Sorry for just dropping in like this, but I hope/think I agree , but
who ever claimed contrary to all Scripture that there will not be a Millennium !? Why would they do this !?
1 or 2 peoples, here and there? where are they !? (don't really need nor want to know this..... they are in enough trouble already without naming names.... )
I am one. And with that 1 or 2 other people, that makes approximately 3.
Revelation 20 is the only chapter of the Bible that mentions a one-thousand year interval, almost as if John mentions it merely in passing, quite in contrast to the great weight that futurists assign it. Certainly, as James Stuart Russell says, a period of consummation of the Messianic kingdom was in order, in which Christ put down all hostile rule, authority, and power (
1 Cor 15:24). We see in the Scriptures that this transition from old to new was gradual. The church overwhelmed paganism and Jewish resistance over a period of time, which, as Russell says, was “symbolically represented by the chaining and imprisoning of the dragon in the abyss.”
That exactly one thousand years must be something other than symbolic is questionable. Loose references to symbolize timeframes were not uncommon among the ancients. Josephus, for example, refers to a 600-year interval as the Great Year (
Antiquities 1.3.9). Russell explains the symbolism thus:
Respecting the duration of this restriction of satanic power it is not easy to determine; but it seems, on the whole, most in consonance with the symbolical character of the Apocalypse to understand the thousand years as significant of a long but indefinite period. When we have high numbers stated in the Apocalypse they are usually, if not invariably, to be understood indefinitely. For example, it is not to be supposed that the hundred and forty and four thousand of the sealed signify exactly that number, and no more and no less. It would be absurd to say that there were exactly twelve thousand, to a man, saved out of each of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel. The conception is appropriate in a vision, but incredible in a historical statement. In like manner the army of the horsemen in Chap. 9:16 is set down as two hundred millions; but no sane commentator ever ventured to assign to this a precise and literal signification. Following these analogies we are disposed to regard the thousand years as a definite for an indefinite period, covering doubtless more than that space of time, but how much more none can tell.
[ii]
Other schools assert that the thousand-year interval does not refer to a timeframe at all, symbolically or otherwise; rather that it implies fullness or immensity (
Dt 7:9;
Ps 50:10, 84:10). In Chapter 20, therefore, John tells us that the Messiah’s rule on the earth is endless and complete. The Lord did say on the Cross after all that it is finished.
J Stuart Russell, The Parousia: A Critical Inquiry into the New testament Doctrine of Our Lord’s Second Coming (Public Domain, originally published in 1887 in London by T. Fisher Unwin) Kindle eBook.
[ii] Russell.
