Anonymous Asks (285)

“Why would God release Satan after 1,000 years?”

Any answer to a “why” that is not clearly spelled out in the text of scripture itself is bound to be somewhat speculative, but it seems to me that the text of Revelation 20 does indeed give us a few clues with which to formulate a reasonable suggestion.

Clue #1: The Purpose of the Incarceration

John tells us why an angel will bind Satan and hurl him into the bottomless pit. It is “so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended”. This suggests to me that at least one of the purposes of the millennial reign is to prove a point, and perhaps more than one. The millennial reign of the Lord Jesus will demonstrate some thing or things to the world with absolute finality, and silence false arguments put forward since time immemorial.

Clue #2: The Necessity of Satan’s Release

“After that,” John writes, “he must be released for a little while.” In order for God to make the point he is seeking to make to the world, and maybe to the cosmos, Satan’s temporary release is required. The Greek word used is dei, meaning a necessity. It comes from a word that means “to bind”. It is not optional. That is not to say that God himself is bound by necessity, but rather that God deliberately creates a situation that he will resolve in only one possible way. What will Satan do the moment he is free? Verse 8 tells us he will come out to deceive the nations, to gather them for battle against the Lord Jesus and his saints at Jerusalem.

The Innate Goodness of Man

Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers of eighteenth century Europe. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality argued for the innate goodness of man, blaming history and society for the corruption he saw around him and teaching that all bad behavior is learned, rather than arising organically from human nature. Of course, Rousseau was not the first to teach this; the ancient Chinese ethologist Mencius said much the same thing way back in the third century BC. Rousseau simply repopularized a philosophical position that has been around for millennia.

That puts Rousseau and everyone else before or since who believes in the intrinsic goodness of our species at odds with both Genesis 3 and the more detailed explanation later given by the apostle Paul that “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned”. God denied access to the tree of life to Adam and his descendants. The possibility of a world full of eternal beings acting in perpetuity on the impulses of their sinful natures was not to be entertained for even a moment.

Today, we see Rousseau’s intrinsic goodness argument everywhere, from Scientific American to Rutger Bregman, author of 2020’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, who says, “To believe that people are hardwired to be kind isn’t sentimental or naïve. On the contrary, it’s courageous and realistic to believe in peace and forgiveness.” Courageous, perhaps. It’s also delusional. It’s the oft-unstated notion behind the woke movement: that if we rip down all the existing structures in society, something better will just happen organically. The problem is not with us as people, but with the institutions that corrupt us. So man argues for his own goodness and makes excuses for his failures, but scripture plainly teaches we are slaves to sin.

Defining Goodness

What it means for men to be “good” is debatable, of course. When pressed to define goodness, modern experts trot out words like “unselfish” and “cooperative” as synonyms for “good” or the presence of such qualities as evidence of goodness, replacing Mencius’ earlier idea that a good man is a man who cannot bear to see suffering, is modest, respectful and empathetic.

The problem with all such extra-scriptural attempts at defining goodness, both recent and ancient, is that they substitute adjectives for nouns. The men who built the Tower of Babel were unselfish and cooperative, but they were doing something that was in its essence self-exalting and opposed to the will of God. They were building when God had given them the job of exploring and settling. One can empathize with wicked men, respect the wrong values, and flinch when true evil needs to be dealt with unsparingly. Not one of these alleged virtues is in itself virtuous.

All man’s ideas about what goodness means either fall far short of God’s standard or invert it. Arguing for man’s goodness when we cannot even define it is a fool’s errand. Nevertheless, the popular delusion remains that if we untether man from his history, society and corrupt education, we will find something wonderful inside him.

Curing the Delusion

A millennium with Satan bound in the bottomless pit is the cure for all this. Christ will do exactly what Rousseau’s disciples have always wanted. Millennial man will exist in a perfect society. Of the increase of the Lord’s government and peace there will be no end. With 1,000 years of Satan’s absence, multiple generations will come and go (though a little more slowly than at present) without hearing the serpent’s lies. The delusions and political conceits of earlier generations will trick nobody; the wisdom of the Word will expose their futility to all. History will lose its perpetual hold on man. Education will be in every respect positive. No baser impulses will be inculcated into the young under the rule of Christ.

And yet … and yet … when Satan is finally released from his thousand years of imprisonment, the nations will rush to embrace him and his deceptions, proving the wisdom of God at the end of Genesis 3 and everything the Bible has ever taught about the nature of man. Man will be left without a word to say in his own defense.

That’s a lesson we desperately need to learn, and only an 1,000 year test case can prove for certain that God is right: we don’t want to “ascend above the stars of God” because they are flawed and ought to submit to us. We want to do it because we are who we are. Apart from the grace of God, sin defines us. Without the life-changing power of the resurrected Christ in our hearts and his eternal presence by our side, there is no hope whatsoever for our fallen race.

It also puts paid to another less-asked question from the universalist camp, “Why can’t the devil get a second chance?” Answer: Because he wouldn’t take it.

Not even if you gave him 1,000 years in really uncomfortable circumstances to think about it.