The passage: John saw an angel come down from heaven holding the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. The angel seized the dragon—the old serpent, the Devil, Satan—bound him for a thousand years, threw him into the pit, shut it, and sealed it, so that he could no longer deceive the nations until the thousand years were finished; after that he must be let loose for a short time. John also saw thrones, with judges seated on them, and he saw the souls of those beheaded for witnessing to Jesus and to God’s Word, who had refused to worship the beast or its image or take its mark; they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not live again until the thousand years were over. This is the first resurrection; those who share in it are blessed and holy, untouched by the second death, priests of God and Christ, reigning with him a thousand years. When the thousand years end, Satan is let loose to deceive the nations everywhere—Gog and Magog—and gather them for battle, as many as the sand of the sea. They surround the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire from God devours them, and the devil is thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone with the beast and false prophet, to be tormented forever. Then John saw a great white throne and one seated on it, from whose face earth and heaven fled away, leaving no place for them. He saw the dead, great and small, standing before God; the books were opened, including the book of life, and the dead were judged by their works. The sea, death, and hell gave up their dead, all judged by their works; then death and hell were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death. Anyone not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.
The word “Millennium” brings up unpleasant memories for many educated people. Some think of the Fifth Monarchy men from our civil wars. Others recall speculations they have heard in their own time—speculations that seemed a strange blend of history and fiction, supported by arguments both clever and incoherent. Such people approach this chapter, where the doctrine of a Millennium is stated, with boredom or irritation. They will be inclined to say: “Surely these few words that have prompted such dreams can be passed over as the offhand remarks of a book that is itself rather unintelligible. We are practical men; we want the Bible for practical lessons. If some people have nothing to do, let them busy themselves with these things.”
By all means let us remember that we are practical men and that the Bible is a practical book. But I cannot think this way of dismissing passages that, for good or ill, have moved and still move the most earnest men and women is practical at all. Contempt is never practical; it is the child of laziness, and it ends up causing much needless trouble. Questions denounced as beneath our notice prove they have a power we must attend to. Opinions we have despised in others rebound and strike back at us, and probably overthrow us precisely because we ignored them. I am convinced this belief in a Millennium has been a practical belief for many devout thinkers. If it is, as claimed, wrapped in fancies and held on weak grounds, that is a reason to ask where it gets a strength it clearly cannot owe to anything essentially feeble. Suppose there had never been such a tradition in Christendom, no such thought hovering in men’s minds age after age—we would all have been the losers. There would not have been less fanaticism; that would simply have taken other forms. But there would have been far less hope, far less confidence in God’s promises, and more of a dreary suspicion that the earth is handed over to those who only want to rob and spoil it. All art, all poetry, all politics would have been lower and more grovelling if this idea had not haunted those to whom it came in no formal, doctrinal shape—people who were often least inclined to welcome it.
But as I said about the word “Babylon” in the last chapter, this word points not to one set of opinions but to opposite sets. The objectors to the doctrine are not found only, or mainly, among those who scorn it. Many shrink from it because they hold positive convictions they think they must give up before they can accept it. They say: “We have been taught to look for a heavenly state; you want us to fix our hopes on an earthly paradise. We have been looking forward to a reward for those who serve God faithfully here, once they cross the boundary of death; you point us to a blessed condition that may come to this world in general. Even supposing we could care about that general, indiscriminate happiness here, does any Christian know he will live to reach the appointed moment?”
These are serious doubts—so serious in some minds that they simply ignore or dismiss the part of Scripture that gave rise to them. I cannot regard that as a safe course. It seems to me that the hope of good for this earth is essentially bound up in all God’s promises; that we must suppress the plainest statements of Scripture, and kill the best wishes in our own hearts, if we refuse to cherish it. I cannot think that any true belief in a Kingdom of Heaven, or in the gifts God will give after death to those who love Him, would interfere in the least with the other hope. If they have seemed to clash, it must be through some confusion in our minds. And a faithful study of the actual words of the Divine book must be the way to remove the confusion and bring the two into harmony.
The traditions of the early Church show St. John in direct conflict with Cerinthus, who championed a notion of Christ’s reign on earth that identified it with a golden age of the god Saturn—a return of an Eden of outward happiness. Though there is no historical foundation for the stories that make John and Cerinthus personal enemies, those stories express an instinct that their doctrines were incompatible, each the undoing of the other. That instinct is supported by every part of the Apocalypse. Its subject is certainly the deliverance of the earth—but the deliverance of the earth from the sensual masters who had degraded it, by its true spiritual Lord. That idea of a kingdom of Heaven, unfolding through every part of the New Testament, now reaches its completion. The Lamb fully vindicates His right to rule, against the Dragon, over all God’s willing creatures. The unwilling creatures are restored to their proper place when man is restored to his. Remember that this has been the Apocalypse’s consistent teaching so far, and now consider the words that open this chapter.
