As we begin Chapter 20 we start to take a look at the portion of Christ's reign known as the "millennium". This represents the first thousand years after Christ returns to earth, when Satan is under lock and key. This is the beginning of the "kingdom come" of the Lord's prayer. This is the beginning of the removal of the curse from the earth. The ground became cursed on the day Adam fell from grace. Sin pollutes the earth, so the Lord said to Adam, "Cursed is the ground because of you: through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life." (Genesis 3:17)
During the 1800s there was a popular belief that, as the gospel continued to spread throughout the world by both the spoken and the written word, the world would become a better and better place every day until the sharing of the gospel actually ushered in the millennium and the second coming of Christ. The followers of this ideology had to abandon it after the first and second world wars when it became obvious that the world was growing worse instead of better. There is no doubt now that sin and violence have continued to wax worse in the decades since the world wars. The technology that's available to us today has been used to increase sin and to give us easier access to it. Our improvements in weaponry, which we were promised would enforce the peace by making others think twice about attacking us, have not had that effect. Terrorism has actually increased. It's bad enough that we face threats from outside our country, but our own citizens have begun using automatic assault rifles to gun down their fellow man in mass shootings over the past several decades. The condition of the earth has grown worse, not better, in modern times. This is because sin is the worst form of pollution, and the longer sin exists on earth, the more polluted the world becomes. But a day is coming in which the Lord Jesus Christ will remove sin from the earth, and that is when it will revert to an Eden-like state. Very soon now as we near the end of our study, the Lord Jesus will declare, "Behold, I am making all things new."
As we begin Chapter 20, John tells us, "And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended. After that, he must be set free for a short time." (Revelation 20:1-3)
To understand the binding of Satan and why he must be loosed at the end of a thousand years, we must keep in mind that Christ returned to an earth populated by people. He returns with His bride (the church who has been given perfect and eternal bodies like His and who will never sin again) but those who are living on the earth at His return will still be inhabiting their original human bodies. During the Great Tribulation there were people who accepted Christ and people who rejected Christ and people who were still struggling with what decision to make regarding Christ. Men and women were still having children together during the seven years of the Great Tribulation, so although the population did shrink due to disasters and wars and famines in the end times, the population also grew. During the first thousand years of Christ's reign, it is believed that children will continue to be born on the earth, for when describing the millennium, the prophet Isaiah said that during this time no infant would be born only to live a few days. Premature birth is not going to exist on the earth in those days. Evidently birth defects will no longer occur, for Isaiah said that no one would bear a child doomed to misfortune. Isaiah said that instead a person who is one hundred years old will still be considered a youth. This means that the extra long lifespans of the early Old Testament times will be reinstated. In fact, some scholars believe that no one born during the millennium will die during the millennium but will still be alive when Satan is loosed at the end of it. During the first thousand years of the reign of Christ, His presence on the earth will cause the ground to again yield crops like it did in the pre-flood era, crops that are capable of providing all the nutritional needs of humans and animals, so that people and animals will no longer eat meat. (See Isaiah 65:20-25 for a description of the world during the millennium.) The earth will be an absolute paradise, and yet when the thousand years are ended and Satan is loosed for a short period of time, there will be those who will reject the truth of Christ in favor of Satan's lies.
How is this possible? How can human beings live in a perfect environment under the rule of a perfect King and still fall under sin's spell? Because sin is something that originates in the heart. The millennium is going to prove to mankind that sin is not a result of factors that come against human beings in this world. There will be no temptation on the earth in those days except that which comes from inside men and women. Satan will be bound and unable to deceive them. No one will be able to sin and shrug off their responsibility for it by saying, "The devil made me do it." From the time the Lord first created the world until the day Satan is bound, human beings have faced temptation both from the inside and the outside. Satan has been roaming the earth like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. (1 Peter 5:8) This old serpent has buffeted men and women day and night with temptation, so that even though we have no excuse for rejecting the Lord, there is truth in any statement we make regarding how much easier life on earth would have been for us if Satan had not been present. But the human beings on the earth during the millennium won't be able to claim that they would be able to live holy and sinless lives if only Satan weren't present. He won't be present. Any temptation they feel to sin will be coming from within their own hearts. Any rebellion they commit against the Lord will originate within them, not from the outside. Any lie they believe will be a fabrication of their own minds, not a lie fed to them by Satan.
