God And His Word - A Question And Answer Approach To Understanding The Bible

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Hoekema proceeds to explain, using the principle of "progres sive parallelism," how the thousand years is to be interpreted: "According to this view, the book of Revelation consists of seven sections that run parallel to each other, each of which depicts the church and the world from the time of Christ's first coming to the time of his second." Revelation 20-22 constitutes the last of these seven sections and does not describe, therefore, what follows the return of Christ. "Revelation 20: 1 takes us back once again to the beginning of the New Testament era." It is generally understood that the first serious effort to inter pret Revelation 20 in a non-literal (nonmillenarian) way was by Augustine in the beginning of the fifth century. Since he was con vinced that the thousand-year period of Revelation 20 was the period between the first and second advents of Christ, he became disillusioned because the real world did not match the Bible's de scription of the Kingdom. He then came to feel that the Kingdom must be spiritual, not literal. In his treatise The City ofGod, he de scribed the thousand years as the period between the first advent and the final conflict. 6 William E. Cox, one of the leading exponents of amillennial ism, quotes Walvoord's definition favorably while attempting to define his own position: A good definition of amillennialism comes from the pen of one of its severest critics. "Its most general character is that of denial of a literal reign of Christ upon the earth. Satan is conceived as bound at the first coming of Christ. The present age between the first and second coming is the fulfillment of the millennium. Its adherents are divided on whether the millennium is being fulfilled now on the earth (Augustine) or whether it is being fulfilled by the saints in heaven (Kliefoth). It may be summed up in the idea that there will be no more millennium than there is now, and that the eter nal state immediately follows the second coming of Christ." 7 The amillennialist believes that the binding of Satan in Reve lation 20 occurred at the cross. God has now curtailed, but not annihilated, the influence of Satan during the Gospel age. This means Satan cannot prevent the spread of the Gospel to the na

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