Why I believe the thousand years of Revelation 20 describe the reign of Christ now

I have written a summary of what I believe about the last things, and in a recent article I looked at Revelation 20 and gave a fair hearing to the view that it describes a future earthly reign of Christ. What I have not done is lay out, from the ground up, the positive reasons for holding the view I hold. This article is my attempt to do that.

I want to be clear about what kind of article it is. It is not a reply to anyone. Godly, careful Christians read these matters differently, and I have learned from many of them. But most of what gets written on this subject is written in reaction, one side answering the other, and a reader can come away knowing every objection without ever having heard the case. So I will set the objections aside and show you, text by text, why I believe the kingdom of Christ is not a future arrangement waiting for its turn, but a present reality that will one day be brought to completion. If the case is sound, it will stand on its own.

The argument comes in eight parts, and they build on one another. I will begin with the way the Bible divides time, because once that is clear, much of the rest follows.

1. The Bible Knows Only Two Ages

Start with the way Jesus and the apostles divide time. They do not speak of three ages, or of a golden age tucked between this one and eternity. They speak of two. There is “this age,” and there is “the age to come,” and nothing else.

Jesus uses the division as though everyone already understood it. Blasphemy against the Spirit “will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come” (Matt. 12:32). Those who leave houses and family for His sake will receive a hundredfold “now in this time” and “in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:30; Luke 18:30). Paul says Christ has been raised above every name that is named, “not only in this age but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1:21). Two ages. This one, and the next. When the Gospels and the Epistles map time, those are the only two countries on it.

Now look at what Jesus says happens at the border between the two. The Sadducees came to Him with their puzzle about the woman married seven times, and His answer told them more than they asked. “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection” (Luke 20:34–36).

Read that slowly, because it settles the shape of things. This age is the age of marriage and death. The age to come is the age of resurrection, and in it people neither marry nor die. And the doorway from one to the other is the resurrection itself. You attain “that age” by attaining “the resurrection from the dead.” Jesus defines the age to come by two things: the dead are raised, and marrying and dying are over.

Now hold that definition next to the idea of a kingdom on this earth, after the resurrection, in which people still marry, still have children, and still die at a hundred years old. Those who hold that view will say, fairly, that Jesus in Luke 20 is describing the resurrected only, and that the ones marrying and dying are a different group, people who were never raised. On the first point they are right: Jesus is describing the resurrected. But that leaves a question, and the question is the point. Once “that age” has arrived, with the dead raised and immortal, does Scripture anywhere describe the marrying-and-dying order of “this age” carrying on beside it for a thousand years? Jesus does not. Paul, who knows only “this age” and “the one to come” (Eph. 1:21), does not. An age that has arrived, with its dead raised, in which the old order continues alongside it, is a category the view requires and no text names. That does not by itself disprove it. It does mean the burden lies with the one who needs it, and it means that when I read the rest of the New Testament, I read it expecting the two ages Jesus described and not a third.

That expectation is what the next seven parts will test. If the return of Christ, the resurrection, the judgment, and the new creation belong together on one day, then the two ages are exactly what Jesus said they were, and nothing is in between.

2. The Last Day Is One Day

If the Bible knows only two ages, the next question is what happens at the border between them. The answer is that the New Testament gathers everything onto a single day. It calls it “the last day,” “that day,” and “the day of the Lord,” and it puts the return of Christ, the resurrection, the judgment, and the new creation all on it together.

Jesus is the one who fixes the phrase. Four times in one chapter He promises to raise His people “on the last day” (John 6:39, 40, 44, 54). When Martha grieves for Lazarus, she answers Him with the same words, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24), and Jesus does not correct her timetable. He says He is the resurrection. And He puts the other side of that day in the same place: the one who rejects Him and does not receive His words “has a judge; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day” (John 12:48). The raising of His people and the judging of those who refused Him fall on the same day. There is one of them.

Then notice who is raised on it. “Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28–29). One voice, and everyone in the tombs answers it, the righteous and the wicked together, each to their destination. The weight here is not on the word “hour,” which Jesus uses a few verses earlier for something already begun (John 5:25), but on the scope of the summons. Jesus does not describe two resurrections a thousand years apart, with the righteous raised first and the wicked left in the ground. He describes one summons that all who are in the tombs hear together.

