The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,
and the young child will put [its] hand into the viper’s nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.
(Isaiah 11:6-9, NIV)
Jesus returns. And then the world is transformed. A glorious, joyous new age, a true ‘golden age’, begins. What will it be like? (And what’s all that about a wonderful ‘millennium’ to come on earth? Will there be such a thing?)
(This is an extended post!)
Equally godly Christians disagree about this. What we’re doing in these posts is setting out the more ‘literal’ way of understanding it all, and how it makes sense of the biblical data.
So, Revelation. From maybe chapter 8 through to Jesus’ triumphant appearance at the end of chapter 19, we read of that brief period when God allows us to learn what rejection of His reign really means, the ultimate revelation of the cost of wilful independence from God: the earth poisoned, horrific slaughter in global warfare, famine, disease, and the totalitarian rule of the ultimate dictator as Satan’s final assault is embodied in the rise of the Animal, whose image must be worshipped on pain of death (13:15).(1) By chapter 16 ‘the kings of the whole world’ have been gathered, in Palestine, for ‘the battle on the great day of God Almighty’. At the end of these chapters, the end of chapter 19, God says, ‘Enough.’ Jesus rides out of heaven, returning to earth as King of kings. The ‘kings of the earth and their armies’ unite under the Animal to fight Him, but their rebellion is futile and catastrophic; the Lord reigns (19:19-21). Hallelujah!
Zechariah 12–14 seems to present the same horrendous events. ‘All the nations of the earth’ are gathered against Jerusalem (12:3); two-thirds of the Jews are being slaughtered (13:8); Jerusalem itself ‘will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped’ (14:2). It is the final crisis of the final crisis. But as a minority of Israel calls on the Lord for rescue, He answers (13:9): God says, again, ‘Enough!’ ‘Then the LORD will go out and fight against those nations, as he fights in the day of battle. On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives’ (14:3). Just as the angels predicted in Acts 1, ‘this same Jesus’ has come back ’in the same way [His disciples had] seen him go into heaven’, and to the same place (Acts 1:12). The inhabitants of Jerusalem:
`will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a first-born son … On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity.` (Zechariah 12:10; 13:1)
And from then on ‘The LORD will be king over the whole earth’ (14:9). Amen!
But what happens after that?
Obviously a good place to start looking for answers as to what comes after Revelation 19 might be Revelation 20! Chapter 20 describes 1,000 years – the ‘millennium’ – when Satan is bound, ‘to keep him from deceiving the nations any more until the thousand years were ended’ (20:2), while the people who have been martyred because of their refusal to worship the Animal come to life and reign with Christ for the 1,000 years (20:4). Those who take the more ‘literal’ approach, that Christ’s second coming precedes and leads into all this – alas, perhaps we do now have to use that destructive word ‘pre-millennialists’ – see this as a truly golden age, when for 1,000 years this world is freed from Satan’s works, and becomes, thrillingly, everything it was created for.(2) (Papias, who lived around AD60 to 130 and was indirect contact with those who heard Christ and the apostles, and who may himself have been a disciple of John, the author of Revelation, stated that ‘the Lord used to teach concerning those [end] times [that] there will be a period of a thousand years after the resurrection of the dead, and the kingdom of Christ will be set up in material form on this very earth’. (3))
In other words, importantly, Satan doesn’t win even in this world; on this planet, and not only by the coming of a new earth, the triumph of God will be made fully manifest. ‘God didn’t create the earth to simply screw it up like a piece of paper and throw it away,’ writes charismatic father-figure Roger Forster, explaining why he is ‘staunchly pre-millennialist’.(4) Satan will never be able to say to Christ, ‘But that beautiful world, at least, I ruined permanently; you never got it back.’ This earth, this one, will become a paradise! – one where the wolf lies down with the lamb, and the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (See such prophecies as saiah 11:1-12; it’s important to grasp that this isn’t just a vision in Revelation 20.) Jesus comes back as King, and all heaven breaks loose!
