INTRODUCTORY: The spiritual mode of interpretation of this Book is nowhere more essential and relevant than in chapter 20. Some historicist brethren, too earnest and sincere in their endeavours to interpret these verses according to their usual rule, have refused to attempt the task. Others have dismissed the problem in a sentence - like the excellent Andrew Bonar. The “literal” method nowhere stands so exposed as here. Our method, which follows in the steps of those few men who in more modern times have abandoned the literal interpretation for the spiritual - is to show how the Gospel destroyed all the earlier designs of Satan to hold the nations in the bond of heathenism. Thus he is “bound” until the wisdom of God looses the Evil One for the scourge of the final apostasy in which a return is made to heathenism and the true Church emerges more clearly and plainly than since the days of the Apostles, as the sole bearer of the torch of truth. The denial of the fundamental creed of the Church on a worldwide scale, and the rise in its place of RATIONALISM (the worship of the human mind) makes an ominous separation between believer and unbeliever, though the cleavage is not such as to be visible in an organisational sense. It is a separation of the Spirit, and the siege of the Camp of the Saints in this chapter is not perceived by the world as such, because it is a warfare in the unseen realm of the Spirit. Always the rule is: “We war not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high (heavenly) places”. (Ephesians 6:12)
The last ‘historical’ chapter of the Apocalypse, the 20th, exhibits as though in summary form the prophetic history of the entire Book. Thus the Thousand Years “Millennium” is not to be isolated from all which precedes as though foretelling a new event in succession to all which has previously been foretold. Rather we should see this chapter as a fresh and final summary of all the events of the Book of Revelation, followed by a brief epilogue (the Little Season of the Loosing of Satan) which shows the last state of Church and world before the great consummation. All attempts to present the Thousand Years as a golden age of universal peace, with Christ reigning on earth in visible state in the midst of His people, break down on the appalling apostasy which marks the Loosing of Satan at the end of the Thousand Years.
Put into plain language, we are to view the Thousand Years as a symbolic period denoting the duration of the Church from the days of the apostles to the last apostasy before the Second Advent of Christ. During this Millennial period (which has already lasted almost 2,000 years) Satan is “bound” as to his former world-wide reign when the “Church” consisted only of the tribes of Israel in their tiny patrimony in Palestine, an oasis in a world given over universally to heathenism. The binding of Satan took place when the Saviour consummated His work of Redemption by His death on the Cross, and His glorious resurrection and Ascension into heaven.
When God became incarnate as the Babe of Bethlehem, and when 33 years later the Cross and the Tomb spelled out the wonder and mystery of the Atonement, a new element entered into history. Satan’s dominion over the nations was shattered in one tremendous blow. The foundations of hell and of death were shaken; the Spirit of God was poured out without measure through the Risen Christ; the power of God was manifested through preaching. It pleased God by (what was to the astonished world) “the foolishness of preaching”, to save them that believed. Christ, the Cross, the preaching of the Cross, was a new power which the world had not known before, and which took even hell by surprise. All opposition was overcome by the apostolic effusion. On the rock of Christ (God becoming man for the redemption of the fallen race), the Kingdom of God was built - and the gates of hell could not prevail against it. Satan’s dominion over the races of mankind came to an end. The ancient heathenism was overthrown wherever this gospel was proclaimed, and light, hope, and peace, with joy unspeakable and full of glory prevailed where all had been darkness and despair.
The idols of the heathen fell before the preaching of Christ. Fire and sword were powerless to arrest the triumphant course of the gospel. All that Satan could do to destroy or hinder this new power which had come into the world, was unavailing. Satan’s dominion was ended. The weapon which God used was not the overwhelming force of almightiness, but the weakness and ‘foolishness’ of preaching (1 Cor. 1:21-24). The secret had been foretold by prophets of old time –
“Not by might, nor, by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts”. (Zechariah 4:6)
That promise of the Holy Spirit to be with the Church, to teach, convince, subdue, was the special message given to the Apostle John to record. He alone of the chosen Twelve records the wonderful words of the Saviour in the Upper Room on that dark betrayal night, the eve of Calvary. In the holy privacy of that Upper Room, when the bread was broken and the cup bestowed, the promise of the Father was made clear and plain. The Spirit of Truth, the Comforter, would come to crown the work of Christ and to anoint fallen man to make him one with his Creator and Redeemer, and so realise the original purpose of creation. Redeemed man was - more than a redeemed sinner; far more, he was the lost son returning home from a world of sin, received by His Maker (who was also his Redeemer) in the immortal words of the parable, “This my son was dead, and is alive again - was lost and is found”. Elevated now to a rank above the angels, he becomes a partaker of the Spirit of God, and in him God realises all that His wisdom planned at the first creation. For the goal of deity is the full manifestation of the divine Name and glory in man - the unfolding in him, through union with Christ, of all the grace and glory, beauty and peace of that Godhead whose name is LOVE.
Thus was Satan quelled and put to shame at Calvary through the meek surrender of God to all which total evil could do against Him. Satan is overthrown, and limits set to his kingdom of darkness and death; not by almighty power (that would have been no glory to God and no solution of the problem of evil) - but by weakness, suffering, sorrow and pain, and the inexhaustible meekness of love. “My strength is made perfect in weakness”. (2 Cor. 12:9)
Again Paul reminds us, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor. 1:25). The strength of God lies not in mighty deeds, but in being crucified.
(1 Cor. 1:23)
Our very calling as Christians exhibits this same apparent contradiction between the wisdom of men and the hidden wisdom of God – “Ye see your calling brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and weak things of the world to confound the mighty, and base things of the world ... yea and things that are not, to bring to naught things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence ...” (1 Cor. 1:26-30)
And what bearing has this upon the 20th chapter of Revelation with its mysterious binding of Satan and his being restrained for a thousand years in the ‘bottomless pit’? It has a vital bearing on our understanding of this chapter, for Satan is bound by no material ‘chain’, nor is he sealed in any celestial prison. There is no geography in the eternal world, no pits, and no bottomless abysses - nothing like this in a sphere where all is spiritual. Prisons and pits are earthly terms used to denote restriction, restraint, limitation of powers, the frustration and confinement of evil.
Satan is bound by the divine decree which has ordained that the gospel shall succeed and the world of heathendom be overthrown. '”The bottomless pit” says one of the Fathers “is the soul of the wicked”. The worst thing that can happen to the soul in eternity is that it should be sealed up in itself. Who was really in prison when Caesar, the Master of the world, sought to exterminate this new thing which had penetrated into his world? By fire and sword, by prison and torture, by the lions of the amphitheatre, he strove to destroy this strange new visitation known as the gospel. In vain did he (or Satan through him) use his merciless power to drown the Church in her own blood. She only flourished the more, and spread her beneficent message far and wide. Satan was powerless to suppress. Who was it then who was bound? Not the Church and her witnesses, but Caesar and the Devil.
The “binding” and the “chain’ are the holy decrees of God, otherwise expressed by the Saviour Himself in the words, “On this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”. (Matthew 16:18-19)
The power of the sword having failed to destroy the Church, Satan resorted to lying imitations of the gospel, using Christian terms to shroud heathen pretences. The brood of heretics, who spread over the world after the ancient gods of paganism had fallen before the divine Word, could not hinder the spread of gospel light. Satan remained bound despite the apparent flourishing of these subtle errors which poured like a destructive flood from his mouth (Rev. 12:13).
THE THREE PHASES OF SATAN
It is clear from history that the whole policy of Satan falls into three clearly marked phases. First, he sought to destroy the Church by fire and sword, proceeding from his agents, the pagan Caesars of Rome. The second phase began when the reign of Constantine brought to an end the persecution of the Church. Satan then sought to destroy the Church by a much more subtle weapon - the return of heathenism in a Christian garb. Much more dangerous than the sword of persecution, was the subtlety of recreating heathenism under the Christian name. Robes, incantations, priestcraft, returned to dazzle the mind and deceive the heart. Caesar returned with all his court, his wealth and splendour, as Pope and Papacy, till the ecclesiastical dominion of Rome extended its rule beyond the ancient boundaries of pagan Rome. Yet always the wisdom of God prevailed both inside and outside those boundaries, so that the true Church, though an oppressed minority within the papal empire, waved aloft the torch of truth. Paulicians and Waldenses outside the Papal decrees proclaimed the truth and suffered for it. Inside the ecclesiastical fold itself, there were not wanting men in every generation who held aloft the torch of truth in the prevailing darkness, until the glorious Reformation toppled the Papal crown.
