The millennium

The thousand years of Revelation 20

John saw an angel seize the dragon, Satan, and bind him "for a thousand years" (Revelation 20:2). Then he saw those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus: "they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years" (Revelation 20:4).

Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection! The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with Him for a thousand years.

Revelation 20:6

When the thousand years end, Satan is released for a short time, leads a last rebellion and is judged; then come the great white throne and the new heavens and new earth. ‘Millennium’ is Latin for a thousand years; another name, ‘chiliasm’, comes from the Greek for thousand, chilioi (χίλιοι).

This is the only passage in Scripture that speaks of a thousand-year reign, and it raises several questions. Does the thousand years come before Christ's return or after it? Is it a literal thousand years, or, in a book full of symbolic numbers such as seven and 144,000, a long and complete age? Is the first resurrection bodily, or is it new life in Christ, or the reign of departed saints in heaven? The answers divide premillennialism, postmillennialism and amillennialism.

How the church has read it

In the second century Papias, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus looked for a reign of the righteous on earth after Christ's return. Justin held this view while granting that many Christians of pure and devout faith thought otherwise Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 80. Augustine once shared the hope, but came to read the thousand years as the age from Christ's first coming to his return, in which the church reigns with him Augustine, City of God, Book 20; his reading prevailed in the medieval West, and the Eastern church too for the most part did not expect an earthly thousand-year reign. Lutheran and Reformed confessions both rejected the expectation that the godly would rule the kingdoms of the world before the judgment Augsburg Confession, art. 17 Second Helvetic Confession, ch. 11.

From the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, many Puritans and evangelicals held the postmillennial hope that Christ would return after the gospel had filled the earth. Dispensational premillennialism, systematised in the nineteenth century by John Nelson Darby, spread widely through the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, in the English-speaking world and in Korea. John Wesley expected the thousand years still to come, but added a warning: "The danger does not lie in maintaining that the thousand years are yet to come; but in interpreting them, whether past or to come, in a gross and carnal sense." Wesley

What all confess

The ecumenical creeds do not decide how to read the thousand years. All three views confess that Christ will return bodily and in glory, raise the dead, judge the world and make all things new. So there is no reason to doubt the faith of a Christian who reads the millennium differently, and on any view Scripture forbids setting a date. Each view is set out more fully in the lesson Christ’s return and the millennium and in What are the rapture and the millennium?