Revelation chapter 20. Revelation chapter 20. We look at the book of Revelation and this will be our third message and it will be our final message in this New Testament survey. We've read a chapter a day and I've brought a message from every seventh chapter beginning with Matthew. We began reading in chapter 1 Matthew. The first message was from Matthew 6 and that was on January the 6th. The second message was from Matthew 13 and that was on January the 13th. And then after you get out of January, it starts getting real complicated. But basically, especially after you get out of Matthew as well. But anyways, we are now in our last study, two chapters from the end of the book. Most of you have already finished the New Testament. So we have before us chapter 20, and it deals with the millennial reign of Christ. It deals with the first and second resurrection, and it deals with the great white throne judgment. And so there's plenty of great themes to speak on here, but I want to deal with two words, two words out of the entire chapter. I want to spend my time talking about Two words, and it is the words, well, I guess you could call it three. It's the two words, thousand years. Thousand years. You find that mentioned in verses one through seven. But you find these two words, thousand years, you find them mentioned in no seven verses, no less than six times. So although we're going to be dealing with two words, they're going to occur six times and seven verses. And so we're going to have a theological class tonight. We're going to teach theology, OK? And so we're going to learn some theological terms, and then I'm going to give you my opinion. And if you want to be right, you'll agree with my opinion. I'm just kidding. Well, let's read down through verse 10, then we'll go back and deal mainly with verses 1-7. It says, 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. 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. After that, he must be loosed a little season. And I saw thrones and they that sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them. And I saw the souls that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus and the Word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, nor 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 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. When the thousand years were finished or were expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison and shall go out and deceive the nations which are in the four corners 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 encompassed 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 forever and ever." Okay, as we look at this passage, I think it's important for us to come to grips with some theological terms that refer to the thousand years and people's beliefs about the thousand years. So as we talk about this thousand year reign of Christ, it's important to understand there are some people that do not believe in the thousand year reign of Christ. They rejected outright. Now, that may seem strange to you, but there was a time on the earth where most people rejected the thousand year reign of Christ. But before the majority rejected the literal thousand year reign of Christ, there was the majority of believers that believed in the thousand-year reign of Christ. So, the three primary views, there's really four, but one of them has to do with a guy that said once Constantine was emperor of the earth, of the world and the church, that began the thousand-year reign of Christ. Well, evidently, that was around what 350 something BC, I mean AD. So about 1350 when Christ didn't come back, a thousand years after Constantine, that was blowed out of the water. Okay, so that's already been disproved. So that leaves us with three major views and these views are controversial and none of these views are without some issue of interpretation. But You can't say, well, I don't need to know that. I don't have to know. What you believe about this thousand year reign of Christ will have some determining value as to what you believe about other doctrines of Scripture. Now, let me tell you how bad this is. There are people that disagree in these three primary categories. And some people disagree to the point that they can no longer have fellowship with anybody that disagrees with them on the thousand-year reign of Christ. And if you want to just be honest about it, this is one of the major reasons why we had to close the mission in Ozark. There was someone who disagreed about the thousand-year reign of Christ, and they couldn't accept any other view other than the one they had. And it brothered them to the point that they stirred discord and caused all kinds of problems, all because I believed that Jesus Christ will come back and rule and reign on the earth for a thousand years. You say, well, that's very unfortunate. Yes. And I'll tell you in among preachers, there are preachers that no longer have fellowship with one another because they disagree on the thousand year reign of Christ. I believe there is room for disagreement, moderate disagreement in here, as long as we agree on the main things. But if you disagree here, you're going to have to arrive at some different conclusions about other thoughts of Scripture. So I enter this with a little bit of hesitancy. I enter this with a little bit of concern, knowing full well that Some of you may get mad at me by the time the night's over with. But at the same time, I'm committed, I'm commanded, I've got conviction that I'm going to deal with the text in front of me. And as a preacher, if I don't have some definite conclusions about where I am, I really have no business teaching you the Bible. So if you disagree with my definite conclusion, and it bothers you to the point that you can no longer stand to hear my voice, then I guess you must leave. Because I'm not changing my conclusion because you don't like it, okay? But it's my prayer that you would say, well, I don't agree with the preacher on this, but I see some better qualities in this church and in the teaching ministry here, and I'm not going to let it bother me. Do any of you know the three primary views of the millennial reign of Christ, the three theological terms I'm looking for? They all end with millennial. They have three different prefixes on the word. Anybody? Pre? No, it's pre-millennial. That's pre-post and post-rapture. The millennial reign is pre-millennial. We believe that the resurrection of the dead occurs before the millennial reign of Christ. Then there is the all-millennial. Ah, I said all. You went, oh yeah, you got it. That's not what it means. It doesn't mean like, aha, I figured out the millennium. No, it's the furthest thing from that. Actually, all is the Greek prefix for no, no millennial. And then we have a third. So we have one view that says there's a resurrection and then a thousand year reign. We have another view that says there's no millennium at all. And then we have this third view called post millennial. and post-millennial believes that the Lord comes back at the end of the thousand years. Okay? Now all three of these views at times have had highs and lows as far as their acceptance among people. So let's deal with my view, the pre-millennial view. That's the view I espouse and I have I have no issue or qualms about articulating my view, and I've only studied the others long enough to know what