The Fourth Vision: The Devil (20:1–3)
The controversies which have raged around this passage have been referred to already in the introduction to this Scene. What we shall consider here is the meaning of Satan’s thousand years of imprisonment when seen in the context of the rest of Scripture.
On the face of it, the millennium has certainly not arrived yet. Television, radio, and the papers remind us daily (though not in these words) that Satan is alive and well and living on planet earth. How can he be said to be bound and sealed in the bottomless pit? This fourth Vision must surely therefore depict an event which is still in the future, like the battle of Vision 3.
But what exactly is said here, and what does the rest of Scripture have to say about it?
First, the deed: Satan is seized and bound. Whatever interpretation may seem to be placed on this by the writings of commentators or by the state of the world around us, Christ’s own words must carry the greatest weight; and it is there, in the teaching of Christ, that we find the only other biblical reference to the binding of Satan. All three synoptic Gospels relate the parable of the ‘strong man, fully armed’, who ‘guards his own palace’ so that ‘his goods are in peace’.1 The story goes on to describe the coming of ‘one stronger than he’, whose object is to plunder the strong man’s property. The newcomer ‘assails him and overcomes him’, says Luke, and ‘binds’ him, say Matthew and Mark. Now we know from the context that this story was told expressly to illustrate something which happened to Satan, and which happened to him at the time of the incarnation. With Christ’s first coming, the kingdom of God had come, and he went about casting out evil spirits to demonstrate precisely this—that Satan, for all his strength, had been seized and bound. We may still question what was actually implied by his ‘imprisonment’, since he seems to have continued very much at liberty; but there is no escaping the fact that the same word and action, the ‘binding’, link Revelation 20:2 with Mark 3:27.
Secondly, the object: Satan is thrown bound into the pit in order ‘that he should deceive the nations no more’. Here again, it may seem quite untrue to say that he is even now prevented from deceiving the nations, and indeed has been unable to do so ever since the time of Christ; surely he does still deceive them, and this also indicates that the millennium is yet to come?
But again, consider what is said about the nations in the rest of Scripture. Their blessing will come through the seed of Abraham, their light through the promised servant of the Lord; and when Christ is born, the aged Simeon recognizes that the baby in his arms is himself the Seed and the Servant, a light for revelation to the nations as well as glory for Israel.1 During the earthly life of Jesus, the undeceiving of the nations is foreshadowed by the visit of the wise men, and exemplified by his contacts with a Roman centurion, a Canaanite woman, and a company of Greeks.2 The same pattern is repeated in the life of the church: ‘men from every nation under heaven’ come to its cradle on the day of Pentecost, and its career is marked by the conversion of Samaritans, Romans, and Greeks.3 Alongside Christ’s prediction that the gospel will be preached to all nations, so often understood as something which will be achieved only shortly before his second coming, we have to place Paul’s startling claim, that already, in the middle of the first century, it ‘has been preached to every creature under heaven’.1 What do the apostle’s words imply? Clearly, the worldwide evangelism of which he speaks cannot mean an actual preaching to each individual race, let alone to each individual person. But what has happened is that the gospel has been made available for the nations in general, instead of being restricted to the Jews. Since the time of Christ it has been a universal gospel, in a way that it never was before in ‘the times of ignorance’ (Acts 17:30).
It seems therefore to be quite in accord with Scripture to see in the millennium of Revelation 20:3 a period during which Satan is no longer able to keep in his custody the nations which, till Christ came to bind him and steal them away from him, were altogether in his power. With this would agree the links which Christ makes between the casting out of Satan and the visit of the Greek enquirers (Jn. 12:20–32), and between Satan’s downfall and the early evangelistic campaign of Luke 10:17, 18. Every time we see a new convert added to the church, Satan’s inability to deceive the nations is proclaimed afresh.
The ‘thousand years’, which on our view began with Christ’s first coming, are thus still in progress, and are equivalent to the ‘three and a half years’ during which the witnesses of Scene 3 preach in the world and the woman of Scene 4 survives in the desert. But at the end of that period there will come a time, according to verse 3b, when ‘for a little while’ Satan will be freed from the restraints which the church age has placed upon him.
There are parallels to this end-of-millennium release which are readily to be found both in Revelation and elsewhere, and which support the interpretation we have been following. In Scene 3 God’s two witnesses, who have preached unhindered for three and a half years, are then silenced for three and a half days (see pp. 105 f.). In Scene 4 we saw the beast from the sea revive after it had been fatally wounded; and though we have taken this to be a perennial characteristic of Satan’s godless society (pp. 124 f.), we should not be surprised to find it is true also as the over-all pattern of Satan’s own career. In Scene 6, the period of the seven heads, which to John is present, is followed by the period of the ten horns, which to him is future, and seems again to indicate a great resurgence of evil at the end of time (pp. 164 f.). So here in Scene 7. ‘When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations’ (verses 7, 8).
Paul describes in 2 Thessalonians 2 what will immediately precede the return of Christ: ‘The rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed’ (verse 3). For the present, a divine power ‘is restraining him’, though in some respects, of course, ‘the mystery of lawlessness is already at work’ (verses 6, 7). But when the restraints are off, the world will see again ‘the activity of Satan … with all wicked deception’ (verses 9, 10). Paul’s non-symbolic predictions tally so remarkably with the symbolic prophecies of Revelation 20 that it is hard to see how the two passages could refer to different circumstances.
If the Thessalonians passage describing the end of the church age is indeed parallel to the Revelation one describing the end of the millennium, it settles the relationship between millennium and parousia; for in it we are told that it is the glorious second coming of Christ—‘the epiphany of his parousia’ (as the phrase in 2 Thessalonians 2:8 could be translated)—which will put an end to the last outbreak of evil, which in its turn (according to the chapter before us) will have brought to an end the thousand years’ restriction on Satan’s activity.
It will again be obvious that the order in which John receives his Visions is not the order of the events of history. Vision 3 takes us on to the end of the age, then Vision 4 takes us back to the beginning. The fact that John saw the beast destroyed before he saw Satan bound has nothing to do with the order in which these things actually happen. That must be determined by what each Vision is found to mean in the light of the rest of Scripture. Compare, for example, the millennium of Visions 4 and 5 with the chapters in Ezekiel to which it is linked by the use of the names Gog and Magog (20:8). The sequence of events in Revelation 20 is the defeat of Satan, the resurrection of the saints to a thousand-year reign, the rebellion of Gog when Satan returns, and the last battle, followed in 21 by the establishment of the new Jerusalem. The last chapters of Ezekiel show a remarkable parallel: the defeat of Edom and the resurrection of Israel to prolonged peace (35–37), then the rebellion and defeat of Gog (38, 39), followed by the vision of the new Jerusalem (40–48). The interesting thing is that the invitation to the birds, which formed Vision 2 (way back in 19:17 f., apparently ‘before’ the downfall of Satan and the millennium), is, according to Ezekiel, an invitation to pick the bones of Gog (39:17 ff.), after the last rebellion of Vision 5. John (or Ezekiel, or both) is less concerned with chronology than some of his commentators are.
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