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References: Revelation 20:1-6
Alright, tonight you’re going to find your way to Revelation chapter 20. This is the seventh message and a series of messages on the dispensations and of course we number them as seven. Those are all on our website. If you’ve missed some, I would like to hear the others. Next week, since we have one Sunday night before our Easter comes upon us, I’m going to give you kind of a recap, a summary of why these things are important. Do that next Sunday night and then after our Easter season and the few Sunday nights we have off this month because of business meeting and other things. And the Lord’s Supper by the way, the last Sunday night of the month. Then we’ll come back and I want to go through the covenants that the Bible mentions and we’ll do that on Sunday night as well. We’re going to talk about the dispensation of the kingdom and I want to read for you Revelation 20, one through six.
So if you have found your place there, let me read. 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.
And after that he must be loosed a little season. And I saw thrones and they that 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 for which had not worshiped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads or in their hands. They lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead live not 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, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ and shall reign with him a thousand years. In verse seven, when the thousand years are expired Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.
And I’ll come back to those verses in just a minute. God created the world, of course, we know, and the time of the Garden of Eden and everything was peaceful. Everything was right. There was no sin.
There was no fall. But Adam and Eve sinned and so we fell. And not only we as human beings, but all of creation did. And so we have been less than what God intended for this earth for all this time. But there’s coming a time when Jesus Christ will return to the earth and remove most of that curse, bind Satan who tempted Adam and Eve and bring the earth and all of the world back up to the place where he intended it to be.
And it will be like that for a thousand years. And if that doesn’t happen, then many of God’s prophecies and God’s purposes for this earth will never be accomplished unless we have that time when Jesus Christ rains for a thousand years. We first have to have the return of Jesus Christ.
We can’t do it ourselves as we will see. Christ will have to do that. He will have to return and he will have to bind Satan.
He will have to bring in the kingdom of God and all that goes with it. When that happens, we will have the seventh dispensation. We are now in the sixth, the age of grace, and we are waiting for that time. The age of grace could have been short because the eminent, the return of Christ is eminent and he could have come back. And 150 AD, 250, 1000 AD, he could have come back at any time. But it’s been 2000 years.
So it’s been a long time. But he will come, and that’s what the book of Revelation teaches us, he will come. When he comes there will be changes, there will be spiritual changes. At least at the very beginning, no lost person will remain upon the earth. As I’ve often said, seven years before that, at the rapture, no saved person will be on the earth. And then when Christ comes back and returns and judges the earth, no lost person will be upon the earth.
Everyone saved, everyone born again, all Israel will be saved. There will be spiritual changes that will be wonderful, and having Satan bound as well. And then there will be political, social changes, because Christ will rule with a rod of iron. He will see to it that righteousness reigns, whereas we almost have the opposite these days.
He’ll see to it that righteousness reigns in the world. And there will be physical changes. The curse will be lifted, the line will lie down with the Lamb. Even in Israel, a plane will be created where the millennial temple and the throne of David will be reconstructed. And Christ will sit there on that throne.
It will be a wonderful time on this earth. If a political candidate could promise all of those things, we’d never believe him. We’d say, it’s impossible. How could all of those things happen? And yet here comes the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, and he will bring all of these things to pass. Now, does the Bible speak about such a time?
Often. In the Old Testament, prophets are full of these kinds of things, but so is the New Testament. In Ephesians 1-10, Paul says, in the dispensation of the fullness of times, he might gather together in one all things in Christ, which are in heaven and on earth, even in him. He calls it the dispensation of the fullness of times. In Acts 3-19, as Peter’s preaching, he says, Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord. Called the times of refreshing. Then he goes on and says, He shall send Jesus Christ, which was preached unto you, whom the heaven must receive until the restitution of all things. In this one passage, it is the time of refreshing.
It’s a restitution of all things. And remember Daniel, who spoke of it so often in Daniel 2.44, said, In the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed. The kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. So the Bible is full of descriptions and passages that speak about this coming kingdom. So to say that it stands forever, to call it a kingdom, we call it a millennium because of this passage, as we will see in Revelation 20, the second coming of Christ, the reign of Christ, and so forth. Well, and the verses that we read, if you and your mind can put together the book of Revelation, kind of like in a timeline, can you do that? Can you see where the church age is in chapters 2 and 3, where the rapture would belong at the beginning of chapter 4, and then the first half of the tribulation up until chapter 11 with the seal judgments and some of the trumpet judgments, and then the second half, the second three and a half years, and then if your eye glances back to chapter 19 in your Bible, you probably see, especially in verse 11, that the return of Jesus Christ to the earth, and he comes out of heaven and comes to the earth. Look at verse 14, the armies which were in heaven followed him, I mean chapter 19, the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, out of his mouth, go with a sharp sword, with it he should smite the nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of iron, and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God. And so he comes out of heaven and we come with him. And then what happens after that?
Well, there’s a kingdom of God, right? A thousand years where he reigns on the earth. And then what happens after that? Well, chapters 21 and 22 speak of the New Jerusalem, where we will live forever after there’s a new heaven and new earth. So even when we put the book together, we find that the mention of these thousand years is exactly in the right place, where John, where the Holy Spirit wanted it to be. Six times in these verses, in seven verses, we have the expression a thousand years. Now that’s important because without these, without this chapter, we wouldn’t know that there would be a millennium, a thousand years. We know there’s going to be a kingdom of God, and the Old Testament saw it as a kingdom that will last forever, and it will.
But this is the first phase of it. This thousand years on this earth, the way the Garden of Eden was intended to be, with Jesus Christ reigning on it, then the kingdom of God truly will go on into eternity because we will live with him in that new Jerusalem forever and ever. So an eternal kingdom, yes. But a millennial kingdom, yes. The first thousand years of that kingdom. We wouldn’t know about that thousand years if it hadn’t been for these verses that give us that. So sometimes it’s called a millennium.
Sometimes those of us who believe in it are called chelists from Kilo, a thousand, C-H-I-A-L. Chelists were called believing in a thousand. Well, since these thousand years are mentioned, there’s a lot of views about these. And there has been for the last 2,000 years. There’s an a-millennial view that rather than believing that there’s going to be an exact thousand years, that we live in it now and it’s kind of spread out longer than a thousand, so we’re not supposed to take it exactly or literally as a thousand years. There’s a post-millennial view, which means that thousand years won’t come until you and I get busy and make the earth into the kingdom of God through social work, political work, and all of the things that we have to do. If we can do that, then we will raise the level of the earth up to where it will be a kingdom of God and Jesus would be pleased to come and dwell here. We’re not doing such a good job if that’s what we’re after. But then the pre-millennial view, which we take, I take, is that Jesus will have to return first. He will have to do this. The earth, the world is getting worse and worse, not better and better.
