What is millennialism?

We have seen the heavenlies cleared of Satan and his angels; the earth cleared of its wicked kings; the beast and the false prophet cast into the lake of fire; and now we have the binding of Satan. (Rev. 20) Victory is complete! the hidden source of all the evil is bound in the abyss for a thousand years. The blessed Lord takes the kingdom. "The kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever." (Rev. 11:15.) This is the millennium — Christ openly, manifestly governing, and Satan bound. These are the two grand features of that blessed period, and by which it is distinguished from all former dispensations.

To this inquiry, I am compelled by the testimony of Scripture to reply, that the second personal advent of our Lord and Saviour will be pre-millennial: that is, it will take place before the millennium. I may add here (if perchance there be some present who may not know it) that pre means before; and that millennial is derived from the two Latin words, mille, a thousand, and annus, a year. Hence millennium means a period of a thousand years' duration; and millennial means relating to that period. Pre-millennial, then, simply means, before the millennial period. The second advent of our blessed Lord will, assuredly, be pre-millennial. This, I maintain, is one of the clearest and most unquestionable of truths revealed to us in the Word of God. We have passages proving it, as we have previously said, almost without end. We cannot crowd the whole argument into one address; but we shall endeavour to present the Scripture testimony, as far as time admits, as simply and as concisely as possible. And may we be favoured with a docile spirit of faith, and with happy liberty of heart, whilst it passes under our review.

Thrones are seen next by the Seer. "And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them and judgment was given unto them." Daniel also saw thrones in connection with the judgment of the beast, but nothing is said of those occupying the thrones in Daniel's vision. Here we have the complete revelation, and several times the blessed statement is made that Christ and His saints shall reign with Him for a thousand years. The new age in which all things are put in subjection under His feet, the personal reign of Christ, in which all His redeemed people have a share, begins. It will last a thousand years. Six times we read of the thousand years in this chapter. Because this coming age will last a thousand years it has been called by the Latin word "millennium." Not a few have made the astonishing declaration that such a period of time during which Christ and His saints reign over the earth has but little foundation in the Scripture.

This clearly shows us that the winepress tells us of the judgment of Christ's enemies. We know when this great ingathering of the Lord's own will take place, and we also know when this fearful judgment of His enemies will occur. Both come just before the time when He takes the Throne, and answers that prayer that has gone up for more than nineteen hundred years, "Thy Kingdom Come." Revelation 20:4, to which we have referred above, ends in this way: "And they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years."

From these Scriptures, I think we may understand clearly the verse in Deut. 16:13, "Thou shalt observe the Feast of Tabernacles seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine." We believe this is like a finger to point out to us just the time when we may expect the Feast of Tabernacles to have its fulfilment. We believe this Feast is a type of the glorious reign of Christ for a thousand years. We generally call this "The millennium," which just means, "The Thousand Years." There have been, perhaps, about six thousand years since the creation, but none of these can be spoken of as "The Thousand Years." They have been six thousand years in which "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." (Rom. 8:22). Sin entered in the third chapter of the Bible, and with Sin, came the curse, thorns and thistles, tears, sorrow, pain, and death "until now." Not only has man suffered through Adam's sin, but even the animals and the ground have suffered also, so that the Scripture truly says, "The whole creation groaneth."

The idea of a millennial reign, true and scriptural as it is, tends to get too large possession of the thoughts of those often styled "millennarians," a word which answers to the early "chiliasts," — both derived from this "thousand years" of rule. And these, as shown in Papias, Justin, and Irenaeus, conceived of it in a Jewish and earthly fashion, seriously conflicting with the Christian's heavenly hope. To this Old Testament expectation many in the present day have swung round again, and we cannot too earnestly protest against it.

Amillennialism denies that there will be a literal millennium in which the promises given by God to Abraham (and to Israel) will be fulfilled (literally). Instead, these promises are spiritualised and thought to have been fulfilled in a ‘symbolical millennium' that started at Pentecost and that is thought to last until Christ's second coming in power. To see why Amillennialism is unscriptural and has serious consequences see Q 37 and Q 38. It robs Israel of its promises, the church of its hope and Christ of His Messianic glory.

What is Postmillennialism?

