Ask a room full of faithful, Bible-loving Christians what the "thousand years" of Revelation 20 means, and you may get more answers than you have chairs. These are not careless people. They pray, study, and submit to Scripture, yet they walk away from the same ten verses with very different pictures of the future. How can that be?
This series on Revelation 20 will not hand you a survey and leave you in the aisle, unsure which door to take. It aims to help you read a hard chapter well, and to leave you more settled in the faith your church has confessed. We begin with the passage itself.
The passage this all turns on
Revelation 20:1–10 is the only place in the New Testament that names the thousand years — in Greek, ta chilia etē, from which we get the word "millennium." Not a doctrine woven through the Gospels and Paul, but a single vision in the Bible's most symbolic book:
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.
A binding, a reign, a raising, a release, a final fire. Whatever you conclude about the thousand years is decided largely here, but never only here.
The thesis: you never read the millennium alone
You cannot settle the millennium in isolation. Faithful readers land in different places on these ten verses because they already disagree about four bigger things, and each brings that disagreement to Revelation 20 rather than getting it from it.
Decide what "they came to life" means in verse 4, and you have quietly settled a question about the resurrection: are the dead raised in one event or two? Say who sits on those thrones, and you have taken a position on Christ's reign: is he enthroned now, or only later? Ask who inherits its promises, and you have defined the covenant people of God. Ask what it produces in history, and you have a view of the church and her mission.
So the way forward is not to squint harder at ten symbolic verses, but to read them by the light of the passages, and the doctrines, that are not in dispute.
The method: two old guides for a hard passage
Reading the obscure by the clear is the historic Protestant way of reading Scripture, and it travels under two names worth learning.
1. The analogy of Scripture (Latin analogia Scripturae): Scripture interprets Scripture, and the clear passages govern the obscure ones. You do not build a doctrine on the hardest verse and bend the plain ones around it. The 1689 London Baptist Confession makes this the church's own rule:
"The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture it self: And therefore when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold but one) it must be searched by other places that speak more clearly." — 1689 Confession, ch. 1, ¶9
If any passage's "true and full sense" is genuinely in question, it is this one. So search it by other places that speak more clearly. Those clearer places are what this series calls the four anchors.
2. The rule of faith (Latin regula fidei): the church's settled summary of what Scripture as a whole teaches, the great doctrines Christians have confessed together across the centuries. We do not come to a hard passage as blank slates. A good confession is that rule of faith written down, a faithful digest of Scripture's clear teaching.
A word about authority
A confessional reader will rightly bristle if the Confession sounds like a rival to the Bible. It is not. It is a ministerial guide, a servant under the magisterial authority of Scripture. It says so itself in the very next paragraph, insisting that "the supream judge" of every controversy "can be no other but the Holy Scripture" (ch. 1, ¶10).
So the Confession is trustworthy not because it outranks Scripture but because it faithfully summarizes it. Reading Revelation 20 with it in hand does not let a human document overrule the vision. It lets the clear, confessed teaching of Scripture interpret Scripture's obscure corner. We are not adding to the Bible; we are refusing to read one hard chapter apart from the rest of it.
The four confessional anchors
Each of the four doctrines the millennium touches already has a settled home in the Second London Confession:
| Anchor | The question | 1689 chapter(s) |
|---|---|---|
| The Resurrection | One raising, or two? | ch. 31 (Of the State of Man After Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead); ch. 32 (Of the Last Judgment) |
| Christ's Reign | Enthroned now, or later? | ch. 8 (Of Christ the Mediator) |
| The Covenant | One people, or two? | ch. 7 (Of God's Covenant) |
| The Church | Gather the elect, or Christianize the world? | ch. 26 (Of the Church) |
Revelation 20 is a stormy passage. These four are the fixed points that anchor us to the truth. The posts that follow take them up one at a time, watching how the rival readings fare against each.
But first we have to meet those rivals. Christians read the thousand years in six distinct ways, from a reign still to come, to a reign now underway, to a reign already finished; in 2013 all six were argued side by side at a single conference and published together. The next post, A Field Guide to the Six Views of the Millennium, describes each fairly, in its own terms. Then the testing begins.
Sources: The six views as presented in Criswell Theological Review 11.1 (2013); hermeneutical method from the 1689 London Baptist Confession, ch. 1 (¶¶9–10).