A New Heaven and a New Earth

Chapter 19 opens with heaven singing over the fall of Babylon and moves to the marriage supper of the Lamb, and then in 19:11 heaven itself opens and a rider comes out on a white horse. He is called Faithful and True. His eyes are like blazing fire, he wears many royal crowns, and he has a name written on him that only he himself knows. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is the Word of God.

Four details deserve attention because they are usually rushed. First, the robe is already dipped in blood in verse 13, before any fighting has taken place, which is why readers divide over whose blood it is: his own, on the analogy of the Lamb who was slain, or the blood of enemies, on the analogy of Isaiah 63:1-3, where a figure comes from Edom with garments stained from treading the winepress. Both readings have real support and Isaiah 63 is unmistakably in the background. Second, his weapon is a sharp sword coming out of his mouth, which is the same image as 1:16 and 2:12 and which in this book consistently means speech. Third, the armies of heaven follow him in fine linen, white and pure, which 19:8 has just told us is the righteous acts of the saints, and they are given nothing to do. Fourth, and most striking, there is no battle. The beast and the false prophet are seized. The rest are killed by the sword from his mouth. Revelation, a book accused of luxuriating in violence, declines to narrate its climactic war.

The two suppers in this chapter are set against each other deliberately. In 19:9 there is the marriage supper of the Lamb, and blessed are those invited to it. In 19:17-18 an angel calls the birds to the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings and captains and mighty men. Everyone in this book ends up at one supper or the other, as guest or as meal, and the contrast is drawn with a grimness that no commentary softens successfully.

Then 20:1 begins: 'Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven'. The phrase 'then I saw', kai eidon, is John's ordinary marker for a new vision, and it appears dozens of times in the book. Whether it means 'and the next thing that happened was' or simply 'and the next thing I was shown was' is the whole question of the next section, and the Greek by itself does not answer it.

Revelation 20:1-6 is the only passage in the Bible that mentions a thousand-year reign. That single fact deserves saying out loud at the start, because the weight resting on these six verses is out of all proportion to their length. The phrase chilia ete occurs six times in them. Everything else in Christian millennial thinking is built by combining this passage with texts from elsewhere that do not themselves mention a thousand years. Every reading below is doing that, and each should be judged on how well its combination holds.

Historic premillennialism holds that Christ returns first, in 19:11, and then reigns on earth for a thousand years, after which comes the final rebellion, the last judgement and the new creation. Its arguments are these. The narrative order of the book gives the return before the millennium, and there is no signal that 20:1 doubles back. There are two resurrections separated by a stated interval, and the same verb is used of both: if 'they came to life' in verse 4 means a spiritual rising while the identical Greek verb in verse 5 means bodily resurrection (the BSB's 'did not come back to life' in verse 5 already leans toward the second sense by adding 'back', which the Greek lacks, so amillennial readers will want to check the verb itself), then language has stopped carrying meaning, which is the substance of Henry Alford's famous protest in his commentary of 1861, paraphrased here rather than quoted. And this is the earliest attested reading. Papias held it, Justin Martyr held it and defended it in the Dialogue with Trypho, and Irenaeus set it out at length in the last chapters of Against Heresies, though Justin himself notes that there were right-minded Christians in his own day who did not hold it, which is a useful datum about how early the disagreement began. What it strains to explain is why an entire doctrine rests on one passage, what kind of world contains resurrected saints and mortal nations at the same time, and why, after a thousand years of Christ reigning visibly on earth, a released Satan finds nations like the sand of the sea ready to follow him. Premillennialists reply that a doctrine stated once is still stated, and that one clear passage is a description of Revelation 20 rather than an objection to it; that a mixed world of resurrected and mortal people is exactly what the Old Testament kingdom passages describe, Isaiah 65:20 among them, where the restored age still contains death; and that the final rebellion is the point rather than the embarrassment, since it demonstrates that evil is a condition of the human heart which even a perfect environment does not cure.

