CHAPTER XIV
DIFFICULTIES IN THE THOUSAND YEARS
[Editor's note: Steele wrote
against Premillennialism as taught by the Plymouth Brethren. We include
chapter fourteen of his work here because of his comments that there are two
millennia in Revelation twenty (No. 5, below). Steele's book may be visited on-line at
http://www.gospeltruth.net/Antinomianism/antinom_toc.htm].
We object to the millenarian scheme,
because it is grounded chiefly on those portions of the Bible which are
symbolic, and enigmatic, and difficult to be understood. The personal reign of
Christ a thousand years is not found in the Gospels, nor in the Acts of the
Apostles, nor in the Epistles of Paul, Peter, James or John, but only in the
Apocalypse, which is the darkest book in the New Testament. Its striking
symbols and gorgeous imagery impress the imagination and awaken the feelings.
The visitor in London will find in one library a thousand commentaries on this
book, all professing to unfold its mysteries, all differing, so that only one
of them can be true. These writers have tried to interpret the apocalyptic
numbers, and they have signally failed. From Bengel's date of the binding of
Satan in 1836 down to the present time, the years fixed for the coming of
Christ have passed away, and the expositors who have survived their
disappointment have courageously tried again, by shifting their ground into
the safer future. There are three great schools of interpreters of the
Revelation: (1) The Preterists, or those who teach that the whole, or by far
the greater part, has been fulfilled. Some of the most eminent German
expositors, as Ewald, De Wette, Lucke, and Dusterdieck, belong to this school;
also Dr. Davidson in England, and Moses Stuart in America. (2) The Historicals,
who hold that the Revelation embraces the whole history of the Church to the
end of the world. (3) The Futurists, who insist that this book, after the
third chapter, relates entirely to future events. Some include the first three
chapters, and assert that they refer to the future also.
This is the grand outline of opinions
held by men equally learned and honest; yet on a book whose interpretation is
in so great dispute, the doctrine of a thousand years' personal reign of
Christ on the earth before the last judgment is grounded by those who would
interpret the plain and the literal teachings respecting the last things by
the symbolic and typical, thus inverting an acknowledged canon of
interpretation. The twentieth chapter of the Revelation is the basis of
pre-millenarianism. Let us now examine this chapter, and see what is not
proved by its testimony.
1. There is no mention of the second
advent of Christ before the thousand years. The chapter opens with the vision
of an angel descending from heaven with a chain in his hand. This angel can
never be proved to be Christ. Says Alford: "Angelos, in this book, is an
angel; never our Lord." Thus far in the Apocalypse there is not the slightest
intimation that He has made His second advent in visible term. In chapter xix.
11-21, He wars against the beast, and the kings of the earth and their armies;
but the assumption that this is a literal battle fought on the earth by Jesus
in person, riding on a white horse, with a sharp sword going out of His mouth,
is a literalism which cannot be endured, besides being a begging of the very
question in dispute. John saw the things in the opened heaven, and he saw "the
armies which were in heaven." The Scriptures are unanimous in making heaven
the fixed abode of Christ, until He shall come to judge mankind at the last
day.
2. John saw only the souls of the
martyrs. He makes no mention of their bodies. There is a grave doubt whether a
bodily resurrection is here intended; but we are inclined to the literal
resurrection of these martyrs. In John v. 25, we have a resurrection of souls,
followed in verse 28 by a bodily resurrection. This, in the opinion of many,
explains the first and the second resurrections in this chapter. The passage
is obscure, admitting of different interpretations.
3. There is here no proof of the
resurrection of all the righteous dead, but only of the beheaded martyrs; so
that allowing the literal resurrection of these does not prove that all the
saints rise at this time. Every man is to rise in his own order. Some arose at
the Resurrection of Christ, and doubtless were His convoy to heaven. It may be
that a special honor and blessedness await the beheaded martyrs in the fact of
their resurrection and translation to heaven before the rest of the dead
saints: "for one star differeth from another star in glory." This does not
preclude these from standing with Enoch and Elijah, in holy boldness, before
the judgment seat of Christ in the last day. This may explain Paul's aim at a
martyr's death and the resurrection of the beheaded (Phil. iii. 10, 11). "On
such the second death hath no power." The dying of these martyrs, in a manner
so heroic, utterly vanquished the mighty enemy. An early restoration from the
dominion of death, suffered prematurely for Christ, is an eminently
appropriate reward: "Holy and blessed is he that hath part in the first
resurrection."
4. There is in this chapter a total
absence of proof that these raised martyrs reigned with Christ on the earth.
The visions thus far have been located in heaven. Consistency with the whole
context requires that they should reign with Christ in heaven, and not that
Christ should reign with them on earth. Bengel, Wesley, Moses Stuart, and many
others, say, "in heaven and not on the earth."
