Thank you for your thoughtful comments.
I prefer to interpret the Bible literally. The amillennial view is as you state; the 1,000 is not literal and refers to the Church age.
I just wanted to clear the airways, by saying that I am a futurist, awaiting the Lord's brilliant coming, as he had promised.
I want to further clarify, although I don't hold the Biblical term millennium to be exactly a 1000 years, but I do sincerely consider it as being very literal, in the sense of a time period where the global Church of Jesus Christ are making disciples of all the world, by the preaching of his gospel, before the END of the harvest. So I do consider the millennium literal in the sense of it encompassing the entire harvest from the start to the end.
My reasoning for this is.....
To draw a similarity between how we today use the word several to mean more than a couple, yet it does not imply it to be exactly the number seven. Do you understand, for example, when we say he performed this act on several occasions as to imply he did it more than twice at the very least, yet it could also mean he could have done it 3 times, 4 times......7 times, or even 8 or 9 times.
For the Jewish context of culture back in their context of situation, they too used a figure of speech to delineate a time period of a figure at the very least, that is a millennium and more probable used to imply a figure in excess or multiples of that figure. For example their hand writing was right to left and ours is left to right, so it comes of no surprise that we use the figure of speech several to mean at the very least two and the sematic tribe who wrote left to right would conversely use a figure of speech to imply at the very least a 1000, but more than likely to be greater or even multiples of this figure. In retrospect, it would seldomly mean exactly 1000 years, though the implication is very literal in the sense of a time period that has a beginning and an end.
Let us just use an example of the same writer John, who used the term millennium.
Let us consider the following versus as an example....
And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was
ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; (Rev 5:11)
You could work out what the final number is by doing the following....
(10000 x 10000) + (1000 x 1000) = 101,000,000
Or
(10000 x 10000 x 1000 x 1000) = 100,000,000,000,000
I am certain that John is using this figure of speech to convey a very literal and large number of Angels, but is he giving us the exact number is the question?
I don't believe so!
So when we look at how he uses the term millennium, we need to look beyond interpreting it as an exact figure, rather as a figure of speech to imply more than a 1000 or even multiples of it. If you considered the above example, he uses those figures to imply a very large number, maybe even greater than those exact figures he gave, which means insurmountable in numbers that would again imply multiples of.
Let us look at the last example.....
And the number of the army of the horsemen
were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them. (Rev 9:6)
You can take it as meaning 200,000,000 or you can take it as at the very minimum 200,000,000 or a number greater than that or even multiples of that.
It is interesting how John uses 10000 x 10000 for the heavenly Angelic crowd, yet for the locust demonic army he uses 1000 x 1000 to convey a lesser number. Again is he wanting the reader to be focussed on the number, which by the way would render a reply, so what? Or is he trying to convey an army of sizeable proportion to that of the world population if a third part of humanity would be killed, this would imply multiples, that is billions.
Anyway friend, that is my two cents worth. Thanks for replying to me, I appreciate it.
