Commentaries:
After the thousand years of imprisonment, Satan will be released for a short while. During his parole, he will again unite some of the nations and take them to war against God's people. But this rebellion will be summarily ended when God sends fire out of heaven to destroy them. Because he is spirit and cannot die, the Devil will then be sentenced to eternal torment in the Lake of Fire. Finally, God and man will be rid of their chief enemy, and peace will flourish for all eternity!
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Basic Doctrines: Satan's Origin and Destiny
God will release Satan for a short time when the thousand years end. The people, familiar with Christ and His kings and priests, will have lived in unprecedented peace, happiness, and prosperity. They will have learned and lived God's way from birth. Surely, Satan could have no influence on them!
Almost instantly, however, he will raise an army of people "as the sand of the sea" out of "the four corners of the earth"! His arguments will persuade them that they should and can destroy Christ and his throne in Jerusalem. God, however, will annihilate them all in a blinding flash of fire from heaven and cast the Devil into the Lake of Fire, never to be freed again!
Staff
Holy Days: Feast of Tabernacles
All during the Millennium, Satan will be restrained, prevented from deceiving the nations ( verses 1-3). After the 1,000 years are over, Satan will be loosed out of his prison (verse 7). He will go out to deceive all the humans who are not then born into God's Kingdom (verses 8-9). This will prove, for anyone who might doubt, that Satan will not repent, even after he sees the wonderful results of 1,000 years of righteous rule. The humans who are so easily deceived into fighting Christ will also be proving that they were not paying attention to what they were being taught at the close of the 1,000 years.
Satan and the demons will then be cast into the Lake of Fire. Some Bibles use italics to show that the word are in verse 10 was added by the translators. It is not found in the Greek manuscripts. The phrase should read, "where the beast and the false prophet were cast." The unwritten verb in the Greek should be understood to be in the same tense as the verb in the first half of the sentence. The Amplified Bible has it correct.
The beast and false prophet will be cast into a Lake of Fire at the beginning of the Millennium (Revelation 19:20). These two mortal men will be killed and consumed by that fire, and by the time Satan is cast into that fire, the beast and false prophet will have been dead more than 1,000 years.
In the Lake of Fire, Satan will be able to do nothing. God will have rendered him completely powerless—unable to deceive the rest of the dead, who will then be resurrected to have their opportunity to understand God's Master Plan.
The Last Great Day: God's Master Plan Completed!
What Will Happen After Christ's 1,000-Year Rule?
The apostle John's visions, recorded in Revelation 20:7 through the end of the book, describe these events. Very little additional detail about this time is recorded in Scripture.
What will happen after God's plan of salvation has been completed and the earth purged by fire (II Peter 3:10-12; see "Does Peter Predict the Total Destruction of the Earth in II Peter 3:10?" for an explanation) is found in Revelation 21:
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea. And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, "Behold, the tabernacle [dwelling] of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God." (verses 1-3)
At that time, the earth will become the headquarters of God's Kingdom for the entire universe, and from that time forward it will never cease to expand (Luke 1:33; Isaiah 9:7). We can only guess what members of God's Family will do. Scripture provides us only a few clues.
God's purpose is concerned with all eternity. The sons admitted into His Kingdom will be active, dynamic, productive! They will not just sit around idly, but like the Father, they will plan and create. In a word, they will continue fulfilling God's master plan. Hebrews 2:6-8 says that God will ultimately put the whole universe—all things—under man's authority.
What is happening now is only the beginning. We cannot begin to fathom the immensity and glory of what the born-again sons of God will be doing for eternity. A great deal more is included than meets the eye in the hint given in Revelation 21:5: "Behold, I make all things new." Everything will be made glorious and wonderful beyond our most imaginative dreams (I Corinthians 2:9; Romans 8:18). God speed that day!
Additional Reading:
Knowing God: Formality and Customs (Part 1)
Other commentary entries containing this verse:
Isaiah 53:3
Isaiah 53:8
John 3:16-17
1 Corinthians 15:22-24
1 Timothy 2:4
2 Peter 3:9
Library resources that contain this verse:
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