These three inducements come straight out of close analyses of Scripture texts; they are not opinions based on a general look or gathering together of passages that, at first sight, seem to prognosticate blood and fire falling from the sky and the erecting of a greater temple than the one in Solomon’s day on the soil of Palestine. There is a symbolic resurrection; there is a symbolic binding of Satan; there is a symbolic duration of a thousand years. All three inducements happen to be gospel-centered: the first one being about individuals receiving new life in Christ on the basis of his merits and through the Spirit’s agency; the second one being about multitudes from the nations of the world coming into the kingdom of God through their reception of the saving work of the King of the Jews; the third being about, not a literal, material millennium, but the Age of the Gospel, or Church Age, which extends from the first coming of Christ to his glorious return. There will be no literal millennium; there will be no rebuilding of the temple for memorial sacrifices; there will be no mingling of glorified saints with impenitent sinners while lions and bears dine peaceably beside zebras and caribou.
Proponents of premillennialism admit that when Jesus Christ comes back, he will come back in his exalted state. But for him to come back to mingle and mix with mere mortals during the millennium, he would have to come back, not in his exaltation, but in his humiliation. When Saul saw the Lord way up in heaven from somewhere along the road to Damascus, he went blind (Acts 9.) When the apostle John, undoubtedly the holiest man on earth in his day, saw the same Lord in a vision, he fell ‘as dead’ (Revelation 1.17.) This old earth, with humans in earthly bodies, cannot endure light come down from heaven brighter than the sun. The unbiblical incongruities involved in a literal millennium, as summed up by a postmillennialist, make up the best part of The Meaning of the Millennium, a book of four views on this disputed topic. From that book, Loraine Boettner: “In developing their ideas of what conditions will be like during the millennium, premillennialists fail to take into consideration the overpowering majesty of the risen and glorified Christ. They imagine that men will be in personal contact with him as he reigns from an earthly throne. Apparently they assume that he will be as he was in the days of his humiliation...When Christ returns in his own glory and that of the Father, with all the holy angels, certainly no mere man, who by comparison is but a worm of the dust, shall be able to stand before him. His period of humiliation is over, and his divine glory forbids the approach of those who are tainted with sin” (p. 50.) This observation is theologically astute.
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