Ecclesiastical tyranny having failed, the Evil One brought out of his armoury the third and last of his devices for the perpetuation of his reign over the mind and soul of man - THE LAST GREAT BAAL OF RATIONALISM. It is this which now dominates the scene. The Reformation has ended in shambles, and the historic churches are falling on every hand. This surely is THE DEVIL’S LITTLE SEASON which must supervene after Satan’s former subtlety has run its course. The banishment of the idea of God from His own creation and the worldwide flood of atheism is Satan’s last weapon. It is now being wielded on a universal scale.
NO GOLDEN AGE
To summarise, the THOUSAND YEARS, or “MILLENNIUM” of Revelation 20 is not a golden age of universal peace, with Christ reigning visibly at Jerusalem, or even reigning invisibly from heaven, over a terrestrial globe renewed in Edenic splendour (as some worthy men have taught). It is the Gospel Reign of Christ in the midst of His Church gathering out His people from north, south, east and west, bringing them into the gospel Zion, the true City of God, proving their faith by trial, pain and loss against all the lying charges of Satan, as in the prime example of Job. A Golden Millennium in which it is easy to be a Christian but desperately hard to be a sinner, proves nothing unless it proves Satan to be right after all, when (again as in the case of Job) he boasts that no-one serves God except for present advantage.
According to the general consensus of Millenarian theory, Satan has only to be set free for a Little Season from his prison of restraint, for the entire glory of a thousand years of the personal reign of Christ on a restored and paradisaical earth, to collapse into universal apostasy, with nothing to show for that Golden Reign but a ‘camp of the saints’ surrounded by the multitudes of revived heathenism, “Gog and Magog” arisen from the four corners of the earthly paradise. Our friends who hold this theory have a hard task before them. They have sought to prove that only the complete removal of Satan from the world can bring in the Golden Age of universal peace, whereas Satan’s unloosing even for a Little Season is enough to procure a universal apostasy.
THE BINDING OF SATAN
It is now our duty to advance through this great chapter verse by verse, and we begin with the descent of the ‘angel’ to the earth for the arrest of Satan and his imprisonment for a thousand years in the abyss:
“And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.
And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.
And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.”
The “angel” is Christ. No other can bind Satan and restrain his liberty. Even a great angel like the one sent to strengthen Daniel beside the river Hiddekel, was unable to come at once to Daniel’s aid when he (the angel) was obstructed by one of the Satanic ‘princes’ sent to monitor the affairs of the kingdom of Persia (Daniel 10:10-13). Only the appearance of Michael the archangel gave Daniel’s angelic messenger success in his mission - and Michael is Christ in His office as Lord of the angelic host. (See Jude 9 and compare Zechariah 3:2)
The Prince of Hell can only be bound by one mightier than himself, and that One is Christ who as Lord of the angelic host executes the divine decree against Satan -by virtue of that authority vested in Him by the Father whose holy will He fulfils by lowly birth, obedient life, and yielding Himself unto the death of the cross. Being Himself God, He consented to take the form of a servant, was made in the likeness of men, and as man humbled Himself in absolute obedience unto death, even the death of the cross: wherefore the Father hath highly exalted Him and given Him a name above every name (Philippians 2:6-10). It was in that same spirit of humility and obedience that (according to Jude) the Lord, as Michael, ‘durst not’ rail against Satan. There is no power but of God, and Satan is permitted to exercise a mysterious part in the divine government. The Evil One must not be made the subject of railing accusation. The terrible power of darkness and the divine method of overcoming that power may not be made the excuse for foolish and ignorant raillery. “DURST NOT” does not indicate weakness, but reverence for God’s holy decrees. This becomes clear as we consider the related passage in Zechariah 3:2: “THE LORD SAID UNTO SATAN, THE LORD REBUKE THEE O SATAN”.
The bottomless pit is a term describing the condition of restraint laid upon Satan as a consequence of his overthrow at Calvary. Satan can at one and the same time be in prison and at large; bound with a great chain, yet fearsomely active. The chain, like the binding, is a figure denoting the restrictive decree of God as in the case of the divine control over the rolling sea –
“Hitherto shalt thou come and no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed”. (Job 38:11)
HOW SATAN FALLS FROM HEAVEN
Luke (chap. 10:17-20) records that when the Seventy disciples (a significant number!) returned with joy from their prophetic mission to the cities of Israel, they declared, “Even the devils are subject unto us through thy name”. The Lord replied, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven”. This was spoken prophetically in anticipation of the worldwide spread of the gospel after Christ’s ascension to the right hand of power. Before the preaching of the Word, Satan would be cast down from his long heathen reign over the gentile world. Heaven is often used as a symbol of power, and Satan is always falling from heaven wherever the irresistible Word of God is proclaimed. Christ signifies this in His continuing words to the Seventy:
“Behold I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: And nothing shall by any means hurt you. Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”
There can be no doubt that this significant event in the ministry of our Lord was intended to prepare the Church for her New Testament ministry of the Word by which Satan’s kingdom would be overthrown. “Serpents and scorpions” are Satan’s army of demonic fallen spirits who are trodden down by the preaching of the gospel.
Wesley - great Charles Wesley: - put it well when he wrote,
Jesus! the name high over all
In hell, or earth, or sky.
Angels and men before it fall,
And devils fear and fly.
Happy if with my latest breath
I may but gasp His name;
Preach Him to all, and cry in death,
Behold, behold the Lamb!
Satan has liberty to act only so far as the providence of God permits and the whole problem of the Book of Job was recorded to make that point clear. Other statements in Scripture make it perfectly plain that hell and its evil angels, including the chief of them, Satan, are always under the divine restraint.
See 2 Peter 2:4: “God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment”.
Jude writes, in verse 6 of his short epistle, “The angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains unto the judgment of the great day”. Here is a clear statement that devils can be in “everlasting chains” yet remain at large, moving throughout the world at their nefarious work. What is meant is that the fallen angels are kept within strict bounds and limits as touching their present activity. Satan himself must go to God for permission to tempt Job. It is in this sense that Satan is both bound and at large; both in prison in the bottomless pit, and still engaged in his evil work on earth.
There is a formidable difference between Satan’s activity before and after Calvary. No more is Satan permitted ‘to deceive the nations’ as once he did. He no longer has power to hold the nations fast in the darkness of paganism and ignorance. Instead of the Word of God being confined to one nation on earth (the small nation of Israel), the boundaries of divine grace have been pushed back so that the whole wide world has come under the power and the preaching of the gospel. That scripture has come true which long ago was spoken by Jeremiah, “The gods which have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth and from under these heavens” (Jer. 10:11) Where now are the gods worshipped by our European ancestors? Where are Wodin and Thor and other Nordic deities who even gave their names to the days of the week still observed by the Western World? Where is the worship of the host of heaven - sun, moon and stars? The territory of Japheth, the youngest son of Noah, to whom the continent of Europe (and from it the Americas) was given after the Flood, at last came under the power of the gospel as was provided in the decree of God when Noah allocated to his three sons their destiny. “God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem” - that is, Japheth was destined to inherit the spiritual privileges and promises originally bequeathed to Shem the eldest son, in whose family Abraham and the tribes of Israel arose.
Despite the fearsome might of the Evil One, the Word of God triumphed in Japheth’s inheritance and from that territory the gospel has gone out to the whole world. For 2,000 years the truth of God as it was revealed to the apostles and set down in the Holy Scripture, has been developed by the sons of Japheth until the task of Japheth is well-nigh complete.
