When the Apostle Paul makes the case for the supremacy and sufficiency of Jesus, he puts his arms around everything in existence and says that Jesus is better. His supremacy is supported by showing that everything exists because Christ wills it to. So, he is better than creation because he made it, owns it, and keeps it going. How could we turn to anything in creation without turning to something less than Jesus? Put it (whatever it is) on the scale and see that it weighs less than a feather compared to the infinite weight of Christ!

In 20 years of pastoral ministry, I’ve noticed a regularly overlooked emphasis for many Christians. And this emphasis is so important, so valuable, that if adopted, I think it could drastically affect your life. I know this firsthand. I’ve seen it happen and watched it in many others walking that narrow path toward Immanuel’s land.
Intrigued?
Okay, here it is: Besides considering Christ’s work, reflect on his worth.
I’m grateful that many Christians return to the story of the gospel. There’s an unfathomable benefit to our souls when we consider all that Jesus did for us in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. When we walk down those familiar roads in our minds and dwell upon these truths in our hearts, we’re reminded that our sins are gone and that there is a basis for our adoption into God’s family. Because of the doing and dying of Christ, we have his everlasting righteousness. God is pleased to pardon our sins–all our sins!-–forever! They are gone, and we are his! Praise the Lord.
As good as this is for our souls, there’s another step.
Answer these questions: In light of who Jesus is and what he’s done, how does he stack up against anything and anyone else? Where does he fit? How valuable is he? Is there anyone or anything that can rival him?
Most Christians can answer this question quickly and confidently. “No!”
But isn’t it true that we forget this? Believers don’t walk around thinking, “This sin is more valuable than Christ.” This would be insanity. But isn’t temporary insanity what sin is? It’s ridiculous to think that anything or anyone is better than Christ. But when we become futile in our thinking, and our foolish hearts are darkened, we thoughtlessly and absurdly exchange the glory of the Creator for the creation (Romans 1:21–25). Living in periods–however short–where we forget the surpassing excellence of Christ is spiritually dangerous. Therefore, we must fight to revisit and remember the infinite worth of Jesus.
Along these lines, it’s helpful to remember some of the testimonies of Scripture.
When the Apostle Paul considered his pedigree and performance as a religious man, he counted it all as rubbish in comparison to the surpassing value of knowing Christ:
“But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
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The peasants “were swollen with starvation, while the cadres were swollen with overeating.” The destruction of the family in China didn’t mean “more care, more love.” Mao knew. Communist Party Vice-Chair, Liu Shaoqi told Mao, “History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!”

Sophie Lewis wants to Abolish the Family. In her sympathetic review of Lewis’s book, Erin Maglaque traces through the “utopian” views of the anti-family movement. She tells of the 19th Century Fournier communes that “freed” women of the “drudgery” of cooking for their families. Lewis wants to expand on the idea of kitchenless households to include collective childcare. Maglaque writes,
The family, Lewis and other abolitionists and feminists argue, privatises care. The legal and economic structure of the nuclear household warps love and intimacy into abuse, ownership, scarcity. Children are private property, legally owned and fully economically dependent on their parents. The hard work of care – looking after children, cooking and cleaning – is hidden away and devalued, performed for free by women or for scandalously low pay by domestic workers.
“If we abolish the family,” Magaque writes, “we abolish the most fundamental unit of privatization and scarcity in our society. More care, more love, for all.”
Family abolitionists see themselves as liberators, but their dreams are dystopian. Only through force can the family be abolished as a crucial foundation of society.  There is no love in force; the utopian hope of “more love” really means more hate for all.
“More love for all” was not how it worked out when Mao sought to abolish the family during his Great Leap Forward. Like the Chinese communists, Lewis sees no need for every family to cook, wash clothes, and raise children. For the Chinese, instead of paradise, the outcome was the worst man-made famine in history.
In his meticulously researched book Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng reports, in harrowing detail, the totalitarian-induced famine that killed 36 million Chinese. The toll of Mao’s famine exceeds, by many times, the toll of Stalin’s death by starvation of Ukrainians.
