THE HOPE OF ISRAEL - The Preterist Archive

242 The Hope of Israel: What Is It?
they went up upon the breadth of the earth and encircled the
camp of the saints and the beloved city. And there came down
fire from God out of heaven and devoured them. And the devil
who misleads them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone
where are the beast and the false prophet; and they shall be
tormented day and night for the ages of the ages."
In the interpretation of the above passage, the principal
question to be decided is : in what realm do the described
events take place? Are they in the realm of
the natural, or in that of the spiritual? They who locate
them in the realm of the natural, in other words
who make them a part of this earth's history, must of
necessity postpone them to a future era, regardless of
whether they place Christ's second coming before the
millennium or after; for certainly no such events as
are here described have as yet transpired on earth. But,
for those who locate the scenes and events of the millennium
in the realm of the unseen things, there is no
such necessity. According to their understanding of
the passage those scenes and events may be already
past, or they may be going on now.
This preliminary question must be decided by the
testimony of the passage itself; and to my mind its
terms clearly indicate that the seer of Patmos is here
describing events of the spiritual realm. For to begin
with, the two actors in the first scene are spiritual beings;
and hence it must be that the "key" and the "great
chain" are spiritual not material objects, and also
that the place of Satan's confinement, called in the A. V.
"the bottomless pit," but designated in the original text
by the single and very expressive word, abussos
(abyss), is a spiritual locality. Hence also the binding
and the sealing of Satan are spiritual' actions, corresponding
to what those words describe in the realm
of the natural.