What Is the First Resurrection?

The first resurrection is named once in the Bible, in Revelation 20:5, and John never explains it. He describes something happening and then labels it, which leaves the definition to be worked out from the surrounding sentences.

Here is the short answer. The whole question comes down to one Greek verb used twice, two verses apart. Verse 4 says certain people "lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years". Verse 5 says "the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished". Both are the same word, ezēsan. If it means bodily resurrection in verse 5, as almost everyone grants, premillennialists argue it must mean bodily resurrection in verse 4. Amillennialists answer that John says he saw souls, and that the first of the two "livings" is of a different kind from the second.

The text

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. Revelation 20:4-6

The Greek, precisely

The verb is ζάω (zaō), to live. The form in both verses is ἔζησαν (ezēsan), aorist active indicative, third person plural. Not two related words. The identical form, twice.

The KJV renders it "lived" in verse 4 and "lived not again" in verse 5. The "again" is supplied by the translators; it is not a separate word in the Greek.

"Resurrection" is ἀνάστασις (anastasis), from ana, up, and histēmi, to stand. A standing up again. The phrase in verse 5 is hē anastasis hē prōtē, "the resurrection, the first one".

Two other uses of the verb in Revelation itself matter here. In Revelation 2:8, Christ is "he which was dead, and is alive", where "is alive" is ezēsen, the singular of the same aorist, and unmistakably means his bodily resurrection. In Revelation 13:14 the beast has "the wound by a sword, and did live", also ezēsen, describing a body restored. Within this book, when John uses this verb of someone who had died, he has so far meant it physically.

The premillennial argument

It is an argument about consistency, and it was put most memorably by Henry Alford, the Dean of Canterbury, in his Greek Testament, completed in 1861.

Alford's point was that if a passage mentions two resurrections, and you read the first as spiritual and the second as physical, you have made language incapable of settling anything. His line is still quoted: "If the first resurrection is spiritual, then so is the second, which I suppose none will be hardy enough to maintain."

Set out plainly, the argument runs:

1. Verse 5 describes bodies coming out of graves. Nearly all interpreters agree.
2. Verse 4 uses the same verb in the same form two verses earlier.
3. Nothing in between signals a change of sense.
4. Therefore verse 4 is also bodily, and it happens a thousand years before verse 5.

Two resurrections, separated by the millennium, is the premillennial system in a sentence. Add that the sequence in verse 4 runs beheaded, then lived, then reigned, and the natural order is death followed by restoration to life, not death followed by continuing to exist.

The difficulty premillennialists have to carry is the word souls. John says he saw psychas, souls, and souls are not bodies. It is also true that the New Testament elsewhere speaks of one resurrection at the last day, most plainly in John 5:28-29 and John 11:24, without hinting at a thousand-year gap.

The amillennial argument

Amillennial readers take the first resurrection as something that has already happened to every Christian, and they offer two versions of it.

The regeneration reading. The first resurrection is the new birth, the believer's spiritual rising with Christ.

Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Ephesians 2:5-6

On this reading the language of dying and rising is already used of conversion in Paul, and John 5:24-25 has Jesus saying the dead hear his voice and live in the present tense, before he speaks of the graves in verse 28.

The heavenly reading. The first resurrection is the soul's passage into Christ's presence at death. B. B. Warfield argued this in The Millennium and the Apocalypse in 1904, treating the vision as a picture of the departed saints reigning in heaven. Meredith Kline sharpened it in The First Resurrection, published in the Westminster Theological Journal in 1975, arguing that "first" and "second" in this chapter mark a difference of kind rather than mere order. His evidence is the chapter's own vocabulary: the second death in verse 14 is not a second instance of physical death but something categorically different, so the first resurrection need not be a first instance of physical resurrection either.

That is a genuinely strong answer to Alford, and it deserves to be stated in full rather than waved at, because it turns Alford's demand for consistency back on itself. Revelation 20 does contain a first-and-second pair where the two members are not the same kind of thing.

The reading also fits the word souls, and fits the fact that verse 4 never mentions graves, bodies or the earth.

The difficulty amillennialists have to carry is the verb. Even granting that "first" and "second" can mark difference of kind, verse 4 and verse 5 are not a first-and-second pair of the same noun; they are one verb used twice about two groups of dead people. Reading it as "the martyrs went to heaven" and then, two verses later, "the rest of the dead were raised bodily" asks the same word to do two different jobs inside a single sentence pair. Kline's answer explains why anastasis could differ in kind. It does less to explain why ezēsan should.

Side by side

What hangs on it

If the first resurrection has already happened to you, the millennium is now, the martyrs are reigning in heaven, and the next event on the calendar is the second coming with a single general resurrection at the end of it.

If the first resurrection has not happened to anyone yet, then the graves are still full, verse 4 describes a rising that no one has witnessed, and a thousand-year reign stands between Christ's return and the last judgment.

The two readings cannot both be right, and neither is held only by careless people. What decides it is not which system you prefer but what you conclude about a single aorist verb in two adjacent verses. That is an unusually small hinge for an unusually large door, and it is worth looking at closely rather than taking on report.

The rest of the chapter, and the four other decisions like this one, are laid out in Revelation 20 explained verse by verse. The verse that comes just before, and the question of whether Satan is already chained, is is Satan bound right now.