Mao and other Chinese communists, according to Jisheng, saw  “the family as the social foundation of the private ownership system and a major impediment to communism.” In a 1958 speech Mao said: “In socialism, private property still exists, factions still exist, families still exist. Families are the product of the last stage of primitive communism, and every last trace of them will be eliminated in the future.” Mao continued, “in the future, the family will no longer be beneficial to the development of productivity … Many of our comrades don’t dare to consider problems of this nature because their thinking is too narrow.”
Jisheng took a deep dive into the Chinese Communist Party archives. Chinese premier Zhou Enlai believed “thorough liberation required liberating women from their household duties.” Enlai “promoted communal kitchens and communal nurseries as the sprouts of communism.” Vice-chair of the Communist Party Liu Shaoqi observed: that “by eliminating families it would be possible to eliminate private property.”
The intent was to make the Chinese population more controllable and China more productive. A 1959 party report laid out the results:
People eat together in the canteens and go out to work together … Before the canteens, commune members could only work for seven to eight hours a day; now they work an average of ten hours a day … At breakfast, as soon as the bowls are pushed away, the section heads lead people out to work … Before and after meals, commune members read newspapers and listen to radio broadcasts together, improving their education in communism.
Food is usually cooked by families because it is efficient that they do so. During the Great Leap Forward, communal kitchens were rapidly established, some feeding up to 800 people. Jisheng reports, “The communal kitchens were a major reason so many starved to death. Home stoves were dismantled, and cooking implements, tables and chairs, foodstuffs, and firewood were handed over to the communal kitchen, as were livestock, poultry, and any edible plants harvested by commune members. In some places, no chimneys were allowed to be lit outside the communal kitchen.” In short, households lost even the ability to boil water.
The consequences were catastrophic. Jisheng writes, “Eliminating the family as a basic living unit reduced its capacity to combat famine.”
Introducing communal kitchens meant people had to go to a kitchen to be fed. Jisheng observes, “In the mountain regions, people had to tramp over hill and dale for a bowl of gruel.” The details reflect the mad arrogance of the planners:
In the spring of 1960 the newly appointed first secretary of Yunnan Province went to the countryside for an inspection. In the hill country he saw an old woman, covered from head to toe in mud, lugging a basket up a slope during a rainstorm on her way to the kitchen. Some villagers told him that this elderly woman had to cover only two hills and seven-plus kilometers, which was not so bad; some had to travel fifteen kilometers on their donkeys to reach the communal kitchen, spending a good part of a day fetching two meals.
The abolition of the family meant families couldn’t divide labor as they cared for the young, elderly, and infirm. Individuals can see through the eyes of love, but all that mattered to the communists was productivity. A party official proclaimed: “Even the old and feeble cannot be allowed to eat for free, but must contribute their effort. If they can’t carry a double load, they can share a load with someone else, and if they can’t use their shoulders, they can use their hands; even crawling to the field with a bowl of dirt in one hand contributes more than lying in bed.”
The communists seized homes. Jisheng reports, “Kindergartens, nurseries, and facilities for the elderly were established with resources seized from families without compensation, and homes were vacated to house the facilities.”
Of course, none of this was voluntary. Jisheng explains that “Cadres and militia ransacked homes and sometimes beat and detained occupants. When villagers handed over their assets, it was in an atmosphere of extreme political pressure. The campaign against private property rendered many families destitute and homeless.”
Jisheng describes, how initially, with “free” food, commune members gorged themselves:
The communal kitchens were most damaging in their waste. During the first two or three months that the canteens operated in the autumn of 1958, members feasted. Believing that food supply problems had been completely resolved, Mao and other central leaders worried about “what to do with the extra food,” which in turn led villagers to believe that the state had access to vast stores of food to supplement local supplies when they ran out. The slogan was, “With meals supplied communally, there is never any fear of eating too much.”
Of course, as food ran out, not all were equal. Jisheng reports on how the cadres [officials charged with managing communist party affairs] “helped themselves to white rice, steamed rolls, stuffed buns, steamed buns, and meat and vegetable dishes, while ordinary commune members ate watery gruel.” The gruel “was often execrable. Boiling cauldrons of congee might contain rat droppings and sheep dung.”
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When viewed against the backdrop of redemptive history (culminating in Christ’s saving work), the binding of Satan is directly tied to the success of the missionary enterprise. Satan was bound when his power of deception over nations and empires was broken by Jesus’s death and resurrection. John is not referring to the absence of all evil and unbelief as premillennarians contend. The amillennial interpretation is the correct one.

