Online Bible Study - Foundations of Faith

The Last Things

This is what the Bible does says, in part, about the millennium, "And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years" (Revelations 20:1-3).

If one studies all the references to "a thousand years" in the Old and New Testament, and in other extra-canonical writings, it becomes clear that this term is not a chronological period of time, but a symbolic period of time. Also, in Psalm 90:4 we read that "A thousand days" are to God "like a day just gone past and like a watch of the night." God's way of looking at time, even "a thousand years," is not the same as that of mankind (2 Peter 3:8). Another way to think of this symbolic 1000-year period of time is as the whole New Testament period from the time of Jesus crucifixion. It does appear that in the Bible, 1000 is a number designating completeness. In the Book of Revelations the composite of this meaning can faithfully be applied.

One theologian expressed the above ideas in this way. "The biblical and extrabiblical references indicate that a 'thousand years' are not so much a literal chronological period of time, but rather a period of completeness, a time when God will accomplish everything that he planned and set out to do. This indicates that this tradition of one day like a thousand years and of a thousand years like a day in the sense of the completeness and completion of all that God has planned to accomplish was known in Judaism and in the NT itself, and so it continued in the early church (Revelation by Dr. Louis Brighton).

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