SATAN’S NAMES
The Evil One is described in our opening verses as “The dragon, the old serpent, the devil, and Satan”. In Chapter 19 we reviewed the fourfold Name given to the Son of God. Satan’s fourfold name spells out the whole of his nature and his being. The dragon symbolises WRATH, the serpent SUBTLETY, the devil ABSOLUTE EVIL, and Satan ADVERSARY - the adversary of God and Man, seeking to destroy by the threefold exercise of destructive wrath, deceivableness of unrighteousness, and the pollution of mind and soul, God’s crowning creation of MAN in His own image. It was the divine intimation of the creation of man as the full and final means by which God would make Himself visible and glorious, that divided the angelic heaven and precipitated Lucifer (Satan) with the angelic armies which he subverted from allegiance to God, from his heavenly state to that hell, or bottomless pit, which ancient divines have described as being no locality, but simply the SOUL OF THE WICKED. Elsewhere, in our study of “The Problem of Evil” [See 028-1; 028-2; 028-3] we have tried to show how the ultimate realisation of the divine purpose in Man was reserved for God Himself becoming Man. He and He alone bears the burden of creation, and brings the whole creation, visible and invisible, to see the wonder and glory of the divine mystery displayed in Christ, God manifest in flesh. The withholding of any disclosure of how the purpose of God would be so fulfilled (not by Man but by God incarnate as Man), was the moral test of angels - as all moral beings must be tried as creatures with will and choice.
The fall of angels came about by the failure in them of that faith and love by which alone the full purpose of their creation could be realised. The test of Man was on a lower level. Eve was deceived by the Tempter’s words, “Ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil”. The man was not deceived, but by weakness of nature in cleaving to the woman more than to His God, he wrought his own downfall. Yet not as Satan’s fall, for man was a limited creature, not created with fulness of knowledge as were the angels, but having to gather knowledge by seeking, by obedience, by faith, by patience, by love. Hence Man could be redeemed; the devils never. God could take upon Himself the inheritance of Man by becoming Man, saying even to such a sinner as the dying thief – “Today thou shalt be with me in paradise”.
Angels cannot die, but the limited creature, Man can die, and in his nature, taken truly and absolutely from the womb of the Virgin, God could enter into Man’s inheritance and as Man die for Man and bring in a rich Atonement which at the last would raise Man to the throne of the universe to reign over all for ever. The Book of Revelation when rightly understood shows the divine journey to that final triumph.
Thus was the great Adversary cast down and put to utter shame - defeated in spite of all the advantages freely given to him to challenge the divine authority and work his nefarious will and spite against man. His long campaign of deceit and violence is permitted by an All-Wise God to show how faith and love are at last the only conquerors. This is what the Apocalypse is about - and nothing else. Those who use the Book as a crystal ball to forecast the future know not what they do.
THE THOUSAND YEARS
God does not permit man or devil to know the day or the hour of Christ’s Second Coming to judge all creation. If therefore the Thousand Years (Millennium) denote a literal thousand years it would be possible for those who take the post-millenarian position (adopted by most of the Puritans and their successors) to name the date of the final event, the end of the world, by the simple process of reckoning from the commencement of that Golden Age. Likewise, seeing that their Golden Age has certainly not yet begun, they would be in the disturbing position of being able to assure all the sinful world that there is no fear yet of judgment - the Thousand Years has not even started!
But if the Thousand Years is not intended to denote such an exact period of time, but (as we believe) the entire Gospel Reign of Emmanuel from His resurrection from the dead to His sudden appearance to judge all creation - an appearance which is described by Paul as ‘in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet’ (1 Cor. 15:52) - then we must accept that the Thousand Years is not a literal measurement of time, but an uncertain period of great duration, known only to God in whose sight a thousand years is as one day, and one day as a thousand years (see 2 Peter 3:8).
The Lord’s plan of time, fixed before the foundation of the world, is known only to Himself. When He tells us that the last chapter of man’s history will last a thousand years we must not conclude that this period of time is other than symbolic. We must perceive that 1,000 is a perfect number, and in divine language it is used to indicate that God’s times are as perfect as His own great mind. There is no broken time with Him. It is the same with the number of the redeemed. To us that number is as the sand of the sea and the stars of heaven innumerable. To God, the number is perfectly rounded and complete, as in Revelation 7 - the number of those sealed to salvation is 144,000 and yet is also a great multitude which no man can number (same chapter). Elsewhere we read the number of the angelic host as ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands (Rev. 5:11). Indeed, the Apocalypse is a Book of perfect numbers, well-rounded and complete. Therefore the thousand year millennium must not be measured according to the human reckoning of that number, for it is not given to man to know ‘the times and the seasons’ which the Father has reserved to Himself. Indeed we may thank God for that, for it preserves for us the blessed hope that any day or hour the Lord may come for His own.
We may be assured the end will come in His own perfect timing, ordained by matchless wisdom and holy foreknowledge of all things. Days are years in Daniel’s vision of the Seventy Weeks (Dan. 9:25-27). What are they in Daniel 12:11-12? Are these mysterious figures of 1290 and 1335 days a measurement of time on another and yet more mysterious computation, from the Crucifixion of Christ to the end of the world? We know that our day is fixed by the revolution of our planet diurnally on its own axis, and our year by our annual journey round the sun, but our measurement is peculiar to ourselves and does not apply to the other heavenly bodies.
There are myriads of methods of measuring time. What if Daniel's “days” in his last chapter relate not to any earthly conditions at all, but to the great astronomical cycles of time measured by the slow alteration of the map of the night sky? Some have thought so, and that the difference between the 1290 and the 1335 is the Little Season of Satan’s unloosing when the Thousand Years have run their course. We throw out the hint not as a conclusion but as a possibility, given to Daniel in this form so that the suffering people of God may know that though they have no access to the divine map of time, all is none the less measured and weighed in the depths of the divine wisdom.
THE FIRST RESURRECTION (verses 4-6)
“And I saw thrones; and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.
Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.”
The vision proceeds with a remarkable unveiling of the present state of the righteous departed ones in heaven. Where are our departed friends who have died in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ? They are ‘living and reigning with Christ’. It is not to be supposed that only the martyrs are in this happy state, while the great mass of departed believers, who never wore the crown of martyrdom, are quietly and reverently reposing elsewhere in the heavenly scene. This would exclude from the place of special privilege in the next world a vast army of the people of the Lord, including some of the most notable names in history. Most of the Church Fathers survived the great persecutions of the early centuries. Men like Augustine died peacefully in their beds. Great Reformers like Luther, Calvin, Knox, survived many dangers and died natural deaths. But the Church as a whole is a martyr Church. Some in recent times have yielded up their lives to cruel death, in faithfulness to Christ, but most of the Lord’s people have been permitted throughout the ages to end their days in peace. Yet what is common to all true believers is that they bear their witness in a world which is hostile to Christ and at enmity with God. They bear their silent witness against the corruption of the faith and against those who deny the Word of God. Often against many trials harder to be borne than cruel death they take their faithful stand and bear their humble testimony. Others like one of Mr. Bunyan’s most engaging characters - Mr. Fearing - live their simple lives, endure temptation, face the world with an uncomplaining spirit; like Mr. Fearing, one thing they will not do - they “won't go back”. The way is often hard, and lonely. Discouragement and temptation are very real foes. But whatever the trial, they “won't go back” - they will press on steadfastly and faithfully to the end.
This is the nature of the true martyr Church and its members. The verses from our chapter, quoted above, are the banner of the whole army of the Lord, keeping rank and file all the way to the heavenly kingdom and hearing at the last the words of their Lord – “Well done, good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful in a few things. Have thou rule over many”.
These humble and worthy confessors of Christ are described as living and reigning with Christ for a thousand years - not on earth, but in heaven. “I saw the souls ...” says John (v.4). They are not reigning in some Millennial kingdom on earth, but in heaven; not in the body but in the spirit. “This” says John, “is the first resurrection”. In verse 6 he speaks of “the second death”. He neither speaks of a Second Resurrection, nor of a First Death. To understand this is vital to the understanding of the nature of the “millennium”. The First Resurrection is the passage of the believer to heaven when the body is left behind in the grave. The Second Death is the death of the soul when the wicked stand at last before the Judge and are bidden to depart from His presence. The soul does not die as the body dies, for its candle of life is inextinguishable. The theory of annihilation of the soul betrays ignorance of the nature of the soul which is immortal, not mortal - immortal not in the sense of blessedness, but in the sense of ceaseless existence. God does not create in order to destroy. That sentient life He has given to Man or Angel is from Himself and is inextinguishable. It is this which makes life the reality and the responsibility which it is. It is not an evolutionary product of some lifestream derived from the lower forms of life, as evolution teaches. Animals have no moral responsibility. Theirs is but a humble, transient existence, wonderful in its measure (like the life of plants), and reflecting the wealth of the divine mind, but sheerly temporary and transient. Man, as touching the spirit, is immortal, as the angels are immortal. Satan cannot be literally destroyed, because he was made to bear the divine likeness. Nor can Man be destroyed, for he too bears the divine image. The body may moulder into the dust of the grave, but the resurrection is sure, whether to blessedness or to condemnation.