His parables say the same thing. In the parable of the weeds, the wheat and the weeds grow together until the harvest, and “the harvest is the end of the age” (Matt. 13:39). At that one moment the angels gather the wicked to the furnace and the righteous shine in the kingdom of their Father (Matt. 13:40–43). Nothing sits between the growing season and the harvest. The dragnet parable a few verses later makes the identical point: at the end of the age the angels separate the evil from the righteous (Matt. 13:49–50). Separation, judgment, glory, one event.

The apostles took Jesus at His word. Paul tells the persecuted Thessalonians that God will “grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God” (2 Thess. 1:7–8). The church’s rest and the world’s judgment happen at the same appearing, “when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints” (2 Thess. 1:10). That is the passage’s claim, and I do not ask it for more than it gives: relief for the persecuted and judgment on their persecutors arrive together, at His revealing, not in two installments. Peter says the day of the Lord will come like a thief, the heavens will pass away, the earth and its works will be exposed, and out of that fire will come “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:10–13). The day the Lord returns is the day the present creation gives way to the new one. There is no interval in which the old earth continues under improved management.

There is one more text, and I have written about it at length in the earlier article, so I will only state it here. When Paul describes the resurrection of believers, he says that at that moment the saying will “come to pass” that “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:54). He is quoting Isaiah 25:8, a promise that death is swallowed up forever and tears wiped from all faces, the same promise John uses when there is no more death at all in the new creation (Rev. 21:4). Paul does not say the promise begins to come to pass when the saints are raised. He says it comes to pass. A thousand further years of dying on this earth, after the saints are raised, is hard to fit inside a sentence that says death has been swallowed up.

Put those texts side by side and one thing stands out. In every passage we have looked at, the return of Christ is described as the end. Not the beginning of a further stage of history on this earth, but the close of the age, the emptying of the tombs, the separating of the harvest, the passing of the old creation, and the arrival of the new.

This is not a small matter of sequencing. It is the difference between two whole pictures of what we are waiting for. If the last day is one day, then the return of Christ is the finish line, and the church’s hope is not a thousand more years on this earth but the new creation itself, entered the moment He appears. That is the hope the apostles held out, and it is the one I hold.

3. The King Is Already on David’s Throne

If the return of Christ is the end of the age rather than the beginning of His reign, then His reign must already be underway. The New Testament says exactly that, and it says it in the most specific terms possible: Jesus is now seated on David’s throne.

That matters because David’s throne is the throne the Old Testament promised. God swore to David that his descendant would sit on it forever (2 Sam. 7:12–16). Gabriel told Mary that her Son would receive “the throne of his father David” and that “of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:32–33). Israel’s whole hope was tied to that seat. So the question is not whether Jesus reigns in some general way. The question is whether He has taken that particular throne, or whether it stands empty until He comes back.

Peter answered that question in the first Christian sermon ever preached. On the day of Pentecost, with the Spirit just poured out, he reminded the crowd that David was a prophet who knew “that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne” (Acts 2:30). Then he told them how God kept that oath. David foresaw the resurrection of the Christ (v. 31). God raised Jesus from the dead (v. 32). And “being therefore exalted at the right hand of God,” Jesus poured out the Spirit the crowd could see and hear (v. 33). Follow the thread. The oath was about David’s throne. Peter says the fulfillment was the resurrection and the exaltation. He does not use the sentence “the seat at God’s right hand is David’s throne”; that is my summary of his argument. But I do not see where else it can go. If the oath to seat David’s son on David’s throne was kept when Jesus rose and was exalted, then the seat He was exalted to is the one the oath was about. Peter is not saying Jesus went to heaven to wait for David’s throne. He is saying the promise has been kept. And so the sermon lands: “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (v. 36). Made. Past tense. On that day.

Paul preached the same thing in Pisidian Antioch. The resurrection of Jesus, he said, is how God has given us “the holy and sure blessings of David” (Acts 13:34). The Davidic promises were not shelved at the resurrection; they were delivered by it. And when the leaders of the church met in Jerusalem to decide what to do about all the Gentiles who were believing, James settled the matter by quoting Amos. God had promised, “I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen” (Acts 15:16). James did not say that rebuilding was still centuries off. He said it was happening before them, and the proof was Gentiles coming to faith (Acts 15:14–17). The house of David was being restored, and the nations were being gathered into it, through the preaching of the gospel.