Now, Bible Christians who are less ‘literalist’ in these matters – ‘amillennialists’, to use the technical term one more time – view Revelation 20 differently. They mostly see Revelation as doubling back at this point (which is something it probably does elsewhere(5), eg at 12:1), to history’s central event: Christ’s triumph through the cross. They link the binding of Satan in 20:2 (by an angel, it must be noted) to Matthew 12:28-29, where Christ explains that to liberate Satan’s captives, He must first ‘bind the strong man’; and then to the indisputable effects of Christ’s triumph over Satan during His ministry on earth, and above all through Calvary (John 12:31; Colossians 2:15; Hebrews 2:14). Many amillennialists, therefore, read Revelation 20:4:
`I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshipped the beast [the Animal] or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years`
— as a glorious picture of the Church’s authority in Christ now that Satan is bound (or ‘driven out’, John 12:31, which could possibly parallel Satan being ‘locked’ out in Revelation 20:3); now that ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to’ Jesus (Matthew 28:18), and hence to us as we share His throne (Revelation 3:21).(6) (Those of us who take a different perspective should pause here to taste the sheer glory of this interpretation!) And so Revelation 20 is now; and although there may still be a final rebellion at the End (20:7-9), no future ‘golden age’ follows it in this world.(7). The Jews’ rejection of Christ has meant that God’s promises to them find fulfilment in Christ and the Church as the new Israel, and therefore are reinterpreted with solely a spiritual rather than also a physical fulfilment. After our present age is over we move straight into the final judgement and the coming of the new heaven and new earth (20:11-21:1).(8)
Either interpretation – Christ returning triumphantly as King to turn the earth, literally, into the paradise it was first created to be; or Christ reigning invisibly but absolutely now, and delegating His authority over Satan to us – offers us tremendous encouragement. But (leaving aside for the moment all the passages we’ve been feeding on in the previous post about God’s promises for the ethnic Jews), the question here is: Which approach seems to match most tightly with what Revelation 20 actually says?
And here, it seems to me, what we’ve been calling the more ‘literal’ approach repeatedly scores most highly:
1. Accepting that Revelation’s narrative does sometimes ‘double back’, surely it is not doing so here. The people who ‘[come] to life and [reign] with Christ for a thousand years’ are specifically those who have not worshipped the Animal or its image and have not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. This means we are looking at a time later than the horrific end-time events of chapter 13 (and 2 Thessalonians 2:4), a time later than the emergence of the Animal for (13:5) the final crisis of history.(9) When chapter 20 comes that crisis is over; the Animal has been finally defeated with Christ’s open return as King in 19:20. It’s after this climax of the end time that the believers the Animal has martyred come to life and reign for a thousand years.
2. Again, Revelation 20:10 clearly follows on and completes the judgment of Revelation 19:20. In 19:20 the Animal and his false prophet have been thrown into the lake of fire, and then in 20:10, if the NIV is accurate, we are told that Satan joins them there where they ‘had been thrown’ (emphasis mine); the two judgements aren’t simultaneous. In that case the first two evil beings are judged at the time of Christ’s open return as King in 19:20, but the final judgment of Satan himself takes place significantly later than that; and Revelation 20 certainly reads as if the millennium happens between the two.
3. Why are there the repeated references to the ‘thousand years’ at all (vv2,3,4,5,6,7), if they refer to our present era? The respected ‘non-literalist’ writer Hoekema sees these references as standing for ‘a very long period of indeterminate length’.(10) But given how important it seems to be that we shouldn’t know how long our present era is and how long the time before the second coming may be (so that even Jesus chose to share our ignorance, Matthew 24:36), what sense does it make (what does it add) to state any length for it at all? Unless, of course, that 1,000 years is quite literal?
4. A ‘non-literalist’ like Storms must see the events of 20:7-9 as the final crisis of our present era.(11) But are we to see all the horrific judgements of the forty-two-month crisis happening during these verses? Also, this means that Satan’s being released from the abyss in 20:7 equals his being cast out of heaven (likewise triggering the start of that crisis) in 12:8-9,13. Being released from the abyss equals being cast out of heaven – that seems very odd indeed.
5. But for me, the biggest problem is the most obvious: however can we see our present era as a time when Satan is kept ‘from deceiving the nations any more’, as Revelation 20:3 puts it? ‘Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour’, says 1 Peter 5:8; beware of Satan tempting us, says 1 Corinthians 7:5; Satan is ‘the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient’, says Ephesians 2:2 (emphasis mine); as the ‘god of this age’ (a highly noteworthy phrase in this connection!), Satan has ‘blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel’ (2 Corinthians 4:4).(12) In Revelation 20:3, in contrast, Mounce notes, ‘The abyss is sealed (cf Dan 6:17, Matt 27:66) as a special precaution against escape’ (emphasis mine); so that as premillennialist Wayne Grudem puts it, Revelation 20:3’s reference to Satan being ‘locked and sealed’ away surely ‘gives a picture of total removal from influence on the earth.’(13) How then can Revelation 20:2-3 be referring to our present era and our situation now?