And he’s going to have to return and bring in this. There are different views also about the book of Revelation. If you’ve heard the word, Preterist, it’s a word that means some people believe everything that the book of Revelation talks about was all accomplished in the first hundred years of church history.
All in those first few hundred years, all of these plagues and judgments and everything that we read happened here. It’s already done. It’s already been finished. Then there’s the historicists. The historicists, it sounds good. What he takes this as, the book of Revelation and these thousand years, means that this has been fulfilled over the two thousand year period. You can go back into history, for example, and you can find certain times when this pope reigned or this king reigned or this kingdom was reigned. That fulfills the things that are mentioned in the book of Revelation. So it’s kind of fulfilled over the last two thousand years, a historicist. But we call ourselves futurists, meaning we read this book of Revelation and these things are future.
They haven’t happened yet. They are in the future. And they can’t happen until Jesus comes back at the rapture and then these things begin to happen.
Some then take the book as a recapitulation. We have a period of judgments when seven seals are judged upon the earth. Then we go back and we look at the same amount of time again and there are seven trumpets. Then we go back and look at the same amount of time again and there are seven bowls. Then we go back and look at a thousand years and then we go back and look at the new Jerusalem and it just keeps recapitulating back over the same territory again. But rather it is far better and far more literal and normal to take this book as it’s written.
It’s this, then this, then this, then this. And it all makes sense, I think, with all of the prophets. Why is this important? It’s not a matter of salvation. There are many people who know the Lord as Savior who are amillennialists or even post-millennialists. That doesn’t mean that a person can’t receive Jesus Christ as Savior. Although I thought it was interesting as I thought about that, that many of the major denominations who no longer teach salvation by grace, starting with the Roman Catholic Church and many of the Protestant denominations, they’re all amillennialists. And I got to thinking, do I know a liberal who’s a premillennialist?
And I don’t. You know, when you take the Bible in a literal fashion and become a premillennialist, you’re probably not, probably not a liberal. Well, it’s a matter of hermeneutics, then. How do we take the Bible? How do we read it? Do we read it plainly? Do we read it for what it is?
Or are we always trying to spiritualize, allegorize, find typologies, and apply it to something that’s kind of crazy, for example? For example, one historicist takes Charlemagne’s kingdom that began in 800 AD as the beginning of the thousand years. And so I’m scratching my head thinking, then it’s over with, right? And if it’s over with, why are we still here?
You know? Or why isn’t there a new Jerusalem that we’re living in? But there’s always been those kinds of things. So we take it literally. We take it for what it is. And that’s what we’re going to look at in these lessons. Now, on the back of your bulletin, you have six points, though, again, there are, excuse me, you have five, and there are six mentions of the thousand years, but two of them refer to the same thing.
And that’s why I grouped them together like this. So, here is what we learn as we read and we come chronologically to the time that Jesus Christ returns to the earth in chapter 19 and we find even the beast and the false prophet in verse 1920 are taken and cast into the lake of fire and immediately after that verse 1 and 2 says, I saw an angel come down from heaven having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand, he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent and the devil and Satan and bound him a thousand years. So, the first thing we learn about the kingdom of God is the removal of satanic opposition for a thousand years. Well, no wonder we have some peace on the earth when Satan is removed. We’ve been saying, and I understand from Gordon’s Sunday School class, to mine, to my sermon this morning, we’re all in battles with Satan and his foes, are we not? That’s what’s going on in this world. Imagine all of that removed. Imagine Satan and all of his demons removed from their activity from the earth for a thousand years.
That’ll be a great time. Is it literal? I think so.
I think it’s literal. Is there an angel, as the one mentioned in verse 1, who could actually lay hold on Satan and do this to him? Well, there’s a lot of angels and they have a lot of power and God created them and I’m sure he created one just for this purpose and I want to meet him someday and I’m going to. I’m going to shake his hand, squeeze it real hard. He can lay hold on the dragon. Is there a literal chain?
Why not? Why can’t Satan be bound with a literal chain? Well, he’s a spirit.
He’s an angel. Well, there are people in hell today and it’s just their spirits and not their body, but they’re suffering in real torment. And so if God can do that kind of thing, he can do this kind of thing and he can bind Satan for a thousand years and I think the thousand years are also literal as well. So with this binding of Satan, we have peace on the earth.
Some people believe that this happens now. If you’re an Amillennialist, you’re somehow trying to find how Satan is bound in this age in which we live and I’m having a hard time understanding that at all. Now there are some of our charismatic friends who believe you can pray and bind Satan through a Christian prayer and usually they refer back to this verse, but I don’t see it referring to our prayer today that we can bind Satan in such a way. So I have to take it for what it is and that is there’s coming a time not now but in the future when he will be bound and it will be for this thousand years which has to be taken literally also.
So do we take the thousand years here in these verses literally? Folks, that is really the key here. That is the key to your premillennialism. That’s the key to the opening of the book of Revelation. Do we take things like this, especially this mention of a thousand years? Because if we take it literally, then it hasn’t happened yet and it’s going to happen and Satan will be bound and Christ will rule and it will be for a thousand years and you’ve got a millennium whether you like it or not. And the only way you can get around that in the Scripture is to not take this literally.
Somehow it just means a long period of time or an indefinite time or something like that. But you know if we went back to chapter 7 we would read of 144,000 Jews who will be marked out by God for protection. How many out of each tribe?
12,000 out of each of the 12 tribes, 144,000. Is that literal? Is that mention of the thousand years literal? It is.
And we have no problem with that. Those thousands being literal, why do we get here and this one we take in some other way? And by the way, the thousand years mentioned as we see here in this outline in five different ways, five different things that it affects. And so how do you take it spiritual each time?
How would you apply it each time? To me it has to be literal in order to apply to all five of these things. Well now we’re not told the whole story in verses one and two. He’s bound for a thousand years. and the beginning of verse 3, cast him into a bottom of spit and shut him up and put a seal upon him that he should not deceive the nations anymore until the thousand years are finished.