they believe, and no, I don't agree with them. Okay? This is not a debate. I haven't tried to study the other sides and be able to defend them. This is simply me giving you why I believe this way and a general survey of what the other views, the all-millennial and the post-millennial view is. And then I'm going to tell you why I don't believe that. And I want to tell you a little bit about why, if you do believe that, where you will end up logically in some other areas of scriptural thought. So, the premillennial interpretation holds to the literal thousand-year reign that proceeds Jesus Christ's judgment of everyone. So the premillennial view is this. There is a resurrection and Jesus reigns a thousand years. At the end of a thousand years, there is judgment by Jesus Christ. That's what you see in chapter 20. If you read chapter 20 at face value, you will be a premillennial. If you just read chapter 20, You'll say, I'm premillennial. It's not until you read something else that you're going to arrive at a different conclusion. Because premillennial is the literal interpretation of chapter 20. So it's preceded by the resurrection of the saints and it ends with the judgment of the wicked. Let me tell you the first writings that we have of a premillennial belief. Does anybody know how far they date back? Did anybody know when premillennialism started? Anybody? Anybody? Anybody? Okay, good. I did a little research. The oldest writings that we have is from a guy named Paiapus of Hierapolis. Now we know Hierapolis. That's who Luke was writing to. He was writing to someone from Hierapolis. So Hierapolis is a city in Turkey And this man, it's P-A-P-I-A-S, of Hierapolis, he was born in 70 A.D. and died in 163 A.D. And some of his writing survived. And what we learned from him was that he looked forward to Jesus coming back when the resurrection occurred and reigning on the earth for a thousand years. That was in his writing. Now, we don't have that writing. You know why we don't have that writing? because someone with the other views found his papers, read them and said, this guy's an idiot. He believes Jesus is really going to come back for a thousand years and reign. And then there's going to be judgment. So this guy's in it. So they threw away Pius's papers, but they wrote what Pius believed. And they said Pius is responsible for teaching Arrhenius. Arrhenius or Arrhenius, however you want to pronounce it. They said he's the one that must influence this other guy. And they still have his writing. The next person that we see in history that we have writings of that are espousing this view is a man named Justin the Martyr. And he was born in 100 A.D. and lived to 165 A.D. So basically he lived roughly the same time as Pippus did. Now, why do I bring this up? Because the apostle John wrote the book of Revelation somewhere around in the mid-90s A.D. Do you realize that that would make Pippus in his mid-20s? And John wrote this from the Isle of Patmos, which was off the coast of Turkey, and Pippus lived in Turkey. We have a very good chance that Pinapus heard John preach. We have a very good chance that Pinapus might have read this in its original context when it was written on papyrus paper. Because he was alive at that time and he lived to be 93 years old. And he is viewed by all as what we call an early church father, someone who was responsible for the theology of the early church. And we have Justin the Martyr, who was born at 100 AD, so we can literally call him a second generation Christian. His parents very well could have heard the apostles preach. Justin the Martyr lived from 100 to 165 A.D. And then Arianus, or Irenus, I'm from Arkansas, I've always called him Irenus. But then I looked up the pronunciation and that wasn't anywhere close. We don't know when he was born, but we know that he died in 202 A.D. So we're talking about someone that died within 200 years of Jesus Christ. Literally 170 years of Jesus Christ. And we know from His writings that He espoused that Jesus Christ would literally come back and there would occur a resurrection of the dead. And that the saints of God would rule and reign with Christ for a thousand years. And at the end of the thousand years that Christ would judge His people. Now, I'm talking about Christians from John's day on. And if I just read the writings of John, I'll come to the same conclusion. These guys are espousing. And then we have a very famous church father named Tertullian or Tertullian. And he lived from 155 A.D. to 240 A.D. and he espoused the same viewpoint. The thousand year reign, the literal thousand year reign of Christ. So what can we establish from this? We have limited writings from these early first, second and third century Christians. And these very limited writings that we have all established that they universally believe this doctrine. So the question would then be, when did it change? When did people cease to be pre-millennial and become something else? Keep that in the back of your head. I'll deal with it in a minute. Now, who are some modern-day popular people that you may have heard of that would also be pre-millennial? One of them would be Charles Ryrie. Some of you may have heard of a Ryrie study Bible. Charles Ryrie, H.A. Ironsides has a Bible commentary on the whole Bible, Ironsides, Charles Spurgeon. believed in the premillennial return of Christ. He believed in a literal thousand years. He held some other stranger views about eschatology, but he agreed on the millennium. John MacArthur, probably the foremost, most popular premillennial teacher of our day, and also John Walvoord of Dallas Theological Seminary, written a number of books. So let's look at a couple of things about premillennialism before we move on. Number one, it is the only literal interpretation. Well, I guess you could say post-millennial is literal. But it is a literal rendition of the text. In other words, it takes the text at face value. And we should always say that the Bible is literally to be taken unless we have reason to believe otherwise. Now, why would you have reason to believe otherwise? You would only have reason to believe otherwise if the Bible was making a play on words as it does in 2 Peter 3, 9. A day with the Lord is a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day. Well, does that mean a day really is a thousand years? Yeah, it literally is a thousand years. To us, but to God, it's no more than a day. But the key words there is as. A day is as. It's being comparative to tell us something different. So we have a play on words, if you will. But anytime that you want to seek a literal interpretation, what you look for is cooperation here that backs up our claim. Let me give you an example from the text. If you look in verse 2, it says, "...the angel laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent." Now, did he grab a hold of Puff the Magic Dragon? Did he grab a hold of a sneaky snake? No. We know who the dragon, that old serpent, is because we've seen this same title. As a matter of fact, we saw it last week in chapter 13 in our study. Actually, I believe it was in chapter 12, that old serpent, the devil. So we know that he's not really talking about a real dragon and a real snake because these are names, symbolic names, of Satan. However, why would we want to make a thousand years symbolic and not literal? If you look at our text, In verse 2 you see a thousand