I. “And I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, to shut him up, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: after that he must be loosed a little season.”
I want you to notice that in this passage, at least, there is no reference at all to any special earthly happiness the earth or man is to enjoy. Nothing is said about exemption from pain and sorrow for individuals or nations. We have been hearing of a spiritual power who resisted the Lamb, was overcome by Him, and cast out of heaven. We have heard how that power could wage an unusually terrible, though short, war against the inhabitants of the earth. We have heard of armies rising from the bottomless pit to help him—not by destroying trees or grass, but by tormenting the minds and hearts of men. We have heard of a beast to whom the Dragon gave his authority, and of a false prophet who worked wonders in his name. These temporary incarnations of the Evil Spirit have been thrown down. Now it is announced that the Evil Spirit himself will be restrained from exercising the power he has used against human beings. A chain will be put on him. And when we ask what kind of chain, the answer comes at once: he will not be able to deceive the nations as he has done. The mischief he has done is moral. He has persuaded men to believe that the Lamb is not King of kings and Lord of lords; that the visible is mightier than the invisible; that he himself is stronger than Christ. The nations will now confess—those who most strongly assented to his lie—that this is not so; that the invisible is mighty over the visible; that Christ is King, not Satan. It is not said his power has ended. He may be, and will be, set loose again. But there will be a stretch of years during which Christ’s reign over this planet of ours will not only be proclaimed by a few here and there who stand apart from the world’s affairs, but will make itself felt in the world’s order, in its most ordinary daily dealings.
One objection to this doctrine, then, is removed by presenting the whole of it instead of just one side—in the Apostle’s words rather than our own. You think men are already far too prone to imagine a state of lazy happiness, in which all the fruits of the earth fall at our feet without the labor of heads and hands, in which there is no need of justice, government, or self-sacrifice because everything comes to everyone spontaneously. You think this dream, whether called a dream of heaven or of earth, has weakened thought, courage, manhood, and all the virtues we most prize. The Apostle agrees with you. He declares that the Lamb who sacrificed Himself for human beings displayed the truest, highest, most heavenly state. That spirit who has deceived men with the idea of some good different from and opposed to this—who has held up a vision of selfish enjoyment—the Apostle regards as the great enemy and destroyer of the race. And the thousand years he describes are precisely years in which the earth gains new life, strength, and capacity, just because men are not so much a prey to that delusion as they once were; because a wholly different standard is set before them; because they confess themselves to be under a different law.
But can we accept this idea of a great moral change if we suppose it is caused by a sudden descent of Christ to the earth? I believe, my brethren, that this whole book has been telling us how the Apostle connected a moral change in the world with a descent of Christ to the earth. The true Lord of the world showed Himself to the world in poverty and humiliation, in acts of mercy and power, in dying the death of the cross. That was His descent to the earth. And He who descended also ascended, that He might fill all things. Death could not hold Him. He was proclaimed to Jews and heathens as the Conqueror of death, the Son of God, and the Giver of the Divine Spirit to men. Whether He was so or not was to be settled in battle. This book records that battle. Jerusalem, the capital of one half of the old world, and Rome, the capital of the other half, were the fields where it was fought. Other explanations may be given of the outcome. I accept this one: that mortal power was shown not to be supreme over the earth and man; that the power opposed to brute power was vindicated. Christ’s descent to the earth, for which all ages had been preparing, was the beginning of this triumph; if He is the Son of God, all that followed was the necessary result of His appearing. The thrones of the earth were shaken to their center so that it might be known who held the highest throne, to whom all the kings of the world owed homage. This manifestation, or appearing, of Christ in the glory of His Father and of the angels was what the Apostles looked for; and this the last of the Apostles was permitted to see through the clouds and darkness that covered the world in his day. But if you ask, not for a manifestation of Christ’s royal glory, but for another descent like the one into the manger, I can find no trace of it anywhere—certainly not in this passage about the Millennium, where people have most suspected it. For read the next words.