There never could have been a time when man evolved from a lower to a higher state, else how did he acquire his moral accountability, which is acknowledged by the most degraded and savage of tribes as well as in the ethics and laws of modern society? Satan’s present attempt to degrade human life by dragging it into the mire of sin, vice, hate, violence, shame- succeeds in nothing but in proving that God made Man in His own image and likeness, but that Man, like the Devil, has fallen from his once noble state, and is a traitor to his own once-peerless nature. The fact of conscience; the wrestlings of the soul against sin and shame, the yearning after new life, salvation, immortality - these prove that man has a soul, and soul does not evolve. “Man, know thyself!” is not a command which can be addressed to a dog or an ox. Only Man can peer inwardly and examine himself in baffled wonder- “Who am I? Why am I here? Whence came I? Whither do I go?”
“He that liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:26) says the Saviour, and this, conjoined with John’s Revelation determines that the first resurrection is that of the soul – “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” says the Saviour, with an authority which proves that He is God. Who in history, however wicked, has ever dared, or thought to say, “He that believeth in me shall never die”? The first resurrection places us (even in this present life), with the immortals in heaven – “He hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ”. Our feet may tread upon the earth but our inner life belongs to Christ and walks even now, with Him, in heavenly places.
(Ephesians 1:3 and refs.)
Where are these heavenly places? They are our present communion with Christ. They are not in some far distant realm. Heaven has no geography. Christ has never left His people. “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” When at the end of our days, our soul at last leaves the tired body, it does not ‘go’ anywhere - it is already there - in the presence of the King. This indeed is the first resurrection, and ‘blessed and holy’ are they who have part therein, for “on them the Second Death has no power”.
Augustine wisely says “death of the soul is when God leaves it; death of the body is when the soul leaves it”.
The 1,000 years indicate that the second coming of Christ was separated from the suffering saints of John’s day by a great period of time. In the meanwhile death means reigning with Christ and is to be regarded as “the first resurrection”.
Peter (2 Pet. 3:8) hints at the possibility of such a delay as “1,000 years” is intended to represent.
The Second Death is the soul’s final separation from God, from its banishment to that region where its inward-turning life finds no rest. Yet even there, it bows at the Name of Jesus, for at that Name “every knee must bow, of things in heaven and things in earth, and things under the earth; and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father”. (Philippians 2:10-11)
There is therefore no Millennial reign on earth. The reign of the saints, as verse 4 declares, is with Christ upon the throne of immortality in heaven, awaiting the consummation when the mystery of God shall be completed.
THE LOOSING OF SATAN (verses 7-10)
“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.
And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.
And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.
And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”
The binding of Satan means the limitation of his power over the nations, so that wherever the Word of God is preached the bulwarks of his kingdom fall. So the loosing again of Satan can only mean the restoration of Satanic liberty to deceive the nations which, like Israel of old, have forsaken the Word of God after 2,000 years of that Great Light. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”. (Isaiah 9:2)
It is clear that this Loosing of Satan ushers in the final phase of Satan’s long history as the Adversary of God and Man. We must expect, and indeed we find, that the King of Hell takes advantage of this last phase to discard all disguise and come forth as the Devil which he is. In other words, no longer does he rely on the ancient paganism which fell wherever the gospel was preached. Nor yet, as in the second phase of his history, does he prolong Paganism by dressing up the old and discredited idolatry in Christian clothes. Seeing he has but a short time remaining, Satan goes forth no longer disguised, but as an atheistic devil to gather the whole world for the last battle.
This is what is meant by Gog and Magog - not Russia, not Rome, not any centralised system of darkness, but direct from hell, the new rationalism with the devil himself enthroned without disguise at the head of the rout. Worship he desires for himself and worship he is now receiving, and nowhere more so than from those territories where the gospel for the last 400 years reached its highest honour since the days of the apostles.
WILD GUESSES
The modern attempt to equate “Magog” with Russia is typical of the wild guesses made in modern times of the identity of Antichrist. Napoleon, the Kaiser, Mussolini and Hitler have all been groomed for the honour but have disappointed their suitors. Even Dr. Kissinger has not escaped! The fact that the hordes of Gog and Magog emerge from “the four corners of the earth” effectually excludes Russia - or China - from the distinction of being the power or powers indicated by these names. However this may inconvenience the popular theories of the time, we must look to much broader fields. The war of Revelation 20 is exclusively against the Church as THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS, and no nation, east or west can qualify for such an honour as to be called ‘the camp of the saints’. As the Church is “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people” (1 Peter 2:9) it cannot be identified with any of earth’s nations, nor can it be defined in terms of any geographical boundaries. Hence it cannot be surrounded by Satan’s host of Gog and Magog, whether in Jerusalem or anywhere else on the globe. The only way by which the camp of the saints can be surrounded by the heathen host of the wicked, is by the lies, the temptations, the errors, the rationalistic philosophies of the Evil One. The Lord’s people will not be assembled in one place, therefore the scene of the last battle is entirely spiritual. And it is taking place before our eyes, if we dare say so. And if we are right in our thought, it is time the people of God were warned and prepared for the subtilty and danger of the last Satanic campaign of deception, fraud and destruction of the truth. This is far more menacing than the guns and the bayonets of Russians or Chinese (the latter now being our friends anyway at the time of writing). “Fear not those who can kill the body and after that have no more that they can do - but fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” So the Lord warns us.
Are there any signs that such a time may be coming upon us now? Indeed there are, as we now proceed to describe.
NEARING COMPLETION
It is surely beyond dispute that the task to which the Lord has set Himself is nearing completion. The sound of the Gospel has truly “gone out into all the earth, and its words unto the ends of the world” (Romans 10:18, Psalm 19:4). Great must be the righteous condemnation of the Western world, the home of the gospel in age after age, and the scene of its greatest triumphs. No part of the world has ever been so favoured as the territories of Japheth on so vast a scale, and for so long a time. Nowhere has there been so much martyr blood shed by Satan to procure the silencing of the Lord’s witnesses, as in these territories. Nor has there ever been so distinguished a succession of theologians and preachers who have developed the spiritual resources of the Church till the Word of God has been fully opened and the holy wisdom of God displayed. It seems to us that the last task of theology is the final elucidation of THE PROBLEM OF EVIL which lies at the root of our understanding of the Atonement and of the meaning and purpose of Creation. This task still remains for theology to complete and we think that at last the materials are to hand for such a task.
Likewise that other task of the human race, namely the exploration of natural creation to lay bare the wisdom of God displayed in the tiniest atom of matter and the widest, limitless, extent of the universe - this task of Man also has been wellnigh completed in the remarkable developments of natural science in our time. Man is now pressing against the last boundaries of knowledge, and soon there will be no more worlds to conquer. The increase of knowledge has not solved man’s chief problem - HIMSELF. Yet even that problem has truly been solved by God becoming Man that Man may be exalted at last, in and through the God-Man, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, to that throne and that destiny which was hidden in the purpose of God from the beginning.
WHY SATAN MUST BE LOOSED
The Loosing of Satan, which many think they have cause to recognise in present events, is a necessity of divine history, in order that the spotless purity of the Bride, and her devotion to her divine Husband, should be displayed to all, in heaven and in earth. Her devotion to Christ is put to the final test by the permission given to Satan in the last of days, to exhaust himself in the effort to prove his own slander against God, expressed in his words as touching Job – “Doth Job serve God for naught ...?” This contemptuous lie must be put to the last and most significant test, by a complete release given to Satan to prove his own lie, if he can.
It could be that that moment has come upon us now - or is in process of development upon the earth. If this be so, what a call is this to the Church, the Bride, to stand fearlessly and faithfully on her promise to her Bridegroom, as He at Calvary stood upon His promise to her!
How clear it must be therefore, that all the wild guesses of the prophetists concerning Armageddon, Gog and Magog, Russian and Chinese hordes, vultures’ feasts at Megiddo, guns, bayonets and nuclear warfare, are not only utterly irrelevant, but tragically unworthy of those of spiritual mind. Not for such trifling as this was the Book of Revelation written. These guesses are not the preliminaries to the everlasting bliss of Christ and His people. We war not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers; against the rulers of the darkness of this world, and against spiritual wickedness in heavenly regions (Ephesians 6:12). When these things begin to come to pass, then let us look up, for our redemption draweth nigh!
