The Coming Earthly Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, Part 3 B

You see, Satan is loosed in order to pull together all of the rebels to reveal the true character of these Christ-rejecting sinners, to bring it into the light so that the destruction is manifestly just. When you see the aerial coverage of the damage caused by a tornado, it can be stunning how one block of homes will be completely destroyed and the next block is relatively untouched.

And sometimes it's two houses side by side, one leveled, one left intact. Well, it's one thing to ride out a natural disaster, but there is no avoiding the calamity that will hit your life on the day that Christ returns. That is, unless you are prepared. So make sure you're ready for Christ's second coming. That's at the heart of John MacArthur's study called When Jesus Comes, here on Grace to You.

So follow along now with John as he looks at the unparalleled events prophesied in the book of Revelation. Just imagine a world where righteousness and goodness dominate. Imagine a world where there's total and lasting and enforced peace, where joy abounds, where health is widespread, where people live for hundreds of years. A world where there are lions and lambs lying down together and children can play in snake pits, where bears and cows walk together led by a child.

Imagine a world where food is profuse and well-being is common to everyone. Imagine a world ruled by one perfect person, one world ruler. And where under that world ruler only glorified, perfected people are the agents who carry out His will and His purpose so that perfection reigns from the top right on through the whole system.

Imagine a world where sin is dealt with instantly and firmly. Well, if you can imagine that kind of world, you're headed toward understanding the character of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the kingdom to come on a restored and radically reconstructed earth. It is coming because He is coming. And the chapter before us presents the general character of that glorious paradise regained. As the structure of the kingdom unfolds, remember that in chapter 19 is the return of Jesus Christ. He comes back. He comes back to the great battle of Armageddon, which He engages in. And at last, a very brief time, He destroys all the ungodly remaining on the world, as the end of chapter 19 tells us. And then in chapter 20, He sets up His kingdom. And the first thing we saw in the setup of the kingdom is the removal of Satan, the removal of Satan, verse 1. I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hand, and he laid hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years and threw him into the abyss and shut it and sealed it over him so that he should not deceive the nations any longer until the thousand years were completed.

After these things, he must be released for a short time. The second thing that I noted for you in our previous study is the reign of the saints. Look at verse 4.

This is another characteristic of the millennial kingdom, the thousand-year kingdom. Not only will Satan be bound, and consequently the world will be run by Jesus Christ Himself, who imparts that rule through His glorified saints from the Old Testament, the time of the Tribulation, and the New Testament as well. But we see here in verses 4 through 6 the reign of the saints. And I saw thrones, they sat upon them and judgment was given to them. I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of the testimony of Jesus and because of the Word of God and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received this mark upon their forehead and upon their hand, and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. In that verse, you have Old Testament saints, you have those who lived during the time in ministry of Christ, you have the New Testament saints, the Tribulation saints, all of them coming together. The rest of the dead didn't come to life until the thousand years were completed. This is the first resurrection. So you have all of the godly resurrected before the thousand years, as we noted, and you have the ungodly resurrected after the thousand years is over.

Well, that takes us to the third point. The removal of Satan, the reign of the saints is the character of the kingdom, but there's a third thing, and that's the return of Satan. We come down to verse 7, very important. When the thousand years are completed, Satan will be released from his prison, the return of Satan. Now, remind you again that during the kingdom, Satan has no part.

He plays no role. He's not there, and his demons aren't there with him. I think it's fair to assume that it wouldn't do much good if our Lord bound Satan and didn't bind all his millions of minions who were running loose in the earth. I think the whole system is bound. Satan's binding ends, however, at the close of the kingdom, and it doesn't tell us how.

It just says when the thousand years are completed, Satan is released from his prison. We don't know how he's released. It doesn't matter how he's released. The next question would be, why is he released? And that is the fair question. Why would God release him?

Well, that's more evident, and let me give it to you. No unsaved person will enter the kingdom. It appears if you take all of the prophecies with regard to the day of the Lord, the day of the Lord is exhaustive against the wicked, and all of them die. That means the only people going into the kingdom are the people who are believers, Jews whom the Lord has spared, and you know that He's going to do that. Revelation 12 tells us how He hides them in the wilderness so that the Antichrist can't destroy them. And Gentiles who have come to faith in the true Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who escaped the treachery of Antichrist and all the rest of the judgments that are going on, they go in in physical bodies just like we have right now.