In short, then, Revelation 20 seems to make most sense as describing what happens after Jesus returns, overthrowing the Animal and starting to reign openly as King, in chapter 19. ‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, we pray; now it happens! There is indeed a golden age on earth; a key part is played by those martyred by the Animal (20:4); and it is centred on Jerusalem, the ‘city [God] loves’ (and which Satan tries to destroy in his final rebellion before the last judgment, 20:9).
But of course we do not come to this conclusion merely because of Revelation 20, but because of what we read throughout the Bible. There’s Isaiah 11 where the time when God is bringing His people back to Israel ‘a second time’ from the ends of the earth, ‘from Cush, from Elam, from Babylonia, from Hamath and from the islands of the sea’ (vv11-16) is also ‘that day’ when ‘The wolf will live with the lamb … They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD’ (vv6,9).(14) And there’s Isaiah 65:20-25 where we read of a renewed earthly paradise that is yet one where death is rare but possible (unlike the eternal ‘new heaven and new earth’ from which death has vanished, Revelation 21:4). Psalm 72:5-11 describes the messianic King who will rule ‘as long as the sun … from the River to the ends of the earth. The desert tribes will bow before him and his enemies will lick the dust. The kings of … distant shores will bring tribute to him’ (again this doesn’t sound quite like the situation in eternity?). In Zechariah 9:10, the messianic King will ‘take away … the war-horses from Jerusalem, and the battle-bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea.’ And in the closing chapter of Zechariah, after the final conflict and the second coming the Lord is reigning, but again sin and rebellion are still possible, so there need to be clear sanctions against the ‘survivors from all the nations that … attacked Jerusalem’ if they refuse to worship Him there (14:16-19; see also Isaiah 60:10-12). Plus we have all those many other passages we’ve considered in our post about ethnic Israel – eg Deuteronomy 30, Isaiah 2 and 60, Jeremiah 3, Joel 3, Amos 9, Obadiah, Micah 4 and 7, Zechariah 2, Romans 11 – which present huge blessing to ethnic Israel as a key component of what happens at the End. And most clearly of all, it’s because of the long prophecy of Ezekiel 40 to 48, which seems so strange if it is to be spiritualised and only means that ‘God will have a House in the Church and that will be great’, rather than what it actually says, that the temple of the Lord will be restored in Jerusalem (chs 40–42), the glory of the Lord will return there physically (chapter 43), and life, a power of literal life, will flow gloriously out of it, life flooding out in rejuvenation to all the dead lands (chapter 47)!
So what will happen in the time after Jesus returns?
It will be amazing beyond our wildest dreams! The creation, which for so long has been ‘subjected to frustration’ and ‘groaning as in the pains of childbirth’, will be joyfully ‘liberated from its bondage to decay’, exults Paul (Romans 8:20-22) (15):
`The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,
and the young child will put [its] hand into the viper’s nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea!` (Isaiah 11:6-9)
Is a physical millennium, a paradise on earth, a climax or an anticlimax after what we have of God’s kingdom now? I suggest it’s a climax of the kind C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien enthused about, where in the End of the ages ‘myth’ (the hidden, the symbolic, the spiritual) becomes clothed, visibly expressed at last, in the physical. (See Tolkien’s Tree and Leaf.) Probably a feature of this recreated world after Christ’s return will be that the physical expresses the spiritual in a way it seldom does now. So although Ezekiel’s river in the wonderful chapter 47 is a great picture of life and healing flowing out of God’s house (and by glorious implication, of how life can flow out into all the deadlands of society from His Church now [John 7:38]), isn’t the most reasonable primary reading, given how literal are the rest of Ezekiel’s details (all those careful temple measurements), that, after God’s glory returns there, the river that flows out from the temple will carry literal life?:
`I saw a great number of trees on each side of the river. He said to me … ‘When it empties into the [Dead] Sea, the water there becomes fresh. Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows. There will be large numbers of fish, because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh; so where the river flows everything will live. Fishermen will stand along the shore …’
(Read Ezekiel 47:1-12; it’s tremendous!)