In the final judgment, they will have no defense and no excuse for rejecting Christ. They can't claim anyone or anything outside of themselves influenced them to rebel against Him. This exonerates Almighty God from any accusation that He is unrighteous when He judges the sin of man. This proves that even under absolutely ideal conditions, and even while beholding the face of the Lord Jesus Christ in all His glory and holiness, and even while the lifespans of humans become hundreds of years long again so that every person living under the reign of Christ has an untold number of opportunities to know and love Him, there are still going to be those who---at the very first opportunity---decide to reject and rebel against Him. Ever since Adam fell from grace, there have been those who have tried to put all the blame for sin onto God. They've blamed Him for not destroying Satan as soon as the devil rebelled against Him. They've blamed Him for allowing us to live in a world where Satan is free to roam and tempt us. They've blamed Him for creating us with the free will to either serve Him or not.
But during the millennium the Lord is going to prove once and for all that it is impossible to create beings intelligent enough to commune with the Creator without also allowing them to have the free will to choose whether to commune with their Creator or not. He will forever be vindicated of man's accusations that He is at fault for our sins because He should have created mankind with the inability to sin.
God was absolutely right when He created us with free will. In order to make us capable of really knowing and loving Him, He created us in His image which means we possess free will. God Himself has the free will to do what pleases Him, and we human beings have the free will to do what pleases us. God, in His free will, could have chosen not to create anything at all. Or He could have chosen to create a world filled only with animals, or a world containing creatures so unlike us that we can't even imagine what they would have been. Since God has no unrighteousness in Him, He can't use His free will to sin, but His indescribable and unimaginable intelligence provides Him with an unlimited amount of options regarding the creation of the heavens, the earth, the universe, and everything that populates these spaces.
The angels, who are created beings possessing a vast amount of intelligence, also have free will. If they did not have free will, Satan could never have rebelled against God. Other angels would not have been able to join Satan in his rebellion if they did not have the ability to choose whom to serve.
Human beings were created with such an awesome amount of intelligence because God wanted us to be able to have a relationship with Him. He gave us more intelligence than He gave the animal kingdom so that we could talk to Him and so that He could talk to us. If He had not given us free will along with our intelligence, I think we would have been smart enough to know that the ability to choose was left out of us. I think we would have felt somehow incomplete without the right to choose. I think it would have taken something away from the "inexpressible and glorious joy" (1 Peter 1:8) that comes from choosing to accept and know Christ as our Redeemer and Savior. Could we love the Lord with a fullness that completely satisfies our intellect and our hearts and our souls if we had not been gifted with the free will to accept or reject Him? Could we ever have felt the all-consuming rapture of the soul that occurs within us when we are overwhelmed by the glory and majesty that is God? Would we have been able to experience His love for us---a love that surpasses every other form of love and affection and acceptance---if we were incapable of sin and if we did not need a means of redemption from our sin? I don't believe so, and therefore free will is a gift, not a curse. If we were like robots, incapable of sin, and if this world were absolutely perfect in every way, and if no temptation ever came against us in this world, I'm not sure we could love God at all. Can we truly love anyone or anything that is not capable of providing something we are lacking? All of the relationships we enjoy are relationships that enhance our lives. But if our lives didn't need enhancing, then we wouldn't need God, and I don't believe we would love Him. And if we couldn't love Him, we could never be all that He created us to be. I wouldn't trade loving and knowing Christ for anything in this world, would you? Yes, I could avoid making mistakes if I were incapable of making them, but I would never be able to know Christ as my Savior and Redeemer. Nothing is worth missing out on that!
The millennium will silence forever any accusation that God did wrong when providing us with the freedom to choose who and what we want to serve. The millennium will prove that man can't posses the intelligence to commune with his Creator without also possessing the ability to choose for himself whether he will live a life that honors God or a life that serves the flesh. Because even when living in a perfect world, and even while beholding the beautiful and loving face of the Lord Jesus Christ day in and day out, some human beings will still prefer darkness to light. And they will have no one to blame but themselves.
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