Revelation 20

¹ Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. ² And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, ³ and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while. ⁴ Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. ⁵ The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. ⁶ Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years. ⁷ And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison ⁸ and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. ⁹ And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, ¹⁰ and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

On September 6, 1934, the following headline appeared on the front page of The New York Times: “HITLER FORECASTS NO REICH OVERTURN IN NEXT 1,000 YEARS; Proclamation to Nazi Congress Says Movement Won’t Yield No Matter What Happens.”

It begins:

NUREMBERG, Sept. 5. — Chancellor Adolf Hitler today proclaimed the arrival of the Nazi millennium, predicting that the next 1,000 years would not witness another revolution in Germany. He was equally positive that the National Socialist movement had now become absolute master of the Reich and that its leadership rested in the hands of its best men.[1]

Hitler and his followers referred to Nazi Germany as the “Third Reich.” (“Reich” is the German word for “realm.”) The Third Reich is a term that is widely known today. The Holy Roman Empire (800-1806) was the First Reich and the German Empire (1871-1918) was the Second Reich. But Hitler was seen as ushering in the Third Reich. It had another name: the “Thousand-Year Reich.” The idea of “a Thousand-Year Reich” (Tausendjähriges Reich) was an idea which “was inspired explicitly by the millennial reign of the saints prophesied in Revelation.”[2]

How fascinating. How tragic. Hitler prophesied a millennial Nazi reign, a thousand years of German utopian rule. But he was wrong. Very wrong. The so-called Third Reich would last just over a decade and it was marked not by a utopian golden age but rather by horror, by violence, by pain, and by a deep wounding that lingers among humanity to our very day.

In Revelation 20, however, we find the exact opposite. We find a prophesied coming millennial reign quite different from Hitler’s prophesy. Revelation foretells a coming thousand-year reign of Christ with His saints on the earth after the battle of Armageddon. It will be ruled by Jesus Christ and the devil will be imprisoned during it. Wickedness will cease and there will indeed be a utopian age of peace.

The idea of the millennium, found only here in Revelation, has proved unbelievably controversial. For the record, I would consider myself a premillennialist, by which I mean that Jesus returns before a millennial reign. The idea of some kind of a millennial reign for the Messiah was actually a Jewish concept. Leon Morris writes:

The idea of a messianic reign was congenial to Jewish thought. In 4 Ezra 7:28 the Messiah is said to be with his people for 400 years and Strack-Billerbeck draw attention to estimates varying from forty years (R. Akiba) to 7,000 years (R. Abbahu), with Rabbi Eliezer, usually dated c. AD 90, speaking of 1,000 years (S Bk, iii, p. 824).[3]

I also agree with John Newport that millennialism was the “early church view.”[4]

To be frank, I am not overly concerned about whether or not the number 1,000 is taken literally or symbolically here. Leon Morris argues for the latter.

We should take this symbolically. One thousand is the cube of ten, the number of completeness. We have seen it used over and over again in this book to denote completeness of some sort and John is surely saying here that Satan is bound for the complete time that God has determined.[5]

He may have a point. The number of ten is frequently used in apparently symbolic ways throughout Revelation. Consider:

• “for ten days you will have tribulation. Be faithful unto death…” (2:10)

• “The number of mounted troops was twice ten thousand times ten thousand…” (9:16)

• “behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns…” (12:3)

• “a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns…with ten diadems on its horns” (13:1)

• “a scarlet beast…and it had seven heads and ten horns” (17:3)

• “and the ten horns that you saw are ten kings…” (17:12)

And yet, on the other hand, Danny Akin points out that “[n]ever in Scripture when the word year is used with a number is its meaning not literal.”[6]

This seems less important to me than the idea of the millennium itself. Let us consider what this means. We will consider it first with a focus on what it means for Satan and then on what it means for the church.

The Millennium for Satan: Imprisonment/Release/Judgment

Simply put, the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth after His return does not bode well for the devil. It is rather a picture of (1) imprisonment, (2) release, and then (3) judgment.

¹ Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. ² And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, ³ and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.

Once again we see that it is not Jesus who deals directly with the devil but rather an angel. I repeat: the devil is not an equal opposite to Jesus. The devil is a created and defeated being! Scott Duvall wisely observes:

What is striking at first glance is that God delegates the imprisonment of Satan to an anonymous angel. This divine delegation once again stresses that Satan is God’s opponent but not God’s opposite. God simply tells an angel to take care of it.[7]

There is almost a “ho-hum” air to the imprisonment of Satan here. He is a groveling and weak thing whose days are numbered. Notice the titles of Satan in verse 2: “the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan.” He has gone by many names, but there is no doubting who he is. He is thrown into a pit and sealed therein “until the thousand years were ended.” The upshot of his imprisonment is that he can no longer “deceive the nations.” His corrupting influence is now mitigated and he is silenced.

After the millennium he will be released for a bit but this is also to his final and guaranteed doom.