This is why John, writing to churches under persecution, does not comfort them with a coming reign. He calls Jesus “the ruler of kings on earth” in the present tense (Rev. 1:5). It is why Paul says He “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (1 Cor. 15:25), which only makes sense if the reigning is going on now while enemies remain. The King is on the throne. The last enemy is not yet destroyed. Both are true at once, and the Bible holds them together without strain.

So when I say the kingdom is here, I mean it in the most concrete sense the Bible allows. The throne God promised to David is not vacant. It has been occupied since the risen Christ ascended and sat down at the Father’s right hand, and every knee that bows to Him today bows to a King who is already crowned.

4. The Kingdom Is Present, and It Comes by New Birth

If the King is on His throne, He has a kingdom. And when you read what Jesus said about that kingdom, two things become clear: it is here now, and it is not the kind of kingdom you can find on a map.

Jesus began His ministry with an announcement, not a forecast. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15). When He cast out demons, He said, “the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt. 12:28). When the Pharisees asked Him when the kingdom would arrive, expecting Him to name a date or point to a sign, He told them they were looking in the wrong direction. “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:20–21). They wanted a kingdom they could watch arriving. He told them it was already standing among them, and they had missed it.

Then He told Pilate what kind of kingdom it was. “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). That does not mean it has nothing to do with this world. It means it does not come from this world or run on this world’s machinery. It has no borders, no army, no capital city. Paul defines it the same way: “the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17). Its substance is spiritual before it is anything else.

And the way in is not by birth but by rebirth. Jesus told Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel, that “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Being descended from Abraham did not get Nicodemus in. Being a Pharisee did not get him in. Nothing about his nation, his lineage, or his standing counted. The door to this kingdom is the new birth, and the Spirit works the new birth. That is why Paul can say to ordinary believers in Colossae, most of them Gentiles with no claim on Israel at all, that God “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col. 1:13). Transferred. Already. They were citizens of the kingdom while they sat in a house church in a small town in Asia Minor, because they had been born from above.

Jesus even told us how the kingdom would grow. Like a mustard seed, from the smallest of beginnings to a tree the birds nest in. Like leaven, working quietly through the whole batch of dough until all of it is changed (Matt. 13:31–33). Neither picture is of a kingdom that arrives all at once by force. Both are pictures of a kingdom already planted and already working, growing until it fills everything.

None of this means the kingdom is only spiritual, or that it will never be visible. It will be, gloriously, on the day the King appears. But the order matters. The kingdom has not been postponed to that day. It has been present since the King came, hidden in the hearts of the born again, spreading through the world like leaven, and waiting only to be revealed in full. When we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” we are not asking God to start something. We are asking Him to finish what He has already begun.

5. The Strong Man Is Bound

We come now to the passage everyone thinks of first, and I have saved it until the ground was prepared. Revelation 20 opens with an angel seizing “the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan,” binding him for a thousand years, and sealing him in the pit “so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended” (Rev. 20:2–3). The question is when that happened. I believe it happened at the first coming of Christ, and I believe that because the Gospels say so in almost the same words.

Jesus described His own ministry as the binding of Satan. When the Pharisees accused Him of casting out demons by the devil’s power, He answered with a picture. “How can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house” (Matt. 12:29). The strong man is Satan. The house is his hold on people. The plundering is every demon cast out and every captive freed. And the binding, Jesus says, has already taken place; that is why the plundering is possible. When the seventy-two came back rejoicing that demons submitted to them, He told them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). And as the cross drew near He said, “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out” (John 12:31). Now. Not at the end of the age. At the cross.

The apostles say the same. Through His death, Christ destroyed “the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb. 2:14). On the cross He “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (Col. 2:15). Bound, cast out, fallen, destroyed, disarmed, shamed, triumphed over. That is the New Testament’s vocabulary for what happened to Satan at the first coming. When John then shows us Satan bound and thrown down, he is not introducing a new event. He is showing us the one the Gospels already announced, from heaven’s side.

And notice what John says the binding is for. Not that Satan can no longer tempt, accuse, or trouble the saints. Specifically, “that he might not deceive the nations any longer.” That is a claim about the nations, and it is worth holding up against what has happened to the nations since.

In the first century, the church existed in a handful of cities around one sea. The nations beyond that ring lay, as far as any record shows, in the darkness Paul describes, “having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). God had “allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways” (Acts 14:16); those were “the times of ignorance” (Acts 17:30). I was born in Chester, England. The Romans built it as a legionary fortress in the 70s AD, and there is no evidence of a Christian there in the first century. The first written mention of the faith anywhere in Britain comes around AD 200, and a settled church with its own bishops is not visible until the early fourth century. We do know what the soldiers at Chester worshiped: Minerva, whose shrine is still cut into the rock at Handbridge.

