When are fallen angels judged in relation to the Millennium?

Question 10195.

The judgement of fallen angels does not happen all at once, and that is what makes the question worth asking carefully. Scripture describes some spirits already confined, others still active, a leader bound for a thousand years and then released, and a final sentence carried out at the end. Put the passages in order and a sequence appears.

I should say at the outset that Scripture tells us less about this than we would like, and rather more than most Christians realise. Where the text is quiet I intend to be quiet with it.

Not all fallen angels are in the same condition now

Some are already imprisoned. 2 Peter 2:4 says God did not spare angels when they sinned but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness until the judgement. The word Peter uses is tartaroo, a term borrowed from Greek thought for the deepest place of confinement, and it appears nowhere else in the New Testament. Jude 6 says the same of angels who did not stay within their own position of authority.

Others are plainly still at liberty. Demons speak to Jesus in the Gospels, Paul warns of spiritual forces in the heavenly places in Ephesians 6:12, and John describes fallen angels swept along with the dragon in Revelation 12. So the present picture is mixed, with some fallen angels held and others operating.

Both groups await the same verdict. Confinement now is custody rather than sentence, which is why Peter says they are kept until the judgement. I have written on the distinctions between these classes in the article on Tartarus.

Scripture also gives us a hint about why some are confined and others are not. Both Peter and Jude connect the imprisoned group with a particular transgression, described by Jude as leaving their proper dwelling, and both writers set it alongside Sodom and the flood generation. Whatever those fallen angels did, it was distinct enough to bring an early and separate confinement.

The chain before the Millennium

The first great restraint tied to the kingdom falls on the leader. In Revelation 20:1 to 3 an angel comes down with the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain, seizes the dragon, binds him for a thousand years, throws him into the pit and shuts and seals it so that he can deceive the nations no longer.

This is confinement rather than final judgement, and it is temporary by explicit statement. The text says he must be released for a little while afterwards. I take the chain literally in effect if not in metal, as I explain in the article on the great chain.

Scripture does not say in that passage what becomes of the demonic host at the same moment, but the effect described is total. Isaiah says the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, and no prophet describes demonic activity inside the kingdom. The reasonable inference is that the fallen angels are removed from operation along with their leader, whether confined with him or otherwise restrained.

It is worth pausing on how thorough the sealing is. An angel comes with a key, binds, throws, shuts and seals, and the purpose clause is stated: so that he might not deceive the nations any longer. Four verbs and a seal for one prisoner. Whatever we imagine about the strength of fallen angels, God treats their restraint as a matter of straightforward administration.

Is there an interim judgement of angels at the second coming?

There is a passage that points that way. Isaiah 24:21 and 22 says that on that day the Lord will punish the host of heaven in heaven and the kings of the earth on the earth, and that they will be gathered together as prisoners in a pit and shut up in a prison, and after many days be punished. Two stages, with a long interval between them.

That reads remarkably like the pattern of Revelation 20. A gathering and shutting up, then an interval, then a final punishment. If Isaiah is describing what John later saw, then the host of heaven is dealt with at the same point in the programme as the dragon, at the second coming and the setting up of the kingdom.

I hold that as a strong probability rather than a certainty, because Isaiah does not name the parties and I would rather leave a question open than close it with a guess.

Isaiah adds one detail that should stop us being casual about this. He says the punishment falls on the host of heaven in heaven and on the kings of the earth on the earth, which sets the two orders of rebellion side by side. Human pride and angelic pride are dealt with in the same act of judgement, and neither is treated as a lesser matter.

The final sentence and the lake of fire

The final destiny is not in doubt. Jesus said in Matthew 25:41 that the eternal fire was prepared for the devil and his angels, which settles both the place and the company. Revelation 20:10 records the devil being thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur, where the beast and the false prophet already are, to be tormented for ever.

John does not describe a separate scene for the demonic host, and the Great White Throne that follows concerns human beings whose names are not in the book of life. Since Jesus said the fire was prepared for the devil and his angels together, I take it that they share his sentence at that point. My fuller treatment is in the article on whether demons are judged separately.

Note the finality of the language. There is no release, no reduced term and no second chance for fallen angels, and Scripture never offers them redemption. Hebrews 2:16 says it was not angels that Jesus took hold of but the offspring of Abraham.

There is no hint anywhere of a graduated sentence for the demonic host, and no suggestion that any of them repent. Hebrews describes the incarnation as the Son taking hold of the offspring of Abraham rather than of angels, and that omission is deliberate. Fallen angels sinned with a clearer view of God than any human being has ever had, and Scripture offers them no mediator.

Why believers are said to judge angels

Paul asks the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 6:3 whether they do not know that they are to judge angels, and he asks it while telling them off for taking each other to the magistrates over trivia. The argument only works if the future judgement of angels is real and if believers have some part in it.

He does not explain the mechanism, and I will not invent one. Whether it means participation in the verdict, or ruling in the administration that displaces them, or simply that the redeemed church becomes the standing evidence against them, the point Paul makes is about our present dignity and our present pettiness.

It fits the wider pattern that the redeemed reign with Jesus, which is the subject of my article on authority over angels.

Putting the sequence in order

So the order runs like this in my reading. Some offending spirits are already in custody, awaiting sentence. The rest continue to operate through the present age and through the Tribulation, with intense activity described in Revelation 9 and 12. At the second coming the dragon is bound and the host is restrained, and the earth enjoys a thousand years without their interference.

At the end of that period the dragon is released for the final deception, defeated without a struggle, and thrown into the lake of fire, where his angels join him under the sentence Jesus described. The Great White Throne then deals with the unsaved dead of every age.

What that sequence shows is a God who does not act in haste and never leaves accounts unsettled. The confinement of fallen angels has run for millennia already, and it will end exactly when He says.

What I would resist is filling the silences. We are not told where the demonic host spends the thousand years, whether their confinement is the same pit, or how the judgement of the fallen angels is administered. The order is clear enough to teach; the mechanics are not, and a preacher who supplies them is writing rather than reading.

So, now what?

There are two practical results. The first is confidence. The powers that harass believers are not free agents; they are already sentenced and awaiting execution of it, and their timetable is not theirs to set. Resist them, as James 4:7 says, and remember that you are opposing a defeated enemy rather than a rival.

The second is sober gratitude. Not one of those spirits was offered a Saviour, and you were. When did you last thank God for the plain fact that mercy came to your side of the divide? And who in your life still needs to hear that it did?

Then he will say to those on his left, Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

Matthew 25:41 (ESV)