- “And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the Word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.” Surely, taking these words as they stand, they do not describe a descent of Christ to earth, but an ascent of those who had been beheaded for witnessing to Christ, so they might reign with Him. I do not believe that those who cling with the deepest and truest faith to the idea of a millennium—those to whom it is a strength on their pilgrimage through the world and a comfort under the weight of its evil—would be shaken for more than a moment by noticing this difference, startling as it looks. I am satisfied that what they really mean by a reign of Christ on earth is exactly what the Apostle means, and that if they could give a clear account of their own thoughts and hopes, they would find his words far more satisfying than their own. At first it might distress them greatly to suggest that they had put off to a distant future a millennium that he believed the world was about to enter in his own day. And if such a reading of his words meant losing any real hope they have held about the future of the earth or of mankind, I would be very slow to offer it, because I would suspect it was false. I am sure the expectations the Bible holds out to us are brighter, not dimmer, than our own; that they include all anyone has imagined; and that the business of every teacher is to strengthen and deepen them, not weaken them. But it seems to me that this passage not only becomes more consistent with the rest of this book and of the New Testament if we understand it of the ages during which the Gospel was establishing itself in the various parts of the Roman Empire, but that by understanding it so, the difficulty that has perplexed so many minds—about the connection between each man’s future state after death and the future state of the world at large—is removed, and a brilliant light is thrown on both.
That a vision of the souls of those beheaded for the witness of Christ must refer to those who have died, not those who escape death, no one can dispute. What, then, does it seem to tell us? That these witnesses of Christ—who cared so much for the earth when they lived on it, who labored to do it good, and apparently labored in vain, who told it of its true King and of its revolt to a usurper—should, when they were no longer seen, exert an influence over it that had been denied them before, working as the effective servants of Him who gave His life for the world’s redemption. This is their high reward, exactly the reward our Lord held out to them in His parable. The one who used the pound well and made it five pounds was to rule over five cities; the one who used the two well and made another two was to rule over two cities. No idleness, no luxurious indulgence was offered them; they would enter into the joy of their Lord; they would have the delight of knowing more and more of His purposes and working more and more in line with them. They would be freed from the miserable vanity and selfishness that had hampered and disappointed their efforts here; they would understand their own fields of labor and cooperate with all who were assigned other fields; they would live as He lives and work as He works, for the good of His subjects; they would judge, as He judges, between right and wrong, between pure and impure.
And here is the distinction between these true servants of God and those who served not Him but His enemy: “The rest of the dead lived not again till the thousand years were finished.” No such reward was prepared for them. They had chosen the wages of sin and selfishness, and those wages were death. That is what we are told. I accept these words and those that follow just as they are written. They may conflict with some of our notions about the future. I cannot help that. It is a subject on which our understandings make all sorts of crude, ignorant guesses. If we want a revelation to scatter our darkness, let us be thankful one is given.
“This,” we are told, “is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are they that have part in it.” Who, then, have part in it? We have heard the definition of them, and it is surely one that does not exclude the first ages of the Christian Church. Our first and most natural thought might be that it refers especially to the times when men were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus. So suppose we consider what actually happened on the earth in the centuries after the one in which the Apostles lived. We usually say that in those centuries the Gospel made its way into countries where Greek, Syrian, Egyptian, Celtic, or Gothic idolatry had prevailed. But what do we mean by this phrase? Do we mean that one set of opinions replaced other sets of opinions? If that is all we mean, unbelievers ask, and we are forced to ask ourselves, was the world any better for the change? Was there not as much evil done in the name of Christianity as had been done in the names of the false gods? But when we have worn ourselves out with this thought, there rises before us the clear certainty of moral good and physical changes brought about in the earth—brought about directly by Christian agency. We see—no startling facts on the other side, and no false show of fairness, can keep us from seeing—that we are entering a new stage in the history of our planet. The whole religious scheme that had been bound up with the politics, habits, and amusements of the various nations passes away. Principles once contradicted everywhere in the world, still at odds with its practice, gradually force themselves on men’s acceptance as truths. Much as they are disregarded, they more and more prove themselves to be laws that must govern somewhere and ought to govern everywhere. That idea of self-sacrifice, which runs counter to every inclination of every human mind, enthrones itself in human minds as the effective principle—the one thing that can accomplish what nothing else can. In some marvellous way the cross wins recognition from emperors and kings who look as though they must think it the most contemptible of all signs. How do they come to feel its power? By trying their swords against it, by testing whether swords and stakes can put out the confession of it. Those ages therefore exactly match the first part of the description in this chapter. No royal decrees, no acts of priests, will explain the change taking place. It is a change at the very heart of society. The demon is forced to release his grip on minds and spirits that had once recognized him. The new life of the thousand years affects government, education, manners, the cultivation of the soil. But it advances silently, mysteriously, in defiance of appearances. You must study it over the span of centuries to see how complete it is. You must see how the toppling of one established corruption after another shows the permanence of the spiritual rule under which the earth has been brought.
