Satan Bound and Loosed

The sequence of events in Revelation 20 has some puzzles. Jesus has defeated the beast and the false prophet and thrown them into the lake of fire (19:1-21). The devil is well in hand, chained in the abyss that is shut and locked. He can’t deceive the nations anymore, which seems a good thing.

But then when the millennium is completed, Satan is released for a little (mikron chronon, a microchron), gathers the nations for a final war, is destroyed and then tossed into the lake of fire (vv. 3, 7-10).

Which raises questions like: Why wasn’t he tossed into the lake of fire before the millennium? And, Why would God release the devil after he’s been confined for a long period? Leave aside the question of what the referent of the passage is (e.g., what period of historical time is captured by the term “millennium”?); this is a question about God’s purpose in orchestrating history as this passage says he does.

First question first: The millennium described in Revelation has two main features: Satan is bound and prevented from deceiving nations, and faithful martyrs and saints rise up in the first resurrection to rule with Christ. The two are obviously related. The saints are able to reign because their enemy has been confined.

The condition of those who are raised to reign and those who share in that first resurrection represent the fulfillment of God’s purpose in creating human beings in the first place. He formed Adam and Eve to be His son and daughter, reigning at His side over the earth. The saints who reign in the millennium reach that telos. If the dragon had been thrown into the lake of fire at the beginning of the millennium, the reign of the saints would have been short-circuited. Judgment is given to the saints; but if all the enemies that are to be judged have already been judged, how can the saints fulfill their role as judges? If the reign of the saints is the fulfillment of the image of God, it has to last a while.

Why does God release Satan at the end to deceive the nations? For starters, there is a neat symmetry in the shape of history. The world that begins with Pentecostal fire from heaven ends with destructive fire from heaven.

There are other symmetries as well. Before the millennium, the dragon who deceived the nations is captured, bound, and locked away in the abyss. At the conclusion of the millennium, we have a similar sequence of events: Satan again deceives the nations, again makes war on the saints, is again defeated, and is again thrown down, this time into the abyss. The end of the pre-millennial first creation anticipates the end of the millennial second creation. We might be able to tease out further implications from that. At least we can say that the structure of Revelation 20 militates against the “hyperpreterist” view that all biblical prophecy was fulfilled in the first century. Within Revelation 20 is embedded the notion that the fulfillment in the first century is itself a type of a future fulfillment at the end of the millennium. (This doesn’t count as, and is not intended to be, a complete refutation of hyperpreterism.)

More deeply, we have the symmetry of the beginning and end of the Bible as a whole. As Revelation winds to a close, we see Genesis 1-3 in reverse. God created a world and planted a garden; at the end of Revelation, we see the descent of the garden city. At the beginning, God placed a man in the garden and built a woman; the garden city itself the bride, the new Eve. But before we get to these Genesis 1-2 recapitulations, we have a recapitulation of the fall, when Satan is released to “deceive” the nations as he first entered the garden to “deceive” Eve. Thus:

A. Genesis 1-2: Creation of cosmos and garden, Adam and Eve.

B. Genesis 3: Seduction of Eve; initial judgment on the serpent.

….

B’. Revelation 20: Seduction of nations; final judgment on Satan.

A’. Revelation 21-22: New creation of cosmos and city, Lamb and Bride.

More deeply still, the dragon’s concluding history mimics that of Jesus. In Revelation 20, Satan is seized, bound, thrown into the abyss, which is shut and sealed over him until he is released (vv. 2-3) to gather the nations for war (vv. 7-8) before being tossed, this time permanently, into the lake of fire (vv. 9-10). This follows closely the last days of the gospel story: Jesus is seized (Matthew 26:4, 48, 50; 55), bound (John 18:12, 24), put into a grave with a stone at the door and the grave is sealed (Matthew 27:66). After three days, he is “loosed” from the agony of death (Acts 2:24) in order to gather His disciples and commission them to spread out to the four corners to become as numerous as sand on the seashore. 

Of course, the similarity of the pattern of events highlights the contrasts. Jesus does into the grave, but death cannot bind Him. Jesus spends only three days in the “abyss” of death, not 1000 years. Once Jesus is loosed from death, He never dies again. Instead of being tossed into a lake of fire, He ascends into a cloud to reign from heaven.

Satan’s final history is a counterfeit of the death and resurrection and Great Commission of Jesus. To the end, Satan plays the role of anti-Christ.

We might have a hint of this in the way John describes the moment when Satan is released: It is at the “completion” (the verb teleo is used in vv. 3, 5, 7) of the millennium. That verb describes the termination of a period of time, but it also rings other changes within the New Testament. Jesus accomplishes all things and cries “Completed” as He dies (John 19:28, 30). And we can link this also to the New Testament’s emphasis on the “fulfillment” of the times (Mark 1:15; verb is pleroo; Galatians 4:4, using the noun pleroma). 

To say that the millennium is “completed” is to say that it has reached its goal, and to say that we have reached another moment of fullness, another period when time is saturated and ready to burst into a new time. 

Again, we are talking divine symmetries: The gospel age begins with the announcement of the fullness of times, with Jesus’ binding and imprisonment of Satan. The age ends with another kairos, another moment of krsis, when Satan, loosed, is again defeated, seized, and thrown down.