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Examined Doctrine

PASSAGE · BSB

Revelation 20

17 positions in the corpus lean on this chapter. Cited verses are marked.

1Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven with the key to the Abyss, holding in his hand a great chain.

2He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.

3And he threw him into the Abyss, shut it, and sealed it over him, so that he could not deceive the nations until the thousand years were complete. After that, he must be released for a brief period of time.

4Then I saw the thrones, and those seated on them had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their 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 hands. And they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.

5The rest of the dead did not come back to life until the thousand years were complete. This is the first resurrection.

6Blessed 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.

7When the thousand years are complete, Satan will be released from his prison,

8and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—to assemble them for battle. Their number is like the sand of the seashore.

9And they marched across the broad expanse of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. But fire came down from heaven and consumed them.

10And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, into which the beast and the false prophet had already been thrown. There they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

11Then I saw a great white throne and the One seated on it. Earth and heaven fled from His presence, and no place was found for them.

12And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne. And there were open books, and one of them was the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to their deeds, as recorded in the books.

13The sea gave up its dead, and Death and Hades gave up their dead, and each one was judged according to his deeds.

14Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death—the lake of fire.

15And if anyone was found whose name was not written in the Book of Life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Who leans on it

Aquinas on the millennium & christ's returnSTANDARD ACCOUNTAFFIRMS°Amillennial, following Augustine.Augustine on the millennium & christ's returnSTANDARD ACCOUNTAFFIRMS°Read the millennium of Revelation 20 as the present age of the church rather than a future earthly reign — the shift that made amillennialism the dominant Western view for over a thousand years and displaced the earlier …Calvin on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCELEANS°Calvin rejects chiliasm by name and reads Revelation 20's thousand years of the present age. The Chiliasts 'limited the reign of Christ to a thousand years' — a fiction he says is too puerile to deserve refutation — and …Jonathan Edwards on the final state of the lostPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°The punishment is eternal in the strictest sense, conscious, and of the same kind and duration as the devil's — Revelation 20:10 "thus expressing both the kind of misery and the duration." He refutes the two alternatives…Jonathan Edwards on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°The thousand years are a future age of gospel prosperity inside history and before Christ's bodily return. It arrives by ordinary means — "by the preaching of the gospel, and the use of the ordinary means of grace, and s…M. Heiser on the final state of the lostPRIMARY SOURCEHELD OPEN°Holds eternal conscious punishment and annihilation both open, with a stated lean toward annihilation on the ground that it is hard to see how death itself could be destroyed and yet continue. What he affirms without qua…M. Heiser on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Declines a millennial position outright, and not as a hedge — his argument is that none of the available positions is self-evident from the text and that certainty about them is misplaced. He treats the whole area as an …Josh Howerton on the final state of the lostPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Eternal conscious punishment. Annihilationism, universalism, and purgatory are each named and rejected. Distinguishes the intermediate state (Abraham's bosom and Hades in Luke 16) from the final lake of fire, and reads t…Josh Howerton on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°No single position required; preterism, premillennialism, and idealism are all named as views faithful Christians hold, and the hosts disagree on air. History is framed as the epoch of Judaism, then the times of the Gent…Irenaeus on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Chiliast, and polemically so — Book V explicitly attacks contemporaries within the church who allegorize away a literal future earthly reign, meaning the amil-vs-premil argument predates Augustine by two centuries and Ir…Tim Keller on the millennium & christ's returnSTANDARD ACCOUNTAFFIRMS°Amillennial.Luther on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°In the longer preface to Revelation Luther reads the book as a picture of church history running to the Last Day, and places the thousand years of Revelation 20 in the past: Satan was bound when the book was written, the…John MacArthur on the final state of the lostPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Eternal conscious punishment in the lake of fire, following a physical, bodily resurrection of the unsaved specifically for judgment.John MacArthur on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Dispensational premillennialism: a pretribulational rapture removes the church before a seven-year tribulation, followed by Christ's return to establish a literal thousand-year earthly reign fulfilling God's land and kin…Justin Peters on the final state of the lostPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Eternal conscious torment, stated in those terms. Satan and all who follow him are cast into the lake of fire and consciously suffer God's active judgment for ever. The active is deliberate — this is not absence from God…Justin Peters on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Premillennial and explicitly pretribulational: Christ returns bodily to remove believers before a seven-year tribulation, returns again in glory at its end, and then reigns a literal thousand years on earth, which the st…John Piper on the millennium & christ's returnSTANDARD ACCOUNTAFFIRMS°Historic premillennial, distinct from the dispensational form.