years, and then in verse 3 you see the term the thousand years, as if it's a set amount of time. Verse 4 at the end, the last three words say a thousand years, and then verse 5 refers to the thousand years. Verse 6 says a thousand years, verse 7 says the thousand years. We have no reason not to believe this is 1,000 years. God says the exact same words six times. So what grounds do we have to say it's not really 1,000 years? We don't have any. We don't have anywhere else in Scripture where it says 400 years. We don't have anywhere else in Scripture where it says God has yet to determine how long it is. As a matter of fact, the only time frame that's uncertain in what we've read tonight is the time frame at the end of verse 3 where it says that Satan must be loosed a little season. If you really want to do a time research, in my opinion, as to what's being implied here, I know how long a thousand years is. But how long is a little season? That is the time frame that needs to be studied if you want to figure out something that's not expressly written. So, we see here that premillennialism is a literal interpretation of the scripture. Now, the other thing you need to know is it's popular today. Premillennialism is popular today. It was not popular 250 years ago. It was not popular 250 years ago because about 250 years ago, there was a different view that was popular. And as we look at it in a little bit, you'll say there's no way that's happening. But it was hard for people 250 years ago to read the book of Revelation and understand any of it. Let me give you a clear example. How could someone die in the streets of Rome and the whole world see it and rejoice? Before, before photography. Before, before movie reels. Before, before digital television. Before, before the internet. And now some celebrity can trip and fall getting off a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and it's traveled around the world within three hours. It's gone viral. We have no problem understanding how two people sent of God to witness to the wicked world are slain and left dead in the streets and raised from the dead and ascended into heaven and the whole world sees it. We have no problem understanding that. But can you imagine a man from the 1750s trying to comprehend that? They would have to take an artist's sketch of it. You'd have to take it down to a woodsmith. He'd have to chisel it. They'd have to put it in a printing press and ink it up. And they'd have to turn out all these presses and then mail them on ships driven by the wind around the world for anybody to actually see these dead men. So why would anybody think anything in these 22 chapters of Scripture is literally true? I have no problem believing that now. What about the descriptions in here of the people who have a tail like a dragon and fire comes out of their mouth and they sting like a scorpion? They fly like a locust and they have the beating of a horse's hooves. You and I have seen heavy equipment operate. This could be a tank. This could be a helicopter. This could be some kind of weapon of war that you and I have not yet seen. This could be a hovercraft. We have no problem going, oh, that's some kind of big piece of equipment that they used to kill people with. Could you fathom that in the 1890s? No. It's a locomotive. That's why that's stranger of the devil. People could not understand a literal interpretation of this. Now, the first century Christians did. But after about 300 years, they began to question it. So, this has come back into popularity because we're starting to see some things line up worldwide with a one world government, with a one world currency, with nations rising against nations, with a united power force in place. We're starting to see some things come together where one guy literally could be in control of the whole world. You couldn't even get much more than a beep beep beep across the Atlantic Ocean up until about 115 years ago. Remember when they were so excited? They sent a telegram across the ocean. Can you imagine one guy in Rome trying to control the world with... If you don't come back here, I'm going to... And send my army... I mean, it didn't make sense. Well, why does it make sense today? Because mankind sees the technology that is upon the earth and says, this could really happen just as it's written. That brings me to my third thought under premillennialism. I see no reason to question it. Someone who holds another view says, why does there have to be a thousand year reign of Christ? I said, I don't know. I didn't plan it out. Well, why couldn't it be 500 years? I said, because he said 1000. Well, how do you know it's 1,000? I said, well, he said it six times. If I tell my kids to do something six times, do you think there's any question in their mind what Dad wanted them to do? If I tell the church that six times that we're going to do something, do you think anybody says, well, I don't think Brother Harold's really going to go through with that? I've said it six times. So I see no reason to question it. And for someone to come and say, I don't believe there's a literal thousand year reign of Christ, the burden of proof is not on me to prove that Scripture is true. The burden on them is to deliver some evidence that says it's not so. Now, these people used to mock and scoff at people who believe this thousand year reign was was really true, but they don't mock and scoff anymore because they see it's possible. Brings us to our second view. We said that pre-millennial is pre-millennium and millennium is two words that mean milli and annum in the, I think it's in the Greek. An annum is a year and milli is a thousand. So we have pre-1000 years. That means Christ is coming back prior to the 1000 years. That's where I am because that's what chapter 20 and chapter 19 dictate. All millennium says no thousand years. So the all millennial view is that the resurrection is spiritual, that is, the new birth, and the millennium began with the first coming of Christ. You see in the text here, I believe at the end of verse 5, it says at the beginning of the thousand years, the rest of the dead live not, only these that were in Christ. And it says this is the first resurrection. The all-millennial doesn't believe that any of this is literally going to happen. So here's what the all-millennial says. He says that the first resurrection is when Christ came out of the grave. And from the time Christ comes out of the grave until the end of the world, that's the first. I mean, that's the second resurrection. That's when God resurrects everybody really and literally and says, OK, now I'm going to figure out who's saved and who's not. Now, when did this all-millennial view of the first resurrection being what we would call regeneration or new birth, when did that begin? Does anybody know? 70 AD? No, everybody still believe this. 100 A.D. No, everybody still believe this. 200 A.D. No, everybody still believe this. Up until 240 A.D., we find lots of writings espousing the premillennial, literal thousand year reign of Christ at the resurrection of the saints. It's not until Augustine or Augustine or Augustine. I always call him Augustine and I found out later his name is really Augustine by a scholar. So I'm going to call him Augustine once or twice and I'll probably call him Augustine the rest of the time. But Augustine was born in 354 A.D. and actually made this popular in 354 