📖 Revelation Intensive — Unit 14: The Millennial Views — Amillennialism

Text: Revelation 20:1-6

What Amillennialism Holds

This unit presents the third of the three main views of the millennium, amillennialism, and the course continues to hold the three views side by side, presenting each at full strength and favoring none. The prefix "a" means "no," and so the name signals that this view expects no literal, earthly thousand-year reign of Christ following His return. Instead, amillennialism teaches that the thousand years of Revelation 20 are a symbol of the entire present age, the whole span between the first and second comings of Christ. During this age Christ reigns now from heaven over His kingdom, the souls of the faithful who have died live and reign with Him, and Satan is restrained from deceiving the nations so as to stop the spread of the gospel. There is, in this view, no separate earthly kingdom between Christ's return and the eternal state. When Christ comes again, there is one general resurrection of the righteous and the wicked, one final judgment, and then immediately the new heaven and the new earth. Amillennialism therefore reads Revelation 20 as describing the church age in which believers now live, rather than a future period on earth, and it understands the millennium as a present spiritual reality rather than a coming political one. Amillennialists also emphasize how the book first spoke to its original readers. Revelation was written to a church under heavy persecution, and its first purpose was not to chart events thousands of years away but to assure suffering believers that their tribulation was bounded, that the beast and the mark of chapter thirteen wore a first-century face in the Roman emperor cult, and that Christ already reigns and will surely triumph. Read in this way, the thousand years of the present age are the very age in which the persecuted church lives and reigns with her enthroned Lord, and the book is heard as a word of comfort and endurance rather than a calendar of the distant future.

The Order of Events

The amillennial order is the simplest of the three. The present church age is itself the millennium, the time in which Christ reigns from heaven, the gospel goes to the nations, and the departed saints reign with Christ. Throughout this age, amillennialists hold, the kingdom grows and the gospel spreads, but evil also continues and even intensifies, for the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest, and both ripen toward the end. There is no earthly golden age to be expected before the return, as in one of the other views, nor an earthly reign to follow it, as in the other. At the close of the age Satan is loosed for a little while in a final assault, which is the brief loosing of Revelation 20. Then Christ returns, once and visibly. At His single coming the dead are raised, the righteous and the wicked together, in one general resurrection; all stand before the great white throne for one final judgment; and then God brings in the new heaven and the new earth at once. So the whole drama turns on one return, one resurrection, and one judgment, without any thousand-year reign on the earth before or after.

The Biblical Case for Amillennialism

Amillennialists build their case from the wider New Testament as well as from Revelation. They argue that the "first resurrection" of Revelation 20 is a spiritual rather than a bodily rising. Some take it as the new birth, since Scripture speaks of believers as already raised with Christ and made alive together with Him while they live on earth (John 5:24-25; Ephesians 2:1-6); others take it as the entrance of the believer's soul into life and reign with Christ at death. They appeal for the binding of Satan to the victory of Christ's first coming, when the strong man was bound, Satan fell like lightning, and the ruler of this world was cast out (Matthew 12:29; Luke 10:18; John 12:31), so that the nations he once held in darkness now hear the gospel. They stress that the rest of the New Testament presents the second coming as a single event that brings the resurrection of all, the final judgment, and the new creation together, not in stages separated by a thousand years (John 5:28-29; 2 Peter 3:10-13). And they point to the many texts that show Christ already enthroned and reigning now, until He has put all His enemies under His feet (Acts 2:32-36; 1 Corinthians 15:25; Ephesians 1:20-22).

How Amillennialism Reads Revelation 20

The key to the amillennial reading is that Revelation often circles back over the same ground, showing the same period again and again from new angles, as it does with the seals, the trumpets, and the bowls. On this principle, called recapitulation, chapter twenty does not follow chapter nineteen in time but returns to the beginning of the present age and views it afresh. The thousand years are taken as a symbolic number, signifying a long and complete period rather than a literal span of exactly one thousand calendar years. The binding of Satan is his restraint, by the power of Christ's first coming, from deceiving the nations so as to prevent the gospel from going out to them; he is bound for that purpose, though still active in other ways. The first resurrection is the spiritual life and reign of believers, whether in regeneration or in the life of the soul with Christ after death. At the end of the age Satan is loosed briefly, and then come the return of Christ and the one judgment of the closing verses of the chapter. So Revelation 20, read this way, pictures the present age and not a future earthly kingdom.

Proponents and History

Amillennialism has the longest record as the majority view of the church through most of its history. The decisive figure was Augustine, whose work The City of God set out the reading that the thousand years are the present age and that the reign of the saints is spiritual. Under his influence the church largely turned away from the earlier expectation of an earthly reign, and amillennialism became the dominant view of the medieval church for a thousand years. The Reformers, including Luther and Calvin, stood broadly in this tradition, though the technical terms came later. The view remains common in Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and much of Reformed theology to this day. In modern times it has been carefully expounded by scholars such as Geerhardus Vos, Louis Berkhof, Anthony Hoekema, and William Hendriksen, the last of whom set out the recapitulation reading of Revelation in detail. So amillennialism is not a recent novelty but the ancient and widely held reading of the church, defended by many of its most respected teachers across the centuries.

Objections Raised by Others

Those who hold the other views raise serious objections, and fairness requires that they be given their full weight. The chief objection concerns the first resurrection. In Revelation 20 the same word is used for those who "lived and reigned with Christ" and for "the rest of the dead" who "did not live again until the thousand years were finished"; and since the second plainly means a bodily resurrection, critics argue that the first should mean a bodily resurrection too, so that taking one as spiritual and the other as bodily is inconsistent. Second, they argue that reading chapters nineteen and twenty in sequence is the natural reading, and that recapitulation, however common elsewhere, must here be assumed rather than proved. Third, they observe that Satan appears very active and powerful in the present age, prowling like a roaring lion and blinding the minds of unbelievers, which seems hard to square with his being bound. Fourth, they question the figurative reading of the thousand years and ask why the passage should not be taken literally. Some add that amillennialism does not do full justice to the Old Testament promises of an earthly kingdom or to the future of Israel. Amillennialists reply that the first resurrection is paired with the second death and so belongs to the spiritual order, that recapitulation is a genuine feature of the book, and that Satan's binding is limited to the deceiving of the nations.

Summary and an Even-Handed Word

The strength claimed for amillennialism is that it fits the pattern of the rest of the New Testament, which sets the resurrection, the judgment, and the new creation at one coming; that it takes seriously the symbolism and the recapitulating structure of Revelation; and that it has been the church's majority reading for most of its history. Its central claim is that the thousand years are the present age, that Christ reigns now, and that there is no earthly millennium before or after His single return. Sincere, godly, orthodox Christians have held this view, among them many of the church's greatest theologians, and the course presents it at full strength without endorsing it, just as it has presented the other two. This completes the three views. Postmillennialism looks for a golden age of gospel triumph before Christ returns; premillennialism looks for a literal earthly reign after He returns; amillennialism understands the thousand years as the present age, with Christ reigning now. The course favors none of the three and urges students to study the Scriptures and weigh the views before God. What all three confess together, and what matters above every difference, is that the Lord Jesus Christ will surely return in glory, raise the dead, judge the world in righteousness, and reign forever with His people in the new creation.

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