SATAN’S ORDER OF BATTLE
It is now our business to try to outline the gigantic forces which Satan, in his Little Season of unloosing, is bringing into the battleline to crush the Camp of the Saints, the Holy City, and to destroy her testimony in the world.
Neither Russia nor any other nation can be said to occupy the Four Corners of the Earth, from which the armies of the Evil One proceed. Russia occupies but one corner of the earth - and that a very cold one. She has recently lost her ally in the East - China - a proud nation which remembers its historic dignity and will be second to no other power. The universality of Satan’s army indicates that the warfare to which the Evil One is marching is no military campaign of the traditional sort. It is a conflict in the spiritual realm - a conspiracy of fraud, lies, deceptions, blasphemies, atheism, and the vileness of sin open and unashamed; the corruption of the human mind and the destruction of the human soul, its degradation and shame - all the vice and violence and darkness of sin, now bearing down upon our race in an uncontrollable torrent of sinful pride.
We use material we have already to hand, a study we circulated a few years ago in answer to a book, “The Puritan Hope” written by an esteemed friend for whom we have a deep personal regard, but from whose post-millennial theories we begged to dissent. We entitled our study “A PURITAN ILLUSION”
[See 032-1; 032-2; 032-3] and now reproduce the relevant part of it under the title;
“THE DARK AGE OF RATIONALISM”. ECLIPSE OF THE “PURITAN HOPE”
There might have been some excuse for the enthusiastic expectation of the Puritans and their immediate successors, of a steady progression of humanity upwards towards a Latter Day Glory, but we cannot find the same excuse for their admirers today who fail to recognise the positive Satanism of the LATTER DAY APOSTASY. The Puritans lived before the unleashing of Rationalism, the Evolutionary Heresy, and the 1914 war. Those who live after these world-shaking events may treat the Latter Day Apostasy as a passing phase in the general uplift of humanity towards Latter Day Glory, but they do so at their peril. They would be wiser if they gave full value to the gravity of the present situation and saw it not only as the end of an era of enlightenment and progress, but as the beginning of a new Age of Darkness and Violence such as the world has not known since the days before the Flood:
“The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth”. (Genesis 6:11-13)
If the last days of the human race on the earth are destined to be after the example of the judgment of the Flood and later of Sodom (see Matthew 24:36-39; Luke 17:26-30; Jude 5-7) where then is the Latter Day Glory? What will be the state of humanity when Christ returns in all the judicial vengeance of eternal fire to deliver His people and to pour the vials of wrath upon an apostate world? For that dear reader, is the dilemma of all those who expect a Jewish Restoration and a Golden Age of one thousand (or more) years to mark the complete triumph of Christ upon the earth.
It is small wonder that Revelation 20, with its dark foreshadowing of the greatest apostasy of all time to mark the failure of a Millennium of righteous rule and Latter Day Glory - that this chapter is too dark for our friends to interpret. Even the excellent Andrew Bonar, who early fell a victim to Edward Irving’s premillennialism, could write such a mistaken prophetical book as his “Redemption Drawing Nigh” in which he lightly dismisses the awful scene with which the Golden Age closes. “How does Satan get so numerous an army so quickly after the Millennial days?” he asks. His reply is, “This is a question equally puzzling to Millennarian and anti-Millennarian. We do not enter upon it.” A little later Dr. Boner adds, that during the Millennium ‘some ungodly’ will continue to exist in the farthest parts of the earth and “while the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, there shall be a casting out of the scum and filth on the shores of this sea, viz., the four corners of the earth. There will Satan find his materials for an army when he is let loose and his hosts form an array more numerous than the sands of the sea.”
Dr Boner’s parting salvo as he retired from the field of battle is, “There will be much more light cast on this subject during the thousand years”.
To such extremities are good men driven in the fruitless attempt to explain away the greatest apostasy in the history of the world. We turn from the Millennial Illusion with relief to our Gospel Millennium, set up as we shall presently see, when Satan’s kingdom fell at the Cross and the Tomb, a millennium which introduced the triumph of Christ over a world which had lain in darkness from the beginning. “Behold, darkness shall cover the earth and gross darkness the people, but the Lord shall arise upon thee and his glory shall be seen upon thee and the gentiles shall come to thy light and kings to the brightness of thy rising”. (Isaiah 60:2-3)
This has been and is still being fulfilled, ever since Christ’s atoning death and glorious resurrection. It was that event which cast Satan down and ruined his kingdom.
AGE OF OPTIMISM
The Puritan Hope (so-called) was conceived in an age of optimism which had seen the Church emerge from the titanic struggle of the Reformation century into the era when the Protestant cause was in the ascendancy in Britain and northern Europe, and was about to cross the Atlantic Ocean to the New World then being discovered and conquered. Art, music, letters, were emerging into a new era of phenomenal advancement. The Dark Ages were past. The world was being deluged with light such as had not been known for a thousand years, since the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Elizabethan heroes blunted the sword of the Spaniard in accordance with the divine decree that antichrist should not rule in North America which providence was reserving for the refugees and emigrants from the Old World. Virginia had already been named in honour of the Virgin Queen, whose successor, James the first of England and sixth of Scotland came south to London to wear the crown of a united kingdom destined to play a formidable part in the progress of civilisation and the Word of God. The new king - the ‘wisest fool in Christendom’ - orthodox, treacherous, could be relied upon to uphold the Protestant establishment, always provided that it be Episcopalian (and he a Presbyterian!). “No bishop no king” was the formula of his policy, as he laid the foundation of a new tyranny which would drive across the Atlantic those who would carve out of the wilderness a new world of liberty and dynamic energy.
On the other side of the English Channel lay the territories of Anti-Christ, whom our Puritan forefathers had no difficulty in recognising in the Papacy. They confidently expected the early fall of Anti-Christ, and as late as John Bunyan we find this opinion enthusiastically propagated. John Bunyan has enshrined that opinion in a curious picture he gives in “The Pilgrim’s Progress”:
“Now I saw in my dream that at the end of this Valley (of the Shadow of Death) lay blood, bones, ashes and mangled bodies of men, even of Pilgrims that had gone this way formerly. And while I was musing what should be the reason, I espied a little before me a cave where two giants, Pope and Pagan dwelt in old time; by whose power and tyranny the men, whose bones, blood, ashes, etc., lay there, were cruelly put to death. But by this place Christian went without much danger, whereat I somewhat wondered; but I have learned since that Pagan has been dead many a day, and as for the other, though he be yet alive, he is, by reason of age and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can do little more than sit in his cave’s mouth grinning at Pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them.
So I saw that Christian went on his way. Yet at the sight of the old man (i.e. the Pope) that sat in the mouth of the cave, he could not tell what to think, especially because he spoke to him, though he could not go after him, saying, “You will never mend till more of you be burned.”
A few years before Bunyan wrote this quaint note on the Pope, Milton composed his sonnet on the “Massacre of the Protestants in Piedmont”, with the terrible and moving words -
Avenge, O Lord! Thy slaughtered saints whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold
… their martyred blood and ashes sow O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway The triple tyrant; that from these may grow A hundredfold, who having learned thy way, Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
Perhaps Bunyan had forgotten this. Perhaps also he had forgotten the awful massacre of the Protestants of Ireland in uncountable numbers and horror scarce 20 years before (in 1641) when upwards of 150,000 men, women and children - there might have been double that number - were cruelly butchered, drowned, or thrust out to perish in nakedness and wintry cold. The so-called Massacre of Drogheda when Cromwell’s army, ten years later, put to the sword two or three thousand fighting men who refused honourable surrender terms, is preserved in Irish political memory and by subtle insinuation has corrupted British history of those times, while the massacre of the Protestants is unknown except to the occasional historian. A similar propaganda war is now being waged in Northern Ireland - and all the world wonders.
The butchery of non-catholic Serbs in Jugo-Slavia during the 1939-45 war is also forgotten, while the subsequent tribulations of Archbishop Stepinac when the Allies triumphed over Italy and Germany are remembered as a kind of horrible political crime for which the bloody Archbishop was duly honoured by the Pope.
Perhaps Bunyan and his contemporaries were overmuch dazzled by the Protestant ascendancy in their day, but sure it is that they expected the early eclipse of antichrist, and looked for texts which should give colour to their expectations of the Latter Day Glory.
