Home Topics Index Download
Transcript 029C — Understanding the Millennial Reign
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: I've never heard you make too much mention of a thousand year millennial reign. Do you believe in such thing? If you do, will it be with Christ on this earth, or will it be on the New Heaven and the New Earth?
HC: There are only eight verses in the Bible that speak about a thousand years in connection with a reign of Christ. Now that passage does not speak about a reign of Christ on earth. It simply speaks about a thousand years during which Christ reigns. And that's found in Revelation 20:1-8.
Now we can't tell immediately from the context whether that thousand years is a literal thousand years or whether it is a figurative thousand years, because God sometimes uses the number thousand in a symbolical or in a figurative fashion, to indicate the completeness of His plan. We do know from the context that it is speaking about Christ reigning in Heaven, because in verse 4 it says, "I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded." In other words, these are disembodied souls. "And they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years." And so we know that this is speaking about something going on in Heaven.
And we also know, incidentally, from the rest of the Bible, that there is no possibility of an earthly reign of Christ, that is, of Him coming down in His bodily presence to reign on this sin-cursed earth. That is not taught anywhere in the Bible. And so we know that that cannot be in view.
But insofar as knowing whether this thousand years is figurative or literal, and as to when it did begin or will begin, we have to examine the Bible to see if we can tell when it begins. And when we compare the language of Revelation 20:1 and 2 with Jude 6 and II Peter 2:4 and Hebrews 2:14 and Colossians 1:15, and a few other verses like this, we soon discover that the binding of Satan occurred at the cross. And since we are now more than 1900 years after the cross, and since the thousand years spoken of there will end very close to Judgment Day itself, we know that it has to be understood symbolically.
If we were still in the year 900 AD, for example, we still would not know whether it was symbolical or literal. But because so many years have passed, we know that it has to be understood in a symbolical fashion. And so it is the whole New Testament period actually.