THE MILLENNIUM
BEGAN IN 300. JOHN NAPIER: The
thousand years that Satan was bound … began in 300 or thereabout. For proof of
this, it is evident by histories that after the continual and successive
tyranny of ethnic emperors, and last of Diocletian (who in one month made
seventeen thousand martyrs), there arose about this three hundredth year of
Christ Constantine the Great, a Christian and baptized emperor. He and his
successors (except a few of short reign) maintained Christianity and true
religion, to the abolishing of Satan’s public kingdom, and therefore we say
this year Satan is bound.
Second, shortly after this time was the first public and general godly
council held by the Christians at Nicaea, in which the apostolic belief was
published, the authentic Scriptures authorized, and finally the true Christian
religion so received that all Satan’s outward opposition was banished, and his
public tyranny and kingdom overcome. Yet his lieutenant the antichrist even
then began his dissimulate and hypocritical kingdom. Third, we see by the
former proposition that Gog and Magog are the armies of the sixth trumpet and
vial, and these (by the fourth proposition) were loosed about 1296 to make war.
Therefore, about 1296, or rather (as histories precisely report) about 1300,
were the armies of Gog and Magog loosed, and so Satan was then loosed to stir
them up to battle. From this thirteen hundred years think of the thousand years
that Satan lay bound, and it will consequently follow that Satan was first
bound in 300.
Fourth, and for confirmation of the former, the text says that as soon
as the devil is loosed, he passes forth to stir up and seduce these papistical
and Islamic armies of Gog and Magog to strife and warfare. But in that year
1300 began (by Satan’s instigation) that proud strife between them for
supremacy, both of them assigning to themselves the empire of the whole earth.
A PLAIN DISCOVERY OF THE WHOLE REVELATION OF SAINT JOHN. (Revelation,
ed. Rodney Petersen, Gerald L. Bray, and Timothy George [Reformation Commentary
on Scripture 15; Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2025], 135-36)