A.D. and he lived to 428 A.D. I believe that's correct. I cut one of my numbers off in the printing there. So anyways, it's not until the middle of the fourth century that Augustine is born and Augustine starts out believing a premillennial view, the literal thousand year reign of Christ. It's not until he's been a Christian for a while that he's changed and changed his view on the book of Revelation so that he says this first resurrection mentioned at the beginning of chapter 20 is when Christ rose from the grave and people were genuinely saved. And so what's happening here in chapter 20 is really taking place all the way to the end, and then at the end, that's when everyone is resurrected at the same time. The question is this, when did this occur? Somewhere around the start of the 5th century, right? So, according to Augustine's timeline, He was halfway through the millennial reign of Christ. Remember, it started when Christ died on the cross, 33 A.D. Here he is at 400 A.D., 370 years in. He's thinking we got 630 years and Christ is going to return and set things right. And so people embraced Augustine's view. And they embraced it greatly. And a number of the scholars that you may have known from the last 100-150 years that espoused the all-millennial view would be Abraham Kuyper, James White, Louis Burkoff, and B.B. Warfield. These were all smart theologians. And they all bought into the Augustinian view that the 1,000 year reign of Christ was really 1,000 years Well, they had to change that because they ran out of 1,000 years. They had to change that around 1500 and say, well, that can't be right. Because if it started with Christ around 1,000 AD, the 1,000 year reign ended. So we need more time. So why would anybody want to challenge the fact that 1,000 years is mentioned six times in this text? Because a thousand years doesn't fit the plan that Augustine came up with. They ran out of years. All the Catholic Church embraced Augustine's view and said, we like Augustine's view and we think this is right and this is what we're going to go with. And the reason the church at Rome liked this view is because other people were saying the church of Rome is the Antichrist and the false prophet in the text. And so they said, we want a different view of Revelation than the one that makes us the bad guy. So we want this view. And so the Catholic Church espoused primarily the all-millennial view and embraced that because Augustine was declared a saint and there's an order of monks called the Augustinian monks. Do you know who the most famous Augustinian monk is? Other than Augustine himself? I don't think he was a monk. Martin Luther. Martin Luther. Great reformer. Was an Augustinian monk before he was converted. Let's talk a little bit about the all-millennial view. You see how it came along about 350-400 years later? You see this time frame? The first century Christians, the second century Christians, the third century Christians have all began to die off. And now someone comes along with a new view. At the same time, Constantine is being declared head of the church and merging church and state together and becoming the first pope and world leader at the same time. So now that we have a world church and a world economy, we need to have a unified doctrine. And so the Catholic Church began to embrace these differing views. And Christians who disagreed with these differing views just quite simply didn't live very long. You were either told to shut up or recant what you said or they killed you. So we have now this Augustinian Amillennial view, and it's popular among Reformed people because John Calvin teetered back and forth between Amillennial and Postmillennial in his eschatology. It just depends on the way you read it. Most of your Reformers of this time had this, and if you go read John Calvin's a commentary on Romans. It's horrible because he doesn't understand what it means and he can't make sense of it. And he tried real hard and I commend him. But you just can't comprehend what God was writing here in John Calvin's day, nor could you in Martin Luther's day. So it's still popular among reforms. It's just needed not to be literal. In order to be all millennial, you have to say that this thousand years is not really a thousand years. When we have this repeated process of a thousand and the thousand, a thousand and the thousand, a thousand and the thousand, the thousand is referring to it as a specific number. The reason we need to get rid of that specific number is because we don't need it to really be a thousand or it would blow all millennialism out of the water. Because remember, to the all millennialist, all of the Christian church is taking place in the millennial reign of Christ. You say, well, Brother Harold, how could that be? There's not peace on earth. You understand what the millennial reign of Christ is? This is where the lion and the lamb lay down together. This is where the child leads the suckling ox and the leopard at the same time. And the baby plays over the den of the adder. This is where they beat their swords into plowshares and their sickles. They break their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Isaiah 11. Now, how can that be taking place in our life? You remember during this thousand years, Satan is bound. And if you had any trouble with Satan since you've been a Christian, well, See, you really start running into some trouble here if you're a non-millennial. Then you say, well, all this is symbolic, it's spiritual, it's not literal. The reason it has to be symbolic and spiritual and not literal is because you refuse to see it as literal, because if you did, it would change everything else about you. So then we have to start going back and altering some other verses about Satan and explaining and really jumping through some loopholes if Satan is bound. And they say, well, Satan is only bound to the believer. Well, here's the problem with that. Paul said, there was sent unto me a messenger of Satan, a thorn in the flesh, to buffet me. Well, if Satan is bound, not only bound, but with a door shut and locked and a seal put on it so that Satan can't get out and nobody can let him out, how in the world can he get a message to go buffet Paul? We've got problems. So, it also leads to resurrection questions. If the first resurrection mentioned here in Scripture in chapter 5, this is the first resurrection, verse 6, blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection. Well, if you're an all-millennialist, when did the first resurrection occur? It occurred with Christ. OK, did we miss the resurrection? No. It was a spiritual resurrection. This Greek word for resurrection is found 40 times in Scripture. And every time, unless you're an all millennial, and every time it refers to a bodily, physical, somebody gets up out of the grave resurrection, unless you're an all millennial, and then these words right here refer to spiritual resurrection. It's not consistent. Now here's the thing about all millennials. Most of them are Reformed. Therefore, they take a very serious, literal view of the Scriptures until they get to the end of time, and then they go all symbolic. And it just doesn't make sense. If you're going to study everything out and apply what's clearly taught here in a clear repetition here, you can't get to chapter 20 and throw the rules out the window and make it be something else in order to keep