So, number the second point of my outline, number three, there’s a review then of what happens at the end of the thousand years. But it says he’s shut up and there’s a seal upon him and then it says that he’ll deceive the nations no more until the end of Satan. He’s not done yet. Until the thousand years should be fulfilled and after that he must be loosed a little season. And you think really why?
Why let that guy out? Well, go over to verse 7 where we saw the last mention of the thousand years and that’s why these two mentions, the one in verse 3, and this one go together. 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 or corners literally of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle, the number of them is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breath of the earth and compassed the camp of the saints about the beloved city. And fire came down from heaven out of God and devoured them, I mean immediately. God doesn’t fool around here. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are and have been burning for a thousand years and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever. Praise the Lord and he’s gone. And then we have the new Jerusalem.
Now, why does that happen? Well, folks, when the kingdom of God begins, when Jesus Christ comes back to the earth, there will be people who are saved and lost on the earth coming out of the tribulation period. Those who are lost, who have refused his word and refused the preaching, of course, they will be removed at the beginning of this millennium and cast into the lake of fire and they’ll be gone. But save people will go into the kingdom of God. They haven’t died and they don’t have resurrection bodies.
They go into the kingdom of God in physical bodies and they marry and they reproduce. As a matter of fact, the Jewish people will become as the stars of heaven and as the sand of the seashore. They will become a populous nation and be the foremost nation in the kingdom of God over the whole earth. Imagine that, little Israel.
Today, the smallest of all the nations will become the most prominent of all the nations and largely because of population explosion. And so that happens to people in physical bodies, but they have to be saved. They have to know the Lord is Savior and they don’t do it by birth and they’re not resurrected, so they have to be born again. And the first prophecies, when we, whoever calls on the name of the Lord should be saved, is given in Joel chapter 2 concerning the kingdom of God. When that happens, whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. That’s a prophecy for the kingdom of God.
And yet Peter applied it to now and Paul applied it to now as one of the blessings that comes to us even now in this age. So what happens when people don’t call on the Lord to save them in the kingdom of God? Can you imagine people like that? Can you imagine people who live in the millennium and Jesus is on David’s throne here on the earth? Satan is bound and they see his glory and all of that and then they still don’t receive him as Savior. Well, there’s going to be a whole multitude of them by the end of this thousand years.
And we read of them here in these verses. And so Satan is loose for a little season. He goes out and gathers all of these people together and he makes one last attempt at Jerusalem, now the city of Christ himself, and God does not do anything but take him and all of them and cast them immediately into the lake of fire. So that’s the end of Satan and the end of these people too. So we have a review here secondly of the end of the thousand years both in verse three and then in verse seven and following. Then thirdly and in verse four, there’s a reward then coming in this kingdom of God for saints of various different kinds. I saw thrones and then that sat upon them and judgment was given unto them.
That probably refers to the church reigning. But then and he says, I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus and for the word of God, which had not worshiped the beast, neither his image, neither it received his mark upon their foreheads or in their hands. They lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. So the church who’s sitting on thrones like the 24 elders that we find throughout this book, And then those who have died in the tribulation, you understand that, right? These that have been beheaded because they were faced with a choice, these have missed the rapture and gone into the tribulation period lost. And now the Antichrist comes to power and he has a mark and he says, you must receive this mark on you or you cannot buy or sell.
As a matter of fact, we’ll hunt you down and kill you. And so many people receive that mark. But if you receive that mark, you will not be saved.
If you go back to chapter 16 or 14, I mean, and verse 10 and 11, you’ll see that they are tormented with fire and brimstone and the presence of the angels and the presence of the lamb who at the end of verse 11 worship the beast in this image and whosoever receiveeth the mark of his name. And so there will be those who die with or those who receive the mark. But there will be many who do not receive the mark.
There will be people saved in the tribulation period and they will have to refuse that mark of the beast. They’ll have to run for their lives. There will be hounded. Many of them will die. A few of them will make it through. What about those believers who die? Well, they die saved. And at the end of the tribulation period, there will be another resurrection and the Old Testament saints will be resurrected and the tribulation saints will be resurrected. Body and soul put back together and they will live in the kingdom of God.
And here we have a description of them. So we are there. Of course, we are resurrected, have been to heaven and come back with the Lord. And then these resurrected saints out of the tribulation who were beheaded for their faith. They are there and all of us live and reign with Christ for this thousand years.
So it’s a great thing when you have all of these people living and reigning who are born again. Let me remind you that Jesus told Nicodemus, accept a man be born again, he shall not see the kingdom of God. Accept a man be born of water and the spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of God. And whoever enters into this kingdom either comes from the air as part of the church or comes from the earth as part of the tribulation saints or comes from the grave as part of the Old Testament saints, but no one enters into that kingdom of God without being born again. And so that time is coming and here it’s described in these verses. John Walbert said of these tribulation saints in view of the fact that they are publicly humiliated and suffer as no preceding generation of saints have suffered. So God selects them for public triumph on the occasion of the establishment of his kingdom in the earth.
And he honors them and blesses them. Now you and I will be the bride of Christ. We are the bride of Christ.
We have gone to heaven and been married in the Father’s house and now we return to the married supper and we live and reign with him as the bride of Christ. Isn’t that great? We’re not just Israel. We’re not just a first class people. We’re the royal family.
We’re part of the royalty itself. It’s one thing for a Jew to be a Jew and those Jews that come out of an Old Testament type faith will have everything God ever promised to them. But if a Jewish person today gets saved, he loses that Jewish identity just like you and I lose our Gentile identity and we become part of the body of Christ. It’s much greater for a Jewish person today to be saved and become part of the church, the bride of Christ than it is to remain with his Jewish identity. No, we all have an identity physically, but it’s far greater for those who come to Christ and know him as Savior and become part of the bride of Christ.
Where there’s no Jew or Gentile, where there’s no bond or free, no male or female, all are one in Jesus Christ. So the third thing then is this, the reward of the saints for a thousand years. And then the fourth thing, seen in verse five and part of verse six, is that there’s going to be a resurrection, and I’ve spoken about it already, but notice how this resurrection is described. We do have, right at the end of verse four, this mention of a thousand years, reigning with Christ a thousand years, but the rest of the dead live not again until the thousand years were finished, period of sentence. There’s a resurrection at the beginning, there’s a resurrection at the end. There’s a resurrection of some at the beginning of the millennium, and there’s a resurrection of the rest of the dead at the end of the millennium.
