When we compare the description in Revelation of the millennium with the Jesus’ own descriptions of binding and casting out Satan in the Gospels, one crucial point emerges: this is a work that Jesus accomplishes during his earthly ministry, not later. By Jesus’ two great victories over Satan during his temptation and his cross, Jesus shatters the vice-grip of our Enemy over the nations.

Bible-believing Christians have often disagreed about the significance of “the thousand years” (sometimes called, “the millennium”) that John writes about in the book of Revelation:
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.Rev. 20:1–3)
The big question is not only when this “thousand years” has been/is/will be, but what will happen during this “thousand years.” Notably, John tells us that during this time, Satan will be bound “so that he might not deceive the nations any longer.”
What should we expect from the binding of Satan?
Different Millennial Views on the Binding and Casting Out of Satan
Premillennialists take this thousand years as a reference to a Messianic reign of Jesus after his return, but before the glorification of God’s people in the eternal state. I had a dear, premillennialist mentor who would often remark to me, “I look around the world, and it seems pretty clear that Satan is still loose and up to his old tricks.” For the premillennialists, Satan’s binding cannot come until after King Jesus has returned.
Postmillennialists understand the thousand years as something that will take place after the eventual transformation of society by the gospel of Jesus Christ. Ultimately, they believe that the leaven of the gospel will so thoroughly permeate our world that “all [will be] leavened” (Matt. 13:33). Once the entire world is brought under the dominion and Lordship of Jesus Christ, there will be one thousand years of peace and prosperity, during which time Satan is bound from harassing God’s people on earth. The millennium comes immediately before Christ’s return, at the conclusion of the thousand years.
Amillennialists see the thousand years as a reference to the age of the New Testament church. The “thousand years” is not a precise amount of time, but, as a large, round number that functions as a symbol for an undefined long period of time. For amillennialists, the key phrase for understanding the nature of Satan’s binding has to do with the definition John gives about the quality of this binding: “so that he might not deceive the nations any longer” (Rev. 20:3).
Amillennialists take this as the essential difference between the Old Testament and New Testament: Satan’s dominion over the nations has been shattered, so that the gospel of Jesus is now drawing people from every tribe, language, people, and nation into his kingdom (Rev. 5:9). Certainly, God drew a few Gentiles into the nation of Israel during the Old Testament. The degree to which God accomplishes this now in the New Testament era, however, is entirely unprecedented.
Amillennialism is my own understanding of the nature of the millennium. In this post, I want to focus on two important texts the help us to interpret the binding and casting out. I will argue that letting Scripture interpret Scripture drives us toward holding an amillennial view of the “thousand years” of Revelation 20.
The Binding of the “Strong Man” (Matt. 12:29)
The first text comes in the middle of the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus gives us some important insight into the progressive conquest of his kingdom into this world:
Or how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house.(Matt. 12:29)
What, precisely, does this binding of the strong man refer? Brandon Crowe makes a compelling case that it was Jesus’ successfully resisting Satan’s temptation at the beginning of his ministry that marks the binding of Satan. He writes:

If you’re trusting Jesus, sin will not win. A repentant sinner is secure, despite all his struggles with sin, because his obedience is rooted in Jesus’s obedience. Paul, who cried, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” also declared “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 7:24, 8:1). Christian, let your eternal security in Christ compel your fight against sin. Resist the slippery slope of small sins by looking to Jesus—he is our solid ground.