this view. So, all millennials cannot take a literal interpretation of chapter 20 because it destroys the resurrection that they say had to occur with Christ and had to be spiritual and symbolic of this time frame till at the end there's a literal resurrection. Well, here's the problem we have with that. The literal resurrection at the end, the saints are already alive. It says in this text they lived. This is the resurrection of the dead. So now we have both believer and non-believer, both saved and lost, standing before the judgment seat of Christ at the exact same time. I don't believe that occurs. Why don't you believe that occurs? Because I believe the believer is no longer under judgment. and does not stand before Christ to determine whether he's saved or lost. I believe his name is already written down and the judgment that occurs at the end of chapter 20 is based upon those whose names are not written in the Lamb's Book of Life. So the believer is on the other side of the court and the non-believer is resurrected separately, not at the same time. Do you see the resurrection problem we run into if we're all millennial? All of a sudden, we're there with, what are you doing here? I thought only Christians got to go to heaven. In a minute, in a minute, God's going to tell you you're not going and I am. No. No, we rule and reign with Him. So the believer's not standing here in judgment, waiting to determine whether he gets in. Who always says that it's after death that you find out whether you go to heaven or not? Who is it that espouses these views? None other than our Catholic Church, who holds to our all-millennial view of salvation that didn't come about until they came about around the mid-third, fourth century. So there's resurrection questions there. There's no way to make a literal interpretation of it. That brings us to our third view, the post-millennial view. Remember what we said about post? After resurrection. Now, this idea was introduced by a man named Dr. Daniel Whitby. He advocated this position and everyone credits him as being the first to articulate it. He was born in 1638 and he died in 1726. Now, post-millennialists believe this. The earth is going to get better and better and better until we enter 1,000 years of peace. And when we enter the 1,000 years of peace, Christ will be so pleased with us at the end of the 1,000 years, He will come back. Some of you are shaking your head like that just cannot be so. Well, hang on. Charles Hodge, great theologian. Charles Hodge has his systematic theology in my office. He was a post-millennial. He also lived in the mid-1800s. A.H. Strong, great theologian, have some of his stuff. He also lived in the mid-1800s. R.C. Sproul, barely alive today but in bad shape. He is a post-millennialist. You say, Brother Harold, how can anybody possibly believe that the world's just going to keep getting better and better and better until the Lord finally says, OK, I'm going to give you all a thousand year rest and people are going to live to be a thousand years old again. Fruit trees are going to grow like they've never grown before. Lions are going to quit eating animals and go back to eating straw. All these things are just going to morph in to start happening. My problem with the post-millennial view is very simple. It don't make sense. I mean, it just doesn't add up. So why would anything like this get traction? When Daniel Whitby came out with this, people said, you're absolutely nuts. But he went back and quoted some of the old Catholics and he said, you guys are missing it. There's a real millennium. There's a real thousand years, but it's going to come about as the gospel overtakes the world. And if you go back and read post-millennials from the 1800s, the late 1800s, here's what you'll say. They'll say the gospel spread to Asia. There's Christian churches all over China. The gospel spread to India and people are getting baptized like crazy in India. Muslims are converting all over central Turkey. The gospel is going around the world. Guess what? We're on the verge of the millennium. Many people believed that at the turn of the 1900s, or what we call the 20th century, that's going to usher in the millennium. We'll turn the corner in the 1900. Here we come. Things will be so good. The church will be booming. Hey, the church was booming. Missions were at an all-time high. More of the world was hearing the gospel than at any other time. People were being baptized all around the globe. Until World War I. And World War I was the most atrocious war we'd ever seen. Why? Because mankind was making advancements like it never made before. Penicillin. Penicillin came along. We had all of a sudden people having surgery and living. They could go in and fix your body and sew you back. That had never been done. 6,000 years! Nobody ever attempted that. No, no, we're making scientific advancements. Welch's developed grape juice. You no longer have to drink wine outside of harvest time. We're making advancements. The Lord's going to return any moment. No. World War I happened and we discovered that there was mustard gas. We could just put mustard gas on people and they would die. And we discovered how to make, not only make penicillin, but to make bombs. and long-range cannons and tanks. And we learned how to fly. And with our ability to fly, it was not just an ability to glorify God, but an ability to go to war. And so with World War I, there became a very strong hit as we saw the brutality of the leaders that we fought against. And then World War II came along and put out all hope of post-millennialism. with the atrocities of Hitler toward the Jews, with the atrocities of the Japanese and the Italians. We saw this great wickedness of mankind and nobody began after that saying, oh yeah, it's going to get better, just hang in there. This was a minor setback. No, what mankind recognized is although that he got better. And the evolutionists were buying into this big time. The evolutionists said, see, God's causing us to evolve so that we can usher in the millennial kingdom. Anytime wicked science gets on your side, you're on the wrong side, OK? Problem with it being popular in the 1800s and the early 1900s is the same reason we see so many latter time contradictions in Scripture. I read Spurgeon on post-millennialism. He did just a couple paragraphs of one of his sermons today. And he said Paul didn't paint the end of the world in a rose color. What he was saying in our language is Paul told us that the end times would be nasty. bad. False teachers would grow more and more and people who really loved the truth would be hard to find and people would want to hear false teachers over those that told the truth. And so what Spurgeon was saying is there's no way, he was saying this in the 1850s, he was saying there's no way the world's going to get better and better and better. And because anybody that believes in the total depravity of man knows that man, apart from God, will not get better. So why do I reject post-millennialism? Well, I said earlier, this doesn't make sense. But if you look in the book of Revelation, it goes pretty much in chronological order with maybe one or two parenthesis, pit stop chapters along the way. But what has just happened in chapter 19, the Lord has returned to earth on a white horse and slain the armies that were encircling around Israel, right? It was Armageddon. It was