The Millennial Kingdom

5900 words long.

Published on 2024-07-12

This article draws upon results from several prophetic clocks to show that the Millennial Kingdom of Christ began in 380 AD and ended in 1380 AD. It argues that during this period, Satan was bound for a thousand years and at the end released to "deceive the nations" and gather them for war. The solutions to several interpretative difficulties that are offered conform to a system called Fractal Historicism and defined on this website.

---

The First Resurrection

There is no theory of eschatology that can explain Revelation 20 without difficulty.

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years,and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.

Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.

And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea.

- Revelation 20:1-8

Some end times theories argue that there will be two physical resurrections for believers, the first at the start of the millennium and second after the final battle with Satan. In Fractal Historicism, the first resurrection, when many Christian martyrs were raised up to reign with Jesus, was not an event anyone could see on Earth. Christ ruled over the Millennial Kingdom from Heaven through his agents, the visible church. The resurrected martyrs remained with Christ, wherever he is.

Consider the alternative. Any system that expects a literal thousand-year kingdom that begins with a resurrection visible on earth has a problem. It is self evident that this first resurrection has not occurred yet. If it occurred tomorrow and ushered in Christ's kingdom, then that kingdom would end in 3024 AD. The year 3024 is more than 7,000 years after the Creation, which occurred between 4100 and 4000 BC. Over the course of church history (and including ancient Jewish philosophers), many theologians have expressed the conviction that the world will not exceed 7,000 years of history before the end comes. All literal systems that posit a visible first resurrection and literal millennium must therefore allow for history to extend beyond 7,000 years. May it be so, but I am not prepared to sacrifice an idea proposed by people wiser and holier than I.

To Deceive the Nations

In 2020, I began to tackle the problem of assigning dates for the millennium. The answer did not come via the avenue one might expect. Instead of studying what God has been up to, the answer came from studying what Satan was doing. I worked backwards from the present and then forwards from the Creation to narrow the timing for these events down.

Working backwards. Instead of first figuring out when the millennium began, I worked backwards from today to find when it ended. It was the writings of Ellis Skolfield that made it clear how important are verses 20:7-8. "Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations." We live in a time when one by one, nations that once formally acknowledged Jesus as their Lord have turned away. That means that for many years Satan has been deceiving the nations and causing them to renounce their former loyalty. When did this trend begin? Skolfield proposed a year, but I pushed it farther back in to the past. I initially settled on 1453 AD, when Constantinople fell, but another line of reasoning made me push it farther back, to 1380 AD. Here is the logic that led me to my first guess of 1453 AD, from "The Final Countdown" in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew:

When did this great deception begin?

When did Satan begin whispering

“ditch Christianity” in the ears of rulers

and revolutionaries?

When India gained independence (1947)?

After Hiroshima (1945)?

During the Bolshevik Revolution (1917)?

How about the Mexican Revolution (1911)

or Mexico’s earlier adoption of an

anti-clerical constitution in 1857?

Maybe further back, with the American

constitution (1787) that disestablished

religion and the French Revolution (1789)

that waged war on the Catholic Church

in that country?

If you walk back further in history, you get

to the Ottoman conquests, which forced many

Christian kingdoms, like Bulgaria, Serbia and

Romania, to renounce Christianity and become

Muslim. Tracing this back to its source,

history made a sharp turn in 1453 AD, when

Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire and

the Byzantine Empire – called also the

Eastern Roman Empire – was no more.

Was that the year Satan began to deceive the nations?

Working forwards. It was mathematics and not Scripture alone that supplied the next clue. In this approach, I worked forward from the Creation to discover when Satan was released. When I was a child, I loved the puzzle books sold at the grocery store. One of my favorites was a book of number sequence puzzles. They gave you part of the series and you had to figure out the rule and guess the next numbers in the series. The Bible provided me with such a puzzle.

Almost ten years ago, I tried to find a pattern in history, what I called a "cosmic chiasm" based on the genealogy in Matthew. This exploration is related in detail in Generations Come and Go and Two Patterns in History. A result from this was that history might last 42 generations of 119 or 120 years, excluding the first two of Adam and Methuselah, who lived much longer. This yielded an approximate time for the end of 2283 AD.

