Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| What is Written in the Revelation of John Regarding the Two Resurrections, and the Thousand Years, and What May Reasonably Be Held on These Points.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter 7.—What is Written in the
Revelation of John Regarding the Two Resurrections, and the
Thousand Years, and What May Reasonably Be Held on These
Points.
The evangelist John has spoken of
these two resurrections in the book which is called the Apocalypse,
but in such a way that some Christians do not understand the first
of the two, and so construe the passage into ridiculous fancies.
For the Apostle John says in the foresaid book, “And I saw an
angel come down from heaven. . . . 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.”1339
Those who, on the strength of
this passage, have suspected that the first resurrection is future
and bodily, have been moved, among other things, specially by the
number of a thousand years, as if it were a fit thing that the
saints should thus enjoy a kind of Sabbath-rest during that period,
a holy leisure after the labors of the six thousand years since man
was created, and was on account of his great sin dismissed from the
blessedness of paradise into the woes of this mortal life, so that
thus, as it is written, “One day is with the Lord as a thousand
years, and a thousand years as one day,”1340
there should follow on the
completion of six thousand years, as of six days, a kind of
seventh-day Sabbath in the succeeding thousand years; and that it
is for this purpose the saints rise, viz., to celebrate this
Sabbath. And this opinion would not be objectionable, if it were
believed that the joys of the saints in that Sabbath shall be
spiritual, and consequent on the presence of God; for I myself,
too, once held this opinion.1341
But, as they assert that those
who then rise again shall enjoy the leisure of immoderate carnal
banquets, furnished with an amount of meat and drink such as not
only to shock the feeling of the temperate, but even to surpass the
measure of credulity itself, such assertions can be believed only
by the carnal. They who do believe them are called by the
spiritual Chiliasts, which we may literally reproduce by the name
Millenarians.1342
It were
a tedious process to refute these opinions point by point: we
prefer proceeding to show how that passage of Scripture should be
understood.1343
| 1343 [Augustin, who had formerly
himself entertained chiliastic hopes, revolutionized the prevailing
ante-Nicene view of the Apocalyptic millennium by understanding it
of the present reign of Christ in the Church. See Schaff,
Church History, vol. ii. 619.—P.S.] |
The Lord Jesus Christ Himself says,
“No man can enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his
goods, except he first bind the strong man”1344
—meaning by the strong man the
devil, because he had power to take captive the human race; and
meaning by his goods which he was to take, those who had been held
by the devil in divers sins and iniquities, but were to become
believers in Himself. It was then for the binding of this strong
one that the apostle saw in the Apocalypse “an angel coming down
from heaven, having the key of the abyss, and a chain in his
hand. And he laid hold,” he says, “on the dragon, that old
serpent, which is called the devil and Satan, and bound him a
thousand years,”—that is,
bridled and restrained his
power so that he could not seduce and gain possession of those who
were to be freed. Now the thousand years may be understood in two
ways, so far as occurs to me: either because these things happen
in the sixth thousand of years or sixth millennium (the latter part
of which is now passing), as if during the sixth day, which is to
be followed by a Sabbath which has no evening, the endless rest of
the saints, so that, speaking of a part under the name of the
whole, he calls the last part of the millennium—the part, that
is, which had yet to expire before the end of the world—a
thousand years; or he used the thousand years as an equivalent for
the whole duration of this world, employing the number of
perfection to mark the fullness of time. For a thousand is the
cube of ten. For ten times ten makes a hundred, that is; the
square on a plane superficies. But to give this superficies
height, and make it a cube, the hundred is again multiplied by ten,
which gives a thousand. Besides, if a hundred is sometimes used
for totality, as when the Lord said by way of promise to him that
left all and followed Him “He shall receive in this world an
hundredfold;”1345
of which
the apostle gives, as it were, an explanation when he says, “As
having nothing, yet possessing all things,”1346
—for even of old it had been
said, The whole world is the wealth of a believer,—with how much
greater reason is a thousand put for totality since it is the cube,
while the other is only the square? And for the same reason we
cannot better interpret the words of the psalm, “He hath been
mindful of His covenant for ever, the word which He commanded to a
thousand generations,”1347
than by understanding it to mean
“to all generations.”
“And he cast him into the
abyss,”—i.e., cast the devil into the abyss. By the
abyss is meant the countless multitude of the wicked whose
hearts are unfathomably deep in malignity against the Church of
God; not that the devil was not there before, but he is said to be
cast in thither, because, when prevented from harming believers, he
takes more complete possession of the ungodly. For that man is
more abundantly possessed by the devil who is not only alienated
from God, but also gratuitously hates those who serve God. “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.”
“Shut him up,”—i.e., prohibited him from going out,
from doing what was forbidden. And the addition of “set a seal
upon him” seems to me to mean that it was designed to keep it a
secret who belonged to the devil’s party and who did not. For
in this world this is a secret, for we cannot tell whether even the
man who seems to stand shall fall, or whether he who seems to lie
shall rise again. But by the chain and prison-house of this
interdict the devil is prohibited and restrained from seducing
those nations which belong to Christ, but which he formerly seduced
or held in subjection. For before the foundation of the world God
chose to rescue these from the power of darkness, and to translate
them into the kingdom of the Son of His love, as the apostle
says.1348
For what
Christian is not aware that he seduces nations even now, and draws
them with himself to eternal punishment, but not those predestined
to eternal life? And let no one be dismayed by the circumstance
that the devil often seduces even those who have been regenerated
in Christ, and begun to walk in God’s way. For “the Lord
knoweth them that are His,”1349
and of these the devil seduces
none to eternal damnation. For it is as God, from whom nothing is
hid even of things future, that the Lord knows them; not as a man,
who sees a man at the present time (if he can be said to see one
whose heart he does not see), but does not see even himself so far
as to be able to know what kind of person he is to be. The devil,
then, is bound and shut up in the abyss that he may not seduce the
nations from which the Church is gathered, and which he formerly
seduced before the Church existed. For it is not said “that he
should not seduce any man,” but “that he should not seduce the
nations”—meaning, no doubt, those among which the Church
exists—“till the thousand years should be
fulfilled,”—i.e., either what remains of the sixth day
which consists of a thousand years, or all the years which are to
elapse till the end of the world.
The words, “that he should not
seduce the nations till the thousand years should be fulfilled,”
are not to be understood as indicating that afterwards he is to
seduce only those nations from which the predestined Church is
composed, and from seducing whom he is restrained by that chain and
imprisonment; but they are used in conformity with that usage
frequently employed in Scripture and exemplified in the psalm,
“So our eyes wait upon the Lord our God, until He have mercy upon
us,”1350
—not as
if the eyes of His servants would no longer wait upon the Lord
their God when He had mercy upon them. Or the order
of the words
is unquestionably this, “And he shut him up and set a seal upon
him, till the thousand years should be fulfilled;” and the
interposed clause, “that he should seduce the nations no more,”
is not to be understood in the connection in which it stands, but
separately, and as if added afterwards, so that the whole sentence
might be read, “And He shut him up and set a seal upon him till
the thousand years should be fulfilled, that he should seduce the
nations no more,”—i.e., he is shut up till the thousand
years be fulfilled, on this account, that he may no more deceive
the nations.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