Somehow the bringing of all this ‘life from the dead’ to a hugely damaged world will involve the Jewish followers of Jesus (returning to Romans 11:15); and let’s note, Paul says this will amount (amazingly and almost inconceivably) to blessing greater even than salvation extending to the Gentiles in his lifetime (11:12)! (16)
`Till the Spirit is poured on us from on high,
and the desert becomes a fertile field,
and the fertile field seems like a forest …
The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom;
it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.` (Isaiah 32:15; 35:1-2)
‘Sit enthroned, O Jerusalem’, says Isaiah 52:2; Jerusalem will be, as Jesus said, ‘the city of the Great King’ (Matthew 5:35; what could He be referring to but this, when He Himself will reign over the earth from there?(17)
And with the Lord reigning in Jerusalem, what will that mean for worship? Isaiah 2:2-4 says clearly:
`In the last days, the mountain of the LORD’S temple
will be established as chief among the mountains;
it will be raised above the hills,
and all nations will stream to it.
Many peoples will come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He will judge between the nations,
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war any more!`
(It’s the situation that was foreshadowed briefly with Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, but this time it’s permanent. However, a situation where there are disputes to be settled is obviously something other than that of eternity.(18)) The last five verses of Zechariah make clear that ‘going up to Jerusalem to worship the King’ will be central to that era’s spirituality; and so does Jeremiah 3:17: ‘At that time they will call Jerusalem The Throne of the LORD, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honour the name of the LORD’! (Amen! Hallelujah!)
(One reaction one often hears to all this is: But how can any system of temple sacrifices be instituted again, as Ezekiel 44-46 – and Jeremiah 33:18 and Zechariah 14:21 – indicate? Wouldn’t this be regressing back to the Old Testament era? And obviously [this is the point of Hebrews 10] there could never be any idea of sacrifices that in any sense could ‘take away sins’ [Hebrews 10:4,11,18]. But perhaps it should not surprise us if after the second coming, in this centre of global worship [Zechariah 14:16-19], Christ’s death is remembered through the symbolism of animal sacrifices, the grim bloodshed of which illustrates so powerfully the horrific cost of our sin, and the colossal price Christ paid for us. [After all, Paul tells us that by taking the symbols of the bread and wine we ‘proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Corinthians 11:26, emphasis mine)!] In an almost exact parallel, the bread and wine now do not ‘take away sins’: they too are given to us as a powerful reminder of the cross, which did. In the millennium, it may seem, a different reminder will be given to us.)
And what about everyday life? Here Scripture cannot tell us much, given that the new age obviously follows upon one as developed (at least) as our own, where everyday life has cultural forms unimaginable to the biblical writers. But I loved the speculations in the chapter titled ‘The Redemption of London’ in Andrew Wilson’s superb apologetics book If God, Then What?:
`People in the redeemed London live without anything to prove, in complete security, and this has all sorts of implications that make it hard to recognise as London … People on the Tube make eye contact with one another and smile, instead of hiding behind their newspapers, because now strangers are not people to be avoided because they’re all scary, but people to be celebrated because they are all happy … The roads are weird: taxis don’t cut one another up around Parliament Square or Hyde Park Corner, nobody honks their horn in frustration, bus drivers look happy, and you can’t hear any sirens … Metro doesn’t have any negative stories anymore, and nobody kills or abuses or cheats on any one … The oddest thing about the redemption of London is the way people work … People still work, but they do it not so much for their own benefit as for the whole community. The City is still there, but all the financial whizz-kids spend their best years trying to work out how to use money to help the most people. All the advertising agencies up by Goodge Street use their creativity and communication skills to praise what is honourable and admirable for its own sake. Oxford Street, would you believe, has become a massive open-air market, where every product you can find is crafted with care … Every square inch of the city has had the good reinforced, and the bad removed, and it spills over into the arts scene, the architecture, the public spaces, even the government. It’s a sight to see.` (19)
(Ironically, I understand Wilson himself wouldn’t hold to the approach we’re setting out in this book, but his chapter is a glorious response to this question nonetheless.)
Whatever it’s like, the new age is going to be made wonderful beyond belief! Thank You, Jesus!
But let’s not forget: What God has prepared for us in eternity – when ‘the mortal’ has finally been ‘clothed …with immortality’, gloriously ‘swallowed up by life’ (1 Corinthians 15:53; 2 Corinthians 5:4) – is unimaginably better still!
And now an important PS…
One thing I’m looking forward to when I get to heaven is learning what I was wrong about!
I know I won’t be wrong about Jesus being God, or about Him dying to pay for our sins according to the Scriptures – the kind of things 1 Corinthians 15:3 calls ‘of first importance’. But I may well find my sisters and brothers were right and I was wrong about, say, the charismatic gift of prophecy, or election and free will, or what does and does not grieve the Spirit about women’s ministry: things that equally godly Bible Christians see differently. The approach set out in this post is like that. It may be wrong!