After that, I studied Job for several years. Part of that research yielded an approximate date for the events in that book in the range 1800-1700 BC. When I turned my attention to Ecclesiastes, I began to develop the Growth Pattern. Insights from the story of the temptation of Jesus in Matthew were important in developing this pattern. To understand that temptation, I looked for all the places where Satan tempts people. My initial search found three: Eve, Job, and Jesus (ca 29 AD). Jesus alludes to another: Satan has asked to sift Peter like wheat, but that event happened near in time to when Jesus was tempted. Later on, I added Satan going out to deceive the nations as prophesied in Revelation 20 as representing a fourth tempting by Satan. Paul then supplies a fifth prophesied example of Satan's temptation in the accounts of the strong delusion: "Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false." (2 Thessalonians 2:11)

Before tackling dates, do we have a reason besides the presence of Satan in the account to tie these stories of temptation together into a meaningful sequence? The chapter "The Final Countdown" has this to say:

Recall the numerical sequence?

• Eve was tempted once (the fruit),
• Job was cursed twice (loss of property and children followed by loss of health and status),
• and Jesus was tempted three times (with bread, safety from harm and authority over the nations).
• In the deception of the nations above, he goes out to the “four corners of the earth”. We are also reminded of the four horsemen of the apocalypse which are sent into the world.

Yes, we have good reason to suppose that this deception of the nations spoken of in Revelation is the next step in Satan’s plan.

Returning to dates, in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew, in the chapters "Three Appointments with Satan" and "The Final Countdown", I worked my way from an approximate number series to a precise one. Here are the initial, imprecise numbers:

• 4004 BC: Temptation of Eve (near the Creation according to Bishop Ussher)
• 1750 BC: Temptation of Job
• 29 AD: Temptation of Jesus
• 1453 AD: Satan begins to deceive the nations
• 2283 AD: Satan's strong delusion

As a child, I would have given up on this sequence. It is not regular. The intervals between the dates keep getting less, and there is no obvious rule for how:

I was no longer a child, so I didn't give up. I plotted the numbers and fit a curve to them. It was close to a declining quadratic sequence, in which each difference is the same as the previous difference with a constant factor removed. An example of an ascending quadratic sequence would be:

The first change adds 4, the next adds 3, then 2, then 1. Each change is one less than the previous change. What if I adjusted the dates to force them into a quadratic sequence? The 29 AD date for Jesus' temptation is the most accurate one; I shifted it to 30 AD, another accepted year for the event. What was the original step size and how should the step size change? The closest round number for the first step was 2,250 with a decrease in step size of 450. This led to the following intervals between events:

Applying those intervals backwards and forwards from 30 AD yields these years. (We ignore the missing year zero to make the dates round numbers. This doesn't matter because the uncertainties in the earlier dates exceed one year anyway.)

This shifted the date of the Creation back 16 years, Job back 20 years, and the time of the end back three years. Since this bit of estimation I have found solid solutions to chronology problems to back up this Creation date. This includes dealing with the rounding errors inherent in the Genesis chronology, as reported in Dating the Creation.

The largest change was to the time when Satan was unbound and set out to deceive the nations, shifted by 74 years. It was this analysis that focused my attention on the next question. When was Satan bound? If he was ubound in 1380, then he must have been bound in 380 AD. What happened in that year? That was the year that Rome became a Christian empire as a result of Theodosius I's Edict of Thessalonica. That was the backwards way that I discovered the year when Satan was bound and the Millennial Kingdom began.

What's more, in 381 AD the church held the Council of Constantinople. One of the purposes was to oppose a heresy of Marcellus that Christ was a temporary expression of God that would vanish when this age comes to an end. Then Jesus would be absorbed into the Godhead and cease to have an individual existence as a separate person. How did the church refute this heresy? They appealed to words spoken by the angel to Mary:

and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever,

and of his kingdom there will be no end.

- Luke 1:33

To memorialize this, the counsel added words to the Nicene Creed, resulting in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 AD. After the change, this is how one statement was amplified:

He will come again in glory to judge

the living and the dead,

and his kingdom will have no end.

By this act the church unknowingly declared the commencement of the Millennial Kingdom of Christ.

Why expect a pattern of years?

The entire chain of reasoning above flowed from my expectation that God structures history in a regular way such that the intervals between key events happen at round, predictable intervals. My mathematical bent predisposed me to look in that direction. That is not the way that most scholars conduct theology. Numerical elegance does not carry much weight with them. They consider it a trap for fools who lean on ideas that cannot support weight. What is the point? The point is that I now had a theory about when important events occurred or will occur. Having a theory, I could test it. Inspiration may spring from strange impulses, but its source should never be used to rule an idea out. Logic and evidence are the proper tools for that.