THE REVIVAL OF ROME
But we of the 20th century have witnessed the greatest miracle of modern times: in one lifetime the Reformation has fallen in ruins. The dregs of Protestantism have become more bitter and contemptible than the Papacy at its worst. The sun of antichrist has risen again in great political and ecclesiastical splendour. The Pope has become once again the honoured and accepted head of Christendom, fawned upon and courted by monarchy and parliament of Britain, acclaimed with a hero’s welcome on the streets of New York, with Bishops, Moderators, and statesmen jostling for a share of the Papal smile. A hundred ministers of the establishment founded in Scotland by John Knox have met in Retreat with Jesuit priests, for lectures on the Mass.
As late as 1870 when the Pope was toppled by the Risorgimento of Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel, the Papal States were regarded as a disgrace to civilisation and a British Prime Minister (William Ewart Gladstone) wrote a book on “Vaticanism” in which he denounced in classical English the tyranny and the evil pretensions of the Papal system.
We are a century on, and the Pope is restored to high credit and influence, while the term “Protestant” has become contemptible, and the Reformation is viewed as a historic disaster.
From 1815 (Waterloo) to 1914 was the century of the Pax Britannica, when the Mistress of the Seas swept with her mighty besom the oceans and continents of the world and sent her sons far and wide, from utmost east to utmost west, some to carry the flame of the gospel and others to spread the advantages of civilisation, justice, law and freedom over one quarter of the globe. Slavery was abolished and suppressed.
The advance of science and the increase of knowledge and engineering skills in that great century bade fair to bring to fulfillment the hopes of humanity. Peace and its arts were to flourish world-wide. The 20th century would do it. The 19th century of optimism and achievement would see to that.
THEN CAME 1914
Then came 1914 and the holocaust of the nations. The flower of Europe’s manhood perished on the fields of Flanders in four terrible years. The appalling disaster of the Great War not only swept away a generation, but it wrecked the foundations of society and created a vacuum into which were poured sinister and mighty influences in politics, culture and social economy.
The traditional standards of Christian morality and education began to fall. In 1918 the West emerged into moral bankruptcy and decay. Liberty and light went out over half the world and the nations spent an uneasy twenty years preparing for the renewal of the carnage which by 1945 would leave (and has left) the world powerless to arrest or control the terrible evils which have now swallowed up what remained of the 16th century Reformation. Only the Bishop of Rome survives the wreck, blandly to survey a world scene in which all his historic enemies have eliminated themselves and he has but to await the last act to enthrone him officially as the titular head of Christendom.
HE WHOM THE PURITANS LOOKED UPON AND DENOUNCED AS ANTICHRIST HAS TRIUMPHED AFTER ALL AND IT IS PURITANISM AND PROTESTANTISM WHICH HAVE FALLEN AND BEEN BURIED.
Nineteenth century “post-millennialists” who slavishly and blindly followed the Puritan Illusion of a gradual conquest of all the world for Christ, would not have believed it. We are confident that Mr. Spurgeon would not have believed it, or he would have abdicated his somewhat nebulous prophetical views and studied with care, and with that intensive grasp of issues which his fine mind was so well able to contain, those prophetical rhapsodies which all his life he took too much for granted.
Truth to tell, the sinister rumblings of the coming earthquake were already clearly to be detected in Western society even prior to the Puritan Age, but there was no prophet among those good men, none to disrobe them of their illusion of a Latter Day Glory. Obsessed with the triumphs of the evangelical cause in Britain and Europe they found it only too congenial to seek, and perforce to discover, suitable texts to be taken from their setting and woven into an eschatological scheme based upon no known rule of interpretation, by which it was easy to forecast the fall of antichrist and the rise, in full glory, of a Kingdom of Christ on earth. THEY had forgotten (or overlooked) Paul’s warning that antichrist would survive until the Second Advent of CHRIST (2 Thess.2:8). While they were busy with their books of prophetical fantasy, Satan was busy preparing the downfall of their illusory empire. His weapon? THE LAST GREAT BAAL OF RATIONALISM. With the watchwords of LIBERTY, ENLIGHTENMENT, HUMANITY, which added together were to spell ATHEISM, he prepared his final campaign against God and Truth.
Why (oh, why?) did the great men of the Puritan age not perceive it? The seeds of universal atheism were planted in Britain while Puritanism was at its zenith, but they knew it not.
RISE OF RATIONALISM
We now trace for our readers the true origins of the present day wreck of the Protestant and Puritan Reformations. All too little information seems to be available on this subject and we are therefore bold to ask our readers to examine this record with great deliberation.
It is the history of the rise and triumph in Western thought, of Rationalism. By Rationalism we mean that human philosophy, which denies the necessity for, and the fact of, a divine revelation. Rationalism takes the position that human intellect is sufficient of itself to make man the master of his own future. The basis of man’s existence is therefore not divine but materialistic, and the question of immortality is irrelevant.
Modern Rationalism was already incubating in Europe in pre-Reformation times. Pope Leo X (the pontiff of Luther’s day) was certainly a skeptic, but expediency preserved outwardly the monolithic structure of the Church and the form of Christian belief.
The Reformation by dividing Europe and releasing thought from the authoritarian suppression of all dissent conferred a freedom which the latent elements of Rationalism were quick to exploit. It is nevertheless fallacious for the Romanist to blame the rise of unbelief upon the Reformers. The materials of the modern revolt against faith were lying around Europe long before the 16th century dawned. The history of Roman Catholic France since the Reformation shows how ready were the Pope’s territories at all times to burst into the flame of atheistic revolt.
ENGLAND LEADS IN UNBELIEF
But it was in England that the revolt against faith first showed itself openly. We quote from a too much neglected work of Dr. Theodore Christlieb, University Preacher and Professor of Theology at Bonn (Germany), “Modern Doubt and Christian Belief” first published in English in 1874:-
“In the 15th and 16th century, Italy had taken the lead in free-thought; in the 17th and 18th England and France are the first to show the way. In England from the middle of the 17th to that of the 18th century, one portion after another of the great body of Christian faith is dissolved in the crucible of a Hobbes or a Hume, or under the attacks of the long series of the English deists - Herbert of Cherbury, Toland, Collins, Woolston, Shaftesbury, Tindall, Chubb, Bolingbroke and others. Unitarians having begun with the denial of the Trinity and the incarnation, these deists soon follow, first with the rejection of the prophecies and miracles of the O.T. and then of the N.T. as opposed to reason and the laws of nature; and finally, with the denial of a special providence, or any possibility of a divine revelation. From about the year 1690 to the rise of Methodism and the consequent revival of evangelical religion in the Church of England and among Protestant dissenters, it might be said that in many a circle of English society the denial of all that was specifically Christian or in excess of the axioms of natural religion, had come to be regarded as a sign of superior intelligence, and the maintenance of contrary opinions as a proof of being quite behind the progress of the times.
“The results of English free-thinking were speedily introduced into France by Condillac and others. Jesuitism had in that country been slowly but surely undermining all the foundations of true religion and morality. Pascal, the man of conscience (a Protestant without knowing it), and Malebranche, were the last philosophers of France who reverenced Christianity.
“What the French literature of unbelief did for the general public English literature accomplished among the learned. Rationalism however, properly so called, that is, the denial of all dogmas which seem incomprehensible to the ordinary understanding, is an outgrowth of our own (i.e. German) soil. The Leibnitz-Wolfian philosophy which laid the foundation for a mechanical formal treatment of Christian doctrines contributed largely to the general alienation from the Christian faith. A sort of natural religion began to be taught, in which it was endeavoured to demonstrate the principles of the Christian faith entirely by those of natural reason. Revealed religion under this process soon appeared to become a superfluity, and whatever in it could not be demonstrated by reason was quietly abandoned.
“It must then be confessed that the church theology (Germany) of the last two centuries deserves the chief blame for the general apostasy which then began from the ancient faith; it was adopted, cherished and promoted by the church itself. From the middle of the 19th to the end of the first third of the 19th century the chief authorities in pulpit and university were promoters of rationalism.... We theologians reap that which ourselves have sown.”
Christlieb saw coming upon England (what has long since his time reached its full maturity) the spread of the same doubt and unbelief in our native churches. “The want of experienced leaders through the thickest labyrinths of modern criticism is painfully felt.”