It’s true too that the viewpoint set out here is very much a minority one, at least on this side of the Atlantic. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. Early in the second century AD the great apologist Justin Martyr affirmed, ‘I and others are assured that there will be a resurrection of the dead and a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned and enlarged’, while recognising that ‘many who are true Christians think otherwise.’(20) (The ‘others’ from the second century that we know about who awaited the millennial transformation of the natural world included the author of the Epistle to Barnabas, and Papias, Irenaeus and Tertullian.) Again, second-century believers went thoroughly astray on other things. Nevertheless, it’s a shame that this whole perspective is almost forgotten in our own country and era; we may very well come to need it.
So that’s why this post was written!
—
(1) Matthew 24:22 is very interesting here: ‘If those days’ (the ‘great distress, unequalled from the beginning of the world’, v21) ‘had not been cut short, no-one would survive.’ So the issue determining that God steps in to ‘cut short’ this terrible time is that otherwise no one would be left alive on earth. But that raises a striking question: if, as ‘non-literalists’ say, there were no millennium on earth to follow, and this world were
about to end anyway, why would this matter?
(2) It is ‘the day of the greatest glory for the world’, William Kelly, Lectures on the Book of the Revelation (A S Rouse, 1893), p443.
(3) Quoted by John Warwick Montgomery in Handbook of Biblical Prophecy, ed Carl Armerding and Ward Gasque (Baker, 1977), p177.
(4) In Doing a New Thing?, ed Brian Hewitt (Hodder, 1995), p126. It’s worth noting that Roger Forster has been one of Britain’s most motivational teachers of how we can bring in God’s kingdom now, of getting as much heaven on earth as possible now: see his book The Kingdom of Jesus (Authentic, 2002). Premillennialism certainly need not contradict that vision, despite what’s sometimes suggested.
(5) Revelation’s three sequences of seven judgements – seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls – don’t overlap entirely, but all apparently culminate in a climax of ‘earthquake, thunder and hail’ (6:12-17; 11:15-19; 16:17-21) that seems to mark the End; after which the narrative recommences.
(6) There is an alternative amillennialist interpretation, where those martyred by antichrist forces throughout the Christian era have been raised spiritually and are reigning now, not on earth, but in the supernatural universe. Sam Storms affirms this by arguing (Kingdom Come, p458) that Revelation 20:4 parallels the words of Revelation 6:9-11, and notes particularly the reference to the martyrs’ ‘souls’ being what is seen, in both cases. But: 1) Isn’t ‘reigning’ an extremely odd description for what is happening in 6:9-11? – odd enough to necessitate a clear distinction between the martyrs’ situation in chapter 6 and their reigning at a different time in chapter 20? Furthermore, the place in the early chapters where we read about God’s people reigning is Revelation 5:10, and there it is explicitly ‘on the earth’. 2) ‘Came to life’ and ‘resurrection’ (Revelation 20:4,6) seem somewhat strange ways for John to describe a spiritual resurrection that happens to the martyrs, since, as far as the supernatural universe is concerned, these believers had surely ‘come to life’ and been ‘raised with Christ’ ever since they were born again (John 5:24, Ephesians 2:5-6)? 3) Both the verb’s other uses in Revelation, 2:8 and 13:14, apply to a physical resurrection. 4) Arguably, John says ‘souls’ here precisely because he then watched these people ‘come to life’, ie in a physical resurrection. 5) The ‘rest of the dead’ ‘come to life’ in verse 5, and since they (or many of them) are unbelievers this certainly is not a spiritual but a physical resurrection; why then should the ‘resurrection’ of the martyrs in the previous verse be any different? So Storms’ suggestion seems improbable.
