20 Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. 2 And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, 3 and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.
In no chapter of Revelation has controversy raged more thoroughly than in this. There are two issues in the main involved: the question of the millennium and the problem of the two resurrections. These two are linked together, and interpretation of the second depends upon the interpretation placed on the first. We are told that Satan is bound for 1,000 years and cast into the bottomless pit, after which he must be loosed for a little season. We are then told of the saints of God who were beheaded for the witness of Jesus being raised to life and reign with Christ for a thousand years. This is called the first resurrection. Then we are told that at the end of the thousand years Satan is loosed and goes forth to deceive the nations and gather them together in the final battle in which he is destroyed and cast into the lake of fire, and the final judgment is heralded and ushered in. The controversy rests on the differing interpretations of the book as a whole - one, which we have followed in these Notes, taking the view that there are several parallel visions in Revelation is each of which the entire period between Christ's first and second comings is covered, the other, the dispensational, maintaining that each chapter follows on historically from the previous one. In the first, chapter 20 is taken as referring to events connected with Christ's first coming, but in the second, to the second coming. Clearly there can be no kind of reconciliation between two such diametrically contradictory views, and we must spend some time therefore in elaborating and substantiating what seems to be the more likely of the two, namely the first.