Reflections of Grace - Revelation 20:2-3

“And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, 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.” — Revelation 20:2-3

We have mentioned the idea of a “millennium” or the “millennial reign of Christ” a couple of times so far in our engagement of dispensationalism. This idea comes directly from Revelation 20:2.

That passage is describing an event wherein Christ renders Satan powerless to deceive the nations for a period of one thousand years. During this time, verse 6 indicates that Christ “reigns.” All Bible-believing Christians believe in the millennial reign of Christ, but there are stark differences among various Christian schools of thought regarding what they believe about the nature of the millennium. My purpose in this article is not to expound Revelation 20—we will do that in a future article—but to provide some basic principles for how we ought to approach this topic.

First, the reason we are even thinking about the millennium is because a person’s framework for interpreting the Bible plays a large role in determining their conclusion on this matter. Dispensationalists are “premillennial,” meaning that they believe Christ’s return will occur prior to the millennium of Revelation 20. He will then set up his millennial kingdom on earth.

Those who hold to covenant theology are “postmillennial,” meaning that they believe Christ’s return will occur after the millennium of Revelation 20. Within this viewpoint there is a subset called “amillennial” which is the majority view among Reformed believers today. Nevertheless, all the varieties of postmillennialism understand Revelation 20 to be speaking figuratively in order to convey spiritual realities about the victory of Christ on the cross and how that manifests in the present Church age.

Premillennialism, postmillennialism, and amillennialism have all been represented in church history going back to the early centuries of the church. What makes dispensationalism unique and, in my opinion novel, is that in addition to believing that Christ’s return will occur prior to his millennial reign, it also promotes a pre-tribulation rapture of the Church. This viewpoint, popularized by the Left Behind books and movies and held by many throughout the 20th century, only began to be formulated in the 1830’s.

Finally, the dispensational viewpoint is largely built off of a particular approach to reading the book of Revelation. The fact of the matter is that Revelation is far from being the only book that addresses last things. In fact, most books of the Bible do so in one way or another, which means that we are able to have a nearly fully-formed eschatology before we ever get to the book of Revelation. Revelation then serves to fill out the eschatology of the rest of the Bible, helping us to see not so much what is going to happen at some point in the future, but what Christ is doing now and how we ought to live in light of his promised return. Amen.