They'll be no different than us. They'll go into the kingdom in their normal physical form. All the ungodly will be destroyed, and so all you have in the kingdom then are believers. All you have are the godly, those who belong to the Lord. If you need a word on that from Scripture, you might listen to Isaiah 60 and verse 21. Then all your people will be righteous.

They will possess the land forever. It is only the righteous who go into the kingdom. Verse 21 of chapter 19 after the slaughter of Armageddon says the rest were killed with the sword, and that's all of them. There is nothing in the Scripture that says any unbeliever survives the day of the Lord. You say, well, then they come into the kingdom and they have children.

Sure. And remember, the conditions are perfect, so they proliferate. And they live long, and they are productive for a long time, but they produce, guess what? Sinners, because that's all we can produce, right? Even in millennial conditions, we're going to produce sinners because we're fallen people, so their children are going to be sinners, and they're going to need to be saved. And amazingly, while many of them will come to faith in Christ and many of them will believe, many will not. In a thousand years, there can be millions of people on the globe.

The exponential reproduction growth will be rapid. And many of them, sad to say, will love their sin. And they are the ones that the Lord will judge in some cases by killing them, in some cases by some other kind of swift judgment, in some cases by holding back the reign so that they have to experience harsh living conditions, as we read earlier. They will love their sin, they will refuse His grace, and they will refuse the lordship of the King of all the earth.

It's an amazing thing to think about, actually. Though Jesus Christ reigns in a totally renewed universe, though He has absolute power over everything and everyone, though it's a perfect world, His glorious perfections are manifested through His person and His will and through all of the glorified saints who carry out His will, even though everything is exactly the way it ought to be, everything is right, everything is peaceful, there aren't any wars, everybody's weapons have been pounded into plowshares, everything is flourishing, all the economies of the world are doing very well, everything is prosperity on every front, everything is bliss, utopia has arrived, people will reject Christ. And it's important to make this reminder that people reject Christ because they love what? Sin. They are rebellious sinners, and they love their sin. And it really is not an issue what kind of world they're living in. I daresay there are people in this society today, many of them, millions of them, who would choose this kind of society or a worse kind of society over a society ruled by Jesus Christ.

Would they not? They have no particular love for righteousness. In Romans 8, 7, it says, the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God.

The mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God. They will have ample proof all around them that Jesus is God. They will have ample proof all around them that He is the Savior. They will have ample benefits by His lovingkindness and generosity and mercy and grace toward them. But in spite of all of that, they will reject Him. They will have all kinds of evidence of His miracle power and of His swift judgment, His equity. But like the willful sinners on the earth when Jesus came the first time, they will reject Him. The Pharisees, according to Matthew chapter 12, said about Jesus, He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons. They said, He's demonic. We hate Him.

Kill Him. How could they conclude that? Because they love their sin. They love their sin.

And so it isn't the environment that saves people, whether they're in a terrible one or a good one. They rejected Jesus the first time He came. And He showed them a glimpse of what a perfect world would be like. He basically banished disease from Palestine. He forgave sin over and over, day after day. He taught truth. He demonstrated lovingkindness, generosity. He created food for them to show them a little taste of what it was going to be like in the kingdom.

He fed them fish and loaves on the side of the sea. He gave them principles to make their life rich and rewarding, and when they had their chance, they screamed for His blood because they loved their sin. And that's the nature of depravity, and no matter what the environment is, doesn't change that. So Satan is loosed to offer cohesive leadership to bring all the rebels together so that what is latent can break loose. You say, why does God want it to break loose so He can destroy it? You see, Satan is loosed in order to pull together all of the rebels to reveal the true character of these Christ-rejecting sinners, to bring it into the light so that the destruction is manifestly just.

You see that? I mean, God could just kill them all, but that's not the way He does it. Before they are executed, before they are killed, their rebellion is manifest so that all the universe knows that the execution that God brings upon them is a righteous one.

So Satan is loosed to bring the rebels together, providing the cohesive leadership and the demonic force to pull them together to fight against Christ so that their latent opposition can be made manifest to the whole universe, and therefore God's devastation and destruction of them is seen as just and righteous. But a footnote here is appropriate, I think. The issue regarding salvation is never a lack of information.

I want you to get that. It's not a lack of information. Romans 1 says everybody has enough knowledge of God to be without what?

Excuse. It's not information. It's not a failure to have enough evidence presented to you to make a convincing enough case or to make Jesus lovely enough or to make the gospel winsome enough or convincing enough or to make it attractive enough. The issue in evangelization is that sinners love sin. John 3, their deeds are evil. They love sin.

