How is that possible?
We still have wars, disease, famine, fear, anger, hate, suffering and innumerable other horrors on Earth.
How can the time we are living in possibly be "the golden age of Christ’s reign."
Good question. I should have posted the paragraphs that followed.
Some may think that the current age doesn’t seem very golden, but this is due to a problem of perspective. The proper frame of reference for judging the quality of the current age is not how paradisiacal we can imagine the world to be. It is what the world was like before the Christian age. Before Jesus, the world was swallowed in pagan darkness, with only the Jewish people and a few "God-fearers" attached to the Jews having reliable knowledge of the true God. Everywhere else, men were in spiritual darkness.But the prophets foretold that "the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea" (Is. 11:9; cf. Hab. 2:14). This prophecy was fulfilled by the coming of Christ and the inauguration of the Christian age. Today a third of the human race is Christian, and fully half of the human race worships God in one way or another. The remainder has—with few exceptions—at least heard of the true God, and by the standards of biblical history, knowledge of the Lord does indeed cover the earth like the waters cover the sea. The light has dawned, and the darkness been dispelled. The biblical prophets would have wept for joy at the unimaginable prospect that so much of the human race would have embraced the worship of God. This was simply unthinkable in their time, and they would have regarded the current age—for all its problems—as unquestionably golden.
But notice what this quality consists in: It is a spiritual goldenness of men knowing and worshiping God in a way unheard of in pagan times. It is not an economic or a socio-political goldenness, which was not what Revelation promised. John writes:
Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended. After that he must be loosed for a little while. (Rev. 20:1–3)The promise is not that the world will be free of temporal problems but that the Devil will be bound in such a way that he cannot deceive the nations. That has happened. He has been bound in such a way that he cannot stop the proclamation of the gospel. As Jesus himself said when reflecting on the results of the disciples’ ministry, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (Luke 10:18).