When is that and how does that happen? Remember Daniel 12, 2, many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake. Some do everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
Even Jesus said in Matthew 25, 46, these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal. So there are two resurrections. There’s a first resurrection and the last resurrection, the first and the last.
And John’s referring to them both here. When he says at the end of verse 5, this is the first resurrection, he’s not talking there about the rest that he mentioned a minute ago. He’s talking about all of these saints who are resurrected at this time to go into the kingdom of God. Blessed and holy is he, verse 6, that hath part in the first resurrection.
On such the second death hath no power. They shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years. They can’t reign with him a thousand years unless they’re resurrected beforehand. So there’s a first and a second resurrection. You remember 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul is giving the description of the resurrections, and he says, Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man also came resurrection of the dead.
For as an atom all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order, Christ the first fruits. So the first part of the first resurrection is Jesus Christ. He rose from the dead but it’s been two thousand years ago. But he’s part of the glorious resurrection.
And then he says, Then they that are Christ said is coming. You and I get to be resurrected at the rapture. Now whether we’re alive or we’re dead, corruption will put on incorruption. Mortal will put on immortality. And so whether we’re mortals living here and need to be changed immediately at the rapture, or whether we’re corrupted in the grave and have to put on incorruption, either way, we’re going to be, we’re going to be changed in a moment in the twinkling of an eye. That’s the second part of the first resurrection. And then at the end of that tribulation period, as we’ve seen already, these tribulation saints will be resurrected that and all of the Old Testament saints. And that completes the three parts of the first resurrection. Now all of them, all of us, will be resurrected to live in the kingdom of God and live and rule and reign with him for a thousand years.
What a great thing that’s going to be. But the rest of the dead will live, lived not until the thousand years were finished. And if you want to see what happens to them, you just go down to verse 11 and read from there to the end of the chapter. Because they are resurrected to stand at the white throne judgment of God. Body and soul, reunited, resurrected. And just as you and I will be resurrected so that we can live forever in heaven and wherever else God wants us to go, forever and ever, so the lost people will be resurrected so that they can live forever in the lake of fire. You say, how can, how can somebody live forever in the lake of fire? By being resurrected, by being given an eternal body that can live that way.
It’s a terrible thing, but it will happen. And you see it at the white throne judgment here in verse 11 and following. Then come at the end when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father, when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power, for he must reign till he have put all enemies under his feet, the last enemy to be destroyed is death. So here are the resurrection then of the saved and the lost, both in mention in verse 5 and part of verse 6.
And then the last thing is the reign of saints for a thousand years, right at the end of verse 6, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ and shall reign with him a thousand years. Now you and I as the bride of Christ, we will reign in the married supper as his bride. We will be given places of authority.
We will be given ways to rule in his behalf for a thousand years. The Israelites will be there in their land. They will be resurrected, those Old Testament saints, David, Isaiah, Abraham, all of them. And they will live in the land of Israel that God promised to them. Ezekiel gives us specific lots or boundaries for their particular tribe in this new land of Israel, with Jesus Christ being in the center of it all.
All of that’s described in Ezekiel and other places too. So even Daniel said to Gabriel, tell me more about this. And Gabriel says, go your way Daniel, for you shall stand in your lot at the end of the days. You’ll be there and you’ll be in your lot.
You’ll be where God wants you to be. So everyone has a place in the kingdom of God, living and reigning with him. I don’t, I don’t, I can’t understand too much how those of us with resurrected bodies will be living with a lot of people without resurrected bodies. But Jesus did it for 40 days and 40 nights. So if he met with the disciples and he ate fish with them and he did things with them, we’ll be able to do that too.
But want to be great to live in this world for a thousand years without our sinful flesh, without that old nature that came from Adam, without the temptations of Satan who will be bound, without the demons and the spiritual authorities. What a day that will be. What a great time that will be. I just hope the Lord lets me go fly fishing. You know, surely there will be good fishing somewhere in the kingdom of God. And I’ll have better luck than I’ve had before. So I hope.
Okay. So we, we reign a thousand years. The Old Testament saints, the tribulation saints, the church, and it’s a great thing. Somebody likened the book of Esther to this. Esther was a Jew and Mordecai, her uncle, was a Jew. But she became the wife of the king and she reigned. Though she was Jewish, she reigned as the queen and Mordecai didn’t only reigned as a citizen. So Mordecai, that Jew was a citizen in that kingdom and Esther was the queen in that kingdom. Maybe that’s a fair parallel or picture. I don’t know.
Probably not. So what are we to pray? Jesus said, when you pray, pray like this. But part of that prayer is that thy will, when thy kingdom comes, thy will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We’re supposed to pray for that. We’re supposed to pray that these things will come to pass soon.
And our prayers, I think, affect that kind of thing. We are to seek the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto us in Matthew 6.38. So seek the kingdom of God. Pray for the kingdom of God to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. And you know, in 1 Corinthians 6, there’s a great passage about what we were and what we’re going to be. Now, does that mean if you’ve done one of those things, you never can go to the kingdom of God?
No. It means unless you’ve been saved from that sin, you’re going to be able to go to heaven. And you’re going to be able to go to heaven.
You will be lost like the rest of the world because he says, at the end, such were some of you, but you are washed. You are sanctified. You are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the spirit of our God. So our sins and staying in our sins will take us to Christless eternity, but being washed in the blood of the Lamb will take us to the kingdom of God and the new Jerusalem. What is the test to believe, to call? Even in the kingdom of God, people have to call on the Lord to be saved and they’ll need to do that.
What is the failure? Well, many won’t and they’ll be part of Satan’s last rebellion and they will be cast into the lake of fire where they’ll be for eternity. That is the judgment and it is immediate, the lake of fire for eternity. So it’s a great study and there’s much more. As a matter of fact, the Old Testament is full of these kinds of things, long chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel even, lots of facts given in the minor prophets and all through the Old Testament of this great kingdom that is coming. This is our hope, folks. This is what we look forward to and we ought to with joy and anticipation.
Stand now with me, if you will. Next week, next Sunday night, I want to give a recap and also a summary of why these things about the dispensations are important and I’ll do that next Sunday night. Let’s pray together.