blood to the bridle of horses. If postmillennialism is correct, that's what occurs immediately before the millennial reign of Christ. If postmillennialism is correct, chapter 20 belongs somewhere else in this book. So here's my take on it, and we'll close with this. I'm premillennial. I make no bones about that. I'm not real dogmatic as to when the resurrection will occur. He said, well, Brother Harold, you have to be definite. Pre-trib, mid-trib, or post-trib? No, I don't. There's already been a resurrection to some degree. Matthew 27, verses 52 and 53. When the Lord died, the graves broke open and many Old Testament saints were rose then as the first fruits of the resurrection. Jesus Christ is the firstfruits of the resurrection. And anytime I talk to a pre-meal person that says it has to be mid-trip, it has to be first trip, I say, what about these guys that were pre-pre-trip? Well, I don't know anything about them. Well, they're there! And we turn over there to Matthew 27, and I read those two verses to them, and I say, what about them? I don't have an answer for that. Maybe you ought to tone down your views about when the rapture actually happened. So I don't know if it happens at the beginning of the seven. I lean that way. I believe that way because the Lord pours His wrath upon the earth and we're not the children of wrath. I don't believe we're going to be here. But I can see a case for us enduring, going three and a half, and I can see a case for us going to the end if we live that long being raptured then. That's not what's important. Here's what's important. If you reject the thousand year reign of Christ, You're going to end up in some weird position. Many of the all-millennial people I talk to do not believe in a rapture. Rapture? There's not going to be a rapture. Post-millennial? There's not going to be a rapture. We're just going to walk into heaven. Because it's going to be the end of the thousand years. It'll be perfect. We won't need any more changing. You say, well, I'm all-millennial. I don't believe that. That's fine. I'm pre-millennial. Don't believe like some other pre-millennials. But here's my take. Let's look at the text quickly. And let's just run down through the list and let's see if I can make sense out of what's happening and give a logical explanation for everything in the text. Chapter 20, let's read 1, 2, and 3, and I'll give you a short explanation. 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 until the thousand years should be fulfilled. And after that, he must be loosed a little season. Now the angel comes down and the angel does a series of things that decapacitate Satan. Satan is always under the restraint of God and always has to have the permission of God to act. We see that in Job where God tells Satan, you can go thus far, but you cannot kill him. We see that with lots of things in Scripture where God restrains evil. We see in James that there were certain angels who left their first habitation. They didn't keep the commandments that God gave them. They tried to cohabitate with men. We find this in Genesis chapter 6. The sons of God looked upon the daughters of men. Then we find in James the angels that kept not their first estate were cast into the pit. We find earlier in the book of Revelation that an angel is sent to the bottomless pit to free these bad demons. Now, here's the interesting thing. These demons have been locked in there. You remember Jesus Christ going to the Gadarene maniac, the man that had been chained and was naked? He said, Who are you? And they said, We are legion for there are many. And they said, Don't cast us into the pit, Jesus. They did not want to go to the abyss. The abyss exists. It's a bottomless pit. It's off the earth. It's a place where God can store demons and they can't get out. And it's a place that Satan is literally going to go. You say, does the angel have a physical chain? It's as physical as Satan is because that's who it holds. Does the door have a real lock and need a real key? As real as the lock and the key that are used in this text. The chain is there for us to see and understand what's happening. So the angel lays hold of the dragon. Now, I've heard people say, I had an all millennial guy tell me one night, he said, preacher, there's no way one angel can grab Satan and take him anywhere. I said, what is Satan? Well, he's an angel." I said, okay. He said, well, Satan was the most powerful of angels. And then I responded with, where did Satan get his power? Is God not able to cripple Satan? God, I would venture to say, probably took the weakest angel of all and said, you, go grab Satan by the nap of the neck, take this chain and chain him up. And Satan laughed, you, really, you? Remember Sampson and his hair? What happened when he lost his hair? They led him around for sport. Satan's power still coming from God. God will have no problem sending the smallest of angels to grab him and chain him. Now notice what happens. He cast him into the bottomless pit, verse 3, shut him up and set a seal upon him. This means Satan is nowhere going to be present. This blows all millennialism out of the water. If I were a child of God, I would have no more temptation from Satan. But we all know that Satan desires to sift us as the wheat of the ground and the sand of the sea. We know that. We know that he would like to do that. Notice what happens. Satan is sealed. That means he has no ability to communicate outside of there. No one can get to him, near him, touch him. There's a seal on it. This same seal is the same seal that had seven on the scrolls and there was found no man in heaven or in earth that could open the scrolls. That's the kind of seal we're talking about. Notice this, that he should deceive the nations no more. Nations is plural. If amillennialism is true, then what nations, plural, are not under the subject of Satan? If you're amillennial, be thinking about this as soon as we get done. I'd like to know what nations Satan is not deceiving right now because according to the amillennial view, At Christ's resurrection, that was the first resurrection, and chapter 20 is right now and not future. What nations is Satan bound out of? I'd like to be there. I'm like Paladin. I have good will travel. If they're not in Costa Rica, I'm going to Costa Rica. However, if you're pre-millennial, this is a very simple illustration. He no longer has the access to the earth. Nations, plural, literally means every single solitary nation on the earth. Notice in chapter 3 it says, till a couple hundred years to 4,000 years, we really don't know for sure it's fulfilled. Till an indefinite amount of time. Till God gets ready. No, it says till the thousand. The thousand refers to a thousand that's mentioned in the previous verse. Till they should be fulfilled. Then it says after that, he must be loose for a little season. You want to know what the answer to the million dollar question is? Why would God let him out? If he went through all the trouble to lock him up, wait a minute, what trouble? What trouble? What trouble did God go through? And did God have to train for nine months like it was a prize fight? You say, well, Brother Hurl, I want to know why God let him back out. I'm going to ask you a question before I answer yours, all right? Why did God turn him loose on the earth to begin with? Got your answer yet? I'll give you mine when you get yours. I'll give