Men love darkness rather than light, he says, because their deeds are evil. All these modern post-millennialists that we call Reconstructionists, all of these who are trying to bring the kingdom by capturing the institutions of men through political power, all these Christian political activists who keep saying, and I hear this over and over and over again, we have to get control of this country. We have to get our people in power if we want to have the freedom to preach the gospel and if we want to continue to see men come to Christ. And I want to say to them, that is not the issue. That is not the issue. Spending all your energy and all your time and all of your money to seek to create a cultural morality as if it somehow enhances the gospel betrays a failure to understand the depravity of man.

It doesn't matter what the environment is. And when I read that some politician spends 25 million dollars or 30 million or whatever amount of million they spend to get them into political power for some noble spiritual purpose, my conclusion is that that's a kind of obscenity. That's irrelevant to the advancement of the kingdom of God.

And I can only imagine what that same amount of money might do were it directed toward the gospel proclamation. We do well to consider that in the most moral culture this earth will ever know, man will love sin. Unless you think that's shocking, go back to the perfect environment in the Garden of Eden. And remember, there were only two people and they both chose sin. And they did it from innocence. What will humanity do from depravity?

It doesn't matter what age, it doesn't matter what kind of world they live in. Depraved people love sin. And it shows you something else, too. It doesn't take Satan. Whether Satan's present or absent has nothing to do with depravity. People say, well, you know, the devil's after me and, you know, I fell into sin.

I don't think so. If the devil was bound, you'd fall into sin. It's not the devil that makes you sin, it's the devil that creates the system that tempts you.

It's not like the devil runs into your mind and says, do this, do this, do this, do this. I wouldn't know if he does, frankly. I don't. I've never heard him. I wouldn't know if he was there saying anything.

I wouldn't know how I would know if he was saying anything. But I do know this system, which he has designed, throws temptation at me from every angle. So you can take Satan out of the system and you've still got depravity and you can put the man with depravity in a perfect environment and he's still going to love sin because that's his nature. It's what depravity is. It's not that everybody's as bad as they could be, possibly, but it's that everybody loves sin. Sin blinds sinners in every age.

You can work all you want to make cultural morality in this country and it's not going to redeem anybody. It's not going to change sinners. They love their sin. In fact, it'll just make sinners mad.

And haven't you seen that happen? Wherever there is the rise of some Christian in politics or whether it appears as though someone who has a high standard of morality is about to get elected, the battle gets really heated because sinners don't want any encroachment on their freedoms. So you have in the kingdom a generation of Christ, would-be Christ murderers rise. So man's depravity is not affected by environment. Satan's desperate wickedness and hatred of God and Christ are not at all altered by being in prison for a thousand years. He doesn't get any better. He gets worse.

Now he's madder than he's ever been. And when he's released from the pit after this thousand years, he comes out as evil as always and more hostile than ever. He doesn't change. Hell doesn't change people. Punishment doesn't change people.

It's not meant to do that. So you have the same wicked, vile, hostile fallen angel and you have depraved people and they get together at the end of the thousand years with the view of killing Christ. That takes us to verses 8 to 10, the revolt of society, the revolt of society.

And I'm just going to kind of introduce it because our time is really gone. But in verse 8 it says that Satan, when he's released from his prison, will come out to deceive the nations. Now as I said, nothing external can change men. Their environment doesn't change them. It's like a pig. You can give him a bath and put a ribbon around his neck and he's still a pig. It's not going to change his nature.

You can put him in the purest environment and he's still going to be what he is. And so now you've got Satan coming out and he's hating Christ more than he ever hated him. You've got man who is unmoved by peace and the rule of righteousness because he loves his sin.

And the combination leads to this revolt. Satan comes out to deceive the nations. Obviously he is a deceiver, he is a liar, and that's what he always does and this is no different. He's got to get them all to battle and he has to do it by deception. He's got to convince them it's going to make sense. I mean, look, these people know the power of Christ, they've been experiencing it for whatever length of time they've lived in the world. They've seen the rod of iron work. They've seen the swift and hasty judgment. They've seen him crack down on sinners. They've seen what happens to those who don't bow the knee to him. They know who he is.

They've seen his miracle power. There's not a question about that. There's no big debate about is Jesus really the king?

Is he really God? That is not a debate. It isn't a question of information. They know who he is.