Father, now as we end our study of these seven dispensations, we thank you Father for the promises that we see throughout your grace, your blessings, your protection of your people. We see faithfulness in your people in all the ages. And Father, then in this age in which we live, if we are at all close to your coming, which we believe that we are, oh, make us faithful, make us anticipate that day by day and may we desire to be in that kingdom of God where we will live and reign with you for a thousand years. Bless now as we sing a song and bring these things to our hearts and minds. Convict us, encourage us, show us things that we need to know and we’ll thank you in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So if you have found your place there, let me read. 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.
And after that he must be loosed a little season. And I saw thrones and they that 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 for which had not worshiped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads or in their hands. They lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead live not 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, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ and shall reign with him a thousand years. In verse seven, when the thousand years are expired Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.
And I’ll come back to those verses in just a minute. God created the world, of course, we know, and the time of the Garden of Eden and everything was peaceful. Everything was right. There was no sin.
There was no fall. But Adam and Eve sinned and so we fell. And not only we as human beings, but all of creation did. And so we have been less than what God intended for this earth for all this time. But there’s coming a time when Jesus Christ will return to the earth and remove most of that curse, bind Satan who tempted Adam and Eve and bring the earth and all of the world back up to the place where he intended it to be.
And it will be like that for a thousand years. And if that doesn’t happen, then many of God’s prophecies and God’s purposes for this earth will never be accomplished unless we have that time when Jesus Christ rains for a thousand years. We first have to have the return of Jesus Christ.
We can’t do it ourselves as we will see. Christ will have to do that. He will have to return and he will have to bind Satan.
He will have to bring in the kingdom of God and all that goes with it. When that happens, we will have the seventh dispensation. We are now in the sixth, the age of grace, and we are waiting for that time. The age of grace could have been short because the eminent, the return of Christ is eminent and he could have come back. And 150 AD, 250, 1000 AD, he could have come back at any time. But it’s been 2000 years.
So it’s been a long time. But he will come, and that’s what the book of Revelation teaches us, he will come. When he comes there will be changes, there will be spiritual changes. At least at the very beginning, no lost person will remain upon the earth. As I’ve often said, seven years before that, at the rapture, no saved person will be on the earth. And then when Christ comes back and returns and judges the earth, no lost person will be upon the earth.
Everyone saved, everyone born again, all Israel will be saved. There will be spiritual changes that will be wonderful, and having Satan bound as well. And then there will be political, social changes, because Christ will rule with a rod of iron. He will see to it that righteousness reigns, whereas we almost have the opposite these days.
He’ll see to it that righteousness reigns in the world. And there will be physical changes. The curse will be lifted, the line will lie down with the Lamb. Even in Israel, a plane will be created where the millennial temple and the throne of David will be reconstructed. And Christ will sit there on that throne.
It will be a wonderful time on this earth. If a political candidate could promise all of those things, we’d never believe him. We’d say, it’s impossible. How could all of those things happen? And yet here comes the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, and he will bring all of these things to pass. Now, does the Bible speak about such a time?
Often. In the Old Testament, prophets are full of these kinds of things, but so is the New Testament. In Ephesians 1-10, Paul says, in the dispensation of the fullness of times, he might gather together in one all things in Christ, which are in heaven and on earth, even in him. He calls it the dispensation of the fullness of times. In Acts 3-19, as Peter’s preaching, he says, Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord. Called the times of refreshing. Then he goes on and says, He shall send Jesus Christ, which was preached unto you, whom the heaven must receive until the restitution of all things. In this one passage, it is the time of refreshing.
It’s a restitution of all things. And remember Daniel, who spoke of it so often in Daniel 2.44, said, In the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed. The kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. So the Bible is full of descriptions and passages that speak about this coming kingdom. So to say that it stands forever, to call it a kingdom, we call it a millennium because of this passage, as we will see in Revelation 20, the second coming of Christ, the reign of Christ, and so forth. Well, and the verses that we read, if you and your mind can put together the book of Revelation, kind of like in a timeline, can you do that? Can you see where the church age is in chapters 2 and 3, where the rapture would belong at the beginning of chapter 4, and then the first half of the tribulation up until chapter 11 with the seal judgments and some of the trumpet judgments, and then the second half, the second three and a half years, and then if your eye glances back to chapter 19 in your Bible, you probably see, especially in verse 11, that the return of Jesus Christ to the earth, and he comes out of heaven and comes to the earth. Look at verse 14, the armies which were in heaven followed him, I mean chapter 19, the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, out of his mouth, go with a sharp sword, with it he should smite the nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of iron, and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God. And so he comes out of heaven and we come with him. And then what happens after that?
Well, there’s a kingdom of God, right? A thousand years where he reigns on the earth. And then what happens after that? Well, chapters 21 and 22 speak of the New Jerusalem, where we will live forever after there’s a new heaven and new earth. So even when we put the book together, we find that the mention of these thousand years is exactly in the right place, where John, where the Holy Spirit wanted it to be. Six times in these verses, in seven verses, we have the expression a thousand years. Now that’s important because without these, without this chapter, we wouldn’t know that there would be a millennium, a thousand years. We know there’s going to be a kingdom of God, and the Old Testament saw it as a kingdom that will last forever, and it will.
But this is the first phase of it. This thousand years on this earth, the way the Garden of Eden was intended to be, with Jesus Christ reigning on it, then the kingdom of God truly will go on into eternity because we will live with him in that new Jerusalem forever and ever. So an eternal kingdom, yes. But a millennial kingdom, yes. The first thousand years of that kingdom. We wouldn’t know about that thousand years if it hadn’t been for these verses that give us that. So sometimes it’s called a millennium.
Sometimes those of us who believe in it are called chelists from Kilo, a thousand, C-H-I-A-L. Chelists were called believing in a thousand. Well, since these thousand years are mentioned, there’s a lot of views about these. And there has been for the last 2,000 years. There’s an a-millennial view that rather than believing that there’s going to be an exact thousand years, that we live in it now and it’s kind of spread out longer than a thousand, so we’re not supposed to take it exactly or literally as a thousand years. There’s a post-millennial view, which means that thousand years won’t come until you and I get busy and make the earth into the kingdom of God through social work, political work, and all of the things that we have to do. If we can do that, then we will raise the level of the earth up to where it will be a kingdom of God and Jesus would be pleased to come and dwell here. We’re not doing such a good job if that’s what we’re after. But then the pre-millennial view, which we take, I take, is that Jesus will have to return first. He will have to do this. The earth, the world is getting worse and worse, not better and better.