you an answer for both of them. You want to know the answer? To reveal to mankind how wicked he is. to reveal to mankind His need for a Savior? To reveal to mankind that He wants to be God Himself? And if God don't save Him from Himself, that He would never come to God without Him? Why has Satan turned loose at the end of a thousand years? Because mankind cannot say, if we just had Jesus on the throne, we wouldn't have ever ended up in this mess. No, God can look at the world, all the world, every person that's ever lived, and say, I put you naked and innocent in a garden and you messed it up. I put you under your own conscience and you did that which was evil. So I built an ark and killed everybody but eight and I put them under government. I put them under the noodemic covenant, where all you had to do was go out and multiply, populate, and replenish the earth, and you huddled up and made a tower of babbles. So I tore it down, I segregated everybody by language, and I put them under government. And they failed. So I made a covenant with one of them, pulled him aside, and you failed, Abraham. So then I gave my law to Moses, told everybody exactly what I expected, wrote it in stone, wrote it on a scroll, built a tabernacle, told everybody that Christ was coming. You failed. I sent Christ into the world. You killed Him. I sent preachers out to declare His gospel and you hated it. poured My wrath upon the earth, destroyed everybody but a true Israel, set My Son on the throne, and here's Christ on His Father's throne. Here's His people. Here's His city. The lion and the lamb are laying down together. The curse on the earth has been removed. Satan's been imprisoned. Jesus is on the throne. And it says in Isaiah that He rules with an iron scepter and He shuts the mouths of those that speak unrighteous. So God's going to straighten people out. There's going to be no more war. And for a thousand years, my people, whom I've redeemed, are going to enjoy this earth, and you people that lived through the seven years of tribulation are going to be on this earth, populating it, and it's going to have a bigger population than it's ever had, because it's going to produce food like it's never had. And it says that the child will die at a hundred years old. If you die at a hundred, it will be a shame that you died in the prime of your life. It's going to be like living in the days of Methuselah, 969 years old. That was with sin's curse on the earth. So why would God turn Satan loose? Because as soon as Satan gets turned loose on the earth after a thousand years of peace and prosperity, as soon as mankind gets another option, The sands of the sea, it says, they will gather around the camp, God's holy city. Why is God doing all this anyways? We saw that in Ephesians chapter 2. I never could find the verse last week that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace toward us which believe. We're trophies of God's grace. So why would He turn Him loose? To demonstrate His grace even more and demonstrate our need even more. So then in verse 4 it says, 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 the Word of God, which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads nor in his hands. And they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years." If you're all millennial, who is the beast? If you're all millennial, what is his image? If you're all millennial, what is the mark of the beast? If you're all millennial, What goes in your hands and in your head? Are these literal hands? Are these literal heads? Is this a literal image? Is this a literal beast? Is this really somebody? I believe yes, yes, and yes, and yes, because I believe everything here can be interpreted literal unless clearly shown otherwise. So here's where I end up. These are literal hands. This is a literal mark. These are literal heads. This is a literal beast. This is a literal image. These people were literally beheaded. We saw them in chapter six. Or was it 13? 13. The souls of them which were beheaded? No, what are we seeing in chapter 20? Those people, last week you had no problem seeing He's literally beheaded. Why would you in chapter 20 say, well, now all of a sudden we're talking about a thousand years. No, we're talking about people here, real people. Those people were literally beheaded and said, How long, O Lord, holy and true, wilt Thou hold judgment upon them on the earth? Here we are seeing their reward. Not all their reward, but the first 1,000 years of their reward. It says they lived and reigned with Christ 1,000 years. The earth is going to get better and better and better. You tell me, post-millennial man, where the mark of the beast enters in, where it enters out. You tell me when the beast leaves and when we start hitting the 1,000 year reign of Christ. None of that makes any sense unless this is real. Chapter 5, and the rest of the dead lived not again until the 1,000 years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Now, here's what I've heard from the post-millennial and the all-millennial who don't believe this is literally true. They say in chapter 5, when someone dies, they just go and die. I said, they don't go to hell? No, they just go and die. Well, why don't they go to hell? Well, they're not going to go there until they're resurrected when we're resurrected. I said, no, no, no, we're already resurrected at this point. No, no, no, the resurrection member is just Christ. Well, When Lazarus died and the rich man died that he ate of his crumbs, he cried out to Abraham and said, send Lazarus down here to touch his finger in water and touch it to my tongue. Why was the rich man in torment? Being dead here doesn't mean being dead in trespasses and sin. It means being consigned into hell and they're sitting there for another thousand years. 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 Christ and shall reign with Him a thousand years." The believer is not reigning today. The believer is suffering today. Spiritually, we reign with Christ. Physically, we suffer. When you start trying to split physical and spiritual hairs, you end up more confused than a termite in a yo-yo. When you look at this text literally, when you look at this text plainly, what do I see there? I see that we're going to suffer. In this life you shall suffer persecution." What he said. We have the parable of the soils. The good soil that brings forth good fruit. It's still a struggle to come up, to plant, to be watered and brought up. So, it says in verse 7, and when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall then be loosed out of his prison. Listen, if all of my life Satan has been bound, I cannot imagine what's going to happen when they cut him loose. And if Satan has only been bound to the believer, as the All-Millennial says, he's spiritually bound from you. He can just kind of breathe on you and swipe at you, but he can't really mess with you. If he can't do that because of Christ, then here's my question. If he's turned loose, what can he do to you then? The being turned loose here of Satan implies that he's been held back from just the believers up until this point according to the all-millennial. But if you're a premillennial like me, he's been held back from the dwellers on the earth during the thousand-year reign. And the second death hath no power on them. Says he should go forth and deceive the nations of