So while the Puritans were engrossed with the sickness of the Papal Antichrist and the enlarging and illusory prospect of “The Puritan Hope” the real enemy was unrecognised. Satan was patiently and ceaselessly constructing his last great system of unbelief.
IN THE U.S.A.
The problem in the United States of America with the congenital antipathy which exists there to establishments, is different from that of the Old World. In America the fragmentation of Protestantism has been much more thorough, but it is to be feared that this very fact has prepared the field all the more for the rising tide of unbelief. Fragmentation has encouraged in America a general watering down of the standards of theology. Expository ability is at as low an ebb there as in Britain. Millennialism has done a fell work in removing large areas of the Divine Word from the use of the Church. Bible knowledge, exegesis and exposition have been inhibited by false and easy techniques of “interpretation”.
Another factor of which the Puritans knew nothing, but which in our day has proved to be the trump card of the devil’s last atheistic deal, has been the rise of the evolutionary philosophy in natural science.
THE EVOLUTIONARY HERESY
The scientific heresy of Evolution has in one century engulfed the Protestant Church. The capitulation to this grossly atheistic doctrine is now more or less complete. The concept of a divine creation has been destroyed, and education, from infancy to university, is now governed by this essentially materialistic dogma. It has created a psychology based on materialistic DETERMINISM and has destroyed all basis of fixed moral standards and quenched the hope of immortality. Its psychological doctrines are now busy undermining all conception of law and order in society.
That this appalling lie should have been foisted on mankind just at the time when the evangelical forces released by the Reformation were ebbing fast, is not to be attributed to any coincidence. We see it as part of a total conspiracy by the powers of darkness to overthrow truth and destroy the image of God in man. We see more. If, as the last book of the Bible assures us, the last state of man shall be a Loosing of Satan and a season of worldwide revolt against God and truth, this could well be the moment in history when, not a Latter Day Glory will mark man's last chapter on earth, but a last battle of the saints against universal Satanism.
REVELATION 20 AVOIDED
The esteemed author of “The Puritan Hope” prudently avoids any entanglement with the 20th chapter of Revelation, declaring it (in a quotation of which he obviously approves) ‘the darkest passage in all the Bible’.
This extraordinary superlative is hardly to be justified in a book dedicated to the promotion of beliefs which (whether the author likes it or not) find their original ground in that very chapter. It is clear that without the 20th of Revelation, the Church and the world would never have heard of any millennium, seeing it is the only place in the Bible where a millennium as such is mentioned. Our friends cannot contract out of this chapter by denying that they are millenarians, because “The Puritan Hope” which they aim to propagate is essentially millenarian in its character. In view of the history of the Chiliastic teaching, no one in the 20th century need feel encumbered by so popular a label.
It is true that “widely different meanings” have been given to this chapter. But widely different meanings are given to many another chapter of Holy Writ, and if we were to avoid writing and preaching upon them we should have to abandon the Bible itself.
This “dark” and mysterious chapter is not so dark when the full light of the Church’s history is turned upon it, and spiritual things are compared with spiritual. It tells us plainly enough that the last state of man on earth, millennium or no millennium, is one of total apostasy. It speaks of the end being a time of the loosing of Satan, and the gathering of the universal forces of unbelief against the testimony and the people of Christ. This unexampled and total revolt against God and truth at the end of a supposed age of Latter Day Glory or the reign of the saints on earth makes nonsense of all millennial theories save one - that theory which sees the thousand years as the complete period of time between the first and second advents of Christ. During that time, Satan is bound as to his former liberty to hold in bondage the nations of the world.
The fall and binding of Satan and his subsequent loosing for the last ‘little season’ of man’s history, is the internal picture of gospel history, as we shall, now proceed (God helping us) to show. The thousand years are a symbolic period of time, fixed by God but indefinite to man, indicating that the second coming of Christ is separated from the suffering saints of John’s day by a great period of time. Yet the prophecy is so presented that no generation subsequent to the apostle’s time could for certainty say that Christ would or would not soon appear. In the meantime, death means ‘reigning with Christ’ and this reigning is ‘the first resurrection’.
THE FALL OF SATAN
There are scriptures which tell us plainly that Satan suffered a fearful and irrecoverable fall when the gospel came in. His worldwide dominion over the heathen nations came to an end. Heathenism received a blow from which it has never since fully recovered, and this is in accordance with the prophecy of Jeremiah 10:11.
“Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth and from under these heavens.”
In the original these words of Jeremiah are not in Hebrew but in Chaldee, the purpose being to comfort the people of God during the Chaldean captivity with the knowledge that the day would come when the gods of the heathen would fall and their very names perish from the earth. The true God, the Creator of all things must in the end prove victorious. Thomas Scott believed that this verse was an express prediction of the total extirpation of idolatry from the earth, and it is certainly true that since the gospel came in and began its world-wide conquest, the very names of the great heathen gods perished from the earth and are unknown today except to the historian - though the spirit of heathenism lives on in the heart of man.
Of this fall of Satan from his heathenish dominion, Christ speaks to His disciples when He says, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18). It is of first importance that we should see how Christ’s words followed the triumphant joy of the disciples when they were able to say, “Even the devils are subject unto us through thy name”.
When did this fall of Satan from heaven take place?
Paul gives us the theology of this in Hebrews 2:14-15:
“That through death he (Christ) might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.”
Satan is destroyed as to the exercise of his former dominion, by the triumph over death accomplished by the crucified Lord.
Again, the Lord refers to this fall of Satan when he declares, shortly before His crucifixion -
“Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out, and I, if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all men unto me”. (John 12:31-32)
By this declaration the Lord indicated how Satan would fall and be cast out before the power of the gospel, so that the light and truth of the saving Word might penetrate those uttermost regions where the prince of darkness so long had reigned undisturbed. The lifting up of Christ for our redemption was followed by the drawing of all men to Christ, that is, His kingdom extends to the utmost bounds of humanity, and the entire human race is affected thereby as the heathen gentiles come from north south east and west to sit down in the kingdom of God. That was a great fall of Satan indeed, and a great binding of the prince of hell when the light of the gospel penetrated all lands so that the heathen gods fell before it.
THE “BINDING” OF SATAN BY CHRIST
In another place the Lord declares that only by the binding of Satan can the gospel do its work in regions formerly given over to darkness:
“If I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you. Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house and spoil his goods except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his hour. (Matthew 12:28-29).
Returning to Rev. 20 we now see that it is in this sense that Satan is bound and set under seal. He is not bound as to his power to tempt and to try. Nor is he bound as to his age-long campaign opposing the kingdom of God. He is bound as to his former dominion over the nations to hold in darkness the great masses of mankind. Paul speaks of this altered state when addressing the heathen Greek philosophers:
“At times of this ignorance God winked at (i.e., tolerated or permitted) but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent”. (Acts 17:30)
Again,
“In times past God suffered all nations to walk in their own ways”. (Acts 14:16)
That in all cases the ‘binding’ of Satan is relative only and not absolute, is also clear from the words of Jude (verse 6 of that Epistle):
“The angels which kept not their first estate but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the Judgment of the great day.”
This remarkable verse tells us that the liberty of evil spirits to tempt and oppress is quite consistent with the fact of their having been bound in everlasting chains under darkness till the judgment day.
Since the gospel came in, Satan has ‘fallen from heaven’, has been bound and cast out, and is laid under chains of darkness.
The false liberty which Satan appears to claim is a binding to act according to the divine decrees only, and this is shown supremely at the crucifixion of Christ where the enemy and his agents could do only what God’s hand and counsel determined before to be done (Acts 4:28).
THE THOUSAND YEARS IDENTIFIED
The thousand years of Satan’s binding are therefore the mystic thousand years of the triumph of the gospel. We repudiate for ourselves the recently coined and artificial word “Amillennialism” which grammatically can only signify “No Millennium”. No-one believes that, and certainly we do not. What we believe is that the millennium is a gospel millennium, spiritual in its nature, and not a millennium on the earth as a visible kingdom of God. During this spiritual millennium, which began with the resurrection and is still running its course, Satan is bound and powerless to prevent the worldwide conquests of the gospel penetrating the darkest recesses of his ancient domain of ignorance and sin.