Postmillennialism (denies the rapture and) teaches that Christ's second coming will occur only at the end of the millennium. Consequently, the millennium is thought to be established through increasing Christian influence (as opposed to Christ's coming in might and power). However, please note that

Everybody is aware of the difference prevailing among the Lord's people as to the interpretation of those passages of Scripture which foretell the future in reserve for the Church and the world. The ordinary interpretation is, that the promises contained in the Psalms and Old Testament prophecies refer to the Church, which, as the spiritual Israel, has taken the place, in God's purposes, of the literal Israel, to whom these promises were given. So, the fulfilment of the promises is taken to be spiritual rather than literal, being brought about by the gradual spread of Christianity, and the blessings of peace and prosperity following the universal triumph of the gospel. This world-wide dominion of truth and happiness is presumed to be the period of a thousand years, during which Satan is bound, and the saints reign with Christ. It is supposed that at the close of this time, after another brief outbreak of Satan's craft and human wickedness, the world is destroyed; and that there is then a general resurrection of the dead, both bad and good, to be judged before the great white throne. This is interpreted as the event called "the coming of the Lord," "the appearing of the Lord," "the day of the Lord," "the end of the age" (mis-translated "world"), and "the coming of the Son of man" — names supposed all to refer to the same period, the closing up of the history, and indeed, of the existence, of the habitable globe.

The views of prophecy which so widely prevail in the present day confound with each other two periods, as entirely contrasted in their character, as they are distinguished from each other by the fact that one commences after the other has closed. Most Christians suppose that by the preaching of the gospel, and the increased outpouring of the Holy Spirit, Christianity will gradually spread — the nations of the earth be gradually subdued by its influence — till at last all men become Christians; and, that the world having thus become Christians, it will remain so for a great length of time. And this universal prevalence of Christianity which they anticipate is what they understand by the millennium. But not only is this idea not founded on Scripture — not only is it contrary to all the plain Scriptures by which it was proved to you a week ago that there can be no millennium till the return of the Lord Jesus Christ — it is based on a complete misapprehension as to what the character of the present period is, as well as the character of the next, the millennial age. They stand in direct contrast with each other. What is the character of God's present dealings with mankind? Grace, unmingled grace. This is the period of God's long-suffering, the day of salvation. God is not now openly acting as the righteous Governor of the world, distributing good and evil according to the character of men's ways. Every body sees this, and infidels try to prove thereby, either that there is no God, or that he takes no concern in human affairs. Whence all the unrequited treachery and rapine, and oppression and blood, which make the head giddy and the heart sick to contemplate, if God be now rewarding people according to their works? — if, in other words, he be now openly governing the world in righteousness?

As for the relation of the Second Coming of Christ to the Kingdom, with the exception of Origen and the few who rejected the "Apocalypse" as apostolic, all primitive expositors — Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus, etc. — were premillenarians; that is, held that the Lord's Second Advent will precede the Millennium: see Gibbon, "Decline and Fall, etc.," chapter 15, comparing Elliott, "Horae Apocalypticae," iv p. 310. "The expectation," remarks Wernle, "of the Kingdom of God upon earth and of the resurrection of the dead, the two thoughts least Greek in character, stand at the centre of the Christian Hope." To this the same writer devotes his chapter 13. "Even so educated a Christian as Justin," he says, "was a convinced Millenarian. The process of Hellenization set in about the end of the second century" (ii., p. 133), that is, in Origen's youth. Augustine did the disservice of following in the wake of the allegorizing of that erratic theologian: see the celebrated Latin Father's "City of God," in particular book x., §7. Gibbon observes that "Agreement of the Fathers went by the board;" that the Apocalyptic Kingdom "came to be treated as the invention of heresy and fanaticism." J. H. Newman, naturally, in his Oxford sermons, through his, incipient Catholicism — that farrago of ideas — discredited the Patristic Millennium indiscriminately. And so Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, in his "Lectures on the Apocalypse" (1848), as to whose views see criticism by B. W. Newton in "Aids to Prophetic Inquiry," pp. 310-386 (3rd ed., 1881). The darkening of counsel seems complete when an esteemed writer like the Protestant Bishop Martensen is found attaching a symbolic meaning, derived from 2 Peter 3:8, to the "thousand years" of Rev. 20:4.

Next follows a brief but vivid sketch of the reign for a thousand years. We need not discuss whether it be a thousand years symbolically or literally. Not that I doubt it is to be taken literally. The important point to see and maintain is that it is a long, though limited, time; distinguished in character from what went before, as well as from what follows itself. It is Christ's reign with the glorified saints for a certain defined period (not through eternity). There are striking changes as to conditions and circumstances, but still substantially the heavens and earth that now are; creation delivered from the curse; Satan bound; man blest; the glorified saints in their proper heavenly place; Israel in the inner earthly circle, and the Gentiles in the outer circle; all this combined and going on through the millennium. How it all differs from the old Chiliastic scheme is manifest. Indeed, I am not surprised that grave men rose up against the notion that the Lord Jesus should again live as a man on the earth during the thousand years. Such a view is both unscriptural and repulsive; though it was sorrowful that, in discarding the chaff, Origen and others lost so much of the wheat. But the thoughts of good men like Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and others, were clogged with elements which ruined their testimony to a great extent, and gave occasion to the philosophising reaction which allegorised almost all. Scripture does not such violence to the spiritual instincts of the children of God, and enables us to hold fast what is good, while we refuse the evil.