Understanding the Millennium - Part 1

One good thing about being an Australian is discussions about the various millennialisms don't really come up that much, and when they do they tend to be more out of curiosity than having any real importance or emotion tied up with it. Of course not all Australians have had that experience, and I'm sure other places around the world are similarly unperturbed by these discussions.

However, there are people who worry about this stuff—really worry about it. I've looked for images of diagrams of the millennium on google and they are super crazy. Crazy in a way in which crazy people would ask them, "Are you okay?" And there are two things about this:

1. It's really new. It's not a thing which has been around for all that long, at least in the form we know it from things like the Left Behind series.
2. It's a whole thing built on only a few verses; essentially just Revelation 20:1–10. 

The Schofield Reference Bible (first published in 1909), Wikipedia tells me, was the first Bible since the Geneva Bible to have a commentary running alongside the text. Thanks to Cyrus Schofield, a century of Bible readers are not just really into Schofield's version of millennialism (pre-, in his case), but they are also really into Schofield's version of creationism, which dates creation back to 4004 BC. Imagine if an apathetic Aussie had've got their study Bible out instead - creationism and premillennialism might not even be a thing! (Well, they probably would, but perhaps not in the divisive way they are today. Well, maybe not that either. But it was still important.)

As a gross oversimplification, there are four views on the millennium (check out Mark's simple diagram at visualunit):

1. there are the post-millennialists, who think things are going to generally get better (for 1000 years) and then Jesus will return.
2. there are the pre-millennialists, who think things are going to generally get worse and then Jesus will return and reign (for 1000 years).
3. there are the a-millennialists, who say the 1000 years is all symbolic for the current reality of reigning with Jesus.
4. there are the pan-millennialists, who trust that everything will pan out in the end.

The fourth group are obviously not a real doctrine, but they do exist, because a lot of people really don't care for shaping an entire doctrine around 10 very confusing verses in a very confusing book. I think, as someone who has only ever heard three sermons from anywhere in the book in my life, that it hasn't been an issue for me. But that's not great either - it shouldn't be neglected, but perhaps is because we don't know what to do with it. However, after preaching through the entire book (I have four out of 20 sermons left), I realise I should probably convert my pan-millennialism to something a little more concrete. So in the next post, I'll try and explain what I think is going on in Revelation 20 and how it fits into the book as a whole.