I am writing this from Arizona, where two thousand years ago no one had heard the name of Jesus. Today there is a church here, and there are churches in Chester, and in Lagos and Seoul and São Paulo and a thousand other places the apostles never saw. The risen Christ sent Paul to the Gentiles “to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:18), and that is exactly what has been going on ever since. I do not offer a congregation in Peoria, Arizona, as proof of how Revelation 20 should be read. Someone who reads it differently can rejoice in the same congregation. I offer it as what the binding looks like if John is telling the truth about the nations: the strong man bound, and his house being plundered, in places he once held without a rival.

Some reject this reading for one simple reason. They look at the world and say, “Satan does not look bound to me.” I understand the objection, but it comes from a picture rather than from the text. Revelation is a book of pictures, and this one comes with its own explanation attached. The angel binds Satan for a stated purpose, and the purpose is that he can no longer keep the nations in the dark. John does not say Satan can no longer do anything. The chain has a length, and the text tells us what it is.

Scripture speaks this way about Satan already. Paul says that at the cross Christ “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame” (Col. 2:15), and the same Paul tells the Ephesians that the devil is “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2) and that they must stand “against the schemes of the devil” (Eph. 6:11). Disarmed, and still scheming. One apostle says both, and he sees no contradiction, because a defeated enemy is not a dead one. Peter says the devil “prowls around like a roaring lion” (1 Pet. 5:8); Jesus says the strong man is bound and his house is being plundered (Matt. 12:29), and the strong man does not lie still while it happens. That is what the shut and sealed pit pictures: not that Satan can do nothing, but that the one thing John names, the holding of the nations in darkness, is closed to him. Or, in an older and homelier picture, a chained dog can still bite anyone who wanders within reach; what it can no longer do is roam the neighborhood.

And John tells us what it will look like when the chain comes off. Satan will “come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth” and gather them for war against “the camp of the saints and the beloved city” (Rev. 20:7–9). The loosing is a worldwide muster against the church. The binding is its opposite: the nations open to the gospel, and the church spreading among them, hindered often, stopped never. That is the age we live in, and it has been going on for two thousand years.

6. What John Actually Saw

I have saved the passage that gives this view its name until now, because Revelation 20 reads very differently once the rest of the New Testament has been heard first. But it has to be read, all of it, and read the way John wrote it.

Start by noticing what kind of writing this is. In the space of a few verses John sees a key to a bottomless pit, a chain long enough to bind a spirit, a dragon who is also a serpent, a pit that can be shut and sealed, thrones, the souls of slain witnesses, a beast, a mark on foreheads, an army as numerous as the sand of the sea, a camp, a beloved city, fire from heaven, a lake of fire, a second death, and books opened for judgment. No one takes the chain to be iron. No one thinks the pit has a lid. No one believes Satan is a reptile. Every reader of this chapter, whatever his view of the millennium, reads it as a vision made of pictures, and then asks what the pictures mean. That is not a departure from reading the Bible literally. It is what reading the Bible literally has always meant: reading each part according to the kind of writing it is. A parable is read as a parable, a psalm as a psalm, a letter as a letter, and a vision as a vision. We do not take the mustard seed to be about farming or the Good Samaritan to be a police report, and no one is accused of “spiritualizing” for it. The book’s own first verse points the same way. When John says God “made it known” to him, the word he chooses is one that means to show by signs, and the contents bear that out from the first vision to the last. To read the book as signs is to read it literally. So the question was never literal versus symbolic. Everyone reads symbols here. The question is what the symbols stand for. And in a chapter where the chain, the pit, the dragon, and the second death are all pictures, the thousand years is not the one item that has to be a calendar.

Numbers in Revelation often carry meaning as well as, or instead of, measurement. There were seven real churches in Asia, and the number still says something about the whole church. Twelve gates, twelve foundations, twelve thousand from each of twelve tribes. Forty-two months, twelve hundred and sixty days, a time and times and half a time. Six hundred sixty-six. In a book that uses numbers this way, what “a thousand years” means has to be settled from its setting, not assumed. And the setting points to fullness. Elsewhere in Scripture a thousand is the number of a complete, God-sized quantity: God owns “the cattle on a thousand hills” (Ps. 50:10), and “a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday” (Ps. 90:4), a line Peter picks up to say that with the Lord “a thousand years” are “as one day” (2 Pet. 3:8). Six times in six verses John says “a thousand years,” and I take it each time in that sense: a long, complete, God-appointed span, whose exact length is His to know. It is Christ’s reign in its fullness, measured by God, not by us.