In Revelation 20:1-3, John is given a remarkable vision:

“Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. 2 And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, 3 and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.” In verse 7, John adds, “and when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison.”

The binding of Satan as depicted in this passage raises several obvious questions, especially in light of the on-going debate between amillennarians and premillennarians about the timing and character of the millennial age. This is the only biblical text which specifically mentions a thousand year period of time in which Satan’s power and activity are curtailed (the millennial age). The two most obvious questions raised by John’s vision are, “what does it mean for Satan to be bound in such a manner?” and “are the thousand years a present or a future period of time?” Amillennarians and premillennarians take quite different approaches to this passage and offer conflicting answers to these questions.
Amillennarians believe that the binding of Satan is but another way of speaking of Jesus’ victory over the devil during our Lord’s messianic mission. The thousand years are not a literal period of time, but refer to the entire age between Christ’s first and second coming (the inter-advental period). If true, the binding of Satan begins with our Lord’s death and resurrection, continues throughout the present age, and ends with the release of Satan from the abyss (abussos) shortly before Jesus returns at the end of the age when Antichrist is revealed during a time of final apostasy (cf. 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12). This brief apostasy is followed by the final consummation which includes: the general resurrection (1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11; 1 Corinthians 15:50-57), the final judgment (Matthew 25:31-46; Revelation 20:4-6, 11-15), and the ushering in of a new heavens and earth (2 Peter 3:4).
Premillennarians, however, contend that the thousand years are a literal period of time commencing with Christ’s second advent, who then establishs his physical rule over the earth in a millennial kingdom (Revelation 20:1-7). During this time, Satan is bound. The thousand years ends with Satan’s release from his imprisonment so as to lead the nations in a final revolt against Jesus’ rule, immediately before the final judgment at the end of the millennial age (Revelation 20:7-10). I address the serious problems with this understanding of redemptive history here: Evil in the Millennial Age? A Huge Problem for Premillennarians.
To summarize, amillennarians understand the binding of Satan to be a present reality, while premillennarians see this scene as an entirely future event. In this essay, I will consider and evaluate the biblical background to John’s vision and then respond to the premillennial challenge, “when and how is Satan is bound?” And “why is there so much evil in the world if he is?” These are two important questions which merit response.
The Redemptive Historical Background to John’s Vision
There is significant biblical background which provides context to help us understand what John sees, and which ought to be considered before we turn to the details of the vision given John as recorded in Revelation 20:1-3, 7. The scene depicted in Revelation 20 occurs in heaven (where the thrones are) and actually makes much sense in light of Old Testament imagery and events, especially when these are interpreted in light of the dawn of the messianic age in which Jesus triumphs over the devil and his legions. Since the context behind John’s vision is important and often overlooked in this debate, I will endeavor to trace out these images and events to aid us in our interpretation of the binding of Satan in Revelation 20. There are three categories of biblical events which give us considerable aid in understanding and interpreting John’s vision.
First, we consider Satan’s influence upon the nations. We start with the obvious fact that Satan was instrumental in the fall of our race during a time of probation in Eden (Genesis 3:1-24). A fierce adversary is introduced into the biblical narrative from the very beginning, although it is foretold that this adversary ultimately will be defeated by the seed of the woman (Genesis 3:15). According to the subsequent chapters of Genesis, Satan managed to deceive much of the world soon after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden, although an elect line did remain—the line of Seth, as recounted in Genesis 4:26. The first city was built by Cain in the land of Nod, and named for his first born son, Enoch. The Cain-Enoch genealogy in Genesis 4:17 ff. implies that the city became a center of unbelief and opposition to the purposes of God. Then we read of the Nephilim (Genesis 6), followed by YHWH’s judgment upon “the world that was” in the form of the flood (Genesis 6:9-9:29). No sooner did Noah and his family leave the safety of the ark, we read of the rise of two more cities hostile to God’s purposes and his people, Nineveh (Genesis 10:11-12) and Babel (Genesis 11). The early course of redemptive history is characterized as a period of increasing human wickedness, manifest in city-states hostile to God due to the spiritual darkness of satanic deception (Genesis 6:5).
