The condition of the saints thought of in this vision is described, however, not only generally, but in various particulars, all of which, it will be seen, correspond with the apocalyptic idea of it even in a present world. _And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them._ But we have been already told that "they reign over the earth."[533] _Judgment was given unto them_, words which seem best understood in the sense, so peculiar to St. John, that for believers there is in the ordinary sense of the term no judgment. As they have passed through death, so also they have passed through judgment.[534] _They lived with Christ._ But Christ Himself had said in the Gospel, "Because I live, and ye shall live."[535] _They reigned with Christ._ But that is only another method of saying that they sat on thrones, with the added conception, so often associated with the word in the Apocalypse, that their enemies were bruised beneath their feet. _Over these the second death hath no authority._ But we have before been told of "him that overcometh" that "he shall not be hurt of the second death."[536] Finally, _they shall be priests of God and of Christ_. But it is needless to dwell upon the fact that from the opening of this book such has always been spoken of as the position of believers.
Nothing, in short, is said of the saints of God in this picture of millennial bliss that does not find a parallel in what the Seer has elsewhere written of their present life. On not a few different occasions their ideal condition in this world is set forth in as glowing terms as is their thousand years' glory and joy.
One expression may indeed startle us. What the Seer beheld is said to have been _the souls of them that had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God_. Is the word "beheaded" to be literally understood? Then a very small number of martyrs can be thought of. The great majority of those who have died for the faith of Jesus have been martyred in other and more dreadful ways. The word is the counterpart of "slaughtered" in the vision of the souls under the altar.[537] These were the saints of the Old Testament, whose death is described by a term characteristic to the Jewish mind of the mode in which offerings were presented to God. When the Seer passes to the thought of the great Gentile Church, he uses a term more appropriate to the Gentile method of terminating human life. "Beheaded" therefore expresses the same thing as "slaughtered." Both words refer to martyrdom; and both include all faithful ones in the dispensations to which they respectively belong, for in the eyes of St. John all the disciples of a martyred Lord are martyrs.[538]
4. The meaning of the doom inflicted upon Satan demands our notice. And the angel _laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the devil, and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and cast him into the abyss, and shut it, and sealed it over him_. It is hardly possible to read these words, at the same time remembering St. John's love of contrast or even travesty, and not to see in them a mocking counterpart of the death and burial of Jesus, when the stone was rolled to the door of the sepulchre and sealed. If so, it is not enough to say that by the infliction of this doom the power of Satan was restrained, and his influence lessened. Much more must be implied; and the language can only mean that, in one sense or another, Satan was rendered powerless and harmless, as unable to act his part as though he had been laid in the grave.