1000 thousand years is not literal

[GallagherM]

The Thousand Years: Symbolic Completion, Not Chronological Countdown
The idea that the "thousand years" in Revelation 20 is a literal span of time has fueled centuries of speculation, but I believe it's symbolic—a metaphor for the fullness or completeness of God's redemptive timeline, specifically marking the transition from the Mosaic age to the fullness of Christ's reign.

Scriptural Anchors for a Symbolic View:
• Revelation 20:2–6 speaks of Satan being bound for a thousand years, but this echoes other symbolic uses of numbers in apocalyptic literature. Just as “seven” often represents completeness, “a thousand” may represent the full scope of divine purpose—not a stopwatch.

• Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 remind us that “a thousand years is like a day” to the Lord. Time in prophetic literature often bends toward meaning, not measurement.
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• Hebrews 8:13 declares the Mosaic covenant “obsolete” and “ready to vanish away”—a clear signal that the old age was ending in the first century.

• Matthew 24:34: “This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.” Jesus was speaking to His contemporaries, not forecasting millennia ahead.

• Revelation 1:1 and 22:6 both emphasize that the events described were to happen “soon” and were “at hand.”

So why do we keep trying to pin down a date?
On Predictions Like 2037 or 2056: I’ve heard those too—2037, 2056, and countless others. But this pattern of prediction isn’t new. From the early church to modern forums, people have tried to decode the timeline. Yet Jesus Himself said in Matthew 24:36, “No one knows the day or hour.” That should humble us.
Instead of chasing dates, maybe we should ask: What did Jesus mean by “the end of the age”?

First-Century Fulfillment? It’s entirely plausible that the “end of the age” Jesus spoke of was the end of the Mosaic age, culminating in the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. That event marked a seismic shift in covenantal history. Jesus warned of it repeatedly:
• Matthew 23:36–38: “Your house is left to you desolate.”
• Luke 21:20–22: “These are the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled.”

This wasn’t about the end of the world—it was about the end of a world: the old covenant world.

 

[3 Resurrections]

The Thousand Years: Symbolic Completion, Not Chronological Countdown

The thousand years of Revelation 20 was both symbolic and chronological. And I deliberately speak in the past tense, since the literal thousand-year period is loooong past by now. The literal thousand years spanned the years of 968/967 BC until AD 33 - the years of a God-ordained physical temple system begun under Solomon. This millennium looked forward to Christ establishing the spiritual temple not made with hands, with Himself as the foundation stone - the "chief cornerstone" which the builders had rejected.

So why do we keep trying to pin down a date?

We keep trying to pin down a date because Scripture itself gives us time indicators as to exactly when the thousand years was "finished" and "expired". The date that ends the millennium is very simple. Revelation 20:5 tells us that the millennium was "finished" when the "first resurrection" occurred. That "first resurrection" was the year when "Christ the First-fruits" arose from the dead, along with the Matthew 27:52-53 saints who were raised from those broken-open graves around Jerusalem on the same day that Christ arose.

There were 144,000 of those Matthew 27:52-53 "First-fruits", according to Rev. 14:4. That means the Jewish Matthew 27:52-53 resurrected saints were the "remnant of the dead" in Rev. 20:5 which "lived again" at the time the thousand years was "finished". That means the Rev. 20 thousand years ENDED in AD 33 with the bodily resurrection of all the "First-fruits" of the "first resurrection" - which included Christ Himself as well as the Matthew 27:52-53 resurrected saints from all those Jewish tribes listed.

• Matthew 24:34: “This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.” Jesus was speaking to His contemporaries, not forecasting millennia ahead.

Amen to that. The end of the thousand years of Satan's deception of the nations being bound had already taken place even before John was writing Revelation. Satan's deception of the nations was again in full swing as soon as Christ had ascended to heaven and had cast Satan and all his devils down to earth, when they would plague the inhabitants of the world once more. John warned his readers in Revelation 12:12 that Satan was then operating in "great wrath" in those days, knowing he only had a "short time" left (the same as that "little time" after the thousand years had just ended in AD 33).

 

[mikesw]

The sense of 1000 is actually plural such that it can be an indefinite duration. Then we know that all this happens after the first century since Rev 12:14 shares the 3.5 years of Dan 7:25 and 12:11-12. These three and a half years then come in connection with the start of the kingdom in Dan 2:44-45 and 7:13-28.

The mention of the 1000s years end point in Rev 20 functions as a parenthetical point within Revelation that helps show the ultimate demise of Satan and to explain the protection of the Christians overall through troubles that would happen in this revived deception of nations against God, as seen in Rev 20:7-10

 

[GallagherM]

It's not literal.