As the course of redemptive history continues to unfold throughout the balance of the Old Testament, we read of repeated instances of various nations and empires arising and persecuting the people of God. The list is long, but includes the Egyptians and its Pharaoh, followed by the various Canaanite tribes, most notably the Moabites, then the Assyrians and the fall of the northern kingdom (Israel), before Nebuchadnezzar conquers Judah and destroys the city of Jerusalem and its temple. Although Jerusalem and the temple were rebuilt in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, the people of God now find themselves as tenants in their own land, living under the rule of a series of pagan Gentile empires. These are nations who fell under Satan’s sway, did his business, and marshaled their resources against the people of God. This extensive evidence from the biblical narrative points in the direction that Satan’s influence upon the nations during their opposition to God’s purposes is very likely in the background of John’s vision when he refers to nations being freed from satanic manipulation.
A second factor to be considered is Satan’s power of deception, which often takes the form of idolatry and the worship of pagan deities is expressed in continual apostasy among the Israelites, seen initially in the wilderness of the Sinai, and then more openly once the Israelites have conquered the promised land of Canaan. The Canaan narratives inform us that like Adam, Israel never fulfilled the commission given them in Isaiah 49:6, “I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.” Because of Israel’s rank unbelief seen in the nation and the idolatry of successive kings evident in their persistent disobedience to YHWH’s covenant, Israel comes under the covenant curses and repeatedly ends up as subjects of godless Gentile nations and their foreign gods. Israel’s witness to the Gentile nations regarding YHWH’s gracious promise of future restoration, coupled with the hope of a final redemption from sin, was largely absent. In the absence of such a witness which chases away satanic error, Satan continues to deceive the nations and is able to keep them walking in darkness.
Third, we fast forward to the New Testament era, where much more information is given us about the devil, his intentions, and the extent of his power. He is called Satan, which comes from the Hebrew for “accuser.” He is also called the devil, (diabolos—the Greek translation of the Hebrew satan). We learn of two names given to Satan, Belial and Beelzebul. He is variously identified as the Adversary, the Dragon, the Enemy, the Serpent, the Tester, and the Wicked One.[1] Satan is said to rule a host of fallen angels (Matthew 25:41), and he has been given control of the world (i.e., Luke 4:6), which indicates that Satan’s actions are limited by God’s providence, a point well captured by Martin Luther’s famous dictum, “the devil is God’s devil.”
Satan dominates non-Christians (John 8:44; Colossians 1:13), he is destructive of life and property (Luke 8:33), and he must be resisted (1 Corinthians 7:5). He is said to be exceedingly cunning (2 Corinthians 2:11), he tempts people to sin (Ephesians 6:11), and he opposes those who preach the gospel (1 Thessalonians 2:18). Especially important for our discussion, recall that Jesus responds to a hostile crowd by declaring, “you are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). Satan is, therefore, the progenitor of lies and deception, and will do anything in his power to oppose the proclamation of the gospel. We see his opposition to the gospel at work when Jesus tells Peter, who implores our Lord not to go to Jerusalem to suffer and die, “get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you [Peter] are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Matthew 16:23).
An important theme running throughout the New Testament is the repeated references to Jesus’ triumph over Satan and the curtailing of his deceptive powers through our Lord’s death and resurrection. Jesus appeared in the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4-5), but his public ministry did not commence until after he had resisted Satan’s temptations in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). In an unexpected turn of events, Jesus’ messianic mission appeared to come to an end with his death by crucifixion on Good Friday. But by Easter Sunday, it was abundantly clear that Satan’s victory over the promised Messiah was actually a complete and total defeat. By orchestrating the death of Jesus, ironically Satan ensured his own demise.
Our Lord completes the redemptive mission which Adam and then Israel failed to accomplish, when he fulfills all righteousness through his own personal obedience to God’s commandments, thereby providing a justifying righteousness for his people, while bearing the guilt of our sin in his own flesh. The accuser can no longer accuse if the guilt and power of sin is removed from those whom he would otherwise incriminate. Paul encourages struggling Christians in Colossae by reminding them of Satan’s complete and total defeat. “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” ( (Colossians 2:13-15). Satan is a thoroughly defeated foe whose end is certain, which echoes what Paul had previously told the Romans. “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20).
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