The apostle John gave us a description of his vision in verses 1-6 that told of the church age[1] during the period between Christ’s first and second coming. We learned that Satan would be bound by Jesus so that Satan’s ability to deceive the nations would be greatly curtailed. This would enable the gospel of Jesus Christ to spread throughout the world and dominate the hearts of his elect. It is the preaching of the truth of God’s word that prevented Satan from exercising an unrestricted dominance of the nations during the church age.
John’s vision in chapter 20 views the interadvental period[2] from an earthly aspect and warns us that this binding of Satan would not last until the second coming of Christ, but that Satan must be released for a little while (Rev. 20:3) in the future. Then in verses 4-6, John’s vision takes a view of this same period of time from a heavenly aspect specifically looking at the reign of the saints in heaven with Christ. And in verses 7-10 John’s vision again takes the aspect of an earthly view.
A very short period of time before Christ’s second coming, immediately after the thousand years are ended (Rev. 20:7) God will release the restraint on Satan’s deceptive work. Satan will then be allowed to return to his work of spreading unbelief through his deceptive actions much as he did before the first coming of Christ. This will be a time of great tribulation for the Church. This tribulation period will end at the second coming of Christ at the end of the world.
Once released, Satan will promptly gather the deceived nations to give battle against Christ’s Church. John refers to these nations as Gog and Magog and says this will be a large number of soldiers that is akin to the number of grains of sand in the sea. This is the same battle spoken of in Revelation 16:16 and is referred to there as Armageddon. The same battle is mentioned in verses 19:19 as well as here in 20:8, 9. This battle will occur on the Day of the Lord (Rev. 16:14), at the second coming of Christ, and will be followed by the final judgment.
John’s vision symbolically uses the names Gog and Magog taken from Old Testament Scripture found in Ezekiel chapters 38, 39. The term God and Magog used in this Old Testament passage, is explained by William Hendriksen when he writes:
[T]he term undoubtedly indicates the power of the Seleucids especially as it was revealed in the days of Antiochus Epiphanies, the bitter enemy of the Jews.… his kingdom was located in northern Syria.… To the east his territory extended beyond the Tigris. To the north the domain over which the Seleucids ruled included… districts in Asia minor.… Therefore the oppression of God’s people by “Gog and Magog” refers, in Ezekiel, to the terrible persecution under Antiochus Epiphanies, ruler of Syria.[3]
HISTORICAL NOTE
About 332 BCE, Alexander the Great set out to conquer Persia and on the way conquered Palestine. After Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, his kingdom was divided into three kingdoms with three of his victorious generals each claiming a portion. One of these kingdoms, the Seleucid kingdom took control of Palestine from the Ptolemaic kingdom. In 163 BCE, Antiochus IV Epiphanies, the evil ruler of the Seleucids in Syria, fearing a Jewish revolt, banned the practice of the Jewish religion and moved against Jerusalem. Jewish rebels led by the Maccabees rose up against the Seleucids in what has been called the Maccabean Revolt. Eventually, the Seleucids were forced to remove themselves from Palestine. Subsequently, the then independent Jewish Palestine would submit to Roman rule which was in power at the first advent of Christ.
Just as Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39 speak of a future final battle against God’s people, the Jews, before the first advent of Christ, these chapters foreshadow the future battle at the second advent of Christ, which is spoken of in Revelation and that destroys all Christ’s enemies and saves all God’s elect to eternal life in glory with God.
The rule of Antiochus IV Epiphanies as explained by Ezekiel extended over the non-Jewish world just as the symbolism of John’s vision uses the term “Gog and Magog” to represent the final enemies of God, the nations of the world under the command of Satan. The term “Gog and Magog” therefore does not refer particularly to any nation of the world then or now. It simply refers to all non-Christian nations of the world that are under the rule of Satan just prior to the second coming of Christ.
The symbolism used in verse 9, namely, “the camp of the saints” and “the beloved city” refers to the Church, the Body of Christ. Once released by God to deceive the nations again, Satan will do just that. The deceiver, Satan, will mislead the nations by convincing them that it will be possible to defeat God. But we are told that the nations and Satan learned very quickly at Christ’s second coming that they were doomed in their efforts as we are told that “fire came down from heaven and consumed them” (v. 9).
We find three individuals in verse 10 called “the devil,” “the beast,” and “the false prophet.” The devil of course refers to Satan, while “the beast” is Satan’s persecuting power and “the false prophet” is Satan’s anti-Christian religion (Rev. 19:19, 20). All three are inseparable. This means that even though the text of verse 10 seems to imply that “the beast” and “the false prophet” were in hell before Satan, nonetheless, this simply means that the defeat and punishment of the beast and the false prophet are described earlier in John’s vision than that of Satan. It is clear that where one is, the others are. Accordingly, all three evil forces are in hell together forever and ever (Cf, Matt. 25:46).
This vision has a focus on the destruction of Satan by Jesus Christ. The first phase of Satan’s destruction was Christ’s binding of him by curtailing Satan’s ability to deceived the nations. And the second phase was 1) Satan’s defeat in his last efforts to destroy the Church, 2) his eternal condemnation at the final judgment, and 3) his sentence to hell and eternal separation from God.
Scripture has already shown Christ’s defeat of sin and death and now here in verse 10, we are told of the eternal defeat of Satan and all his legions. Once Christ has defeated all His enemies that He came to defeat, the last one destroyed being death (1 Cor. 15:20-28), He can now deliver the kingdom of God to God the Father (1 Cor. 15:24).
[1] The Church Age refers specifically to the period of time beginning with Pentecost and extending through the second coming of Jesus Christ.
[2] The interadvental period refers to the period of time between Christ’s first and second advents. It is generally synonymous with the church age.
[3] William Hendriksen, More Than Conquerors: An Interpretation of the Book of Revelation (Baker Books, 1940, 1967), 212.
