Revelation 20 - Introduction

The Reign of the Thousand Years.

We have now examined the various topics mentioned in the separate clauses of chap. 20 with the exception of ‘the thousand years.' It is impossible, however, to pass from the chapter without devoting some attention to this point. No subject referred to in the New Testament has more agitated the Church throughout all her history. Upon none has greater diversity of opinion or greater keenness of feeling been displayed; and there is none on which, alike for our individual comfort and for the sake of our general estimate of Scripture, it is more desirable to gain, if possible, a clear and definite conception. The writer of this Commentary is more particularly desirous to offer a few considerations upon the point because, so long ago as August 1871, he was led to take a view of the thousand years which, as far as known to him, had not been previously suggested, and which seemed to remove in a manner consistent with fair interpretation the chief difficulties of the subject. Since that time the most important conclusion then arrived at has been brought forward, though apparently as the result of his own independent investigations, by Kliefoth, in the second part of his Commentary on the Apocalypse, A.D. 1874. Kliefoth's interpretation of the passage as a whole is indeed entirely different from that adopted here, but upon the particular point of the thousand years he and the present writer are at one. Such a fact may help to propitiate the reader in favour of what has now to be said.

Before again suggesting the solution referred to, it will be well to devote a few sentences to two views, one or other of which is generally accepted as upon the whole the best explanation of the apostle's meaning. The first of these is that a lengthened period of prosperity and happiness for the Church of Christ on earth is to intervene between the close of the present Dispensation and the general Judgment. Almost everything indeed connected with this period is matter of dispute among those who accept the main idea, its length, the proportion of believers who shall be partakers of its glory, the condition in which they are to live, the work in which they are to be engaged, the relation in which the exalted Redeemer is to stand to them. These differences of detail it is impossible to discuss as if they were so many separate theories, but the more important will be noticed as we proceed. The second explanation demanding notice is that which supposes the thousand years to be a figure for the whole Christian age from the First to the Second Coming of the Lord. Turning to the first of these explanations, it would seem as if the difficulties surrounding it were nearly, if not wholly, insurmountable.

If we interpret the thousand years literally, it will be a solitary example of a literal use of numbers in the Apocalypse, and this objection alone is fatal. If, on the other hand, we regard the thousand years as denoting an indefinite period, the difficulties of doing so are hardly less formidable. The numbers of the Apocalypse may be symbolical, but they are always definite in meaning. They express ideas it is true, but the ideas are distinct. They may belong to a region of thought different from that with which arithmetical numbers are concerned, but within that region we cannot change the numerical value of the numbers used without at the same time changing the thought. Thus the thousand years cannot mean two thousand or ten thousand or twenty thousand years, as the necessities of the case may demand. If they are a measure of time, the measure must be fixed, and we ought to be able to explain the principles leading us to attach to it a value different from that which it naturally possesses.

It is impossible to form any reasonable conception of the condition of the saints during the thousand years. Multitudes of them must have risen from their graves through Him who is ‘the first-fruits of them that sleep;' those who were alive at the beginning of the thousand years must have been ‘changed.' This is admitted by such as hold the theory: Believers raised, however, are raised ‘in glory,' and we have the absolutely inconceivable spectacle presented to us of glorified saints living in a world which has not yet received its own glorification, and is thus completely unfitted for their residence. Nor is the difficulty lessened by adopting the supposition that only the Holy Land and Jerusalem shall be transfigured, for we cannot imagine one part of the earth transfigured without the rest, and the part chosen for this purpose is far too small to accommodate those who are supposed to occupy it. Still greater difficulties meet us when we think of the relations existing between the saints thus glorified and ‘the nations.' It is not easy to gather together in a single sentence the various ideas upon this point of those who hold the view of which we speak; and it may be enough to say that ‘the nations' are generally regarded as either subject to the saints, and ruled by them in peace, or as the objects of their missionary enterprise. They are thus either harmless innocents, the absence of Satan preventing all combination and organized manifestation of evil, or they are peculiarly accessible to the grandeur of the spectacle which they behold in the glorified Saviour and His people. It is needless to say that for all this, and much more of a similar kind, there is absolutely not the slightest foundation in the apostle's words. Indeed the total absence of any mention of relations between the saints and ‘the nations' until we come to Revelation 20:7 is one of the most remarkable characteristics of the vision. Evidently the Seer has no thought of any complex state of matters such as would spring out of the long dwelling together of these different classes. Or, if there is to be a fresh duration of existence, is there also to be another probation for ‘the nations,' a Gospel preached under circumstances very different from what we have known, and constituting a new Dispensation, while yet there is the same judgment at the end, and the conditions for entrance into happiness or woe continue as before?

