Revelation 20, the Thousand Years Reign, and Important Considerations

What to do with the information in Revelation 20 about the thousand years reign and where to begin to even try to understand what it means remains an enigma among most Christians and their churches around the world.  In fact, the Book of Revelation is troubling for most Christians and Revelation 20 takes that anxiety to the next level of incomprehension.  The logic of the thousand years seems to defy all rational sense: Why would God bind an evil being like Satan and then allow him to be released again only to wreak havoc on mankind with predictable widespread and devastating results?  How could a good God do that at all?  Many, many questions arise as to how to at least explain the reasoning and timing of Satan's binding and release and we cannot say we have come near to mastering this subject until we address some major considerations that the New Testament presents beginning in the Gospel biographies about the life and teachings of our Lord.

In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John there are important things for us to learn and understand because the majority of teachings about the end of the world completely disregard anything Jesus had to say about his return in the Synoptics and John.  Certain strategies of attention or inattention have been applied to the New Testament can be denied their legitimacy through an audit and check of their validity.

These are accomplished by willful or unintentional story alterations: The Second Temple transmogrified into an epitome about a Third Temple; this generation transformed into That Generation; Jerusalem as the city of those murderers changed to the Vatican as that person of interest, almost all Second Coming of Christ prophecies in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have been condemned to superfluity and in the Book of Revelation Gog and Magog end up being, once upon a time the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and now Russia.

The chart below exemplifies the extent of Jesus' sayings about his expected to return to Judaea and complelely disqualify the notion that he could promise to do such a thing and then turn around and not fulfill it.  Attention to these details do not result in a cherry-picked version to be yet another source of contention between Christians.  Intead, we obtain a comprehensive view and begin to understand how integral Jesus' revelation of himself in the disasters of the destruction of Jerusalem, the Second Temple and the Hebrew State would point conclusively to his authenticity as the true Messiah of Old Testament predictions.

Now, the proximity of Jesus' Second Coming to the generation of his contemporaries tells us a lot about God's stategy to bring Jewish salvation history successfully from the Mosaic Age to the Christian Age without getting the Jewish race getting completely wiped out because of Jewish rebellions and the Roman Empire's ability to utterly destroy the Hebrew people from off the face of the earth.  God's strategy to transition from the First Covenant to the Second Covenant was diametrically contrary to anything man could conceive of (let alone direct and realize) and we will discuss what it was below).

Jewish Wars as a Way to Realize the Intended Results

The Zealots, the Sicarii and other Jewish nationalists believed changes would come for the situation of Judaea, but not necessarily passively by waiting on God.  Taking things into their own hands was high on their list of priorities and they had no idea that fighting a foe like the Romans without God's help was quite impossible.

Intervention Against Jewish Wars to Realize God's Will

According to the prophecies of the Tanakh God would intervene on behalf of his people but to know who or what his people were under new covenant terms was going to be tricky and dangerous under the assumption that the Old Testament's Law of Moses was to continue to be that criterion.

Jewish Policy Changes to Thwart

the Notzri's After the Initial Victory

After the Second Temple and Jerusalem were destroyed in complete confirmation of what the non-believing Jews had vehemently denied for 37 years the Jewish attitude toward the confirmation was predictable perverse: Now they turned to the idea that after seven decades God would again allow them to build yet another Temple and what had happened in A.D.70 was chalked up as merely a penalty for being divided and conducting a civil war against each other.  The new affirmation, however, missed the entire point that the deadline for the true Messiah was the destruction of the Second Temple: A fact and expiration date now established for all time after 4 August A.D.70.

Wilful Blindness in the Absence of Satan

The significance of inter-revolt blindness cannot be attributed to superhuman forces of darkness once we recognize that Satan was bound after the Destruction of the Second Temple.  The leadership of Judaea could clearly see that all the testimonies of Jesus of Nazareth, the Apostles and the earliest Christians were 100% true, but in their rebellious hearts no truth was good enough to convince (and yet many leaders who could not be convinced before the Destruction DID repent after the Destruction).  This turn of events cause new insidious developments to be enacted.

The Collapse of the Diaspora Before the End

While Judea's leaders were trying to fgure out how to handle loss control in the synagogues militants continued to plague the Roman Empire would enormous instances of mass aggression to the tune of over a half million casualties in the Mediteranean Basin alone.  The Romans dispatched their best generals to weigh in on these post-Destruction of Jerusalem threats to the stability of the Romans Empire and by A.D.117--two years after serious fighting broke out, all was again under control.  Meanwhile, it appears that Christians became known as collaborators against the Jews to the Romans and helped the Romans police and keep an eye on possible incidents before they ever had a chance to gain any traction.