Over the next several years I uncovered over forty Prophetic Clocks. This required that I synchronize all the clocks, otherwise the same prophesied event would be assigned to disjoint eras, producing a temporal inconsistency that would undermine everything. Part of that effort was expressed in the chapter "Let's Synchronize Our Watches" in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew. The difficulty with synchronization is the sheer number of combinations involved. If the range of dates for the Creation is 100 years, for Job another 100 years, for the Unbinding of Satan another 100 years, then you have a million permutations right there (100 x 100 x 100 = 1,000,000). Add more clocks with more uncertainties for additional events and the combinatoric explosion will overwhelm you. They cannot all be tested. My math skills reduced the problem to a single solution to test. If a poor guess then the large set of constraints supplied by the collection of clocks could not all be satisfied at once. Instead, I was able to harmonize all the clocks to assume those key dates, like 4020 BC for the Creation and 380-1380 AD for Millennial kingdom. Because all the clocks use ranges of dates for each era, there is a little wiggle room. Some dates could be off by a decade or so and still mostly work, but no more than twenty years in most cases. In other cases the overlaps constrain the dates to no more than four years error.

The preceding is how an engineer approaches theology. Beginning with rough estimates, I slowly applied additional constraints to sharpen the result. When the numbers did not add up, I checked my assumptions and if necessary changed them. There are many ways to solve some chronology problems; I had to research the range of solutions proposed by others and pick ones that worked together without contradiction.

Clock by Clock

With the preceding as prolog, it is time to look at several prophetic clocks from my books and see what they have to say about Satan being bound and about Christ's rule over the nations. The symmetry of the stories of Satan's temptations of Eve, Job, Jesus and the nations was the first clock I called Satan's Countdown Clock. It was so named on account of the fact that each event follows the previous by successively shorted amounts of time. Many of the clocks are introduced in the several articles in this section of the website: Prophetic Clocks. We will not define those clocks or prove their existence here. Instead the clock will be named, the passage with the prophecy identified, and the year range that the clock assigns to that event given.

Ecclesiastes 3, from Solomon's Celestial Clock

When Jesus was crucified, that was "a time to weep", according to Solomon's list of times. When the church was persecuted by Rome, especially under Diocletian, that was "a time to mourn". The tears and mourning turned to the joy of "a time to dance" when Rome became Christian. The era for that time was 360-480 AD.

Psalm 105, from The Master Psalm Clock.

This section is quoted from "Songs in the Night: Psalms 1-110" of Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace. Psalm 105 corresponds to the era 348-390 AD.

When they were few in number,

of little account, and sojourners in it,

wandering from nation to nation,

from one kingdom to another people,

he allowed no one to oppress them;

he rebuked kings on their account,

saying, “Touch not my anointed ones,

do my prophets no harm!”

When he summoned a famine on the land

and broke all supply of bread,

he had sent a man ahead of them,

Joseph, who was sold as a slave.

His feet were hurt with fetters;

his neck was put in a collar of iron;

until what he had said came to pass,

the word of the Lord tested him.

The king sent and released him;

the ruler of the peoples set him free;

he made him lord of his house

and ruler of all his possessions,

to bind his princes at his pleasure

and to teach his elders wisdom. (105:12-22)

This psalm retells the story of Joseph, who rose from slavery to command an empire. In this era, by the Edict of Thessalonica, Rome officially became a Christian empire. That edict is the expression of God’s rebuke, “Touch not my anointed ones, do my prophets no harm!” The majority of Christians were drawn from the ranks of slaves and plebeians, just like Joseph. In prophecy, Rome is symbolized as the empire of iron (e.g. Daniel 2:33), and so the “collar of iron” was removed from God’s people. Thus was fulfilled the prophecy of Jesus Christ:

Or how can someone enter a strong man's house

and plunder his goods,

unless he first binds the strong man?

Then indeed he may plunder his house.

- Matthew 12:29

Rome had been the devil’s strong man. Now all the goods in that house were the Lord’s.

Psalm 91

For another prophetic psalm that speaks of this era, see Psalm 91. The analysis is so complicated that it deserves a whole article: Satan's Taunt

Psalm 91 not only identifies the beginning of the Millennium, but also its end and the year of the siege of Constantinople.

Psalm 112:3, from The Acrostic Clock

Psalm 112:3 corresponds to the era 257-495 AD.

It has the words "Wealth and riches are in his house, and his righteousness endures forever."

