If we ask for how long will each trial last, we are given an ambiguous answer. We are told One-thousand-two-hundred-sixty-days. But this is written in three different ways within the text. One-thousand-two-hundred-sixty-days, is equal to forty-two months, or ‘a-time, two-times, and half-a-time’. This raises questions: Do these signify different patterns within that time period?
The focus narrows to the site of the Temple, which will be trampled on by foreigners for forty-two months. But, during that same period two witnesses will preach for one-thousand-two-hundred-sixty-days.343 The woman is to be taken care of for one thousand two hundred sixty days, while she is escaping the snake for a time, two times, and half a time.344 Is all this happening at the same time as the beast was allowed to brag and claim to be God, and for forty-two months, or is it another time?345 Again we have three options:
The next natural question is: ‘What is the thousand-year reign’. The millennium is the period of time between when Jesus the King begins His rule on earth and when the Earth is rolled up and replaced with the new heaven and New earth. So, ‘Will it be a literal time or a symbolic time’. Again, three answers. There was no problem to the earliest Jewish community. Messiah would come, conquer the world, reign from Jerusalem and judge all nations in turn. When John introduced us to the millennium, theologians got to work to divide the Church with three more clever views.
The Non-millennialists do not believe in a millennium but the world will just get better in the end.
Postmillennialists, cut chapter twenty out, and paste it before chapter nineteen. They believe Christ will return after the thousand years. This view arose from Greek separationalist.346 Christ’s millennial Kingdom is therefore spiritual and symbolic in their eyes, extending from His Resurrection to Armageddon. At the point of the resurrection of the righteous, Messiah will come to defeat the wicked. From then on, the Messiah will reign in the hearts of his people forever. The millennial Kingdom of Christ is therefore now, both in heaven and on earth. On earth, Christ’s kingdom ‘is not of this world,’ but He reigns in the hearts of His people on earth, and in heaven over the hosts of the redeemed and His Holy Angels. This view, not held by all believers, did suit the political classes. Constantine saw it as his justification to conquer when:
A most marvellous sign appeared to [Constantine] from heaven, the account of which it might have been hard to believe had it been related by any other person…. He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle347.
Not to be outdone, middle age Popes and Kings used the same argument that Christ was king of Heaven and his church must conquer the earth by their Crusades. Some today still hold a slightly modified view of this. During colonial Britain348, and in USA today, 349 there is the belief we must win the world for Jesus and keep it for a thousand years before Jesus returns and takes the Church to a new Heaven and Earth350. The Church will rule the world before Jesus comes back to take over.
Pre-millennialism
The early Church, through the apostles and Paul taught the world will not be converted before the Second Coming of Christ. Christ may come at any time after the fulfilment of certain prophecies. Jesus will judge both, the living and the dead, and Jew and Gentile. Further, after a period reigning over all nations on earth, He will fold up the earth and his kingdom will be set up in a new heaven and a new earth. In this view Jesus will come again in order to establish His kingdom. He will come with his angels, gathering the Church into the air to be with Him.
Augustine found this disconcerting, Under Greek obsession to separate everything, He proposed the Jews will remain in the Kingdom on earth, while Christians will go to Christ’s Heavenly Kingdom. This view raised its head again in eighteen-thirty AD, when a prophecy was given in a Brethren Church that went viral. The prophecy was that Christians would be caught up in the air to meet Jesus before the tribulation. No record of this view being held before then has come to light, and Brethren Elders did not countenance it at the time. But, it was included in the Schofield bible which, being a very popular bible of the age, spread it the theory rapidly to be held by some today.
343 Revelation 11: 2 - 3
344 Revelation _12: 6 and Revelation _12: 14 ; Daniel 7: 25 ;Daniel 12: 7
345 Revelation 13: 5
346 Separating the spiritual from material
347 Eusebius
348 See many of the triumphal Hymns of the period where the Church will win Jesus’s rule wherever the sun rises
349 Even today in the USA it is a preve lent view of ACMTC (Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps) and others
350 Many Restoration churches hold this view.