What Will the Millennium Be Like?
Revelation 20 tells you how long the millennium lasts and almost nothing about what it is like. Six times in eleven verses it says a thousand years. It shows thrones, judgment handed over, priests, and a rebellion at the close, and it never describes a single ordinary day inside it.
So every picture people carry comes from somewhere else, mostly from the Hebrew prophets. The Old Testament supplies a detailed portrait of a coming age, and the argument between the views is not about the details of that portrait but about what it is a portrait of. Premillennial readers take it as a future age on this earth after Christ returns. Amillennial readers take it as the present gospel age drawn in figures, or as the eternal state. Postmillennial readers mostly take it as the world the gospel will produce before Christ returns. The images are shared property. What they refer to is not.
The word itself
Millennium is Latin: mille, a thousand, and annus, a year. It is not a word the Bible uses in either of its languages. John writes chilia etē, a thousand years, from the Greek chilioi. That is why the older English name for belief in a future earthly kingdom is chiliasm, and why chiliasm and millennialism mean the same thing arriving by different roads.
Where the reign happens is a separate question, and a big one. It is worked through in where Christ reigns for the thousand years. This article is about the character of the age rather than its address.
The animals: Isaiah 11:6-9
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. Isaiah 11:6
Fix the famous misquotation first, because it appears on greeting cards, in sermons and in book titles. The lion does not lie down with the lamb. The wolf dwells with the lamb. The leopard lies down with the kid. The lion turns up in the next verse eating straw like the ox, and Isaiah 65:25 pairs the wolf with the lamb again. Lion and lamb together is a blend of two images the text keeps apart.
What the passage actually claims is that predator and prey are at rest, that a small child is safe at a snake's hole, and that this follows from something else: "for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea". The change in the animals is presented as a consequence of a change in the knowledge of God.
Ordinary life, extended: Isaiah 65:17-25
This chapter is the fullest description in the Bible of what the coming age looks like from inside a house. People build and stay in what they built. They plant and eat what they planted. Labour is not wasted. And then verse 20, which is one of the strangest sentences in the prophets.
There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed. Isaiah 65:20
Read plainly, that describes a world where a hundred-year-old counts as a child, where nobody dies in infancy, and where people still die. Note where the chapter starts: verse 17 announces "new heavens and a new earth". A reader has to hold both of those together, and how you do it decides a great deal.
Disarmament: Isaiah 2:2-4
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Isaiah 2:4
The disarmament is not spontaneous. It follows from arbitration: "he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people". Nations stop making war because a judge with authority over all of them is settling their cases. The passage is set "in the last days", with the nations flowing up to a mountain in Jerusalem. A version of verse 4 is carved on a wall opposite the United Nations headquarters in New York, which is a fair sign of how far the image has travelled from its setting.
The nations at the feast: Zechariah 14
Zechariah 14 pictures the survivors of a war against Jerusalem making an annual pilgrimage.
And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles. Zechariah 14:16
Two features make this passage hard to file. It has nations who are subject rather than converted, since verses 17 to 19 threaten drought and plague on any family that fails to come. And it has an Israelite festival, the feast of tabernacles, still being kept. That is a world with religion organised around Jerusalem and with resistance still in it.
The temple: Ezekiel 40 to 48
Nine chapters of measurements, gates, courts, a river running out from under the threshold, and a priesthood. What makes it contested is the altar.
And thou shalt give to the priests the Levites that be of the seed of Zadok, which approach unto me, saith the Lord God, a young bullock for a sin offering. Ezekiel 43:19
Ezekiel 45:17 has the prince providing sin offerings, burnt offerings and peace offerings "to make reconciliation for the house of Israel". Hebrews 10:10-14 says Christ's offering was made once and needs no repeat. A temple with a working sin offering after the cross is a genuine problem, and it is a problem chiefly for those who read Ezekiel's vision literally.
The passages, and where each one strains
| Passage | What it pictures | Where it strains |
|---|---|---|
| Isaiah 11:6-9 | Predators at peace, child safe | No timescale given |
| Isaiah 65:17-25 | Long life, houses, vineyards | Opens with a new earth, yet has death |
| Isaiah 2:2-4 | War ended by arbitration | Says last days, not a thousand years |
| Zechariah 14 | Nations keep an Israelite feast | Nations still need threatening |
| Ezekiel 40 to 48 | Temple, priests, sin offerings | Sacrifices after the cross |
The divide
Premillennialists read the set as one thing: a real age on this earth, after Christ returns bodily, before the eternal state. On that reading the oddities are the point. Death that still happens, nations that still resist, a feast still kept, all fit a kingdom that is glorious and not yet final.
Amillennialists read the same passages as prophetic description in the idiom available to a pre-Christian audience, pointing either to the present age of the gospel among the nations or to the new heavens and new earth. Isaiah 65 opens by announcing the new creation, so on this reading the long life and the vineyards are that, said in terms an ancient farmer could feel. Anthony Hoekema argued the case this way in The Bible and the Future in 1979, and it is the standard Reformed treatment.
Postmillennialists mostly take the passages as a description of what the gospel will yet produce in history: real nations, really changed, before Christ returns to a world already largely won.
The hardest question for the premillennial reading
If Christ has returned in glory and is present and reigning, why is there still death, still unbelief, and a rebellion at the end? Revelation 20:7-9 has Satan loosed after the thousand years and finding nations "as the sand of the sea" willing to march. That looks like the wrong world for a period after the second coming.
The premillennial answer runs in two parts. First, the millennium was never claimed to be the eternal state; it is a kingdom in history, with the curse rolled back rather than abolished. Second, not everyone alive at the return is destroyed by it. People enter in ordinary bodies, have children, and children are not believers by inheritance. Isaiah 65:20 is the text cited, since a passage about a world with no death at all would have no reason to mention anyone dying at a hundred.
The amillennial reply is that Isaiah 65 says new heavens and new earth in its own opening line, and Revelation 21:4 says there shall be no more death, so a reading that puts real dying inside verse 20 sets Isaiah against himself. Neither side has closed that exchange, and the better writers on both sides say so.
The sacrifices, three answers
| Answer | The claim | The cost |
|---|---|---|
| Memorial | Offerings look back, as bread and wine do | Ezekiel says sin offering, not memorial |
| Ceremonial | They cleanse the site, not the conscience | Reads a narrow sense into broad words |
| Figurative | The whole vision is symbolic worship | Hard to hold with a literal temple |
The memorial and ceremonial answers are the dispensational ones, argued at length by Charles Ryrie, John Whitcomb and more recently Jerry Hullinger, who ties the offerings to the presence of the divine glory among an unclean people rather than to atonement. The figurative answer is the older Reformed one, associated with Patrick Fairbairn's nineteenth-century commentary on Ezekiel.
What the question is really asking
Notice what has happened. Nobody disputes the content of the prophets. Both sides can quote Isaiah 65 with feeling. The disagreement is entirely about reference: whether a described world is one you are living in now, one that is coming after the return, or one beyond the last judgment altogether.
That decision is not made by reading Isaiah harder. It is made by how you read Revelation 20, and by what you do with the covenants the prophets were drawing on when they promised a land, a throne and a people. Working those through in order is what turns an argument about pictures into an argument about texts.