(3) The great difficulty, however, presented by this view of the millennium arises from the teaching of Scripture elsewhere upon the points involved in it. If we suppose that the saints who are made partakers of millennial glory are a selected company, we introduce a distinction between different classes of believers unknown to the word of God, in which all believers enjoy the same privileges on earth, share the same hope, and are at length rewarded with the same inheritance. Even if we reject such distinctions, we are not entitled to separate between believers and unbelievers, for it cannot be denied that the New Testament always brings the Parousia and the general judgment into the closest possible connection. When Christ comes again, it is to perfect the happiness of all His saints, and to make all His enemies His footstool (Matthew 25:31-46; John 5:28-29; Acts 17:31; Romans 2:16; 1 Thessalonians 4:17; 2 Thessalonians 1:5-7; 2 Peter 3:8-13). The teaching of the Apocalypse itself in other passages corresponds with this (chaps. Revelation 3:20-21; Revelation 11:17-18). The idea of masses of the nations continuing to be Christ's enemies for years or ages after He has come is not only entirely novel, but is at variance with everything we are taught by the other sacred writers upon the point.

The same remark may be made with regard to the two resurrections (in whatever particular form we imagine them to take place) which are separated from each other by a thousand years. We have already seen indeed that the simple exegesis of the passage disproves this idea, and that the ‘first resurrection' is a state, not an act. But, apart from this, the New Testament knows only of one, and that a general, resurrection (John 5:28-29), and the passages usually quoted as containing partial indications of the opposite, such as 1Co 15:23-24, 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, to which we shall afterwards advert, fail to support the conclusion drawn from them. The resurrection of believers takes place at ‘the last day' (John 6:40).

Again, the idea that before the end the Church shall enjoy a long period of prosperity and rest on earth with Christ in her midst, is inconsistent with that teaching of Scripture which seems distinctly to imply that her history down to the close of her pilgrimage shall be one of trouble. That this is the meaning of Matthew 24 can hardly be disputed, and the argument from that chapter is the stronger because the discourse of Christ contained in it lies at the bottom of the Apocalypse, and the writer of the latter could not contradict the very authority upon which his delineation is grounded. Or, if it be said that Christ is only to come personally at the end of this time of joy, what can be the meaning of the exhortations addressed to us to wait and long for His Second Coming? We ought rather to wait and long for the millennial bliss.

The second interpretation of which it is necessary to say a few words is that which understands by the thousand years the whole Christian age from the First to the Second Coming of Christ. That there is an element of truth in this view we shall see by and by; but, looking at it in the form in which it is usually presented, it is not possible to accept it. The number one thousand is inappropriate to the purpose to which it is applied. The period in question has already been made known to us as three and a half years. To make it one thousand years now is to throw everything into confusion. Still further, the place of the book in which the vision is found is unsuitable to this view. No doubt the Seer is in the habit of recapitulating. But the thousand years' reign forms part of a series of visions designed to point out the nature of the Church's victory after her warfare is concluded. We cannot separate it from the visions of Revelation 19, and these certainly belong to the end. Again, the ‘reign' of one thousand years is obviously granted not to the generation of believers only who are alive at the coming of the Lord, but to all who have been faithful unto death; and none of these have lived through the whole Christian Dispensation. Once more, we cannot speak of Satan as bound and shut up in the abyss during the whole period of the Church's history. That there is a sense in which he is so as regards the righteous must be allowed, but his action upon the ungodly, upon ‘the nations,' has never ceased. He has been their betrayer and destroyer in every age. When he was cast out of heaven he was ‘cast down to the earth,' and there he persecuted the woman ‘for a time, and times, and half a time' (chap. Revelation 12:9; Revelation 12:14). Our Lord teaches us to pray, ‘Deliver us from the evil one' (Matthew 6:13). This view, too, equally with the last considered, perplexes our ideas as to what is to happen when the Christian Dispensation has run its course. At this point the thousand years expire; and, as they have been understood of time, it becomes necessary to allow some additional space of time for the closing war. We are thus brought into fresh conflict with other statements of Scripture relating to the same subject. The second proposed solution is not more satisfactory than the first. It was in these circumstances that the writer of this Commentary offered many years ago what seemed to him the true solution of the question of the millennial reign that the thousand years are not a period of time at all. They represent that victory of the Lord over Satan which is shared by His people in Him, and they complete the picture of that glorious condition in which believers have all along really been, but which only now reaches its highest point, and is revealed as well as possessed. The saints ‘died' when they believed, and entered into a Divine life, but one ‘hid with Christ in God.' At the manifestation of Christ at His Second Coming they also are ‘manifested with Him in glory' (Colossians 3:3-4). Such is the leading thought.