We are reinforced in this belief by the weighty words of John Owen, the greatest of the Puritans:
“Christ has made a conquest over the evil powers (angels), prevailing absolutely against them, and they are put in subjection to him for ever. They are subjected to Him as to their present actings and future condition. He now rules them and will hereafter finally judge them. And in so far as in His holiness and wisdom He suffers them to act in temptations, seductions and persecutions, He bounds and limits their rage, malice and actings; He orders and disposes these events to His own holy and righteous ends and keeps them under chains for the judgment of the last day.” (Hebrews, Vol.2, page 52, 4 vol. edition.)
In short, the sign of the kingdom of God (that is, the gospel) is the casting out of Satan, according to that word of Christ. “If I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you” (Luke 11:20). The Jews did not recognise their Messiah or His kingdom when He gave them this sign of the casting out of Satan.
THE LAST BATTLE
“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.
And shall go out to deceive the nations which are In the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.
And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.
And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever”. (Rev. 20:7-10)
The theory of the excellent Dr. Bonar (whose name we truly revere) that the devil will gather his millennial recruits from the scum of humanity washed up by the glorious millennial sea, is quite inadequate to represent this grave scene of a world in complete revolt against its God. The names Gog and Magog denote the primeval heathenism of the fallen human race. “The four quarters of the earth” denote universality; four is the Bible signature for the world as a whole. The loosing of Satan is effected by the same hand which bound him. Satan is loosed as a judgment upon a world which has spurned two thousand years of gospel light. They who choose Satan shall have Satan as their prince.
David in the Second Psalm tells us of the divine decree which at the resurrection proclaimed Christ as Lord over all. “I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.... Ask of me and I will give thee the heathen (i.e., the gentile nations) for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”
Having completed His task of assembling His Church from the utmost limits of the earth, the point is reached in history when the earth ripens for judgment. The lifting of the restraining hand of God permits the last release of Satanic power upon a world which has given itself over (as in the days before the Flood) to uncontrolled wickedness and atheism.
THE LOOSING OF SATAN
This may be of crucial importance to us in the 20th Century. Hengstenberg observes: “The deceiving can only return by a return being first made to heathenism. Then Satan makes himself known as the organising principle of opposition to the Kingdom of God”. What this means in terms of our own times, is only too ominous and clear. For over a century the Western World has been departing from the ground of faith, in theology, science, and latterly even in art and music. The air vibrates with the rhythm of the tom-tom, and the endless and oppressive discords of jungle culture. The frightful daubs and meaningless twisted and distorted forms which are purveyed in the salons of the Western World at enormous prices indicate a condition in the minds of men which can only arise as the heathenish spirit moves into the vacuum which has been created by the agnosticism and atheism of the age. Philosophy largely proceeds today on the assumption that there is no God, and science with its evolutionary foundation has long since, in effect, banished the idea of a Creator from creation. Poetry, literature, have gone the same way. In most theological halls it is impossible for a young man to be trained for ordination without dire menace to whatever faith he may have when he enters. The new psychology (founded for the most part by an agnostic Jew) is entirely materialistic in its treatment of the human mind and soul. “Humanity” as Dr. Gresham Machen once said, “has become dumb”. Since faith went, great composers of music, poets, philosophers, artists and divines, have gradually faded out - or almost so.
In short, if there is one passage in the Book of Revelation which specially applies to the precise time in which we now stand, that passage is “THE LOOSING OF SATAN FOR A LITTLE SEASON” in Rev. 20.
One advances this statement with the utmost caution, but nothing can be more clear, that the unique, the “new” situation of our own time, is the eclipse of faith, the darkening of the intellect, the recrudescence of heathenism as a national condition after a thousand years of restraint, and the re-emergence of the devil, in the very crudest of his forms, in his last naked and open attack on the Christian faith, on the Word of God, and on the Kingdom of Christ. If such a time as this has not been the subject of some special warning in the Bible, one can only say, in all reverence, ‘It ought to have been’.
We could certainly be wrong in our chronology of this event - but we could just as well be right. A “little season” in prophetic time could well be a century or longer.
THE REVIVAL ILLUSION
But what about the hope of revival? We would remind our friends who are always anticipating new awakenings similar to those which restored religion in previous centuries, that ours is the first century since the Reformation in which there has been no general awakening. The memories of some of us go back upwards of seventy years, embracing two world wars, and all our days revival has been expected, prayed for by earnest people (including ourselves), and many sermons have been preached that we might expect it. Bolder spirits have told us exactly how it may come about, and how God is only waiting for us to do something so He can reward US with revival.
Leading figures in the evangelical world forecast ‘revival’ very persistently, assuring us with every fresh ‘campaign’ that revival is just on the brink. But there has been no revival. One of the leading exponents of this theory taking stock of the pathetic ‘Jesus’ movement in America, assured us on the strength of this movement that we were again on the verge of revival. How blind can we be?
Meantime our readers should be assured that the Holy Spirit has never altered His methods from the foundation of the world and is scarcely likely to do so now. Those methods are always the clear exposition of the Word of God, by men competent to enter fully into the deep treasures of Christ and unfold those treasures in preaching.
We are not short of theologies today. We are short of divines. It is a crime against the people of God and against Christ to raise hopes of revivals emerging from the trivialities (to put it no lower) of modern preaching and methodology.
We who write these lines are not pessimistic, but neither are we so foolish as not to read the signs of the times.
THE LAST WITNESS
Truly God is able to do the impossible, but whether this means we have a right to expect that God will act in the way many suppose when they speak of revival, is a totally different question. If our age is an age rapidly running down to judgment; if ours is an age which exhibits all the features of those historic times which immediately preceded the pouring out of the wrath of God - the age of Noah, the age of Lot, the age of Jeremiah - we have every reason to believe that the next event which lies before us is JUDGMENT, not REVIVAL.
Those who think they see by their prophetical interpretations a greatly lengthened future still for this world, no doubt will be complacent, but that is their responsibility. For ourselves we think all the signs are present of a complete and worldwide revolt against everything which is called God, leading directly to the consummation of all things in judgment.
Satan is waxing bold. Not since the Garden of Eden has he been in such a paradise. He has the ear of humanity, and no lie, conceit or daring blasphemy is now withheld from a generation which in other fields beside that of religion exhibits the most alarming symptoms that humanity has lost its soul. The Age of Faith had its triumphs in every field of human culture, but for over a century the Western world has been departing from the ground of faith. What Rationalism has done for Protestantism, Materialism has done for science and culture. We have a Creation without a Creator and a universe without meaning, purpose or plan. Atheistic evolution reigns, and there is no iniquity, blasphemy or vice which is not now brazenly uttered and publicly defended.
What then? If revival after the traditional pattern may no longer be feasible, but only the expectation of judgment, what is the believer to do? Is there to be no light in the prevailing darkness?
The answer should thrill every true believer who is jealous for the glory of the Redeemer. Ours is the privilege in a falling age of bearing the last witness for Christ against the devil and all his works. In the hour of his unloosing, he is to be resisted and fought with all the weapons in the armoury of God. We will lift up our voice for Christ and truth whether the people hear or whether they forbear. Like Noah in the ancient world, like Lot in Sodom’s last night, like Jeremiah in Israel’s last apostasy before the judgment of the captivity, it is our privilege to bear witness against the unbelief of the present age. We are destined to be the Camp of the Saints compassed about by the heathen and atheistic multitudes of Gog and Magog, until fire falls from heaven to consume the transgressor.
The question of “revival” is irrelevant to that testimony, as it may be irrelevant to the hour in which we live. What we look for is that our God should pluck His hand out from His bosom and vindicate the testimony of His people, so that the nations may know there is a people in the midst of the earth whose God is the Lord. That vindication is more likely to take the form of judgment than revival.
Are we ready for such a testimony? Are there enough men who know their God and their Bibles well enough to arouse by their preaching the enmity of Satan’s multitude? We doubt it. There is an appalling evangelical sickness which prevents a robust and convincing testimony to the glory of Christ. If some of the energies expended in the vain search for “experiences” were devoted to the creation of a company of preachers adequate under God to the task, the evangelical position would be changed overnight. It might not - in our opinion it would not - spell revival in the sense in which that almost discredited word is now used, but it would mean TESTIMONY, and testimony would mean the opposition of Satan, suffering, persecution, loss and shame. But why should WE escape the penalty which our fathers were called upon to pay for their devotion to Christ’s crown and covenant?
Sola Scriptura 