This is another account of the plundering of Rome by the church.

Job 26:2-3 from Job's Chapter Clock

This chapter of Job corresponds to the 26th generation, 376-495 AD.

“How you have helped him who has no power!

How you have saved the arm that has no strength!

How you have counseled him who has no wisdom,

and plentifully declared sound knowledge!

- Job 26:2-3

The once powerless church was not just strengthened, it was placed in charge of the most powerful empire on the planet. God does help. God does strengthen. As for plentifully declaring sound knowledge, this era included Saint Jerome completing the Vulgate and Saint Augustine writing City of God.

But wait - there is more!

By his power he stilled the sea;

by his understanding he shattered Rahab.

By his wind the heavens were made fair;

his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.

- Job 26:11-13

Piercing the fleeing serpent means that God caught the serpent on His fishhook. That was the binding of Satan.

Job 34 from Job's Chapter Clock

If Job 26 described the binding of Satan, chapter 34 announces his unbinding. Here is part of the analysis from "The Second Half: Job 21-37".

The 34th generation lasted from 1328-1447 AD.

In chapter 34 of Job, the theme is “God is not unjust.” The Almighty does not show partiality. He previously executed judgment against Israel and succeeding empires. We await the day the Lord will judge the world, but the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were frightful times. God judged the church. This was the end of the five hundred year era of the church of Sardis, the “Dead Church”.

Although I am right,

I am considered a liar;

although I am guiltless,

his arrow inflicts an incurable wound.’

- Job 34:6

Two incurable wounds afflicted the church during these years: the Black Plague and the precipitous decline (wound) of the Byzantine Empire, which would fall (die) six years after the close of the era. One claimed individuals, the other an empire.

Is there anyone like Job,

who drinks scorn like water?

- Job 34:7, NIV

They die in an instant, in the middle of the night;

the people are shaken and they pass away;

the mighty are removed without human hand.

- Job 34:20-21, NIV

Among the many symptoms that people suffering from Bubonic Plague presented were high fever, chills (verse 20) and unquenchable thirst (verse 7). Accounts of the Black Plaque tell of people going to bed healthy but dead by dawn (verse 20).

Without inquiry he shatters the mighty

and sets up others in their place.

Because he takes note of their deeds,

he overthrows them in the night and they are crushed.

- Job 34:24-25, NIV

As for the Byzantine Empire, it was shattered and the Ottoman Empire set up it its place. Its overthrow came in the night, which means near the end of one era or beginning of the next.

The phrase “His arrow inflicts an incurable wound” supplies another clue. The first horseman of the Apocalypse in Revelation carries a bow. Ishmael was an archer and father to the Arabs, from whom was descended Mohammed. Thus it was the armies of Islam that delivered the incurable wound, acting as the first horseman.

Revelation 2:13 from the Seven Letters Clock

This is from the letter to the church of Pergamum, for the era 313-550 AD. The analysis was originally given in "Seven Churches for Seven Eras" in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew.

The name Pergamum means “united in marriage”. This is the era of the state church, the compromising church. In 380 AD, the Edict of Thessalonica made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. This “marriage” of government and religion completed the process begun under Constantine. The scriptural evidence for this is:

I know where you live—where Satan has his throne.

Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce

your faith in me, not even in the days of Antipas,

my faithful witness, who was put to death in

your city—where Satan lives.

- Revelation 2:13, NIV

The real city of Pergamum (or Pergamon) was famous for its temples of Athena and Trajan, which symbolize Satan’s throne. The era of Pergamum, on the other hand, was centered in Rome, which as the greatest pagan empire in the world could be considered Satan’s true throne.

Psalm 102:12 of the Holy Spirit Clock

Each verse of this psalm corresponds to one of Solomon's times. For "a time to dance" the era is 360–480 AD. The verse is:

But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever;

you are remembered throughout all generations.

- Psalm 102:12

This is the era in which the church truly was enthroned, as Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire following the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD.

Psalm 110: Christ the Conqueror

Psalm 110 is not a clock with multiple prophecies for successive eras. Instead it represents a single time and a single prophecy. The following was originally published in "Appendix D: To Number our Psalms" from Peace, like Solomon Never Knew.

Psalm 110: Christ the Conqueror, for the era 4020 BC–380 AD.

This psalm declares one thing eloquently. It predicts the year when the Lord’s political influence would extend to capture control of an empire!

