WE know of no proof that the righteous will be raised a thousand years before the wicked. The Lord says, “The hour is coming when all that are in the graves shall hear his voice and shall come forth; they that have done good to the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil to the resurrection of damnation.” We see no thousand years between the resurrection of those that have done good and those that have done evil here.
The quotation from John v. 28–29, above, connects the coming of Christ and the resurrection, and the following connects the coming of Christ and the judgment: “I charge you, therefore, before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing (his coming) and kingdom.” II. Tim. iv. 1. Other Scriptures show the same. At the close of Matt. xxv. it will be seen, as it is from other Scriptures, that all will be judged at the same time, and at the same time that the righteous “enter into life eternal” the wicked “go away into everlasting punishment.” This connects the coming of Christ, the resurrection, the judgment, the separation of the righteous and the wicked, and the entrance into life on the one hand, and the going away into everlasting punishment on the other hand.
We listened to the Millerites in 1843, read pretty much all they wrote about a thousand years’ reign of Christ, between the resurrection of those who are Christ’s and those who are not his, and whatever the thousand years may mean in words, “the rest of the dead lived not again till the thousand years were ended,” we find no clear evidence of its coming between the resurrection of the righteous and the wicked. Sundry Scriptures show that the judgment of all, will be at the same time.
Christ sitting on the throne of David does not make him a king, in the temporal sense, as David was, but only that he is in the royal family, and, in the sense of that Scripture, he is now in that reign, and not to be in the Millennium. In the end he will deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father, when he shall put down all rule, and all authority and power. For he must reign till he has put all enemies under his feet. See I. Cor. xv. 24, 25. “When all things shall be subdued to him, then shall the Son also himself be subject to him, who put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” I. Cor. xv. 28. The Lord has come to receive a kingdom, and is now reigning over that kingdom—a kingdom not of this world—and on David’s throne, in the only sense he ever will be.