Summarize

"The thousand years. — There is some difficulty in determining what particular time is intended by the thousand years. The only aid furnished by the other sacred books in coming to a right understanding of this matter is, they seem to show that the number, a thousand, was used proverbially for many. Hence we read of a thousand generations for many generations, and one chasing a thousand for chasing many. Again, God says, " The cattle on a thousand hills are mine," where no one will pretend that the exact number of a thousand is intended. We read also, " A day in thy courts is better than a thousand," to which the same remark will apply. It will be remembered, that in determining what time was intended by the twelve hundred and sixty days, (Rev. xi. 3 ; xii. 6,) we maintained that all we could learn about it was, that it was the time of the church's depression and of the triumph of the Roman power. The thousand years, on the contrary, is the time of the church's prosperity, and of the dragon's restraint. It is not probable that the exact number, a thousand, was intended. The season described was what would appear to men to be a long time, although in the eye of God it might be a very short time, for a thousand years in his sight are but as yesterday ; Psa, xc. 4. The two events which particularly distinguish the thousand years are the restraining of the dragon, and the spiritual reign of the Christians (of whom the martyrs were made the representatives) with Christ upon the earth ; though it is not certain that the reign of the Christians was to close when the thousand years closed. Sir Isaac Newton supposed that what St. Peter said, about the thousand years, 2 Ep. ii. 4, he was led to say from what he had read in the Apocalypse ; and he believed for this, and many other reasons, that the Apocalypse was written before that epistle. — (p. 243.) We apprehend that the revelator borrowed his idea of the thousand yean from the Rabbins. Lightfoot says : " The Jews counted the days of the Messias a thousand years. The Babylon Talmud doth show their full opinion about the days of the Messias ; and amongst other things they say thus, as Aruch speaks their words : ' It is a tradition of the house of Elijah, that the righteous ones whom the blessed God shall raise from the dead, they shall no more return to the dust ; but those thousand years that the holy blessed God is to renew the world, he will give them wings as eagles, and they shall flee upon the waters.' The place in the Talmud is in Sanhedrim, fol. 92, where the text indeed hath not the word thousand, but the marginal gloss hath it, and shows how to understand the < thousand years.' And Aruch speaks it as a thing of undeniable knowledge and entertainment. And so speaks R. Eliezer, < The days of the Messias are a thousand years.' " — (Lightfoot's Works, Pitman's ed.. London, 1825, vol. iii.,' p. 361.) Obi serve the particulars of this tradition. During the thousand years, the righteous were to revive and fall no more : they were to mount up with wings as eagles and flee over the waters. Are not these the facts which the revelator incorporates into that section of the Apocalypse which we are now considering ? Hence Lightfoot says : " John all along this book doth intimate new stories by remembering old ones ; and useth not only the Old Testament phrase to express them by, but much allusion to custom, languages, and opinion of the Jews, that he might speak, as it were, closer to them and nearer their apprehensions, — so doth he here and forward." — (Idem, 361.) John uses the traditions of the Jews, in regard to the prosperity of the kingdom of the Messias, to describe the coming prosperity of the church during the dragon's restraint. He speaks of it as a thousand years, not at all for the purpose of describing the length of it, but because such had been the Rabbinical expression."