And what is the character of that spiritual rule? We sometimes say nothing is more deceptive than the dream of fame after death. The claim is well founded, for every selfish anticipation is full of delusion. But is there anything more real, more undoubted, than influence after death? How it was felt in those ages we all know. The benefactor of a neighborhood was regarded as the saint who, after his death, went on blessing that neighborhood. The tilling of the land is dear to him; he gives healing power to the springs. But were not those ideas full of superstition? Do I think the Bible endorses such superstitions merely because they may have had some good effects? I believe men’s thoughts about these saints and this government were full of superstition. I believe the Bible endorses no superstition. I believe no superstition has good effects, only evil ones. And for that reason I do not confuse the thoughts with the reality they pointed to and testified about. This is the mistake of the philosophers who talk grandly about certain ideas that prevailed in certain periods. If by “ideas” they mean men’s notions and conceptions, they must canonize very mischievous and dishonorable fancies under that name. But if by “ideas” they mean laws, principles, truths that are not of today or yesterday, then they will admit with me that men’s doctrines about departed saints may have pointed to a real rule those saints exercised, of which men were aware in many ways, though they could not reduce it to order and often made it an excuse for shameful idolatry. For, let me say it again and again, this power, if it is of the same nature and quality as the power from which it comes, cannot act on men as if they were stones, or trees, or even mere animals. It must speak to their understandings, affections, and consciences; it must appeal to them as free, responsible creatures. May it not, then, be a great help to us in studying the facts of the world’s history—including men’s apprehensions about themselves and the powers surrounding them—if we simply adopt the Apostle’s statement; if we suppose this dominion of the departed over the earth’s condition and destiny is joined, by a Divine and providential link, to the dominion of Him who was the firstborn from the dead, the head of many brethren?
Blessed and holy indeed, if this is so, is the first resurrection and those who share in it. They have passed through one death in the dear power of Him whom that death could not hold. The second death, the death that overtakes the self-seeker, has no power over them, as it had none over Him. His Spirit bore witness with their spirits that they were sons of God, and therefore that their lives, in one world or another, were to be spent in the service of men. And have they not been joined by all whom the same Spirit has taught the same lesson? Do we not know what their occupations must be? Truly the occupations of heavenly creatures, because devoted to helping and comforting those who are walking, and often losing their way, on earth. A light falls on a page of a book—someone seems to be showing you its true meaning. Why not the one who wrote it?—who perhaps understood his own words only imperfectly when he set them down, but who has learned their meaning since. A room brings back the memory of faces once seen there, of voices once heard—why may not those faces be looking at us, those voices giving us reproofs and consolations? If we thought so, we would care little for false messages from the dead; the real ones would be infinitely precious and awful. If we thought so, we would truly feel that the reign of the saints is not yet over—though perhaps a higher reign than theirs has been revealed to us.
For we are told of an end to the thousand years.