Dispensational premillennialism needs its own account rather than a footnote, both because it argues differently and because it is what most students in English-speaking churches have actually been taught. It was developed by J. N. Darby from the 1830s and carried worldwide by the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, and it holds that God works through distinct administrations, that Israel and the church are distinct peoples with distinct promises, and that the land and kingdom promises made to Israel therefore require a literal earthly fulfilment which the church has not absorbed. Its exegesis runs like this. Daniel 9:24-27 marks out seventy weeks of years, of which sixty-nine run to the Messiah and the seventieth remains unfulfilled, which supplies a future seven-year tribulation. 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 describes believers caught up to meet the Lord in the air, read as an event distinct from the public return of Revelation 19, and Revelation 3:10, the promise to keep Philadelphia from the hour of testing that is about to come upon the whole world, is read as the promise of that removal. The word ekklesia, church, runs all through Revelation 2 and 3, disappears from chapters 4 to 18 and does not return until 22:16, which is taken to indicate that the church is not on earth during the tribulation. Chapter 20 is then the literal earthly kingdom in which the promises to Israel are kept. What it strains to explain is each of those links. The argument from the absence of ekklesia is an argument from silence, and saints are plainly on earth throughout chapters 4 to 18. Daniel 9 says nothing about a gap between the sixty-ninth week and the seventieth. The Greek of 1 Thessalonians 4, and in particular apantesis, the word used of a city going out to meet an arriving dignitary and escorting him back in, reads more naturally as one arrival than as two. And 3:10 is a single clause carrying a great deal of structural weight. Dispensationalists reply that the recency of a system is not an argument against its exegesis, since the Reformers' doctrines were charged with novelty too; that the distinction between Israel and the church stands or falls on Romans 9 to 11 rather than on Revelation; and that the movement has already revised itself, since progressive dispensationalists such as Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock have softened the two-peoples distinction while keeping a future for Israel. Note also that this is a dispute inside premillennialism as much as about it: George Eldon Ladd was a premillennialist who argued at length against the dispensational form.

The postmillennial reading holds that the thousand years is a long period within history, still future or already begun, during which the gospel largely succeeds, the nations are substantially discipled, and the world is brought into a condition of righteousness and peace; Christ returns at the end of it. Its arguments are these. Scripture as a whole speaks of a kingdom that grows, from the mustard seed and the leaven to Psalm 2, Isaiah 2 and Isaiah 11, and Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:25 says Christ must reign until all his enemies are under his feet, which sounds like a process rather than a single blow. The Great Commission is a promise as much as a command, and the binding of Satan specifically so that he cannot deceive the nations reads naturally as the enabling of the worldwide mission. It has a serious pedigree: Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield were postmillennialists, and it was the majority Anglo-American Protestant expectation through most of the nineteenth century, restated in the twentieth by Loraine Boettner and more recently by a group of Reformed writers. What it strains to explain is the twentieth century, which is a blunt way of putting a real difficulty, and the order of Revelation 19 and 20, which on a natural reading puts the return before the thousand years rather than after. Its defenders reply, with some force, that it was abandoned for historical rather than exegetical reasons, and that losing confidence in a doctrine because the news is bad is not an argument.

The amillennial reading holds that the thousand years is the present age, running from the resurrection and ascension to the return, and that the number is symbolic, as every other number in this book is. Its arguments are these. The book recapitulates constantly, so 20:1 restarting rather than continuing is exactly what the rest of Revelation has trained the reader to expect. The binding of Satan is what the Gospels say the ministry of Jesus accomplished: Mark 3:27 has the strong man bound before his house is plundered, Luke 10:18 has Satan falling like lightning, John 12:31 has the prince of this world cast out. The binding in 20:3 is stated for a specific purpose, that he could not deceive the nations until the thousand years were complete (the Greek also has eti, 'any longer', which the BSB leaves untranslated), which describes precisely what changed when the gospel went to the Gentiles. And the people who reign are called souls, the same word as the souls under the altar in 6:9 who are plainly in heaven, so the first resurrection is the believer's passage at death into reigning life with Christ. Augustine set all this out in City of God, book 20, chapters 7 to 9, and was frank that he had once held the millenarian view himself; through Tyconius before him it became the standard Western reading, and it stands behind the Reformation confessions. What it strains to explain is the double use of the same verb in 20:4-5, which is the premillennial objection and is a real one, and the claim that Satan is currently bound, which is hard to hold next to 1 Peter 5:8 and next to the experience of most Christians in most centuries. Amillennialists answer that the binding is specific and limited rather than total, which the text does support, and some of them dislike the label, preferring to speak of a realised millennium, since they are not denying the thousand years but locating them.