They have ample information. And there would be a natural hesitancy on the part of these people to just go tackle him, take him on. And that's why it doesn't happen until Satan is released and can go out and by some means deceive them that this is a worthwhile enterprise. He has the ability to do it. Back in chapter 12 verse 9, the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan who deceives the whole world. He is a deceiver. He's always been a deceiver. He's always portrayed as a deceiver. Somehow he goes out and pulls off this incredible deception. Now back in verse 3, we saw that he had been deceiving the nations all along. He hasn't deceived them for a thousand years. Now he comes back in verse 7.

He's released in verse 8. His deception begins again. His primary function is always to lead people astray, always to deceive them. But, you know, just to remind you and it's an amazing thing to go back to this point that no matter what Satan does, he's just kind of carrying out God's purposes. Let's bow together then in a final word of prayer. What an amazing truth, Lord, it is that we are already citizens of the kingdom, we are already subjects of the king by faith, that even right now in our hearts we enjoy peace and righteousness, joy, power, truth, and wisdom. Lord, we are living in the kingdom now spiritually. Oh, how marvelous and wonderful it is to think about what it will be like to live in the kingdom in a glorified form literally.

What a glorious future awaits us. What an amazing glimpse into the coming kingdom. Father, we thank you.

We're literally overwhelmed on the one hand that we have been chosen to such glory and we are deeply grieved on the other for those who do not enjoy the first resurrection but experience the second resurrection and the second death. Who will never know your kingdom and your rule either spiritually or literally or eternally. What shall be cast into outer darkness where there's weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth forever. Father, thank you for your mercy and your grace.

Give us hearts of compassion. May we, like Paul, plead with men and women to come to Christ and escape the coming judgment. Oh, Lord, we thank you for that day in which you will remove Satan, in which the saints will reign, in which Satan coming back and leading a revolt will be finally and eternally defeated and we'll enter into eternal glory. Lord, we don't need to go through life wondering about the future.

You've laid it out so clearly. Thank you that by your mercy and grace you've made us a part of it for the glory of Christ. In whose name we pray.

Amen. Now, I know, John, that you've said why questions are tricky to answer, like why would God do this or that, but I'm going to ask you one anyway because it relates to prophecy, what we're talking about. Why do you suppose God would give so much insight into how human history will end?

Simple answer. He wanted us to know. He wanted us to know. There's no sense in a believer living in fear, doubt, questioning, but how bizarre is it that the Lord has given us so much revelation about the end and Christians insist on being confused?

Just makes no sense. God did not write the book of Revelation to confuse us, but to bless us. Blessed is the one who reads and understands this book. I think the end matters. I think God wants us to know how this ends.

The beginning matters. Hey, we fight for a literal interpretation of Genesis 1, 2, and 3. Why don't we fight for a literal interpretation of Revelation?

It's the same God and speaking with the same clarity. It is to me one of the most disturbing facts of the evangelical church that people and leaders, pastors, are content with a kind of default position on the book of Revelation that says, well, you know, could mean this, could mean that, not really sure, don't want to be dogmatic, don't deal with that. Every Christian needs to know the end of the story.

That's why it was revealed. Let me suggest that we have a resource that will help you understand the book of Revelation. You'll get it. It's titled, Because the Time is Near. It takes the entire book of Revelation verse by verse, condenses it into a 300-page book, and explains everything through that book, cohesively, coherently, taking the Word of God at face value. This explains all 22 chapters of Revelation verse by verse. The title of the book, Because the Time is Near, it's been very popular and well received. We'd love to get it into your hands.

Again, the cost is reasonable. It's a paperback book. You need to understand the truth of Revelation.

That's right. Friend, we want you to take hold of the blessing and joy that comes from reading and understanding the book of Revelation. So I would encourage you to pick up, Because the Time is Near, when you contact us today. You can order by calling us at 800-55-GRACE, or you can get the book through our website at GTY.org.

The title of the book again, Because the Time is Near. Pick up a copy in English or Spanish by calling 800-55-GRACE, or visit us online at GTY.org. And now, before today's broadcast ends, consider the tangible role you have in proclaiming biblical truth to hungry listeners when you support this ministry. Every day, Grace To You reaches people right where they are—at home, at work, on the go. And it is the support of listeners like you that helps make this Bible teaching ministry possible. To connect people with verse-by-verse teaching in your community and beyond, mail your tax-deductible gift to Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. You can also donate online at GTY.org, or when you call us during regular workday hours at 800-55-GRACE. That's our toll-free phone number, and it translates to 800-554-7223. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to join us tomorrow when John looks at the climax of our Lord's reign on earth—the final defeat of Satan. John continues his study titled, When Jesus Comes, with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.