4 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 worshipped 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. 5 The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. 6 Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.
The next question that arises is that of the two resurrections. The dispensational view maintains that a literal period of a thousand years separates the resurrection of the righteous from that of the wicked. But this does violence to the general teaching of Scripture which elsewhere says something very different. And here an important principle of interpretation must be called into operation. It is that where there are seeming contradictions between statements in Scripture, we must start with those that are plain and unequivocal and interpret in this light those that are symbolic, and never vice versa. And since in Revelation we are dealing almost entirely with the symbolic, it is dangerous and misleading to seek to interpret plain statements made elsewhere, on the basis of symbolic categories that could mean something else, and could have a different interpretation. The plain statements we need to consider here are those such as are made in John 5:28, 29, 'The hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall.... come forth.... unto the resurrection of life...and... unto the resurrection of damnation'. Here one hour is specifically for one general resurrection. This emphasis is likewise made in Acts 24:15, which speaks of a 'resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust', and in Romans 2:5 (cf also Matthew 13:30, 42, 43, 49; Matthew 22:12, 13; Matthew 25:1-12, 14ff, 31ff). Since the preponderance of Scripture teaching is on one general resurrection, not two, these verses must necessarily refer to something else than the final resurrection. And this in fact is the case. For it is the souls (4) of the martyrs, not their bodies, that John sees. The reference is therefore to the translation of departed saints and martyrs to heaven. To understand this is to have a flood of light shed on what has been admittedly a difficult and thorny problem and to have innumerable complexities and perplexities swept away.