⁷ And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison ⁸ and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. ⁹ And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, ¹⁰ and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

In the millennium Satan is imprisoned. After this he is let loose and he deceives the nations, spoken of here as Gog and Magog. Who are these deceived nations if it is Christ and the people of God who are on the earth in the millennium? Scott Duvall offers a helpful idea here:

More likely, the nations are to be identified with all the wicked dead who are now pulled back from the dead (i.e., the “rest of the dead” mentioned in 20:5). The release of Satan and the retrieval of wicked humanity parallel one another. The “four corners of the earth” serves here as a figurative expression for the entrances to the underworld. Gog and Magog, understood in a variety of ways in the Old Testament, here symbolize the wicked people/nations who were killed in the first battle (19:17–21), imprisoned with Satan, brought back from the dead at Satan’s release (20:5), and now further deceived by Satan into fighting against God’s people.[8]

After his release and last-gasp efforts at standing against the Lamb he will be ultimately destroyed and “thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”

The devil’s reign of terror will have an end. It will not last forever. He will be overthrown and thrown down and cast into the lake of fire. The Lamb’s victory over the serpent, the dragon, will be complete.

The Millennium for the Church: The Bride Reigns with the Lamb

But what of the church, the people of God, in the millennium? Here the picture is different.

⁴ Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed.

There have been numerous theories as to the identity of those seated upon the thrones, but it is likely best to see them as all of God’s people. Recall that in 1 Corinthians 6 Paul said this to the church of Corinth and, by extension, to us all:

^2a Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world?

So in the millennium the people of God are gathered to Jesus and reign with him. Verse 4 and onward reveals this to be the case.

⁴ Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. ⁵ The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. ⁶ Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.

This is an important passage and helps us understand a number of things:

• Martyrdom is not a final defeat. “Those who had been beheaded” are resurrected.

• The resurrection is guaranteed to all of God’s people.

• Those outside of Christ do not rise for judgment until after the millennium, after the first resurrection of those who are in Christ.

• Followers of the Lamb are given victory over death in the resurrection. Death’s power is broken.

• We will be called to practice a holy priesthood in the millennium, a priesthood that we are even now to practice with one another.

This last point is profoundly important. The idea of “the priesthood of all believers” was most powerfully spelled out by Peter in 1 Peter 2.

⁵ you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

⁹ But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. ¹⁰ Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

We are called, then, to be a priesthood church together, that is to share in our common calling to holiness and to the offering of sacrifices of love and service. But what strikes me as most interesting is the verb tenses of 1 Peter 2 and Revelation 20. Compare:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood…. (1 Peter 2:9)

…but they will be priests of God and of Christ… (Revelation 20:6)

Do you see? You are what you will be. You will be what you are. It is just that we will be in a higher and better sense what we currently are in a lower and struggling sense. But in terms of divine proclamation the future and present realities are to be the same.

We are priests.

We will be priests.

This is important. Why? Because it shows us that our future reality in, first, the millennium, and then in the new heaven and the new earth is a reality to which are called right now!

Life is not a holding pattern in which we wait to put our wheels down in an utterly new reality. Rather, life as a follower of Jesus is a living out now, no matter how imperfectly and with how much difficulty, of the same reality into which we will be perfected in the years to come.

The glory to come is therefore not a different reality for the child of God. It is a perfected and unveiled reality, the beginnings of which we are currently living in.

This exact same reality is demonstrated in 1 Corinthians 6 when Paul is rebuking the Corinthian believers for having lawsuits against one another. Listen closely:

¹ When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? ² Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? ³ Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life!

Ah! There it is! Notice the two statements that comprise both verse 2 and verse 3. The first is future tense. The second is present tense. If you are going to judge the world in the millennium, can you not judge rightly between yourselves now?!If you are going to judge angels, can you not judge rightly in “matters pertaining to this life!”

This means we have biblical warrant for fleshing this out further:

• If you are going to live in peace in Heaven, can you not live in peace now?

• If there will be no gossip in Heaven, can we not dispense with gossip now?

• If we are going to love each other in Heaven, can we not love one another now?

• If the thought of sin is going to appear absurd in Heaven, can it not appear so now?

• If we are not going to hurt each other in Heaven, can we not hurt each other now?

• If we are going to praise God with purity of heart in Heaven, can we not praise Him so now?

• If we will be joyful in Heaven, can we not be joyful now?

With all due respect to E.E. Hewitt’s great 1898 hymn, this does call into question a bit the refrain:

When we all get to heaven,
what a day of rejoicing that will be!
When we all see Jesus,
we’ll sing and shout the victory!

But why must we wait until “we all get to heaven”? Can we not rejoice now? Can we not “sing and shout the victory now”?

You priests! You followers of the Lamb! You blood-bought saints of God! You mighty church of the risen Savior! You royal priesthood! Can we not begin now to do what we will do perfectly then? Can we not exhibit in our lives even now the work that God will perfect in us then?

Yes! Yes we can! And we must! Let us be here and now a picture of the millennial and then forever reality that is to come: a worshipping and righteous people gathered before and with the Lamb of God, Jesus!

 

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1934/09/06/archives/hitler-forecasts-no-reich-overturn-in-next-1000-years-proclamation.html

[2] Koester, Craig R., ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Book of Revelation. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), p.450.

[3] Morris, Leon L.. Revelation (Tyndale New Testament Commentaries) (p. 223). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] Quoted in Garrett, James Leo, Jr. Systematic Theology. Vol. 2 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1990), p.829.

[5] Morris, Leon L., p. 224.

[6] Exalting Jesus in Revelation (Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary) (pp. 334-335). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[7] Duvall, J. Scott. Revelation (Teach the Text Commentary Series) (p. 276). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[8] Duvall, J. Scott, p. 284.