The LORD says to my lord:

“Sit at my right hand

until I make your enemies

a footstool for your feet.”

The LORD will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying,

“Rule in the midst of your enemies!”

- Psalm 110:1-2

Jesus quoted this passage in Mark 12:35-37 and in Matthew and Luke to confound his enemies as to the identity of the messiah. How could David call the messiah lord if he was his son? Father’s do not call their children or later descendants “lord”! The answer is that the messiah existed before David; the messiah is eternal and divine, yet also David’s son through the incarnation. Thus the prophecy of this psalm has its starting point at the beginning of creation, signifying the ancient origin of the Son of God.

The Lord was pointing us to this psalm to show us that it not only promised victory for the Lord and his people, it also told us when! The number forty is for suffering. It signifies a time of testing. After Jesus had fasted forty days, Satan tempted him with an offer of dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth, which Christ refused. This also reveals a connection between forty and dominion. After all, David and Solomon each ruled Israel for forty years. What happened after the world endured 110 forties?

It was 110 x 40 or 4,400 years from the creation until the Edict of Thessalonica officially made the Roman Empire a Christian empire. Christ received his scepter. It did not start with all the kingdoms of the earth, just one, surrounded by enemies as promised.

The Lord is at your right hand;

he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.

He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead

and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.

- Psalm 110:5-6

The preceding verses announced that the Lord would crush the rulers of the whole earth. It was through Rome and its offshoots, the European Colonial Empires, that all the rulers of the earth were crushed. There remains a second day when he shall do it again, upon his return. From the two meanings of forty comes a lesson. Submit to the dominion of God and you shall enjoy forty years of peace. Reject the dominion of God and you shall endure forty years of suffering.

Ecclesiastes 10:11 : The Grand Father Clock

In keeping with the fractal nature of this system, Ecclesiastes has at least three clocks:

• Solomon's Celestial Clock runs from the dedication of the temple in 960 BC to the end.
• Rebirth of Israel Clock runs from the Holocaust to the end.
• The Grand Father Clock runs from the Creation to the end.

In the chapter "A Grand Father Clock & a Silver Cord", the third of these clocks is explained. Verse 10:11 falls in the era 1380–1480 AD:

If a snake bites before it is charmed,

the charmer receives no fee.

- Ecclesiastes 10:11

The snake is a reference to Satan. If it is no longer charmed, it must be free. This speaks of the unbinding of Satan in 1380 AD.

My book also had a complicated analysis of Psalm 58, which associates it with the Islamic conquest and final overthrow. In that Psalm, snake imagery also refers to Satan and this time of unbinding:

Their venom is like the venom of a snake,

like that of a cobra that has stopped its ears,

that will not heed the tune of the charmer,

however skillful the enchanter may be.

Break the teeth in their mouths, O God;

LORD, tear out the fangs of those lions!

Let them vanish like water that flows away;

when they draw the bow,

let their arrows fall short.

- Psalm 58:4-7

Proverbs 30:17-19 in the Sevenfold Battle Plan

"Appendix E; The Plan of Proverbs" analyzed Proverbs 30. Part of the chapter is a parable about the five main eras of Christian missions:

The eye that mocks a father

and scorns to obey a mother

will be picked out by the ravens of the valley

and eaten by the vultures.

Three things are too wonderful for me;

four I do not understand:

the way of an eagle in the sky,

the way of a serpent on a rock,

the way of a ship on the high seas,

and the way of a man with a virgin.

- 30:17–19

The five eras of missions were:

• The Raven era: Apostolic and Persecuted church (before Constantine)
• The Eagle Era: Christian Rome (Rome's symbol was an eagle)
• The Serpent Era: After Satan unbound
• The Ship Era: Christian Colonial expansion by sea, to the Americas and the world
• The Ere of Man and Maid: Women gain freedoms and join men as missionaries

Once again, a Scripture reference to snakes refers to Satan's unbinding. The analysis of Proverbs did not supply dates for these five missionary eras, but in Matthew are prophecies about the five missionary eras that do specify the dates.

Matthew 5:5,10 from Matthew's Monthly Planner

This clock begins with Christ's resurrection and runs until the end. The era for chapter 5 is 354-434 AD.

The prophecy is that the once persecuted Christians now inherit the kingdom of Rome:

Blessed are the meek,

for they will inherit the earth.