5. There is no evidence here that a
single millennium is spoken of. The best scholars, and among them Bengel,
Wesley, and Dr. Owen, assert that there are two distinct periods of a thousand
years spoken of in verses 1-7. The Greek article sustains this view. The first
period extends through the repression of Satan which, Bengel says, indicates
the great prosperity of the Church. The second is the reign of martyrs. Both
of these periods are before the second coming of Christ. Thus Bengel and
Wesley, instead of being Pre-millenarians, were, in fact, what most modern
Methodists are, post-millenarians. Bengel styles those who confound these two
distinct millennial periods, "pseudo-Chiliasts." The Prophetic Conference thus
falls under Bengel's censure as pseudos. He says: "Whilst Satan is loosed from
his imprisonment of a thousand years, the martyrs live and reign, not on the
earth, but with Christ; then the coming of Christ in glory at length takes
place at the last day; then, next, there is the new heaven, the new earth, and
the new Jerusalem." Thus the coming of Christ is two thousand years plus a
little season after the binding of Satan. A harmless sort of Chiliasm is this.
Says Bengel: "The confounding of the two millennial periods has long ago
produced many errors, and has made the name of Chiliasm hateful and
suspected."
6. It is a very important point for the
millenarian to prove, that the judgment of the dead before the great white
Throne is that of the wicked dead only. But this vital point is not proven by
this chapter. In fact, the bringing forth of the Book of Life and the casting
into the lake of fire of those whose names aren't written therein, imply that
some were found inscribed. Dr. Brooks' declaration that this Book of Life is a
blank book, is a baseless assumption. This is not proved by the words, the
rest of the dead lived not," etc. Says so eminent a Greek scholar as Dr. Owen:
"Yet as the words here stand, we cannot, without, great violence, make 'the
rest' (in Greek) embrace any other than the class of the pious dead, from
which the martyr saints have been previously taken to participate in the first
resurrection." We quote Dr. Owen, not to endorse him, but to show the
difficulty of proving that this is a judgment of the wicked dead alone.
We believe that it is the general
judgment of the race described in Matt. xxv. 31-46, and that "the rest of the
dead" include all the human dead, both righteous and wicked, except the martyr
saints, and that the good and the bad will be raised in the general
resurrection and sentenced in the general judgment.
7. We look in vain, in this account of
the millennium, or millenniums, for any reference to the Jews as being
gathered to Jerusalem. The Revelation strangely omits to associate them with
either of these chiliads. In chapter seven, the angels seal exactly twelve
thousand of each of the twelve tribes, but there is no hint of the restoration
of the Hebrew nation to their own land. After the day of general doom, the
last great day, there descends a new Jerusalem into the new earth which has no
more sea. Even then "the tabernacle of God is with men," not with the Jews.
Considering the fact that the old
Testament prophecies are constantly quoted by the millenarians in proof of the
personal reign of Christ on earth, with the Jews as His most loyal supporters,
it is to us an insuperable objection to the doctrine, that the book of
Revelation omits to place the restored Hebrew nation in any such relation to
Christ, either in the old or the new Jerusalem.
If there is to be a personal reign of
Christ on the earth, during a thousand years, to subdue the nations, as a
substitute for the conquest now being made by the Holy Spirit, it is
remarkable that these seven essential facts should be absent from the only
account in the whole Bible where the millennial period is spoken of.
These important items are culled from
dark prophecies, often violently wrenched from the context, and are fitted
together on the pedestal of this chapter of a book which has been an
inexplicable enigma to the scholarship of all the Christian ages. This style
of interpretation may be satisfactory and convincing to those who accept
imagery for doctrine, symbol for substance, and rhetoric for logic; but there
are Christian minds which have an unconquerable aversion to stitching together
selections from the symbolry of the prophets, literalizing the whole
patchwork, and holding it up to the world as God's truth. Yet this is what the
pre-millenarians are perpetually doing. They opened their recent Conference
with the disclaimer that they had not brought their ascension robes with them.
But such is the perilous fascination of their method of prophetic studies,
that they will soon be attracted to an interpretation of the apocalyptic
numbers and a determination of the year and day when, in the language of Mr.
Barbour, "Christ is due," as we say of an express train. History always
repeats itself. This has been the outcome of every great millenarian movement.
The leaders may keep their own intellectual balance quite well, but by
deluging Christendom with their literature, they will soon shake the minds of
Christians of less steadiness who will insist on bringing to the next
Prophetic Conference their arithmetical charts of Daniel's animals, if not
their ascension robes. We who survived 1843 know the sequel.
