…They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.

Revelation 4b-6

The Thousand Year Reign of Christ is the third apocalyptic element of this passage; an unusual concept for certain. We have in this passage two deaths and two resurrections, a unique way of looking at things to be sure, but which makes perfect sense in light of the scope of Christian Apocalyptic Theology. The first death is the death of the mortal body which all of us will experience sooner or later. It is the death of say, a martyr, who has been “beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus” (20:4a). The second death is illustrated by the symbol of being cast into “the lake of fire”, it is eternal damnation, condemnation or judgment, and it is nothing that will affect a follower of Christ, for we will not “be hurt at all by the second death” (Rev. 2:11).

The first resurrection is the resurrection of Christian martyrs referred to in 20:4-6, a special privilege of being raised to reign with Christ for His thousand year reign before the rest of the church is raised. The second resurrection is when all of the dead, both Christian and non-Christian are raised at the Second Coming.

The concept of eternal damnation (the second death) is referred to often in the New Testament, however John’s mention of two resurrections, one for martyrs and one for everyone else is unique in the Christian canon. The notion of a temporary earthly reign of the Messiah prior to the final judgment appears in Jewish apocalyptic writings (cf. 4 Ezra 7:26-33) but nowhere in the Christian Bible apart from Revelation 20:1-6, and thus we are faced with the interesting task of trying to determine John’s meaning for this image. As we might suspect, there are theories on this subject, each with its adherents. All of them have their strong and weak points, but very few are harmonious with the rest of the New Testament. For the purposes of this study, let’s just think about the subject anew, forgetting what we may have heard and see what we come up with. I’ll give you my conclusions, and then the rest is entirely up to you.

God has always reigned as King of the Universe, exercising ultimate control over the Creation. As we know, Satan entered the picture in Genesis 3 and began to introduce evil into God’s wondrous creation; our world became Satan’s kingdom; God allowed Satan and other malcontents and evildoers to do their dirty work to a certain degree. However, at no time has God ever ceded to Satan His ultimate control. With the coming of Christ, God began to do away with evil and re-establish the good to the earth. Jesus began the work of destroying Satan’s kingdom and building the Kingdom of God by healing the sick and chasing out demons. He called on people to turn away from their old lives and commit to following God’s ways, and by His death on the cross He paid the price for sin, established the New Covenant and made it possible for Man to be reconciled to God by faith in Christ. The result was that both Jew and Gentile could have a covenant relationship with God, receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and enter the “family” of God’s household.

Between the first and second comings of Christ, the two kingdoms coexist on the earth. God’s Kingdom, the Church has a mission to spread the Good News of redemption and reconciliation, and the kingdom of Satan, under attack, fights back in an attempt to hold on to its world dominance. This is John’s notion of Satan “making war” on God and His people, the “tribulation” in which Christians may undergo intense persecution in various forms; “labor pains”. Satan’s allies in this “war” are the beast from the sea and the beast from the earth of chapter 13, Babylon the prostitute from chapter 17 and those men who bear the “mark of the beast” as we have already seen.

Will there be a great Antichrist just before the Second Coming  will things continue to get worse and worse up until the end?

Not necessarily. John spoke of his concept of “antichrist” in a different way: “It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist…”and “even now many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:22, 18) cf. 4:3). When Jesus spoke of a time of “great distress” He was speaking of the whole period being worse than the age before it. Remember, one thing that Jesus made perfectly clear was that when He returns, everyone will be surprised, because it will be a time of business as usual, see Matthew 25. I’m sorry to have to be the one who keeps saying this, but there will not be a sign just before He comes; it could just as easily be today.

When Jesus returns, He will return to the final judgment, just as we have seen in the other visions we have covered in Revelation; this seems to me to be a logical conclusion. If there is a millennial age to follow our present age, then it should be mentioned by John in those other visions, but it is not. If it is an essential part of the story, then Jesus should have mentioned it, but He did not. If there is another age to come, then the other New Testament writers should have mentioned it, but instead, they refer to this present age as “the last days” multiple times.

Earlier in this study, I wrote a Bonus Post on the significance of numbers in apocalyptic writings, and you will recall that the number 1,000 represents a large but definite number, the complete number, of years of this age, and I must conclude that that is John’s meaning in 20:1-6 just as it is everywhere else, for not to reach such a conclusion would be to take this passage out of its context. The only question left, as I see it, is why John used this image, and I will discuss that after we have completed our look at the apocalyptic elements of this section.