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This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened (Luke 21:32)
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The Kingdom of Israel
John Shepard
April 8, 2002
1,000 Year Millennium is Symbolic
The purpose of this article is to show that it is perfectly reasonable to interpret the 1,000 years of Revelation chapter 20 as symbolic.
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There are many uses of the phrase "a thousand" in the Old Testament that clearly refer to an exact number or a round number.
However, there are other uses that are clearly intended to be figurative. In these cases it means "all," "forever," "many" or "abundantly." By showing that this is a common usage for the phrase we are strengthening the case for amillennialism -- the viewpoint that there is no literal 1,000 year millennium.
Premillennialists base their doctrine of the literal 1,000 year millennium on the six occurrences of the phrase "a thousand years" in Revelation chapter 20. Their justification for doing this is the so-called "literal" hermeneutic in which all passages are interpreted literally unless there is sufficient grounds to interpret it figuratively.
As I show elsewhere much of the book of Revelation is symbolic so it is reasonable to interpret the thousand years of chapter 20 as symbolic also.
The case for doing this is strengthened when we observe that it is common in the Old Testament to interpret this phrase figuratively.
A few examples to illustrate the point:
If each generation is about 20 years then a literal interpretation of this verse would yield a time period of 20,000 years in which God remembers his covenant. But there is a contradiction if we do this. In the context the word "forever" has the same meaning as the phrase "a thousand generations." Thus the phrase "a thousand" is intended to mean "forever."
This passage is not intending to limit God's possession to only the cattle that are on a thousand hills. It is a figure of speech intending to say that God owns all the cattle. This is a usage of the phrase "a thousand" (which in this context is clearly a large number) to mean "all." God owns all the cattle.
This passage is not intending to limit God's blessing to an increase of only one thousand times. Rather it is a figurative way of saying that God is the source of "all" increase and "all" blessing.
The phrase "a thousand" is not intended to represent an exact number. Rather it is merely a large number.
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Clearly a figure of speech since people have never lived 2,000 years.
This is the verse that is usually used to support the idea that each day of the creation week corresponds to 1,000 years of human history. But actually, that is an incorrect interpretation. In the context, this passage is saying that 1,000 years (a long time to us humans) is like a day to God. So it's not "1 day = 1,000 years," instead it's "1,000 years (of human time) = 1 day (to God)."
Very much like the passage above.
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