Matthew 5:5

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

- Matthew 5:10

The idea that Jesus' Beatitudes hold more than a spiritual meaning, but literally promised the church that it would inherit an empire and told it when amazes me. This prophecy also declares it to be "the kingdom of heaven". If that is not a prophecy of the coming of the Millennial Kingdom, nothing is!

That should suffice to demonstrate that God's gift of the Roman empire to the Church caused the founding of the Millennial Kingdom. It should also establish when the binding and loosing of Satan and the events surrounding the ending of that kingdom occurred. Those events are all well attested to in the prophetic clocks.

Let's gather the date ranges for the start of the Millennial Kingdom and binding of Satan from the several clocks:

• 360-480 AD
• 348-390 AD
• 257-495 AD
• 376-495 AD
• 313-550 AD
• 360-480 AD
• 354-434 AD

Observe that if you form the intersection of all these ranges, you do not get the empty set. That means that the ranges are not contradictory. What is that intersection? It runs from the highest start year to the lowest end year:

• 376-390 AD

This means that by combining the results from all these prophetic clocks it is possible to narrow down the year range to just fourteen years. Now lets take our two estimates for when Satan would be unbound:

• 1328-1447 AD
• 1380-1480 AD

If you intersect those two ranges you get:

• 1380-1447 AD

That range is sixty-seven years long. Now if you require the Millennial Kingdom to last a thousand years, you can combine the ranges for the start and end of the millennium to get this range for the start of the Millennium:

• 380-390 AD

That reduced the uncertainty to only ten years! That is how combining many inexact clocks can yield exact answers. That is where Fractal Historicism shines.

How long is "A Little While"?

In Revelation 20:3, it says about the time after Satan is unbound, "After that he must be released for a little while." How long is "a little while"? This phrase is found elsewhere in Revelation. Perhaps looking at that will help.

This calls for a mind with wisdom:

the seven heads are seven mountains

on which the woman is seated;

they are also seven kings, five of whom have fallen,

one is, the other has not yet come,

and when he does come he must

remain only a little while.

- Revelation 17:9-10

The seventh king who was to remain "a little while" was a series of Islamic Caliphates. In Timeless?, the length of time that Islamic peoples controlled Jerusalem was 1,248 years, ending in 1967. This excludes the two times that Christian Crusaders controlled it. It includes the time of the British mandate, because Britain permitted the Arabs to rule Jerusalem. If you add to this period the years until the peace treaty Between Israel, Jordan and Egypt was signed in 1979, you get 1,260 years, which is significant in prophecy. 1,260 years equals 42 months (42 x 30 = 1,260). So in Revelation 17, "a little while" equals 1,260 years. However, "a little while" is a relative term. To what is it being compared? It is being compared to Rome. In its various forms, the Roman Empire lasted 1,480 years, from 28 BC until 1453 AD. (If you count its existence as a republic or kingdom, then even longer than that.) So the seventh empire in John's list is being compared to the sixth empire, Rome, which lasted the longest.

In Revelation 20:3, do we have a time frame to which "a little while" is being compared? Yes, and the author tells it to us bluntly. The time frame for comparison is "a thousand years". That period is repeated six times in the chapter and no other length of time is given. You could say that this chapter also represents all of history. Only seven time periods are given. Six times you hear of the thousand years and once of "a little while". This suggests that the full length of human history will be six full millennia plus one partial millennium, for a total between 6,000 and 7,000 years.

However, in the immediate context, all we know is that after he is released, Satan will have less than a thousand years to prepare for and launch his final attack. According to the clocks of the Fractal Historicist framework, Satan was unbound in 1380 AD. That means that he will be defeated before 2380 AD. Based on Satan's Countdown Timer and other clocks, the year 2280 AD is offered as being as close to that date as the precision of the clocks and our knowledge of the past (especially the date of Creation) permits. For that date, "a little while" is 900 years. That is a mere 256 years from now.

When King Hezekiah took ill, he humbled himself and pleaded with God for mercy, and his life was extended. God had a plan which Isaiah told to the king. In that plan, Hezekiah would die that very year. After his prayer, Isaiah told him of God's revised plan: Hezekiah would be given fifteen more years. I have shown you a plan. That plan is in the Bible and it tells us that the human race is in a race against time. Will we humble ourselves like Hezekiah? I can see the current plan but I can't know how the world will respond. If most people reject God's mercy and refuse his offer of salvation, the plan will go forward as is. Pray for the people you know and pray for your own soul. The words of Revelation were not given to cause despair, but to wake us up and tell us how we need to change. Even so, we only have "a little while" to make that change.