The 1,000 Year Millennium? – Greg Albrecht

Please follow and like us:
fb-share-icon
Tweet

Question:

Your perspective on the “1000 year reign” would be appreciated.  

Response:

In chapter 11 of my book “Revelation Revolution” I devote several pages to this topic.  

In summary to what I have written there, along with some additional perspectives, here are some general thoughts about the “millennium” –

  1. The majority of Christians who are now alive do not subscribe to a literal period of time – 1,000 years as we know time – at the “end” of an age of human history before or ushering in the eternity of the Kingdom of God.  For that matter, most Christians who ever lived did not embrace the idea of a literal time period of 1.000 years.
  2. Why not?  The term “millennium” is not a precise term used in the Bible – it has been substituted for the reference to 1,000 years.  The only passage in the Bible that can be taken as a literal 1,000 years for Jesus’ reign with the saints on earth is found in Revelation 20.
  3. Many have made a huge mistake of biblical interpretation attempting to turn this symbolic use of 1,000 years into a literal, blueprint like literal number of years.  Why is it a huge mistake?
  4. The book of Revelation is a book written in a symbolic, non-literal literary style or genre.  The book is filled with numbers that are not intended literally but symbolically, of colors, of known beasts and unknown beasts… in particular numbers that are used figuratively, like 3 ½, 7, 12, 144,000, 666 – no responsible interpretation of this numbers can arrive at a literal period of time as we humans determine time (and of course, eternity, outside of time and space as we humanly experience our world) is yet another frequent topic addressed in the book of Revelation.
  5. So to boil down all the meaning and symbolism to a literal meaning of a time period is irresponsible, unfaithful to the genre of literature employed by the Lamb of God who gave the Revelation to John.  This reference of 1.000 years is better understood as a long, long time, far beyond any time period that any human has or will experience on earth.  It is more like poetry, in that the beauty and meaning is far beyond any woodenly literal interpretation.  If I tell my wife her eyes sparkle like diamonds, she will fail to appreciate my emotional feeling if she attempts to find literal diamonds embedded in her eyes.  When we read, in the book of Psalms, (which, thankfully, far more readers of the Bible read as poetic literature and thus symbolic than those who attempt to literalize the book of Revelation) that God owns the cattle on a “thousand hills (Ps. 50:10) most people do not engage in a wild snipe hunt looking for the precise location of these 1.000 hills – they know a non-literal meaning, which soars far beyond any literal meaning, is intended.  We do now, and certainly those who originally read the book of Psalms did as well.
  6. Similarly, when the original readers of the book of Revelation understood the literary genre and thus did not concoct literal interpretations of the many symbols in the book – sadly, due to an interpretative method of Bible study called dispensationalism, many today fall for fantastic tales of the “near future” – hyperbolically pretending to read news headlines of our day into the Bible, most specifically the book of Revelation (or the other way around, if you like.
  7. This methodology of “end times” teaching is an addiction, a prediction addiction.  People continue to believe the same old bankrupt message and its predictions of dates and times and places even though ALL of the predictions have failed.  ALL.  Something therefore is dreadfully wrong with dispensationalism, a methodology of understanding all of the Bible, particularly the book of Revelation, first popularized by Charles Darby (1800-1882) in the 1830s in the UK, predicting the Second Coming of Jesus in the 1840s, but when it didn’t happen the movement only seemed to mushroom in popularity, making its way across the “pond” to North America by the late 1800s.
  8. One of the features of dispensationalism is the claim that God gave humans 6,000 years on this earth before Jesus is to come, and reign on the earth for a “seventh day” (all of this linked to their interpretation of a literal seven days of creation).  Among the obvious drawbacks is, that no matter how many times the various dates of creation have been “set” and re-set, 6000 years has now long passed.  And lo, it appears, no Second Coming – but there are those who still believe in this methodology.
  9. Lifting one reference in the 20th chapter of Revelation out of its literary context is a huge error.  Beyond that, attempting to overwhelmingly simplify what many biblical scholars consider, even when it is considered within its literary context, the most intriguing and “difficult” to comprehend chapter perhaps in all of the Bible – that is to say, Revelation 20, and turn it into a “proof” for a methodology – “shoe-horning” that methodology into the Bible is a massive distortion – Scrip-Torture – if you will.   

I have much more to say – in addition to my book mentioned above, we have several free downloadable resources on our homepage (see “free resources”) – under the  alphabetized offerings you will find “Prophecy” and  several articles there which may be of further interest.

Thanks for allowing PTM to be of service.

We hope that our articles and resources bring comfort, hope, encouragement, and healing to our readers. If you’re experiencing that, please subscribe freely, share freely, and, if you’re able, please consider donating freely toward paying it forward by clicking the blue giving at the top of your screen.