That ‘years' may be taken in this sense there can be no doubt. In Ezekiel 39:9 it is said that the inhabitants of the cities of Israel shall prevail against the enemies described, and ‘shall set on fire and burn the weapons, both the shields and the bucklers, the bows and the arrows, and the hand-staves, and the spears, and they shall burn them with fire seven years ' i.e, they shall utterly destroy them, not a vestige shall be left Again, at the twelfth verse of the same chapter, when the prophet speaks of the burying of ‘Gog and all his multitude,' he says, ‘And seven months shall the house of Israel be burying of them, that they may cleanse the land;' where the expression marks only the thoroughness with which the land should be cleansed from every remnant of heathenish impurity. The use of ‘years' in the passage before us seems to be exactly similar; and the probability that it is so rises almost to certainty when we remember that, as proved by the vision of Gog and Magog in the subsequent part of the chapter, this prophecy of Ezekiel is before the Seer's eyes, constituting the foundation upon which his whole delineation rests.

Viewed in this light then, the thousand years, when connected with the binding of Satan, represent the completeness of his overthrow: when connected with the reign of the saints they represent their confirmation in happiness, their establishment in the joy just about to be revealed in fulness, the manifestation of their blessedness to the eyes of all men, when even their enemies shall see that they are safe for ever, and shall follow them with longing eyes as they enter within the gates of the New Jerusalem (comp. chap. Revelation 3:9). They are simply an exalted symbol of the glory of the redeemed at the particular moment referred to by the Seer. Even before this time indeed, and throughout the whole of their struggle with the world, they have enjoyed in principle all that is now bestowed upon them; and herein lies the element of truth belonging to that interpretation which sees in the thousand years the Christian era as it extends from the First to the Second Advent of the Redeemer. During all that period the children of God have not only been sealed, watched over, nourished by their Heavenly Guardians: they have constituted a Resurrection people, living in the power of Christ's resurrection and of their own resurrection life. They have rested upon a risen and glorified Redeemer, and they have been seated with Him in ‘the heavenly places.' Their Lord Himself had been always triumphant: at the opening of the first seal He had gone forth ‘conquering and to conquer' (chap. Revelation 6:2), and in every song of praise, raised by the heavenly hosts the Church and universal nature, which meets us in the book, His had been ‘the blessing, and the honour, and the glory, and the dominion, for ever and ever' (chap. Revelation 5:13, comp. Revelation 12:12; Revelation 11:15; Revelation 15:3; Revelation 19:7). In this triumph of Christ the saints on earth, as well as the saints in heaven, have their share. For this end was Christ manifested, that from His Incarnation onward ‘He might destroy the works of the devil' (1 John 3:8). He Himself said when He was on earth, ‘ Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out' (John 12:31). He declared that ‘the prince of this world hath been judged' (John 16:11). He gave His disciples reason to hope that they could ‘bind the strong man' (Matthew 12:29); He said that they had ‘authority' from Him ‘to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy' (Luke 10:19); and He allowed them a foretaste and experience of this authority in their healings of those who were possessed with demons. There is an unquestionable sense, therefore, in which for the true children of God from the beginning of the Christian era Satan always has been, and still is, bound. He is beneath their feet. For them as members of the Body of Christ his head is bruised. Still the fact remains, that their state in this book has been described as one of tribulation. The object of the passage before us is to show that there is another side to the picture, and that that side, long hidden, shall be at length revealed. Just as in the earthly life of Jesus there came a time when, His struggle over, His glory shone forth in the presence of His disciples, and He spoke as one already glorified (John 17), so there comes a time when His people shall shine forth in the glory which they have received from Him. This is the reign of a thousand years.