(7) For me, the strongest of Storms’ arguments against a literal, this-worldly millennial kingdom in chapter 5 of Kingdom Come is when he draws upon 1 Corinthians 15:50: ‘I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’. But we must all agree that the biblical phrase ‘kingdom of God’ refers to something that comes in stages, starting clearly within this very ‘flesh-and-blood’ world in the Gospels (see Matthew 11:12; 12:28; Mark 1:15; 9:1, and indeed Paul’s own words in Romans 14:17 and 1 Corinthians 4:20); even though equally it sometimes refers to the future (eg Luke 13:28-29). In Matthew 21:31 ‘the tax collectors and the prostitutes’ (flesh and blood, presumably) ‘are entering the kingdom of God’; Paul himself is joyfully announcing the kingdom’s arrival on earth while still very much in the body in the closing verse of Acts. It seems, then, that in 1 Corinthians 15:50 he happens to be using the term to refer only to the ultimate stage where we at last ‘inherit’ all God has for us (until then we only have a ‘deposit’, not the full inheritance, Ephesians 1:14); something on the way to which even the glory of the millennium is only an incomplete though wonderful stage that he passes over. Storms might argue, however, that in this case it’s odd that someone as aware as Paul of God’s Old Testament promises should not have felt a need to make things clearer. Another thing to bear in mind however is the possibility that (as perhaps 1 Cor 15 indicates) we Christians maybe go straight to the new universe at the rapture (whenever that is), and the millennium, fulfilling the old testament prophecies, is at least primarily for the Christ-following Jews and the martyrs, who join us after it.
(8) 2 Peter 3:10-12 does sound as if the second coming, ‘that day’, immediately brings the end of this cosmos when ‘everything will be destroyed’ – but we need to be careful what conclusions we draw from this since what Peter has just said is, ‘With the Lord a day is like a thousand years’! If I myself were arguing the ‘nonliteral’ case I would emphasise here Revelation 11:18, where at the end of the final crisis the elders say, ‘The time has come for judging the dead’; this does sound like the great white throne at the end of the millennium, implying that the millennium is something that has come to a close by the end of chapter 11. (The reference to all those on earth seeing ‘the face of him who sits on the throne’ at the end of chapter 6 could support this too.) One response is that it may well be that time viewed from heaven (eg by the heavenly elders) is rather different from time as experienced on earth; again, ‘With the Lord a day is like a thousand years’! Another is that this could be referring to the judgment of Matthew 25:31, before the millennium, rather than the great white throne. Yet another is that if Revelation 12:1ff sees a recapitulation (as most amillennialists would agree), going back to prehistory and the fall of Satan, then it is not surprising that the narrative of chapter 11 extends first to the very end of our planet’s history.
(9) It’s worth remembering here that even such strong proponents of the ‘non-literal’ approach as Kim Riddlebarger (A Case for Amillennialism), eg pp146,155,272, and Sam Storms (Kingdom Come), pp36,546-47, while recognising the ‘repeated manifestation’ of what the Animal represents throughout history, also look to its embodiment in the rise of a specific, ultimately evil end-time dictator.
(10) In The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views, ed Robert Clouse (InterVarsity Press, 1977), p161. Hoekema adds rather confidently, ‘Obviously the number “thousand” which is used here must not be interpreted in a literal sense’, because ‘Revelation is full of symbolic numbers.’ But is it? What significant symbolism is communicated by 1260, or forty-two, or three and a half?
(11) Cf Storms, p466.
(12) For other clear examples of Satan’s deceptive activity since the cross see Acts 5:3, 1 Thessalonians 2:18 and 2 Timothy 2:26.
(13) Robert Mounce, commentary on Revelation in the New International Commentary on the New Testament series (Eerdmans, 1977), p353, my italics; Wayne Grudem, Bible Doctrine, p447.
(14) And how would Christ’s ruling over the nations ‘with an iron sceptre’ (Revelation 12:5) fit into the eternal state?
(15) This is something that Storms sees as instantaneous, and therefore presents as a reason why a literal millennial age is impossible (pp137,153). But the coming of God’s renewing kingdom has always been step by step, and there is no reason at all why the creation’s liberation should not receive a wonderful beginning with the advent of the millennium (Revelation 20), where the ‘wolf and the lamb will feed together’, and then be brought on to entire, triumphant completion with the arrival of the ultimate ‘new heaven and new earth’ (Revelation 21).
(16) See again Douglas Moo’s commentary on Romans in the New International Commentary on the New Testament series, pp694-95.
(17) `And the name of the city from that time on will be: THE LORD IS THERE’ (Ezekiel’s closing verse, 48:35).
(18) Compare also Joel 3, where the world of verse 18, wonderfully restored after the final battle of verses 9-16 to one where ‘the mountains will drip new wine’, is still one where Edom is ‘a desert waste, because of violence done to the people of Judah’.
(19) Andrew Wilson, If God, Then What? (Inter-Varsity Press, 2012), pp121-23.
(20) Quoted by Montgomery, pp177-78.
(This is a slightly edited version of a chapter from my A Guide to the End of the World, available on Kindle or in book form from https://instantapostle.com/books/a-guide-to-the-end-of-the-world/ .)