And he’s going to have to return and bring in this. There are different views also about the book of Revelation. If you’ve heard the word, Preterist, it’s a word that means some people believe everything that the book of Revelation talks about was all accomplished in the first hundred years of church history.
All in those first few hundred years, all of these plagues and judgments and everything that we read happened here. It’s already done. It’s already been finished. Then there’s the historicists. The historicists, it sounds good. What he takes this as, the book of Revelation and these thousand years, means that this has been fulfilled over the two thousand year period. You can go back into history, for example, and you can find certain times when this pope reigned or this king reigned or this kingdom was reigned. That fulfills the things that are mentioned in the book of Revelation. So it’s kind of fulfilled over the last two thousand years, a historicist. But we call ourselves futurists, meaning we read this book of Revelation and these things are future.
They haven’t happened yet. They are in the future. And they can’t happen until Jesus comes back at the rapture and then these things begin to happen.
Some then take the book as a recapitulation. We have a period of judgments when seven seals are judged upon the earth. Then we go back and we look at the same amount of time again and there are seven trumpets. Then we go back and look at the same amount of time again and there are seven bowls. Then we go back and look at a thousand years and then we go back and look at the new Jerusalem and it just keeps recapitulating back over the same territory again. But rather it is far better and far more literal and normal to take this book as it’s written.
It’s this, then this, then this, then this. And it all makes sense, I think, with all of the prophets. Why is this important? It’s not a matter of salvation. There are many people who know the Lord as Savior who are amillennialists or even post-millennialists. That doesn’t mean that a person can’t receive Jesus Christ as Savior. Although I thought it was interesting as I thought about that, that many of the major denominations who no longer teach salvation by grace, starting with the Roman Catholic Church and many of the Protestant denominations, they’re all amillennialists. And I got to thinking, do I know a liberal who’s a premillennialist?
And I don’t. You know, when you take the Bible in a literal fashion and become a premillennialist, you’re probably not, probably not a liberal. Well, it’s a matter of hermeneutics, then. How do we take the Bible? How do we read it? Do we read it plainly? Do we read it for what it is?
Or are we always trying to spiritualize, allegorize, find typologies, and apply it to something that’s kind of crazy, for example? For example, one historicist takes Charlemagne’s kingdom that began in 800 AD as the beginning of the thousand years. And so I’m scratching my head thinking, then it’s over with, right? And if it’s over with, why are we still here?
You know? Or why isn’t there a new Jerusalem that we’re living in? But there’s always been those kinds of things. So we take it literally. We take it for what it is. And that’s what we’re going to look at in these lessons. Now, on the back of your bulletin, you have six points, though, again, there are, excuse me, you have five, and there are six mentions of the thousand years, but two of them refer to the same thing.
And that’s why I grouped them together like this. So, here is what we learn as we read and we come chronologically to the time that Jesus Christ returns to the earth in chapter 19 and we find even the beast and the false prophet in verse 1920 are taken and cast into the lake of fire and immediately after that verse 1 and 2 says, I saw an angel come down from heaven having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand, he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent and the devil and Satan and bound him a thousand years. So, the first thing we learn about the kingdom of God is the removal of satanic opposition for a thousand years. Well, no wonder we have some peace on the earth when Satan is removed. We’ve been saying, and I understand from Gordon’s Sunday School class, to mine, to my sermon this morning, we’re all in battles with Satan and his foes, are we not? That’s what’s going on in this world. Imagine all of that removed. Imagine Satan and all of his demons removed from their activity from the earth for a thousand years.
That’ll be a great time. Is it literal? I think so.
I think it’s literal. Is there an angel, as the one mentioned in verse 1, who could actually lay hold on Satan and do this to him? Well, there’s a lot of angels and they have a lot of power and God created them and I’m sure he created one just for this purpose and I want to meet him someday and I’m going to. I’m going to shake his hand, squeeze it real hard. He can lay hold on the dragon. Is there a literal chain?
Why not? Why can’t Satan be bound with a literal chain? Well, he’s a spirit.
He’s an angel. Well, there are people in hell today and it’s just their spirits and not their body, but they’re suffering in real torment. And so if God can do that kind of thing, he can do this kind of thing and he can bind Satan for a thousand years and I think the thousand years are also literal as well. So with this binding of Satan, we have peace on the earth.
Some people believe that this happens now. If you’re an Amillennialist, you’re somehow trying to find how Satan is bound in this age in which we live and I’m having a hard time understanding that at all. Now there are some of our charismatic friends who believe you can pray and bind Satan through a Christian prayer and usually they refer back to this verse, but I don’t see it referring to our prayer today that we can bind Satan in such a way. So I have to take it for what it is and that is there’s coming a time not now but in the future when he will be bound and it will be for this thousand years which has to be taken literally also.
So do we take the thousand years here in these verses literally? Folks, that is really the key here. That is the key to your premillennialism. That’s the key to the opening of the book of Revelation. Do we take things like this, especially this mention of a thousand years? Because if we take it literally, then it hasn’t happened yet and it’s going to happen and Satan will be bound and Christ will rule and it will be for a thousand years and you’ve got a millennium whether you like it or not. And the only way you can get around that in the Scripture is to not take this literally.
Somehow it just means a long period of time or an indefinite time or something like that. But you know if we went back to chapter 7 we would read of 144,000 Jews who will be marked out by God for protection. How many out of each tribe?
12,000 out of each of the 12 tribes, 144,000. Is that literal? Is that mention of the thousand years literal? It is.
And we have no problem with that. Those thousands being literal, why do we get here and this one we take in some other way? And by the way, the thousand years mentioned as we see here in this outline in five different ways, five different things that it affects. And so how do you take it spiritual each time?
How would you apply it each time? To me it has to be literal in order to apply to all five of these things. Well now we’re not told the whole story in verses one and two. He’s bound for a thousand years. and the beginning of verse 3, cast him into a bottom of spit and shut him up and put a seal upon him that he should not deceive the nations anymore until the thousand years are finished.
So, number the second point of my outline, number three, there’s a review then of what happens at the end of the thousand years. But it says he’s shut up and there’s a seal upon him and then it says that he’ll deceive the nations no more until the end of Satan. He’s not done yet. Until the thousand years should be fulfilled and after that he must be loosed a little season. And you think really why?