Now the thrones. “Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years” (Rev. 20:4). Notice what John says he sees. The first company, those to whom judgment is committed, he does not describe further; the second he calls “souls,” the souls of the beheaded. The verse does not say where the thrones are. What tells me is a scene earlier in the book. There John saw “under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God” and heard them cry out for justice, and they were told to rest a little longer (Rev. 6:9–11). That altar is in heaven, and those are the same kind of people, described in the same words, souls of the slain. Here they are again, and they are no longer under the altar crying out; they are on thrones, reigning, and with them all who refused the beast’s mark. I read the two scenes as one company at two moments, and so I take the thrones to be where the altar was. These are the faithful dead, alive with Christ and sharing His rule now. Jesus said as much about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: God “is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him” (Luke 20:38). To die in Christ is not to stop living. It is to reign.

Now notice what John calls this. “The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power” (Rev. 20:5–6). Let the vision speak first. The first resurrection is what John has just shown us: souls of the slain, alive and reigning with Christ. That is what he means by it, because that is what he has just called it. And then he sets it beside its opposite. There is a first resurrection, and there is a second death, and he tells us what the second death is: “the lake of fire” (Rev. 20:14). It is not a second physical dying. It is the final and eternal separation from God that follows the judgment. So the two deaths in this chapter are not the same kind of thing, and that at least opens the door to the two resurrections not being the same kind of thing either. Whether we should walk through that door depends on what kind of coming-to-life John is showing. I read it as the life of the faithful dead with Christ, and not as a rising of bodies from tombs, for three reasons taken together: the souls he sees are the souls of chapter 6, whose bodies were slain and who were told to wait; the one bodily resurrection the rest of the New Testament knows is the last-day summons of all who are in the tombs, righteous and wicked at once; and the book’s own structure, which I will come to, places this scene inside the present age rather than after it. On that reading, their bodies are still in the ground while John watches them reign. I hold that as the conclusion of the reading, not as something the verse states, and I think it is the reading on which the verse and the rest of Scripture agree.

Where did that life come from? It began before they died. Jesus said, “an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (John 5:25), and Paul says God “made us alive together with Christ” and “raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places” (Eph. 2:5–6). The martyrs on their thrones are people who heard the Son and lived, and whose life was not interrupted by the executioner. That is the ground of what John sees. It is not a second definition of it. The first resurrection, as the vision paints it, is the faithful dead alive and reigning; the life they have is the life every believer receives in Christ, which death does not end.

“The rest of the dead” have no such life. John uses the same words for them, “did not come to life,” and the difference is not in the words but in what the chapter shows. The first company lives and reigns before the last day. The rest do not live until the thousand years are ended, and when they do, verses 12 and 13 tell us what that looks like: the sea gives up its dead, Death and Hades give up theirs, and they stand before the great white throne to be judged. That is the bodily rising of John 5:28–29, the single summons of the last day, and for these it is the resurrection of judgment. Whoever shares the first resurrection will never face the second death. Whoever does not stays dead until that summons, and rises only to meet it.

Read this way, the chapter holds together with the rest of the New Testament. One bodily resurrection occurs on the last day, exactly as Jesus and Paul said. There is one judgment, and John describes it a few verses later before the great white throne. And there is a reign of Christ with His saints throughout the whole of this age, in heaven with the martyrs on their thrones and on earth in the church, until the day He comes.

One last thing. Revelation 20 does not come after Revelation 19 the way Tuesday comes after Monday. “Then I saw” tells us what John saw next, not what happened next; the phrase allows a vision to return to earlier events, though it does not by itself prove that this one does. What suggests it does is the shape of the book. Revelation tells the story of this age several times over, from different angles, and each telling runs to the end: the seals end at the end, the trumpets end at the end, the bowls end at the end.