So: what is settled and what is not. Settled is that this passage teaches a reign of Christ together with his people, the defeat and final judgement of Satan, and a resurrection to life for those who belonged to the Lamb. Not settled is when the reign happens, where it happens, what kind of thing it is, and how the six verses relate to the chapter before them. All three positions, and both forms of the first, have been held by people who read Greek carefully, who suffered for their faith, and who loved this book. None of them is the mark of orthodoxy and none is the mark of compromise. This course takes no side. What it asks of a student is the ability to state all three in the words their own defenders would use, and to notice when someone presents one of them as simply what the text says.

In 20:11 a great white throne appears and earth and heaven flee from the presence of the one seated on it. The dead, great and small, stand before it. Books are opened, and another book, the book of life. Twice in two verses (20:12-13) the text says the dead were judged according to their deeds. Then death and Hades themselves are thrown into the lake of fire, which the text calls the second death, and anyone whose name is not found written in the book of life is thrown in after them.

Two things in this scene are worth dwelling on before any argument starts. The first is that the last enemy destroyed is death, which is exactly where Paul lands in 1 Corinthians 15:26, and the destruction is described as death being thrown into the fire rather than merely ending. The second is the tension the passage sets up without resolving: people are judged by their works, and they are saved by being written in the book of the Lamb who was slain. Revelation does not explain how those fit together, and neither did most of the New Testament writers you have studied in this track; they simply asserted both.

The nature of final judgement is a genuine disagreement among Christians who take scripture seriously, and Revelation is one of the places it is fought. The historic majority position is eternal conscious punishment, and its strongest texts are here: 14:11 speaks of the smoke of their torment rising forever and ever, and 20:10 says the devil, the beast and the false prophet will be tormented day and night forever and ever. Conditionalism, also called annihilationism, holds that the lost finally cease to exist, and argues from the language of destruction and of the second death, and from the fact that immortality is presented in scripture as God's gift rather than a human possession; Edward Fudge argued it at length in The Fire That Consumes (1982), and John Stott expressed tentative sympathy for it in print in 1988, which caused considerable controversy at the time precisely because of who he was. Universal restoration holds that God finally brings all into the city, and appeals within Revelation itself to 21:24-26, where the nations walk by the city's light and the kings of the earth bring their glory in, to 22:2, where the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations, and to the open invitation of 22:17; a form of it associated with Origen was condemned in the sixth century, though historians argue about exactly what was condemned and by whom, and modern advocates include Thomas Talbott and David Bentley Hart.

The honest report is this. Eternal conscious punishment is the view of the great majority of the Christian tradition and has the most straightforward reading of 14:11 and 20:10 behind it. The other two are held by people within orthodox Christianity and are argued from texts rather than from sentiment, and the reason the argument keeps returning to Revelation is that Revelation itself puts the lake of fire in chapter 20 and the open gates and the healing of the nations in chapters 21 and 22, and does not tell the reader how to hold them together. For the third position in particular, Richard Bauckham's historical survey of universalism in Themelios 4.2, published in 1979, remains a fair place for a student to begin, though it surveys that one view rather than the whole debate. This lesson does not adjudicate it. It notes that a teacher who presents any of the three as obviously correct is not describing the state of the evidence.

'Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.' The loss of the sea is not a comment on oceans. In this book the sea is where the beast came from in 13:1, it is the ancient image of chaos held back at creation, and it is the highway along which the merchants of Babylon carried their cargo in chapter 18. What is gone is chaos, monstrosity and the trade in human beings that 18:13 lists last and pointedly: 'bodies and souls of slaves'.

Then the direction of travel, which you tested in the inquiry. The holy city comes down out of heaven from God, in 21:2 and again in 21:10. The loud voice from the throne announces that the dwelling place of God is with man. Nobody in Revelation 21 evacuates the earth. God moves in. The Greek noun behind 'dwelling place' is skene, a tent, the word used of the tabernacle in the wilderness, and the verb in the next clause is its cognate, so the sentence says something like: the tent of God is with humanity, and he will pitch his tent among them. The whole trajectory of the Old Testament, from a tent in a desert through a temple in a city to a glory that departed in Ezekiel 10, closes here.

