Millennial View: Rev

Millennial View

Binding of Satan

"What about the binding of Satan? Is he not a roaring lion looking for whom he may devour? Is not Satan's sway over the world, demonstrated by the rise of all sorts evil in our midst, proof that Jesus couldn't overcome the disobedience of the nation of Israel and the Satanic blindness of the nations and therefore inserted the church age as a stop gap while kingdom plans were 'put on hold'? It still appears to me that God had to change His plan from the initial, prophetic inauguration of the kingdom of David to one of merely gathering a few converts into a temporary institution called the church." (Moreover, to make this potential objection even more potent, we could add that many consider the binding of Satan in Rev. 20:2-3 as far different in its finality than any earlier defeat of Satan mentioned in Scripture because it says that Satan is "thrown into a bottomless pit.) "That", many premillennialists would say, "has not happened yet."

But do you realize that Jesus Himself viewed Satan as definitively bound by virtue of the inbreaking of the kingdom of God among men at His incarnation? See how Jesus reasons with his foes in Matthew 12:28-29: "If I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or, how can one enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man?"

Here Christ is arguing that his power over the demonic world, far from being proof of his alliance with Satan, is proof of Satan's defeat. He is declaring that He has bound the strong man. Yes, to be sure, Christ acknowledges that Satan still has an organized kingdom, which "stands" according to Matthew 12:26. Nothing Jesus says implies that Satan will henceforth be inactive in this world. But he is bound and defeated to the extent that he can stop neither the arrival nor the advance of the kingdom of God. "The kingdom has come." The proof of this, Jesus points out, is that Satan cannot stop the deliverance of those who had been previously under his domination.

So, yes, Jesus acknowledges that the kingdom of Satan is still "standing". And we would agree with those who say there are components of the glorious victory of Christ over all his enemies which await the second coming. But I don't believe such a consummation includes the binding of Satan in Revelation 20:2-3. Compare Jude, in the sixth verse of his book, who maintains that the very demons who were so active against Jesus' ministry and whom Jesus defeated in our previous text in Matt. 12 were already "bound and in prison" since the days of Noah! Nor were they active only during Jesus' ministry. For these very fallen angels, who are the demonic "principalities and powers" against whom we wrestle in the church according to Ephesians 6:11&12, are the ones Jude declares to be "chained in darkness ...