And the battle at the close of chapter 20 follows the same central pattern as the battle at the close of chapter 19. In both, the nations are gathered for war against the Lord and His people. In both, the gathering is the devil’s work. In both, the enemies are destroyed at a stroke, by the returning Christ in one, by fire from heaven in the other, with the same language of assembling for battle that chapter 16 used for the war on “the great day of God the Almighty” (Rev. 16:14). And the names John gives the enemy in chapter 20, Gog and Magog, are taken from Ezekiel 38 and 39, where they name the final assault on God’s people before the age of God dwelling with them.

Those who read chapter 20 as describing a later era account for its rebels as the descendants of mortals who entered the kingdom. I know that explanation, and I have said elsewhere why I think such a population fits no text. But my reason for reading the two battles as one is not that the second has no one to fight. It is that the second follows the shape of the first in every part that matters: the gathering, the instigator, the assault, the sudden end.

The chapter then goes back to the beginning of the age to show us what the whole of it looked like from heaven: the dragon bound, the martyrs reigning, the church at work among the nations, and at the very end the brief loosing, the last assault, and the judgment. Everything after that is the new heaven and the new earth, which is where every other line in the New Testament has already told us the return of Christ leads. I hold that reading of the book’s structure as a reading, not as a proof. But it is the reading on which the chapter fits the rest of the New Testament without remainder, and I have not found another on which it does.

7. Christ Is the Temple, and the Sacrifice Is Finished

So far, every part has been about time: which age we are in, what day we are waiting for, when the King was crowned, when the strong man was bound, what John saw. This one is about worship, and for me it was the most decisive of all. I should say plainly what it addresses. Not every premillennialist expects animal sacrifices to return; some hold a future earthly reign without them. But the historic reading of Ezekiel’s temple vision in the tradition I was taught, and still the common one, does expect them, and that is the view I held. If the Old Testament’s temple, priesthood, and sacrifices have been fulfilled in Christ and set aside for good, then Scripture leaves no room for a future kingdom built around a temple, a priesthood, and sacrifices. Hebrews closes that door, and it closes it hard.

Start with what Jesus said about Himself. Standing in the temple courts, He told the authorities, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” John explains that “he was speaking about the temple of his body” (John 2:19–21). The temple was where God dwelt among His people and where He dealt with sin. Jesus claimed to be that place in person. And to the Samaritan woman, who wanted to know which mountain was the right one for worship, He said the whole question was about to expire. “The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.” Then, so no one could push it off into the distance: “the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:21, 23). Now here. Not after a rebuilt temple. Then, in that hour, with Him.

Hebrews takes that and builds a whole argument on it. The old covenant, with its sanctuary and its priests, was “a shadow of the good things to come” (Heb. 10:1). The blood of animals never removed sin; “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb. 10:4). Hebrews does not say those sacrifices did nothing. It says the blood of goats and bulls sanctified “for the purification of the flesh,” and then contrasts it with the blood of Christ, which purifies “our conscience from dead works” (Heb. 9:13–14). They did what God appointed them to do at the level of the flesh, and they were repeated year after year precisely because they could never do what Christ’s sacrifice did. Christ finished it. He “entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (Heb. 9:12). He “offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins” and then “sat down at the right hand of God,” because there was nothing left to offer (Heb. 10:12). And “by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Heb. 10:14).

And then the sentence that settles the matter: “Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin” (Heb. 10:18). No longer. Any. The writer is not saying animal sacrifices have paused. He is saying the category is closed. Forgiveness has been secured, and an offering for sin after that is not a lesser thing or a reminder; it contradicts what the cross accomplished.

Hebrews says the same about the covenant that housed those sacrifices. “In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away” (Heb. 8:13). Obsolete is a strong word, and the Spirit chose it. The old order was not put in storage for later use. It was retired, because the thing it pointed to had arrived. Paul says it in one line: the festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths “are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col. 2:17). You do not go back to the shadow once you have the substance.

Where I had to stop

I should tell you that I did not always read it this way. For more than thirty years I held that Christ would return to reign on this earth for a thousand years, and I taught it publicly, in churches and at conferences. I was not looking for a way out of it. What moved me was not a book or an argument. It was a picture I couldn’t bring myself to look at.

