What happens to unbelievers who die during the Millennium?

Question 10197.

There will be unbelievers who die during the thousand year reign of Jesus, and Scripture is not silent about them. That surprises people, because we tend to imagine the kingdom as a place where nobody dies and nobody rebels, but the prophets describe something more textured than that.

Two passages carry most of the weight. Isaiah tells us death still occurs in the kingdom, and Revelation tells us where the unsaved dead of every age eventually stand.

Death still occurs in the kingdom

Isaiah 65:20 says that no more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days, for the young man shall die a hundred years old, and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed. Lifespans are restored to something like the pre flood scale, infant mortality ends, and yet death has not been abolished.

Read the last clause again, because it is the key to the question. The sinner who reaches a hundred years is described as accursed. Isaiah is telling us that within the kingdom there will be those who remain sinners, and that death and curse still fall on them.

So the unbelievers who die during those centuries are a real category. Death is not destroyed until the end, which is exactly what 1 Corinthians 15:26 says when it calls death the last enemy to be abolished.

Some read Isaiah 65:20 as saying nobody dies young, and it does say that, but the last clause will not let us stop there. The Hebrew has the sinner being accursed at a hundred, which most take to mean that persistent unbelief brings a death that would be considered premature in a world of restored lifespans. Either way, unbelievers who die are in view.

Why there are unbelievers who die in the kingdom

The Millennium begins with a converted population. Everyone who enters it in a natural body has come through the Tribulation as a believer, and the glorified saints reigning with Jesus are beyond the reach of sin. But those natural bodied survivors have children, and their children have children, across ten centuries.

Every one of those descendants is born with the nature Adam passed on, and each must come to personal faith in the King they can see. Most will. Some will not, and their outward compliance in a kingdom of visible righteousness will not save them.

That is why the kingdom closes with an army on the plain, a subject I take up in the article on the millennial rebellion. Rebellion at the end and unbelievers who die throughout are two symptoms of the same condition.

We should be clear that this is not a defect in the kingdom. The Millennium fulfils every promise made about the reign of Messiah, and it is glorious. What it does not do is abolish the fallen nature of children born in it, which is why the presence of unbelievers who die is not a failure of the King but a feature of a world still awaiting its final renewal.

There is also a striking implication for evangelism. Parents in the kingdom will need to tell their children about the King they can see, because seeing Him is not the same as trusting Him. The gospel will still need to be believed personally by every generation born under His reign.

Where those souls go at death

Scripture treats the unsaved dead of every age alike. The rich man in Luke 16:22 and 23 died and found himself in torment in Hades, conscious, aware and beyond crossing over. Hades, or sheol in the Hebrew, is the holding condition for the unsaved dead rather than their final destination.

There is no reason to think the arrangement changes during the kingdom. The unbelievers who die under the reign of Jesus go where the unbelieving dead have always gone, and they wait there, conscious and lost, for the judgement that closes the age. My fuller treatment of that state is in the article on the intermediate state.

We should feel the weight of that. Dying lost in a world governed by the visible Jesus is the most inexcusable death imaginable, and Isaiah does not soften it. He calls the man accursed.

One further point deserves saying gently. Whatever the number of unbelievers who die in those centuries, Scripture never presents any of them as trapped by circumstance. They will live under the clearest revelation of God ever given to natural bodied people, with the King in Jerusalem and His law taught from the mountain of the house of the Lord.

The Great White Throne gathers them all

Revelation 20:11 to 15 describes the throne, the dead standing before it, the books opened, and each judged according to what he had done. Anyone whose name was not found in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire. Death and Hades give up their dead and are themselves thrown in.

That scene follows immediately after the rebellion at the end of the Millennium, which means it gathers the unsaved of every era: those who died before the flood, those who died under the law, those who died in this present age, those who died in the Tribulation and the unbelievers who die during the kingdom itself.

One throne, one book, one criterion. I take up the mechanics of that judgement in the article on the Great White Throne.

There is one more feature of that scene worth noticing. The judgement is according to what each had done, from the books, and yet the decisive matter is whether a name appears in the book of life. Works establish the justice of the verdict; the missing name explains the sentence. That holds true for the unbelievers who die in the kingdom exactly as it does for everyone else, and it is why no one there will be able to argue that the standard shifted between the ages. One book, one Saviour, one basis of acceptance from Adam to the last child born under the reign of Jesus.

What their existence proves

These deaths are evidence in the case God is making about the human heart. It is common to hear that people would believe if God made Himself obvious. The kingdom removes every excuse of that kind. The King is visible, His justice is immediate, His enemy is imprisoned and the knowledge of the Lord fills the earth, and still there are those who refuse Him.

That tells us unbelief is not fundamentally an information problem. It is a disposition of the will, and only new birth changes it. A person can live under the plain government of Jesus for a century and remain a stranger to Him.

Nobody at the Great White Throne will be able to plead insufficient evidence. Those who lived in the kingdom least of all.

It also settles a common objection to hell. People sometimes say that God is unfair to judge those who never had enough evidence. The unbelievers who die under the visible reign of Jesus dispose of that argument permanently, because they had every advantage and still refused Him.

What it tells us about the eternal state

The Millennium is not the final answer, and this is one of the reasons why. A kingdom in which sinners are still born, still die and still fall under curse is glorious but not yet perfect, and Scripture never asks us to treat it as the end.

The eternal state is different in kind. In Revelation 21:4 death is no more, and mourning and crying and pain have passed away, because everyone who is there has been made new. No unbelievers who die, because no unbelievers at all.

That distinction between the kingdom and the eternal state matters for reading prophecy properly, and I work through it in the article comparing the two.

Notice how the two states differ in kind rather than in degree. The Millennium removes the devil, injustice and war; the eternal state removes sin, death and the possibility of rebellion. That is why Paul says the Son hands the kingdom over to the Father when every enemy including death has been abolished.

Paul makes the same point in a single line when he says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God in its final form. The natural bodied population of the Millennium belongs to a real and glorious stage of God’s programme, and it is still a stage in which mortality operates. The eternal state is not an improved version of the kingdom; it is the end of the whole story.

So, now what?

If a visible King and a thousand years of righteousness will not convert anybody by themselves, then neither will a Christian upbringing, a good church or a well argued sermon. Something has to happen inside a person, and it happens through faith in Jesus. Have you come to Him yourself, or have you only ever lived near Him?

And if you have, let this sharpen your prayers rather than your arguments. Who is nearest to you and furthest from Him? What would it take for you to speak to them this week?

And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Revelation 20:15 (ESV)