Satan Reintroduced to Gather the Chaff

By the third decade of the second century the Jews and the Godfearing co-religionist sympathizers were more numerous than ever before and more united, but the very same time what was in store for them would be a unilateral destruction when they were led back into the land of Israel to commit the final act of defiance against the salvation that Jesus had secured only 100 years before.  This is the logic of Satan's last stand and the gathering of the multitudes of Gog before being cast forever into the lake of fire.

A New Nation Without a Covenant With God

The rebellion that broke out in the Land of Israel in A.D.132 first of all speaks of enormous audacity: To have the nerve to think one could found a nation of Israel, refused God's direction or assistance and wilfully build a Temple to make sacrifices and oblations!  This was Bar Kokhba's exact sinful mod of operation: What he want to do regardless of God's will or permission.  In essense, Bar Kokhba was naming three enemies as had been done in the first Jewish revolt: God, the Romans, and the Christians (and there was no essential difference in this list!)

The End of the Apparition

The apparition of a nation called "Israel" and headed by a Nasi named Bar Kokhba in 132 ended in complete and utter disaster in 136 with countless people starving in caves and tunnels they had fled to for refuge.  They had every intent of returning home to a new age in Judaism under the governorship of Bar Kokhba but that was not to be because the next event horizon was eighteen centuries of intense contempt and suffering for the Jews on earth because they learned nothing by the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D.70.  Meanwhile, for Christians cosmic changes were finalized with  the descent of God's own Temple to be the abode of souls for the self-same period but forevermore.

The Great White Throne Judgment

The close of the times of the Gentiles at the termination of the Bar Kokhba government represents the judgment of all those who died and had rejected the Gospel of the Son of God and lived or fought on the wrong side of history against the will of God.  They were judged out of the books and if anyone's name was not found written in the Lamb's Book of Life they were cast into the lake of fire.

Final Event Horizon: The New Jerusalem

The knowledge of these final incidents in the history of the ancient synagogue bring us to a clean and clear understanding of the meaning and significance of Revelation chapters 21 and 22: These are chapters that describe the event horizons hundreds of thousands of Christians see every day upon passinig from this  earthly existence into the presense of God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.  The Book of Hebrews is by far the best commentary on the significance of all these things for Christians and the stable and secure expectation that is good for all who walk as true disciples and saints of God in the churches.

Summary

Now, whereas as the Jews had convinced themselves that what happened in A.D.70 was merely a cyclic change, the Gospel declared that the changes were  permanent and, moreover, this summary will spell that out and bring it home.

Even without Satan, the sinful human will of determined and corript leaders and gullible masses was determined to believe whatever they wanted to be true, but God's will for the Church, the kingdom of God, and the New Jerusalem ultimately prevailed and continue to expand and persist to this day.  Jewish wars could have reached their goals but because God intervened with the Seals, Trumpets, Bowls, and Thunders, all Jewish efforts to seize the kingdom of God by force backfired badly leaving Christians as the victors by default.  Jewish policies against the New Testament, laws against seeking healing by the name of Jesus Christ and the introduction of the curses of the Nineteenth Benediction only served to remove Christians from participation in the synagogues, but the distance created was very good for the disastrous failures that waited in the wings!

While Jewish leadership was on this contrarian warpath, the Diaspora communities were in shambles and undergoing catastrophic collapse due to the reverberations of Zealot massacres across the Roman Empire echoing negative consequences for Jews who had done no wrong (in other words, the innocent had to face the dire consequences of the actions of the guilty few).  And when Satan was released from the bottomless pit the war to reclaim a semblance of a Hebrew framework to exist within seemed like the only option against the greatest odds, but it called for another direct war against the Romans. But now the nation was without a covenant with God and, as such, on its own and the apparent strength and robustness of the second century manifestation of a unified national will was to be shown for what it really was: A temporary apparition doomed to destruction as being as morally bankrupt as Sodom and Gomorrah of old.   But as predicted, the Hebrew State fought vainly and then passed into oblivion in the exact way foretold by Ezekiel in the 38th and 39th chapter of his book, which described a ill-conceived invasion of the Land of Israel by Israel to be condemned to destruction so that God's glory would be shown in the heathen nations, which came to pass in the stellar growth of Christianity in the direct aftermath of Bar Kokhba's downfall.

Conclusion

This thousand years reign can be interpreted as the patiaence of God toward the twelve tribes of Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple and Jerusalem and before the waterloo of the Hebrew State when it mistakenly thought types and shadows would prove God's permission had been granted for the Temple-State to be restored and continue as usual.  Instead God terminated as system which had proved repeatedly to be prone to wilfulness, corruption, and human abuse.  In the final analysis, God no longer wants a Temple built by the hands of man, Jewish or otherwise.  The Temple Jesus Christ prepared for Christians is one he made himself and is incorruptible and will never fade away.  And this is the horizon of expectation Christians correctly look for after a life lived in repentence, humility, and faithfulness to the Savior.

Endnotes

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