The picture is this. Christ is on His throne in Jerusalem, visibly, bodily, the Lamb who was slain, with the marks of the nails still in His hands. And a few hundred yards away, in a temple built for the purpose, priests are cutting the throats of bulls and goats and sprinkling their blood on an altar to make atonement. Ezekiel’s temple vision does not describe those sacrifices vaguely. It calls them sin offerings. Some of its atonement language concerns the altar and the sanctuary themselves, and I do not want to press those verses beyond what they say. But it also says the offerings are “to make atonement on behalf of the house of Israel” (Ezek. 45:17), atonement for people, in the presence of the King. I knew the attempted explanations. I had given them. The sacrifices are only ceremonial, cleansing the unclean rather than forgiving sin. They are memorials, looking back to the cross the way the Lord’s Supper does. They are for people in mortal bodies who need ritual purity before a holy God.

In the end, I could not make any of it hold. Start with the ceremonial explanation, since it is the most serious. Hebrews has already told us what the old sacrifices could and could not do: they purified the flesh, and they could not cleanse the conscience (Heb. 9:13–14). It also tells us what a truly effective sacrifice produces: worshipers who, “having once been cleansed,” would “no longer have any consciousness of sins” (Heb. 10:2). Christ’s people are those worshipers. To bring them back to a purification of the flesh, in the presence of the One whose blood has cleansed their consciences, is to give them a lesser thing after the greater has come. And Hebrews says the old sacrifices were repeated year after year precisely because they could never finish the work, so that their repetition was itself “a reminder of sins every year” (Heb. 10:3). A sacrifice that reminds you of sin is the opposite of a sacrifice that declares sin finished. And the Lord’s Supper is not a parallel. The Supper is bread and wine, not blood. Christ Himself commanded it. Paul says we keep it to proclaim the Lord’s death “until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26), meaning it is a memorial of His death kept during His bodily absence, meant to end when He appears. A blood sacrifice offered in the physical presence of the Lamb is not a memorial kept in His absence. It is a second altar before the One who said, “It is finished.” A view of the end times that requires a scene like that, a scene which, described plainly, can only be called blasphemy, ought at least to give us much pause.

That was where I had to stop. I could not find any way to describe that scene without denying what the cross accomplished. The whole letter to the Hebrews was written to keep Jewish Christians from going back to the altar, on the grounds that Christ “has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb. 9:26). I did not see how I could teach that the King Himself would preside over a return to it. So I went back to the text, and the rest of what I have written in this article is what I found.

Some years later I preached through Hebrews, more than eighty sermons, start to finish. I had already changed my position before the first. But I want to tell you what that series did. Week after week, chapter after chapter, the writer pressed the same thing: once for all, a single offering, no longer any offering for sin, sat down. He does not say it once and move on. He says it from every direction he can find, because his readers were tempted to go back, and he would not let them. Preaching that book to a congregation, month after month, did not merely confirm what I had come to believe. It underlined it in a way I have never been able to unsee.

So where is the temple now? The apostles answer without hesitation: it is the church. Believers are “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone,” and are “being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Eph. 2:20–22). Peter calls Christians “living stones” being built up as “a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:5). There is a temple, a priesthood, and there are sacrifices in this age. The temple is the people of God, the priests are every believer, and the sacrifices are praise, obedience, and lives poured out. Nothing about that is a downgrade from stone and blood. It is what stone and blood were always pointing to.

And when John is shown the final state of things, he tells us plainly: “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev. 21:22). The end of the story is not a restored temple. It is no temple at all, because God and the Lamb are present without any building in between.

I know Ezekiel’s closing chapters describe a temple in great detail, and I take those chapters seriously. But I read them the way the New Testament teaches me to read the whole Old Testament: as a picture drawn in the only language Ezekiel’s hearers had, pointing to a reality larger than the picture. The river that flows from Ezekiel’s temple and brings life wherever it goes (Ezek. 47) reappears in Revelation 22, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb, in a city with no temple. That is how the Bible itself handles Ezekiel’s vision. The building was the shadow; Christ and His people are the substance; and there is no longer any offering for sin.

8. The Inheritance Is the Whole Earth Made New

One more question a Christian will rightly ask. If the kingdom is present and spiritual, if the King reigns from heaven and the temple is His people, what became of the land? God promised Abraham a specific country, with borders. Did that promise get quietly dropped? It did not. It got bigger.

Paul tells us how much bigger. Writing about the promise to Abraham, he says it was “the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world” (Rom. 4:13). Not heir of Canaan. Heir of the world. Paul is not misquoting Genesis; he is reading it the way Abraham himself learned to read it. Hebrews says that Abraham, living in the very land God had promised him, “was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10). Then it says of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob together that they “died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (Heb. 11:13). Strangers and exiles in Canaan. The land they walked on was really promised and really given. It was not the fullness of what they were waiting for. “They desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:16).