Why let that guy out? Well, go over to verse 7 where we saw the last mention of the thousand years and that’s why these two mentions, the one in verse 3, and this one go together. 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 or corners literally of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle, the number of them is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breath of the earth and compassed the camp of the saints about the beloved city. And fire came down from heaven out of God and devoured them, I mean immediately. God doesn’t fool around here. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are and have been burning for a thousand years and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever. Praise the Lord and he’s gone. And then we have the new Jerusalem.
Now, why does that happen? Well, folks, when the kingdom of God begins, when Jesus Christ comes back to the earth, there will be people who are saved and lost on the earth coming out of the tribulation period. Those who are lost, who have refused his word and refused the preaching, of course, they will be removed at the beginning of this millennium and cast into the lake of fire and they’ll be gone. But save people will go into the kingdom of God. They haven’t died and they don’t have resurrection bodies.
They go into the kingdom of God in physical bodies and they marry and they reproduce. As a matter of fact, the Jewish people will become as the stars of heaven and as the sand of the seashore. They will become a populous nation and be the foremost nation in the kingdom of God over the whole earth. Imagine that, little Israel.
Today, the smallest of all the nations will become the most prominent of all the nations and largely because of population explosion. And so that happens to people in physical bodies, but they have to be saved. They have to know the Lord is Savior and they don’t do it by birth and they’re not resurrected, so they have to be born again. And the first prophecies, when we, whoever calls on the name of the Lord should be saved, is given in Joel chapter 2 concerning the kingdom of God. When that happens, whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. That’s a prophecy for the kingdom of God.
And yet Peter applied it to now and Paul applied it to now as one of the blessings that comes to us even now in this age. So what happens when people don’t call on the Lord to save them in the kingdom of God? Can you imagine people like that? Can you imagine people who live in the millennium and Jesus is on David’s throne here on the earth? Satan is bound and they see his glory and all of that and then they still don’t receive him as Savior. Well, there’s going to be a whole multitude of them by the end of this thousand years.
And we read of them here in these verses. And so Satan is loose for a little season. He goes out and gathers all of these people together and he makes one last attempt at Jerusalem, now the city of Christ himself, and God does not do anything but take him and all of them and cast them immediately into the lake of fire. So that’s the end of Satan and the end of these people too. So we have a review here secondly of the end of the thousand years both in verse three and then in verse seven and following. Then thirdly and in verse four, there’s a reward then coming in this kingdom of God for saints of various different kinds. I saw thrones and then that sat upon them and judgment was given unto them.
That probably refers to the church reigning. But then and he says, I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus and for the word of God, which had not worshiped the beast, neither his image, neither it received his mark upon their foreheads or in their hands. They lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. So the church who’s sitting on thrones like the 24 elders that we find throughout this book, And then those who have died in the tribulation, you understand that, right? These that have been beheaded because they were faced with a choice, these have missed the rapture and gone into the tribulation period lost. And now the Antichrist comes to power and he has a mark and he says, you must receive this mark on you or you cannot buy or sell.
As a matter of fact, we’ll hunt you down and kill you. And so many people receive that mark. But if you receive that mark, you will not be saved.
If you go back to chapter 16 or 14, I mean, and verse 10 and 11, you’ll see that they are tormented with fire and brimstone and the presence of the angels and the presence of the lamb who at the end of verse 11 worship the beast in this image and whosoever receiveeth the mark of his name. And so there will be those who die with or those who receive the mark. But there will be many who do not receive the mark.
There will be people saved in the tribulation period and they will have to refuse that mark of the beast. They’ll have to run for their lives. There will be hounded. Many of them will die. A few of them will make it through. What about those believers who die? Well, they die saved. And at the end of the tribulation period, there will be another resurrection and the Old Testament saints will be resurrected and the tribulation saints will be resurrected. Body and soul put back together and they will live in the kingdom of God.
And here we have a description of them. So we are there. Of course, we are resurrected, have been to heaven and come back with the Lord. And then these resurrected saints out of the tribulation who were beheaded for their faith. They are there and all of us live and reign with Christ for this thousand years.
So it’s a great thing when you have all of these people living and reigning who are born again. Let me remind you that Jesus told Nicodemus, accept a man be born again, he shall not see the kingdom of God. Accept a man be born of water and the spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of God. And whoever enters into this kingdom either comes from the air as part of the church or comes from the earth as part of the tribulation saints or comes from the grave as part of the Old Testament saints, but no one enters into that kingdom of God without being born again. And so that time is coming and here it’s described in these verses. John Walbert said of these tribulation saints in view of the fact that they are publicly humiliated and suffer as no preceding generation of saints have suffered. So God selects them for public triumph on the occasion of the establishment of his kingdom in the earth.
And he honors them and blesses them. Now you and I will be the bride of Christ. We are the bride of Christ.
We have gone to heaven and been married in the Father’s house and now we return to the married supper and we live and reign with him as the bride of Christ. Isn’t that great? We’re not just Israel. We’re not just a first class people. We’re the royal family.
We’re part of the royalty itself. It’s one thing for a Jew to be a Jew and those Jews that come out of an Old Testament type faith will have everything God ever promised to them. But if a Jewish person today gets saved, he loses that Jewish identity just like you and I lose our Gentile identity and we become part of the body of Christ. It’s much greater for a Jewish person today to be saved and become part of the church, the bride of Christ than it is to remain with his Jewish identity. No, we all have an identity physically, but it’s far greater for those who come to Christ and know him as Savior and become part of the bride of Christ.
Where there’s no Jew or Gentile, where there’s no bond or free, no male or female, all are one in Jesus Christ. So the third thing then is this, the reward of the saints for a thousand years. And then the fourth thing, seen in verse five and part of verse six, is that there’s going to be a resurrection, and I’ve spoken about it already, but notice how this resurrection is described. We do have, right at the end of verse four, this mention of a thousand years, reigning with Christ a thousand years, but the rest of the dead live not again until the thousand years were finished, period of sentence. There’s a resurrection at the beginning, there’s a resurrection at the end. There’s a resurrection of some at the beginning of the millennium, and there’s a resurrection of the rest of the dead at the end of the millennium.
When is that and how does that happen? Remember Daniel 12, 2, many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake. Some do everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
Even Jesus said in Matthew 25, 46, these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal. So there are two resurrections. There’s a first resurrection and the last resurrection, the first and the last.