The city is measured, as Ezekiel's city was measured, and the measurements are theological. It is a cube, twelve thousand stadia in length, width and height, which is somewhere near fourteen hundred miles in each direction, a figure no one is meant to build. The only cube in the Bible before this is the Most Holy Place in 1 Kings 6:20. The city is the Holy of Holies, enlarged to hold the nations, which is why 21:22 can say the thing it says: 'But I saw no temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.' Twelve gates named for the tribes of Israel, twelve foundations named for the apostles of the Lamb, and the wall measured at 144 cubits, which is twelve squared. The old people of God and the new are built into the same structure and neither is dissolved into the other.

Then the garden returns inside the city. A river of the water of life runs down the middle of the street, and the tree of life grows on both sides of it, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations. That is Genesis 2 and Ezekiel 47 in a single sentence. The tree that was guarded against humanity in Genesis 3:24 is standing in an open street behind gates that are never shut. And 22:3 says there will no longer be any curse, which reaches back past the flaming sword to the curse itself.

Two more details, and then the last sentence of the vision. 'They will see His face', in 22:4. Moses asked to see God's glory in Exodus 33:18 and was told in 33:20 that no one can see God's face and live. It is the thing chapter 4 declined to describe. Here it is simply given. And notice what the redeemed are said to do in 22:5: they reign, forever and ever. The last word on human destiny in the Bible is not rest, or contemplation, or absorption. It is a city, with culture and nations and glory carried into it, and work.

The book ends the way it began. The angel tells John these words are trustworthy and true, and that the Lord has sent him to show his servants what must soon take place. John falls down to worship the angel a second time and is refused a second time, with the same two words: worship God. And then, in 22:10, the reversal of Daniel: 'Do not seal up the words of prophecy in this book, because the time is near.' Whatever a reader concludes about the map of the future, the book's own last instruction about itself is that it is open.

The warning in 22:18-19 against adding to or taking away from the words of this book is often quoted as if it were a statement about the Bible as a whole. It is not, and a student should know why. Formulas of exactly this kind were a standard way of protecting the integrity of a written work in the ancient world. Deuteronomy 4:2 has one. The Letter of Aristeas has one guarding a translation. Greek and Near Eastern manuscripts carry them in colophons. What 22:18-19 protects is this scroll, against the ordinary hazards of copying and of editing to taste. It cannot be a statement about the canon, because no canon existed to make a statement about. The warning is serious and it is specific, and reading it as more than it says is itself a small instance of adding.

Then three voices in quick succession. The Spirit and the Bride say Come. The one who hears says Come. The one who is thirsty is told to come and drink the water of life freely. Then Jesus says 'Yes, I am coming soon', and the church answers 'Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!', which is the Greek of the Aramaic prayer Paul leaves untranslated at the end of 1 Corinthians. And then a letter closing: 'The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.' The strangest book in the Bible signs off like ordinary mail, which is what it always was.

This is the last lesson of the New Testament Survey, so look back across the whole track. You began Between the Testaments, in four hundred years that are not silent at all: Persian, Greek and Roman rule, the Maccabean revolt, synagogue and Septuagint, Pharisees and Sadducees and Essenes, and a live expectation of a coming king. The Four Gospels gave you four accounts and the synoptic problem, which this course left open, because the evidence leaves it open. Jesus set the man in his own Jewish world and showed you both what historical method can establish and where it runs out. Acts followed the gospel across borders it was not expected to cross. Paul gave you occasional letters written into real crises, and the New Perspective, which this course also left open. The General Letters gave you James and Paul on faith and works, and the long argument about whether they contradict each other or answer different questions. And Revelation has given you four reading schemes, a contested date, a contested number and three millennial positions, and has refused to tell you which to hold.

That refusal was the point, and it is the last thing this track has to teach. A reader who can only state their own position is not yet a reader; they are a repeater. The discipline this course has tried to build is the ability to give the other side its strongest form, to say plainly what the evidence settles and what it does not, and to hold a conviction and its alternatives in the same head at the same time without panic. That discipline is not scepticism. It is the ordinary honesty of someone who believes the text can bear being looked at. If you have it now, you can keep learning without a teacher, which is the only thing any teacher can actually give you. And you can hold this book the way its first readers did: as an open scroll, addressed to churches under pressure, whose centre is a throne, whose key is a slaughtered lamb, and whose last word is a prayer that he will come.