It may be said that the words of Revelation 20:7, which speak of the thousand years being ‘finished,' together with the subsequent outbreak of the devil and the nations against the Church, are inconsistent with the view now taken. The difficulty thus suggested is specious, but by no means insuperable. Let us familiarize ourselves with the idea that the ‘thousand years,' regarded simply as an expression, may denote completeness, thoroughness, either of defeat or victory. Above all let us place ourselves in the position of the Seer, and catch as far as possible the spirit in which he writes. We shall then have little difficulty in seeing that the loosing of Satan at the end of the thousand years is not to be understood literally. It is a mere incident necessary to give verisimilitude to the poetic delineation. The prophet has described Satan as completely subjugated; but the whole evil of the earth is once more to be presented to us gathered together against the saints. Satan, the head of its kingdom, the prince of this world, must be there that he may direct its energies and share its fate. For this purpose it is needful that he shall be spoken of as loosed. The loosing, then, is not chronological, not historical; it is only poetic, designed to give consistency to the prophet's vision.

Let us apply this principle to the passage already quoted from Ezekiel 39:9, by supposing that the prophet, immediately after saying, ‘And they shall burn them with fire seven years,' had desired to mention some other circumstance that then took place, or some other vision that followed the complete destruction of the weapons of war referred to. Would he not have gone on, ‘And when the seven years were finished,' etc.? Is not such a method of expression involved in the very nature of the previous figure? The figure itself may be a strange one. That is not the question. It is simply whether, having been used, its use does not naturally draw along with it the method of expression subsequently employed.

Besides this, it ought to be remembered that there must be a struggle before the exalted Saviour, with His people as assessors, finally destroys His adversaries. We cannot suppose that these do not resist the fate which they see prepared for them. They shall rouse themselves to a last effort of argument and despair (Matthew 25:24; Matthew 25:44; Isaiah 8:21); but it will be a last despair, the final effort of the serpent to sting when it is in the strong hand of Him whom it is powerless to resist. Finally, it may be said that time is necessary for all this. We reply that it is not time that is thought of but succession, and all Scripture implies that in these events there is succession, although not with a long interval intervening. What 1 Corinthians 15:23-24, and 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, teach is no more than is taught in the delineation of the last judgment contained in Matthew 25:31-46, that the eternal condition of the righteous is determined before that of the wicked. There must be a succession in order to enable us to form any conception of the matter. But no sooner is the one sentence pronounced, ‘Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world,' than the other follows, ‘Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels:' ‘And these shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life.'

It is true that by the view now taken the Millennium, as it is called, is resolved into a figure of speech. The argument of this note is that St. John intended it to be so, and that the meaning found by us in the passage is that which it was the purpose of the Apostle to convey. It is the true historical interpretation of what he says; and the idea of any millennial reign of Jesus and His saints between the end of this present dispensation and the beginning of eternity ought to be dismissed from our minds.

Before closing this note it may be well to remind the reader that the great Christian creeds present the same striking exclusion of the Millennium which is to be found both in the passage that we have been considering and in all the other Scripture notices of the Lord's Second Coming. ‘From whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead' (Apostles' Creed);

‘Ascended into heaven; shall come to judge the quick and the dead' (Nicene Creed); ‘And shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end' (Constantinopolitan Creed); ‘At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies' (Athanasian Creed).

To the same effect is the language of the Westminster Confession, ‘At the last day, such as are found alone shall not die, but be changed; and all the dead shall be raised up' (xxxii. 11); while the Larger Catechism is still more definite, ‘Immediately after the resurrection shall follow the general and final judgment of angels and men' (Qu. 88).