Jesus said the same in one line. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5). He is quoting Psalm 37, which promised the land to those who wait on the Lord. The word is the same in both places and can mean either land or earth; what settles its reach is not the word but the setting: a beatitude spoken to a kingdom drawn from every nation, and Paul’s plain statement that Abraham’s inheritance was the world. And Paul closes the loop for every believer, Jew or Gentile: “if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Gal. 3:29). The inheritance promised to Abraham is ours, and it is not a strip of the eastern Mediterranean. It is the creation itself, set free from its bondage to corruption and brought into “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21).

I have written at length elsewhere about the land promise, tracing it from Eden through Canaan to the new creation, and I will not repeat that here. It all comes to one sentence: Canaan was the shadow, Christ is the substance, and the renewed earth is the inheritance.

This is why I do not think the hope I am describing is a spiritual hope in the thin sense, all heaven and no earth. It is the most earthly hope there is. When John sees “a new heaven and a new earth,” he sees the holy city coming down out of heaven to the earth, and hears the announcement, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Rev. 21:1–3). God does not take His people away from the earth to be with Him. He comes to dwell with them on an earth made new. That is the inheritance. Not a thousand years of a better version of this world, with death still in it, but the world itself remade, with death gone, and the meek in possession of it forever.

What All This Adds Up To

Let me gather the eight together.

The Bible knows only two ages, and the doorway between them is the resurrection. The last day is one day when Christ returns, the dead are raised, the world is judged, and the new creation begins. The King is already on David’s throne, crowned at His resurrection and exaltation. His kingdom is already here, entered by new birth and growing like leaven. The strong man has been bound since the cross, and the nations he once held in darkness are being plundered by the gospel. Revelation 20, read as the vision it is, shows that same age from heaven’s side: the martyrs reigning, one bodily resurrection still to come, and one last battle before the judgment. Christ is the temple and the finished sacrifice, and there is no longer any offering for sin. And the inheritance He secures is not a piece of land for a thousand years but the whole earth, made new, forever.

You will have noticed that nearly every one of the eight began in the Gospels and the Epistles rather than in the prophets. That is deliberate. The same Spirit who gave the Old Testament also gave the New, and in the New He tells us what He meant. So I read the old in the light of the new, and let the apostles show me where the promises land.

None of those eight argues against anyone. Each is a plain reading of what the New Testament says has happened and what it says will happen. A reader could grant several of them and still ask why a present reign rules out a further earthly phase after Christ returns. The answer is in the texts themselves. Paul says Christ reigns now, and must reign, “until he has put all his enemies under his feet,” and that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death”; and in the same chapter he places the swallowing up of death at the resurrection of believers (1 Cor. 15:24–26, 54). I read those two statements together, as I think Paul means them to be read: the reign that is going on now runs until death is destroyed, and death is destroyed when the saints are raised. There is no reign of Christ over a dying world after that, because there is no dying world after that. So when you set the eight side by side, they describe one thing: a kingdom that came when the King came, that has been advancing through this age by the power of the Spirit, and that will be revealed in full on the day the King returns. There is no missing piece waiting to be inserted between that day and eternity. The day He comes is the day it is finished.

That is why I titled this article as I did. The kingdom is not coming in the sense of not having started. It has come. It is here. It is in every congregation gathered around the Word in every nation on earth, in every sinner born again, in every knee that bows to Jesus now. What we are waiting for is not the beginning of His reign. We are waiting to see it.

And that changes how a Christian lives on an ordinary Tuesday. If the King is on the throne now, then prayer is not a message sent to a court not yet in session; it is spoken to a King who is already ruling, and every “Thy will be done” lands where it is meant to land. If the strong man is bound, then the neighbor who seems beyond reach is not beyond the gospel, because no nation and no one has been sealed off from it since the cross. If the King reigns now and His people live with Him, then the believer who is losing ground to illness or age is not waiting for a kingdom that will arrive some time after death; the moment this life ends, he goes to reign with the One who has already won. And if the sacrifice is finished, then there is nothing left for anyone to add, on this earth or any other, to what Christ has done. That is not a doctrine to argue about. It is a place to stand.

“Thy kingdom come” is still our prayer. But we pray it as citizens, not as applicants.

*The two earlier pieces referred to above are “A Summary of My Eschatological Convictions” and “What About the Millennium?“