And John’s referring to them both here. When he says at the end of verse 5, this is the first resurrection, he’s not talking there about the rest that he mentioned a minute ago. He’s talking about all of these saints who are resurrected at this time to go into the kingdom of God. Blessed and holy is he, verse 6, that hath part in the first resurrection.
On such the second death hath no power. They shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years. They can’t reign with him a thousand years unless they’re resurrected beforehand. So there’s a first and a second resurrection. You remember 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul is giving the description of the resurrections, and he says, Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man also came resurrection of the dead.
For as an atom all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order, Christ the first fruits. So the first part of the first resurrection is Jesus Christ. He rose from the dead but it’s been two thousand years ago. But he’s part of the glorious resurrection.
And then he says, Then they that are Christ said is coming. You and I get to be resurrected at the rapture. Now whether we’re alive or we’re dead, corruption will put on incorruption. Mortal will put on immortality. And so whether we’re mortals living here and need to be changed immediately at the rapture, or whether we’re corrupted in the grave and have to put on incorruption, either way, we’re going to be, we’re going to be changed in a moment in the twinkling of an eye. That’s the second part of the first resurrection. And then at the end of that tribulation period, as we’ve seen already, these tribulation saints will be resurrected that and all of the Old Testament saints. And that completes the three parts of the first resurrection. Now all of them, all of us, will be resurrected to live in the kingdom of God and live and rule and reign with him for a thousand years.
What a great thing that’s going to be. But the rest of the dead will live, lived not until the thousand years were finished. And if you want to see what happens to them, you just go down to verse 11 and read from there to the end of the chapter. Because they are resurrected to stand at the white throne judgment of God. Body and soul, reunited, resurrected. And just as you and I will be resurrected so that we can live forever in heaven and wherever else God wants us to go, forever and ever, so the lost people will be resurrected so that they can live forever in the lake of fire. You say, how can, how can somebody live forever in the lake of fire? By being resurrected, by being given an eternal body that can live that way.
It’s a terrible thing, but it will happen. And you see it at the white throne judgment here in verse 11 and following. Then come at the end when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father, when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power, for he must reign till he have put all enemies under his feet, the last enemy to be destroyed is death. So here are the resurrection then of the saved and the lost, both in mention in verse 5 and part of verse 6.
And then the last thing is the reign of saints for a thousand years, right at the end of verse 6, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ and shall reign with him a thousand years. Now you and I as the bride of Christ, we will reign in the married supper as his bride. We will be given places of authority.
We will be given ways to rule in his behalf for a thousand years. The Israelites will be there in their land. They will be resurrected, those Old Testament saints, David, Isaiah, Abraham, all of them. And they will live in the land of Israel that God promised to them. Ezekiel gives us specific lots or boundaries for their particular tribe in this new land of Israel, with Jesus Christ being in the center of it all.
All of that’s described in Ezekiel and other places too. So even Daniel said to Gabriel, tell me more about this. And Gabriel says, go your way Daniel, for you shall stand in your lot at the end of the days. You’ll be there and you’ll be in your lot.
You’ll be where God wants you to be. So everyone has a place in the kingdom of God, living and reigning with him. I don’t, I don’t, I can’t understand too much how those of us with resurrected bodies will be living with a lot of people without resurrected bodies. But Jesus did it for 40 days and 40 nights. So if he met with the disciples and he ate fish with them and he did things with them, we’ll be able to do that too.
But want to be great to live in this world for a thousand years without our sinful flesh, without that old nature that came from Adam, without the temptations of Satan who will be bound, without the demons and the spiritual authorities. What a day that will be. What a great time that will be. I just hope the Lord lets me go fly fishing. You know, surely there will be good fishing somewhere in the kingdom of God. And I’ll have better luck than I’ve had before. So I hope.
Okay. So we, we reign a thousand years. The Old Testament saints, the tribulation saints, the church, and it’s a great thing. Somebody likened the book of Esther to this. Esther was a Jew and Mordecai, her uncle, was a Jew. But she became the wife of the king and she reigned. Though she was Jewish, she reigned as the queen and Mordecai didn’t only reigned as a citizen. So Mordecai, that Jew was a citizen in that kingdom and Esther was the queen in that kingdom. Maybe that’s a fair parallel or picture. I don’t know.
Probably not. So what are we to pray? Jesus said, when you pray, pray like this. But part of that prayer is that thy will, when thy kingdom comes, thy will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We’re supposed to pray for that. We’re supposed to pray that these things will come to pass soon.
And our prayers, I think, affect that kind of thing. We are to seek the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto us in Matthew 6.38. So seek the kingdom of God. Pray for the kingdom of God to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. And you know, in 1 Corinthians 6, there’s a great passage about what we were and what we’re going to be. Now, does that mean if you’ve done one of those things, you never can go to the kingdom of God?
No. It means unless you’ve been saved from that sin, you’re going to be able to go to heaven. And you’re going to be able to go to heaven.
You will be lost like the rest of the world because he says, at the end, such were some of you, but you are washed. You are sanctified. You are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the spirit of our God. So our sins and staying in our sins will take us to Christless eternity, but being washed in the blood of the Lamb will take us to the kingdom of God and the new Jerusalem. What is the test to believe, to call? Even in the kingdom of God, people have to call on the Lord to be saved and they’ll need to do that.
What is the failure? Well, many won’t and they’ll be part of Satan’s last rebellion and they will be cast into the lake of fire where they’ll be for eternity. That is the judgment and it is immediate, the lake of fire for eternity. So it’s a great study and there’s much more. As a matter of fact, the Old Testament is full of these kinds of things, long chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel even, lots of facts given in the minor prophets and all through the Old Testament of this great kingdom that is coming. This is our hope, folks. This is what we look forward to and we ought to with joy and anticipation.
Stand now with me, if you will. Next week, next Sunday night, I want to give a recap and also a summary of why these things about the dispensations are important and I’ll do that next Sunday night. Let’s pray together.
Father, now as we end our study of these seven dispensations, we thank you Father for the promises that we see throughout your grace, your blessings, your protection of your people. We see faithfulness in your people in all the ages. And Father, then in this age in which we live, if we are at all close to your coming, which we believe that we are, oh, make us faithful, make us anticipate that day by day and may we desire to be in that kingdom of God where we will live and reign with you for a thousand years. Bless now as we sing a song and bring these things to our hearts and minds. Convict us, encourage us, show us things that we need to know and we’ll thank you in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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