Revelation 20 Explained, Verse by Verse

Revelation 20 is fifteen verses long, and it is the only chapter in the Bible that mentions a thousand-year reign of Christ. The phrase "a thousand years" appears six times inside it and nowhere else in Scripture.

That fact does more work than most people realise. Amillennialism, postmillennialism and premillennialism are not three systems that happen to disagree about Revelation 20. They are three ways of reading Revelation 20, extended outward until they touch everything else. Get these fifteen verses in view, in order, and the whole argument becomes something you can hold in your head.

The three positions in one table

The word millennium is Latin, from mille (thousand) and annus (year). The Greek behind it in Revelation is chilia etē, which is why the early church's version of this belief is called chiliasm.

The prefixes describe where the second coming sits. Premillennial puts it before the thousand years. Postmillennial puts it after. Amillennial uses the Greek alpha privative, the negating a- you also hear in atypical, and means not a future millennium at all, since the period is already running.

Amillennial and postmillennial readers agree about most of this chapter and disagree about how well the church does inside it. A fuller comparison sits in the three millennial views.

Verses 1 to 3: the angel, the key and the chain

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. Revelation 20:1-3

"Bottomless pit" translates abyssos, from the alpha privative again plus byssos, a depth or bottom. Something with no floor. "Bound" is edēsen, from the verb deō, the ordinary word for tying something up.

Amillennial readers take this as already accomplished. Christ bound the strong man at his first coming, and the binding is limited to one specific effect named in the text itself: Satan can no longer keep the nations in darkness. Before Christ, the gospel sat inside one nation. After him it runs everywhere.

Postmillennial readers agree the binding is present, and press it further. If Satan is restrained from deceiving the nations, they expect the nations to be discipled in large numbers before Christ returns.

Premillennial readers answer that the language is not the language of restraint. A chain, a pit, a shut door and a seal are four images of total confinement stacked on top of each other, and 1 Peter 5:8 describes a devil still walking about. That exchange is worked through in is Satan bound right now.

Verses 4 to 6: the thrones, the souls and the first resurrection

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 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. Revelation 20:4-5

The hinge here is a single Greek verb. "They lived" in verse 4 and "lived not again" in verse 5 are the same word, ezēsan, an aorist of zaō, to live.

Premillennial readers argue that one verb, used twice in two verses, should carry one meaning. Nearly everyone agrees verse 5 describes bodies coming out of graves, so verse 4 must as well.

Amillennial readers answer that John says he saw souls, not bodies, and that the first resurrection is either the believer's spiritual rising with Christ in Ephesians 2:5-6 or the soul's entry into Christ's presence at death. B. B. Warfield argued the latter in The Millennium and the Apocalypse in 1904, and Meredith Kline developed it in The First Resurrection in the Westminster Theological Journal in 1975.

Postmillennial readers generally follow the amillennial line here.

The Greek, and the difficulties on both sides, are laid out in what the first resurrection is.

There is a second question tangled with it. Is the number itself a figure? Revelation is full of symbolic numbers, and a thousand is a natural way to say "a very great many". Against that, the number is repeated six times, which is unusual for a symbol. See whether the thousand years is literal.

And a third. Verse 4 says they "reigned with Christ", but it does not say where. Amillennial readers locate the reign in heaven, with the martyrs already before the throne. Premillennial readers locate it on the earth, pointing to Revelation 5:10. That is where Christ reigns.

Verses 7 to 10: Satan loosed, and Gog and Magog

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. Revelation 20:7-8

Magog appears in Genesis 10:2 as a son of Japheth, and Gog is the prince of the land of Magog in Ezekiel 38 and 39. John borrows the names for a final rebellion, then ends it in one verse: fire from God, and the devil cast into the lake of fire.

Amillennial readers see the end of the church age, a short outbreak of persecution before Christ returns, and take Ezekiel's battle and this one as the same event described twice.

Premillennial readers see rebellion at the end of a real earthly kingdom, and usually keep Ezekiel 38 and 39 separate from this, since John names the enemy only in passing.

Notice what this section does to the structure of the chapter. If the binding is present, the loosing is still future, and the thousand years is the stretch you are living in now.

Verses 11 to 15: the great white throne

And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened. Revelation 20:11-12

This is the final judgment, and it is the least disputed part of the chapter. All three positions agree it is universal, bodily and last. They differ on whether believers stand there too, and on how it lines up with the judgment scenes in Matthew 25 and 2 Corinthians 5. That is the great white throne judgment.

Verse 14 supplies the chapter's own definition of a term it used earlier: "This is the second death." Verse 6 had already promised that on those in the first resurrection "the second death hath no power".

The question underneath all four sections

There is one more decision, and it sits under everything above: does chapter 20 continue chapter 19, or start again?

Revelation 19 ends with Christ returning on a white horse and destroying the beast and the false prophet. If chapter 20 simply carries on, then the binding of Satan happens after the second coming, and premillennialism follows almost automatically. If chapter 20 instead restarts the story at Christ's first coming, the binding is already behind us.

That second approach is called recapitulation, from the Latin capitulum, a heading or chapter. It reads Revelation as a set of parallel passes over the same period rather than one running timeline, and it goes back at least to Tyconius in the fourth century, whose work Augustine drew on in book 20 of The City of God. The case for and against is set out in whether chapter 20 follows chapter 19.

Five questions, two answers

Strip the argument down and it comes to five decisions, each of which the text leaves genuinely open enough for careful readers to differ.

Read down the first column and you have amillennialism. Read down the second and you have premillennialism. Postmillennialism mostly tracks the first column and then adds an expectation about history that neither of the others shares.

Nobody arrives at a millennial position and then reads the chapter. Everyone reads the chapter, makes these five decisions, and finds afterwards that the decisions have a name.

Which is why the honest way to hold a view here is to be able to say what the other side does with each verse, and why an intelligent person could land there.