the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, and gather them to battle, and the number of whom shall be as the sands of the sea. This is a different battle than that which is mentioned in Ezekiel. This is the four quarters of the earth. Gog and Magog are specific areas on the earth. Be very similar to the battle that we've already seen. One of the battles that we've seen in the book of Revelation already. Who's Gog? Who's Magog? Is it Russia? Is it Syria? We don't know. We don't care. This is going to occur after our resurrected bodies. Premillennialists is not trying to figure out who Gog and Magog are. Not in this instance. Because the second death hath no trouble or no power over us. Verse 9, And they went up on the breadth of the earth and compassed the camp about the saints in the beloved city. And fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them. So are the believers supposed to be living in the holy city if you're all millennial? If you're post-millennial, will we all end up in the heavenly city at the end of a thousand years? Will we all clamber together there I mean, these things just don't make sense to me any other way than literal. And if we make it literally a thousand years and it's literally God's people and there's literally people that live through the seven years of tribulation, you say, preacher, who lives through the seven years of tribulation? I submit to you, there are 144,000 Jews, 12,000 from 12 tribes each. Does anybody question whether that's really 12,000? Or just some symbolic number that really doesn't mean anything? Nobody disputes that it's not really 12,000 from really 12 tribes. But when we get to this 1,000, oh, no, it can't be 1,000. Why? Because it jams the system that was built by a man in the 4th century that was refined by a man in the 1700s and rejected the system that the early Christians believed, which was premillennialism. Yes, there's some difficult passages to interpret if you're pre-millennial, but they're not nearly as difficult if you're all or post-millennial. I know some really good people that are all in post-millennial. They're good friends of mine. I don't beat them up for that. But as the pastor at Lee Creek, I don't get up and preach on these things unless I come to them in scripture. And I really didn't realize when we started our every seventh chapter back in January that I'd be dealing with it come the middle of September. But when I come to it, I'm going to deal with it the way Harold Smith sees it. Because that's my job. And when I get through with it, I'm going to move on. And I don't like preaching a bunch of these messages. They make you unpopular. If an all-millennial listens to this on the internet, he's going to get mad. Well, he's not even talking about this or that or this or that. And I would answer this and I would say that. He doesn't go to church here. I'm pre-millennial. You don't have to hear me preach from this chapter to know that I'm pre-millennial. The first time an all-millennial ever preached here, he never touched the millennial reign of Christ. And I picked up there was something different than he and I. You know what he said? Christ is on the throne ruling right now from heaven. I said, well, wait a minute. No, he's not. He's seated at the right hand of God interceding for us. He's waiting for his enemies to be made his good school. I said that you shouldn't have said that after church was over. I said, hey, you really believe Jesus Christ is reigning on the earth right now in the hearts of every believer? I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, isn't he seated at the right hand? I started quoting those verses. No, no, he's right in the heart of everybody. I said, yeah, but what about this verse here? And he said, are you pre-millennial? And I said, yeah, aren't you? And he goes, no, I'm all. And I was like, what in the world is all millennial? I didn't know. But do you see how differing on this thousand years changes how you view Christ now? changes how you view the end of the earth, changes how you view our role here on the earth. These things are important. So if you are all millennial, that's OK. I'm not going to demand you be like me, but be forewarned. You're going to hear me preach on it every once in a while. If you're post-millennial, I feel sorry for you. I really, really do. I feel sorry for you. Because the earth is going to have to get better than it was 150 years ago when we were sending missionaries all around the world and people were actually believing the gospel. They're not believing it anymore. I'm pre-millennial. So the message is on two words. A thousand years. I believe they're real. They're literal. They're going to happen. And if you're saved by the grace of God, during that time you will be reigning with Him on this earth. And I believe at the end of that thousand years, Satan will be turned loose. And you and I, with awe and amazement, will be shocked at how many people who live on the earth, follow after Satan, want to overthrow God and take the throne of Christ back for him. So are there any questions about this? Do any all-millennials or post-millennials have answers for my questions? Richard, I was a post-millennial, but I won't say it now Called me stupid and dumb and crazy. Yeah. Right. Right. He was telling me that, you know, okay, now we have all this stuff, we could very well be young about it. Here's what I meant to add there, Dan. The reason that pre-millennialism gets such a bad rap is because there's some real idiots that believe it. I mean, they're stupid in other areas, like really, really stupid, like John Hagee. and the blood moons and Jesus is not the Messiah. I mean, this guy's a complete and total nut job. But he'll get up and tell you, I'm premillennial. So then an amillennial will come up and go, you're like John Hagee. And I'm like, no, I'm not. No, I'm not. I'm the premillennial of Charles Spurgeon. Oh, he wasn't premillennial? And you go and you start reading some of what he preached. Oh, yeah, he did believe in a millennial reign of Christ. So it's real easy to get categorized in with some hyper-dispensational guys like C.I. Schofield and a lot of assembly god type, you know, wackos. And so it's real quick to say, oh, everybody wants to categorize you and put you in a category. Christians who truly understood, in my opinion, understood the end times, took literal approaches to Scripture, all arrived where the early Christians did in the first, second, third century. They all arrived at a literal thousand year reign of Christ. And so it wasn't until people started putting together a one world church and taking their literal approach and critiquing the early Catholic Church for its universal acceptance, which that was also Augustine's position. He said that they would circle around the holy city. And he said all of us need to be in the Catholic Church, all one church, all clumped together, all under one leader, all under a pope. So he was espousing the Catholic's theology. So when the Catholics got in power, why not embrace this new view of the millennial reign of Christ? And so when you start explaining the history of all millennialism to all millennialists, They become as embarrassed as I am when they say, you believe like John Hagee. I'll say, oh, you believe like that Catholic Augustine. And so anyways, that's kind of the, you know, we all have skeletons in our closet, I guess you'd say.