“Just one more drink,” the drunkard says.
“I’ll just look for a little while,” the porn-addict explains.
“It’s just a little sin,” Satan whispers in our ear.
The road to life-shattering sin is paved by little sins. Small, daily decisions shape our desires and habits. The apostle James notes, “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14–15). James is not arguing that wrongful desire is not sin—it is. But he is stating that the lusts of our hearts do not remain in our hearts. These desires give birth to sinful acts. Christians who dwell upon sexual fantasy in their minds cannot excuse themselves by saying it’s only in their heads. Our thoughts ultimately lead to action. Each moment we dwell upon our wrongful desires, we train ourselves to see them as acceptable.
The first “little” sexual sin many of us indulge in is fantasy. This is hard to battle. As we reject one pernicious thought, another is right around the corner ready to entice our heart. Suddenly, the lies of the enemy become too sweet to reject. He who said, “You will not surely die” was a liar from the beginning (Gen. 3:3, John 8:44) and is still a liar now. Yet, although we’ve been warned, Satan’s whispering influence stirs our hearts. With full moral culpability, we all too often feast upon the banquet set before us.
As with all sin, fantasies gradually cease to satisfy, giving birth to larger sins (James 1:15). A man frequently begins by letting his gaze linger on women in public or on images in magazines and social media. His heart hardens and desire increases. Those lingering glances last just a little bit longer than they did at first. Before he knows it, he’s not satisfied with what he sees in these brief moments and seeks something more explicit. Though he may be married, he engages other women in inappropriate conversation or begins viewing explicit pornography. Conversations become flirtatious; pornography ceases to satisfy. Suddenly, a man realizes he’s committed adultery. Broken, he may cry “I never thought I would do this!” as loudly as he’d like, but he himself paved the way for his great sins.
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Written by Alan D. Strange |
Monday, February 19, 2024
The “spirituality of the church” (SOTC) relates to the reality that the church is supremely a spiritual institution (not a biological one, as is the family, or a civil one, as is the state) and that its power is moral and suasive (not legal and coercive, as is state power), ministerial and declarative (not magisterial and legislative, as is power in the Roman Catholic Church). Thus, the church is an institution gathered and perfected by the Spirit, having chiefly spiritual concerns, carried out in a spiritual fashion by a Spirit-indited use of the means of grace.

An Ongoing Dialogue
Historically, the church has at times claimed a supremacy that she does not have—over the state, especially—and she has, at other times, allowed the state to dominate her. Part of the genius of the Reformation was the rediscovery that the state is not over the church or vice-versa, but that all institutions are properly under God. The Scots, in opposing Erastianism—the notion among some Protestant rulers that the church is properly under the state, as was the case with the Church of England under the English monarch—particularly developed this Reformational notion that the church was not under the state in what they called the “spiritual independency of the church.” In the American context this came to be known in the nineteenth century as the doctrine of the “spirituality of the church” (SOTC).
To be sure, the doctrine was often abused to stop the mouth of the church against slavery; however, Charles Hodge of Princeton, and others of his time and following him, developed a better use of the doctrine, capturing the older notion that the spirituality of the church was calculated to spare the church from simply giving way to politics and state control, minding instead its proper spiritual call and mission, having rule over its own affairs. At the same time, Hodge was careful not to muzzle the prophetic voice that the church always possesses as she calls the whole world to repentance and faith. The spirituality of the church of this sort could be helpfully recovered for the ongoing dialogue of how the church is to relate to the world in which it finds itself, both in how it distinguishes itself from the world and how it gives itself to the world.
It is important for the church to do both: to distinguish itself from the world, or it fails to be the distinct agency of gospel proclamation that it is called to be, and to give itself to the world, or it fails to be the foot-washing servants that Christ calls it to be. The present atmosphere, in which the politicization of virtually everything looms, can prove especially challenging in this regard. Highly charged partisan political currents can impact the church as well as civil society, especially when it comes to the temptation of those on both extremes—left and the right—to bring social, economic, political, and like agendas into the church. The church as church may have something to say about present concerns (e.g., abortion, same-sex marriage, etc.), which is to say that God’s word may address such, usually in principle, though not in detail; in any case, not in a way that renders the church just another voice in the current cacophony of shouted political slogans, but that contributes a proper faith perspective to vexing moral questions in the public square. We need to be salt and light, to witness to the power of Christ and his gospel in an unsavory, dark world in a way that does not avoid the moral issues of our time, bringing a clear prophetic witness to them, but also not allow politics to swamp the boat so that the gospel gets sunk in a sea of cultural concerns.
Recapturing Spirituality
The SOTC, which we seek to recapture, is today either forgotten as a concept or remembered only for its abuses (e.g., justifying the church not addressing American slavery and the racial hatred that especially developed in its wake, including iniquitous Jim Crow laws).
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