For since
on this view Satan’s release from prison and destruction (Rev. 20.7-10) is
connected with the parousia, then the time of his imprisonment ‘so that he
should deceive the nations no longer’ (20.3) seems to be coterminous with the
career of the beast (which also ends at the parousia). But this is impossible,
since the beast’s career is portrayed in Revelation as the time of Satan’s
greatest success ever in deceiving the human race (In Rev. 12.9, Satan is
characterized as the one who ‘deceives the whole world’. In context, the events
of ch. 13 graphically picture the full outworking of this deception, and by no
means its limitation).
Further,
it does not good for this view to over-interpret the report of Satan’s release
from the abyss in Rev. 20.8 to mean that the only sense in which Satan had
previously been bound was that he could not then deceive the nations in such a
way as to ‘gather them together from the war.’ For to do this is not only to
ignore the explicit cosmological import of such passages as Rev. 12.9-17, but
it is also to forget the fact that ‘Har-Magedon’ is but the last episode in
Satan’s ‘war’ with the saints. In rev. 13.7 it was the beast himself who was
given authority throughout his career and who was, in concert with Satan, to ‘make
war with the saints and to overcome them’. The beast’s career, in other words,
far from being the time of Satan’s binding in this regard, is undeniably the
time of his power par excellence to deceive the nations into making a
way on the ‘camp of the saints’ (the expression ‘the camp of the saints’ is intentionally
used here in the very sense that one would presumably be forced to give it,
given the a-millennial interpretation under criticism. That is, if one takes ‘the
camp of the saints’ in Rev. 20.9 as a reference to the church militant on earth
prior to the parousia, as opposed to the eschatological community of the
kingdom following the parousia [sc. the New Jerusalem], then it follows
that the most salient feature of the beast’s three and a half year career is
that it is that time during which he prosecutes an all-out war on ‘the camp of
the saints’ [cf. 12.6, 13-17; 13.5-6]).
It is
thus only at the parousia that the power to practise even this particular kind
of deception is taken away from Satan.
What is
taken away for the first time at the parousia is however given back a
thousand years later, when Satan is released from the abyss, and is permitted
once again to instigate an attack on the people of God (Rev. 20.7-10). This a completely
lucid and coherent sequence is established between Rev. 19.11-20.3 on the one
hand, and 20.7-10 on the other: the power to deceive is first removed from
Satan, and then subsequently restored. This means that the battle described in
20.7-10 can in no way be identified with the battle of Har-Magedon, since in
spite of any similarities between the two scenes, what happens to Satan in the
one manifestly precedes what happens to him in the other.
There is
a separate (but interrelated) interpretive move which it is necessary to make
if the a-millennial claim that Rev. 20.4-6 refers to a period prior to the parousia
is to be reconciled with the fact that resurrection manifestly follows
martyrdom in that passage. That interpretive move consists in the claim that
the first resurrection of Rev. 20.4-6 represents the reception of the Christian’s
soul in heaven upon death. But this idea fails to convince for each of two
independent reasons. First, Rev. 6.9-11 already pictures the state of martyred
souls in heaven, and there they are told to wait for their vindication until
all the rest of the martyrs have given their lives:
And when
He broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had
been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they
had maintained. And they tried out with a loud voice, saying,
‘How long, O Master, holy and true, wilt Thou refrain from judging and avenging
our blood on those who dwell on the earth?’
And there was given a white robe, and they were told that they should rest for
a little while longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their
brethren who were to be killed even as they had been, should be completed also
(6.9-11).
It
becomes obvious in all that follows that the era of continued martyrdom anticipated
in Rev. 6.11 is being assumed to extend right up to (and to be brought to an
end by) the parousia (for example, Rev. 6.12-17 [the sixth seal] encourages interpretation
as an immediate and graphic portrayal of the parousia as God’s response to the
prayer of 6.11. So also the martyrdom and assumption of the two witnesses in
11.12 occur [in view of 11.2-3] only at the very end of the beast’s career,
which, as the reader will later learn, is to continue up to the parousia. Thus,
in 12.13-17 and all of ch. 13, the assumption is that Satan, after trying
abortively to persecute the ‘woman’, will use his remaining time on earth
[which extends to the parousia] to persecute Christians. Earlier promises as
well [esp. 2.25-28; cf. 22.16] look to the parousia as the end of the battle of
perseverance in suffering [2.19]). Equally obvious is the fact that the
priestly reign of Rev. 20.4-6 does not parallel the passive situation pictured
in this vision. Rather, Rev. 20.4-6 presents the parousia as the future time
which the earlier vision anticipates, when God will answer the prayer of the martyrs.
The heavenly court of 20.4 fairly and appropriately vindicates them by
decreeing resurrection from the dead in their case, while refusing resurrection
to their persecutors. The first resurrection, in short, is firmly tied to the parousia.
As was
mentioned, there is a second and independently fatal difficulty with the ‘soul’s
assumption into heaven’ model, namely that the resurrection spoken of in Rev.
20.4-6 must be bodily resurrection in order for the passage to retain even a
minimum level of coherence. For to deny bodily resurrection in v. 4 is to
assert that the same expression ‘they came to life’ signifies, in a single
context, first bodiless communion with Christ in heaven, and then (in the very
next sentence) bodily resurrection. And in the absence of any obvious play on
words, that is untenable. For if (as seems obvious) bodily resurrection was the
experience of being denied to ‘the rest of the dead’ who ‘did not come
to life’ for the duration of the millennium (cf. 20.5, 12, 13), then it goes
without saying that bodily resurrection was the experience of those who did ‘come
to life’ (εζησαν) for that age. In addition, there is something exceedingly implausible
about denying that resurrection is really meant in 20.6 (‘the first resurrection’),
when 20.6 is the only passage in Revelation in which the word ‘resurrection’
actually occurs.
Given the
insoluble difficulties connected with these a-millennial models, it is not
surprising to find that the great majority of scholars feel constrained to
build their views on the foundational assumption that the millennium is at
least pictured as beginning at the parousia. (J. Webb Mealy, After
the Thousand Years: Resurrection and Judgement in Revelation 20 [Journal
for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 70; Sheffield: JSOT Press,
1992, 2019], 20-23)
