The Apocalypse: Its Structure and Primary Predictions. The Rest Of The Dead.
The Thousand Years’ Reign With Christ.
THE REST OF THE DEAD.
“The rest of the dead lived not again till the thousand years should be finished” (ver. 5). But what happened then? Did they “live again” (literally on the thousand years being finished)? Not a word of this do we read. But if the sense is figurative, we see them here alive, and ready tools of the serpent when again let loose. He was shut up that he might deceive the nations no more for a thousand years. But, this long period ended, he is “loosed out of his prison,” and finds “nations” enough prepared to do his old work. This is to me another clear proof that the whole language of the prediction is to be understood in a figurative sense.
“And when the thousand years are finished Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall come forth to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to the war, the number of whom is as the sand of the sea” (ver. 8). Let us look at this statement first in the figurative and then in the literal sense.
To Christians whose lot is cast within the bright latter day, it must be a joy to live,—religion is uppermost everywhere and in every thing,—in public affairs, business transactions, in social intercourse, in family life; worldliness quite out of fashion, and the ungodly nowhere to be seen, or obliged to “feign submission”: a “heaven upon earth,” and this for a thousand years!
“But the sun of this bright day is destined to set—gradually, no doubt, as gradually it will rise, subject to the laws of spiritual decline. . . . Everything may go on as before, but without the ‘first love,’ with the mechanism of habit, and lingering recollections of the past. By this, the jealous Lord of the Church will be touched, and His Spirit will be grieved, whose withdrawal will accelerate the decline. . , . Settling upon her lees, and her outward prosperity proving a snare to her, secularity taking the place of spirituality, and inconsistencies appearing increasingly, the Church’s influence for good upon the world at large will grow less and less. And just as on a small scale in some little community like Northampton, as described by President Edwards, (See “Second Advent,” p. 404.) after the remarkable sense of God’s presence over the whole town had begun to wax feeble, the still unconverted portion of it, though subdued and seemingly won over to Christ, would by little and little recover themselves, and at length venture forth in their true character,—so will it probably be on a vast scale at the close of the latter day. The unconverted portion of the world, long constrained by the religious influences surrounding them, to fall in with the spirit of the day, catching some of its wholesome impulses, but never coming savingly under its power this portion of mankind, which we have reason to believe will not be small, will now be freed from these irksome restraints, no longer obliged to breathe an atmosphere uncongenial to their nature, and ‘feign submission.’ . . . And then the Lord will be provoked to let loose upon them the roaring lion.” *
* ” Christ’s Second Coming,” etc., pp. 414-15.
Such is an intelligible, and, I humbly think, a reasonable view of the prediction, when taken in a figurative sense. But now try the literal sense of it, and I hesitate not to say it is absolutely unintelligible. For where did those myriads of “nations” come from, whom Satan, as soon as he is “loosed from his prison,” finds all ready to be “deceived,”—that cloud of locusts to eat up the Church of Christ? Since all the saints that have lived before the thousand years and the Second Coming of Christ are supposed to have risen from the dead to reign with Christ, and “the rest of the dead lived not again till the thousand years were finished,” did they rise from the dead then? It is not said that they did, but we must presume that they did so, if we are to interpret literally. Is it they, then, that are the “nations” whom Satan “gathered together against Christ”—men risen from the dead, in resurrection-bodies, to war on earth against the Church? Will this be credited by anybody? But if not, the literal sense will not do.
Continued in Satan’s Last Effort And Final Defeat.
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