What is the millennium?

Question 10049.

The millennial kingdom is the literal, thousand-year reign of Jesus on the earth that follows His Second Coming, when He rules the nations from the throne of David in Jerusalem. When people ask me what the millennium actually is, this is the very heart of my answer to them. It is a real, future, earthly kingdom, and not a symbol for the present church age, nor a poetic way of talking about heaven, nor a figure of speech to be quietly explained away. The millennial kingdom is the age in which the ancient promises made to Israel are finally kept in full, and creation itself is set gloriously right under its true and rightful King.

I take this position, the historic premillennial and dispensational reading, because it seems to me quite simply the plainest and most natural sense of Scripture. The millennial kingdom is where a great many separate prophetic threads are at last gathered up and tied off together, the covenant with Abraham, the throne promised to David, the shining visions of Isaiah, and the settled hopes of all the prophets. Read literally and allowed to mean what they say, these promises plainly demand a coming age of righteousness upon this very earth, and that promised age is the millennium I am describing here.

What Revelation says about the millennial kingdom

The clearest single passage is Revelation 20:1-6. Satan is seized, bound, and thrown down into the pit, and the faithful martyrs of the tribulation come to life again and reign with Christ for a thousand years. Six separate times in only six verses John repeats that same span, a thousand years, and I find it genuinely very hard to believe that he means anything other than a literal period of time. If he had wanted to describe some vague and indefinite age, he chose a decidedly strange way to do it, hammering the same round number home again and again. It is measured, bounded, and altogether real.

The Greek phrase behind that thousand years builds on the plain number chilioi, and I can see no signal in the text itself telling me to read it as a mere symbol. This is exactly where I part company with those who spiritualise the passage into something else. They happily treat the surrounding events, the two resurrections and the final judgement, as real and literal, but then suddenly read the thousand years alone as figurative. That inconsistency is precisely what a plain and honest reading avoids, and it is a large part of why I hold so firmly to a literal reign rather than a symbolic one.

Why I take the millennial kingdom literally

My literal reading of the millennial kingdom does not rest on Revelation 20 all on its own. It rests on the whole accumulated weight of Old Testament prophecy behind it. Isaiah 11 paints a coming age when the wolf shall dwell peacefully with the lamb, when the earth is full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea, and when a shoot from the cut stump of Jesse reigns in perfect righteousness. Isaiah 65 goes on to describe long life, fruitful and unfrustrated labour, and deep peace among the once-warring nations. These are earthly, physical, tangible scenes, and they have plainly never yet been fulfilled in any age of history. The millennial kingdom is precisely where they finally come true.

Above all, the millennial kingdom is what fulfils the solemn promise God swore on oath to David, that his throne would be established for ever, a promise I explore at length in my study of the Davidic covenant. If God’s sworn word to David is to be kept literally, and I believe with all my heart that it must be, then a true descendant of David has to reign one day upon a real throne over a real kingdom of real people. That promised descendant is Jesus, and that promised reign is the millennium. To spiritualise it all away is, as I see it, to leave God’s oldest and dearest promises hanging unfulfilled in the air.

What life in the millennial kingdom will be like

Scripture paints the millennial kingdom in warm and glowing colours throughout. Jesus reigns personally and visibly from Jerusalem, and the knowledge of God covers the whole earth as completely as the waters cover the sea. War itself is finally abolished, and the nations beat their swords into ploughshares and learn war no more. The ancient curse on creation is largely lifted, so that the deserts blossom and even the animal world is at peace with itself. Human life is greatly prolonged, and settled righteousness, rather than restless rebellion, is the ordinary order of every day. It is the world as it was always meant to be, ruled at last by the King it was always meant to have.

Yet the millennial kingdom is not quite the final and eternal state, and this genuinely surprises some people when they first see it. Natural-body survivors of the tribulation enter the kingdom and go on having children, and those later generations must still come to personal faith for themselves. At the very end, when Satan is briefly loosed one last time, a final rebellion astonishingly gathers, proving beyond all argument that even a perfect environment cannot change the human heart apart from the grace of God. The millennium is glorious beyond words, but it points on beyond itself to the eternal new heaven and new earth that follow it.

The millennial kingdom and the alternatives

I hold to a literal millennial kingdom over against two other main views, and I try hard to state them fairly rather than as caricatures. Amillennialism reads Revelation 20 symbolically and locates the reign of Christ in the present church age or the intermediate state, denying any future earthly kingdom at all. Postmillennialism instead expects the church to Christianise the world gradually and so usher in a golden age before Christ ever returns. I examine both of these carefully in my studies of amillennialism and postmillennialism, and I try to give each its honest due.

My real difficulty with both alternatives is finally the same one. They each require me to spiritualise away plain prophecies that read most naturally as literal, and they both struggle to account honestly for the specific, repeated details Scripture gives us about a coming earthly reign. The premillennial view, by contrast, simply lets the covenants stand as written, keeps Israel and the Church distinct as the New Testament does, and reads Revelation 20 in exactly the same literal way it reads the chapters standing on either side of it. The millennial kingdom is, in the end, the glad reward of taking the whole text at its plain word.

Why the millennial kingdom matters

Some people treat the millennial kingdom as a mere curiosity, a fine detail reserved for prophecy enthusiasts to argue over, but I am convinced it matters far more than that. It gloriously vindicates the faithfulness of God, showing the watching universe that not one of His promises to Israel has fallen uselessly to the ground. It vindicates the honour of Jesus, granting Him a visible, public and unanswerable reign over the very world that once rejected and crucified Him. And it assures my own heart that history is genuinely going somewhere good, moving steadily toward a kingdom of righteousness and peace under a wholly righteous King.

The millennial kingdom also guards me carefully against two opposite errors at the very same time. It keeps me from the flat despair that says the world can only ever slide downwards into ruin, and equally from the naive optimism that imagines we ourselves will somehow fix it all in the end. The world will indeed one day be made right, gloriously and completely right, but by the returning King and not by our own efforts, and only after His coming and never before it. That double-edged hope keeps me both clear-eyed about the present and quietly confident about the future.

So, now what?

The millennial kingdom is coming whether the watching world believes in it or not, and the very King who will reign in it then is the same King who calls out to you now. The only question that finally matters is whether you will belong to Him when He comes to establish it. Those who bow to Him willingly now will one day reign together with Him then. Those who defy Him to the last will have no place at all in His kingdom, however grand and secure their place may seem in this present passing age of ours.

So bow to the coming King today, while His grace is still being freely and gladly offered to you. Trust the Jesus who bled and died for you, and you will one day see with your own eyes the very kingdom the prophets longed for across the centuries, with the King you already love seated upon the throne at its centre. Would you truly rather greet that great day as His welcomed subject, or find yourself shut out of the age you were made for?

And the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.”

Revelation 11:15 (ESV)