Premillennialism

A thousand years after the return

‘Premillennial’ means that Christ's return comes before the millennium. The view reads Revelation 19 and 20 as a sequence of events. In chapter 19 the rider on the white horse comes out of heaven and defeats his enemies; in chapter 20 Satan is bound and the saints reign with Christ. Premillennialists give weight to the same verb, zaō (ζάω), in verses 4 and 5.

The rest of the dead did not come back to life until the thousand years were complete. This is the first resurrection.

Revelation 20:5

If the rest of the dead ‘coming to life’ after the thousand years is bodily resurrection, they argue, then the saints who "came to life and reigned" before it (Revelation 20:4) were raised bodily too. They also point to Paul's "each in his own turn" (1 Corinthians 15:23); to prophecies of an age of peace that is not yet the final state, where "the youth will die at a hundred years" (Isaiah 65:20); and to the apostles' question, "Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6). The view lays great weight on God keeping his promises visibly, within the history of this earth.

Two forms

Historic premillennialism goes back to the second century. Papias, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus taught that after Christ's return the righteous would reign in a renewed creation Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5, and Justin granted that many devout Christians thought otherwise Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 80. On this view the church passes through the last tribulation, and Christ comes "Immediately after the tribulation of those days" to gather his elect (Matthew 24:29). After Augustine it was long a minority view, but it revived among some English scholars and Puritans in the seventeenth century, and many evangelicals hold it today.

Dispensational premillennialism was systematised in the nineteenth century by John Nelson Darby and spread widely by the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 Scofield Reference Bible; in the late nineteenth century revivalists such as D. L. Moody also spread the premillennial hope. Dispensationalism holds that God deals with Israel and the church in distinct ways. Christ will first catch up his church (the rapture); then comes a seven-year tribulation, read from the last of Daniel's seventy weeks, after which Christ returns with his saints to set up a thousand-year kingdom fulfilling God's promises to Israel. The view is widely known in Korean churches.

In conversation with other views

Amillennialists and postmillennialists reply that Revelation, rich in symbols, may show the same age several times over, and that elsewhere Jesus speaks of the righteous and the wicked rising in one hour (John 5:28-29). Premillennialists answer that the ‘hour’ can span a long time, and that Revelation 20 reveals its course more fully. This is a long conversation among evangelicals, and neither side gives grounds for doubting the other's faith. The three views are set side by side in the lesson Christ’s return and the millennium and in What are the rapture and the millennium?