the ages”, from the poem. A New World Order!

Our original patriots certainly believed that they would help bring peace to the world, especially the New World that they had conquered. The dream has persisted, despite what is going on in the aforementioned tyrannies of Germany and Italy and Russia and China and the rest. The United States has stood out.

In more recent history, we can trace NWO thinking back to Woodrow Wilson. World War I was over and the president wanted to make sure this would never happen again. We need to get together and talk things out, he reasoned. His desire gave rise to the formation of the League of Nations.

Born in 1920, the League had forty-eight united nations shortly after it opened its doors. But the business of keeping the men’s hands off each other’s throats proved to be too much. With some limited success over the next twenty years, the League’s final failure came when another World War came with all its horror and blood.

The New World Order would have to wait.

But maybe not much. A book by the same name appeared in 1940 by HG Wells. The new world order “it addressed the ideal of a world without war in which law and order emanated from a world governing body…” Sounds more like that conspiracy theory to me. And Wells wasn’t even a fundamentalist. He not even a Christian. He was simply unconsciously echoing the dream of this world, spawned millennia ago, in Satan’s domain.

But it is a dream that, when fulfilled, will not work too well.