- “And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”
To those who see the Millennium as the great climax of all human history, this prospect of a dark ending to it—of an overthrow of all its rare happiness—must be very frightening. They naturally shrink from the vision of Satan let loose on the world again, of wild tribes gathered from the ends of the earth to destroy a city where saints had set up their throne. But to those who see this Millennium as the effect of Christ’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, of the gift of the Spirit, of His victory over Jewish and Heathen enemies, over the rebels of Jerusalem and the tyrants of Rome—to those who regard the Millennium as a real reign, over the earth He had redeemed, of those who believed in Christ, fought on His side, and died in His cause; to those who see it as a state in which this government was making itself felt, but felt by people who kept throwing off its yoke, misunderstanding its nature, and using their acknowledgment of it as an excuse for superstition and crimes; to those who take it as the true explanation of that life-in-death of Christendom which we read of in the records of the modern world; to those who therefore regard it as something immeasurably better than the condition of the old world, and more than any state of mere repose and enjoyment could be, yet immeasurably short of what God’s redemption and His promises would lead them to hope for in the end—to these the announcement of a catastrophe that would shake this order, so blessed and so little acknowledged, is a help in interpreting the past and a warrant for confidence in the future. And when we consider the nature of the disaster said to fall on the camp of the saints and the beloved city, the prophet’s intention again comes out into light and clearness beside the well-known facts of history. What do those wild invasions mean—the hordes of Huns and Avars, and the Tartar armies under Genghis Khan and Timur, who found a garden before them and left a wilderness behind? They called themselves scourges of God; they believed they had a Divine commission. How did that thought come into their minds? What was their role? They disrupted the civilization and order that had gradually been establishing itself in the world; they seemed to say there was no such thing as lawful government, no sacred yoke of customs and traditions. Sheer force of numbers, sheer strength of arm, apart from all that had turned multitudes and swords into servants of order, seemed once more to prove itself supreme. Yes—and why? So that nations which had sunk into a monotony of customs, laws, and traditions; which had forgotten how these had come to be and what gave them their stability and authority; which had corrupted civilization into mere indulgence, and turned belief in an invisible world into a mere tool for propping up the corruption and tyranny of the visible—so that these nations might be roused to remember what they were and how far they had fallen; that they might learn by bitter experience that selfishness is the author, not of government, but of Anarchy; that the forms, graces, and blessings of civil life are not to be sacrificed to the Devil, as though they came from him, but laid on God’s altar, because they are His. Satan is let loose in the strictest sense, so that Satan may be overthrown. That dominion of the upper world over the lower is set at naught so that men may see how real it is, and what a lie society becomes when it ignores the relation between those two worlds and tries to make an earth that is self-sufficient.
That, I take it, has been men’s great crime from the beginning. The Tower of Babel set the precedent for it; all the despotisms of the old world were its development; and it is what has made the Church of Christ, the beloved city of the later ages, fouler and more debased than the Jerusalem of earlier ages. That the attempt to put a visible hierarchy in place of an invisible one is denounced in the most terrible sentences of this book, I believe as strongly as those who would simply turn Babylon into papal Rome, or who would deny there has been any Church of Christ, any Communion of Saints, except in some small scattered communities, which they then have to endow with an ideal purity belonging to none of the churches we read of in the apostolic letters.
Take Babylon to represent an evil principle of society that appeared again and again in the old world, and has appeared again under more fearful and complicated conditions in the new; take the holy city to be indeed the Christendom of which we, and all the baptized nations, are members; take the millennial state to represent that new kingdom into which we have been brought—and then all the calamities that have befallen mankind, from the invasions of the wild Gog and Magog hordes on the outskirts of civilization, and from the mobs left untended in particular lands, hold the most fearful lesson and warning for us. And yet they also hold the blessed promise that the borders of the holy city will be widened to receive the very races that have threatened its existence, and that Satan, the common deceiver of all times and lands, will at last be cast into the lake of fire, where the beast and the false prophet—the tyrannical and idolatrous systems of the old world—have already been sent.
And so we are prepared for the vision that closes this chapter.
- “And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.”
A great white throne, and He who sat on it, before whom heaven and earth fled away, and there was no place for them. Remember, it was heaven as well as earth. If you suppose these words speak of a destruction of the earth, you must suppose they speak of a destruction of the heavens too. If one meaning is impossible, do not contradict everything we have been reading and hearing in this book by imagining the other. Yet the vision is strictly true. In the vision of God Himself all things must disappear—the saints who govern as much as those who are governed. In that perfect light all alike seem lost; no place is found for them. And yet it is that very light which brings everything into view. Each one, small and great, stands out clearly and distinctly when He is revealed. Vague thoughts haunt us of great judgments on the world at large in which we individually are forgotten. Or we grow indifferent to the world, thinking only of ourselves and what will become of us. In this Divine light there is no such confusion. God loves the world—how can we separate ourselves from it? God has made each of us a conscious being—how can we lose that being in the vastness of any society? It is a judgment between life and death. Have you chosen life? Have you chosen death? That question reaches every man, whether buried in the sea or in the grave. It reaches, St. John says, into the very depths of hell. And life, he says, conquers. Death and hell are cast into the lake of fire.
Does that mean, my brethren, that by some change of circumstances, some arbitrary decree of God, evil stops bringing its curse and doom—that a time begins when God no longer judges? I can imagine nothing so frightful as that. Evil can never be less accursed until good becomes less blessed. To ask God not to judge is to ask for utter destruction to ourselves. God’s victories are victories over the will of men. You and I can only be saved from curses and punishments by being saved from sin. God sent His Son to deliver us from that. If death and hell are cast into the lake of fire, it is because He has done His work; because He has seen the travail of His soul and been satisfied.