April 5 - Thousand Years of Peace (pt. 1)

April 5 – Thousand Years of Peace (pt. 1)
Revelation 20:1-6

“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 any more until the thousand years were ended. After that, he must be set free for a short time.” (Rev. 20:1-3)

It’s here! Christ will reign on earth. One thousand years of peace. Stop and think about that for a moment. It’s almost impossible to imagine. We are so used to death and pain that we can barely comprehend what it would be like without those things. What would CNN have to report? Rather than murders and rapes, they would tell success stories of families and children. Instead of investigating crooked politicians, they would report stories of countries working together to promote the message of Christ. Maybe CNN wouldn’t even need to exist.

Christ will rule over the world, so the need for local, state and national governments will be gone. Christ will reign over the church, so we won’t need a hierarchy of church leaders, nor will we have denominational differences. Children will live in safety, no fear of hunger or abuse. Wives will be safe, husbands will be treasured. I suspect you could begin to list all sorts of things that will no longer exist: bars, casinos, strip clubs … the list can go on and on. Things of Satan won’t be here. Christ will rule.

There are four names given to Satan in Revelation 20:2. John doesn’t want us to misunderstand who this is: dragon, ancient serpent, devil, Satan.

IF you look back at Revelation 19, we find four names given to Christ. Faithful and True (Rev. 19:11), Word of God (Rev. 19:13), King of Kings (Rev. 19:16), Lord of Lords (Rev. 19:16).

John didn’t do this by accident. While we recognize Satan by four names and generally only use “Jesus Christ” to identify our Lord, John definitely wants his readers to know that there are many more terms used to identify Jesus and all of these will outweigh the dragon’s names.

We recognized Christ riding on the white horse in Revelation 19. As this happens, an angel comes down from heaven (Rev. 20:1) and he holds the key to the Abyss and a great chain.

The Abyss has been a frequent location in this narrative. We first see it in Luke 8:31 when the demons named Legion begged Jesus to send them into a large herd of pigs rather than order them to the Abyss.

In Rev. 9:2, when the Abyss is opened, smoke comes up to darken the sun and sky from the Abyss.

This isn’t the end of Satan, but it definitely takes care of him for awhile.