The Devil's Final Judgment (2 of 2)

The pattern across every one of these later texts is consistent: real defeat, genuinely begun at the cross, and final removal, still ahead, at Christ's return. Revelation 20:10's lake of fire is the completion that Romans 16:20 is still, actively, promising — not a report of something already behind John's first readers.

This is not a modern invention, arrived at defensively to avoid an uncomfortable conclusion. Augustine of Hippo wrote The City of God in the early fifth century, roughly three and a half centuries after the events full preterism would date Satan's complete and final judgment to. He read Revelation 20 the same way this book has just laid out. He took the "thousand years" as the whole span of history between Christ's first coming and His second — not a future literal reign, but the present age the church was already living inside as he wrote. And he described the binding of Satan in exactly the same both-real-and-incomplete terms this book has just laid out. The devil, Augustine wrote, was "bridled and restrained" so that "he could not seduce and gain possession of those who were to be freed" (City of God XX.7). That is a genuine, present restraint, not a symbol standing in for something already finished. And on the final disposition specifically, Augustine wrote what may be the clearest single sentence on this question written in the first thousand years of the church: "the devil, then, is not bound during the whole time which this book embraces — that is, from the first coming of Christ to the end of the world, when he shall come the second time — not bound in this sense, that during this interval... he shall not seduce the Church, for not even when loosed shall he seduce it" (City of God XX.8). Bound, genuinely, in one sense. Still awaiting a final, still-future disposition, in another. Both true at once. This reading became the dominant view across the Western church for roughly a thousand years, carried forward through the medieval period and into the Reformation.

Full preterism, stated at its strongest, does not deny any of the "already" texts above. A serious full preterist affirms every one of them. He also presses the question of whether partial preterism is simply inconsistent about how far to follow its own logic. Hebrews 2:14 says Christ shared in flesh and blood "so that through death he could destroy the one who holds the power of death" — a Greek aorist verb, the tense normally marking a completed, one-time action, here doing that work even inside a purpose clause. And 1 John 3:8 says His appearing accomplished its stated purpose "to destroy the works of the devil." If both verses describe decisive action rather than a project still underway, then treating Revelation 20:10 as a separate, later, still-future event requires importing a distinction the text itself never signals. Neither Hebrews 2:14 nor 1 John 3:8 flags itself as partial, provisional, or awaiting a later completion. On this reading, the thousand years of Revelation 20 is not a future chronological block at all. It is the same kind of symbolic device the book uses throughout — the 144,000, the seven seals, the ten horns — a way of describing the full, sufficient duration of Christ's reign between His resurrection and the judgment on Jerusalem in AD 70. Satan's release and final defeat, on this reading, represent the last convulsion of the old covenant order's opposition before the temple fell.

What genuinely divides the two readings, once both are heard at full strength, is this: the full preterist case is right that the "already" language describing Satan's defeat is real, decisive, and should never be softened into something more tentative than the text actually says. The partial preterist case is right that the New Testament's later writings — later than the cross, later than the resurrection, and in several cases later than most full preterist chronologies place AD 70 itself — keep using active, unfinished, present-tense language about the very enemy those earlier texts describe as defeated. "So that you will be able to stand against the schemes of the devil" (Ephesians 6:11, NET) reads, on its face, like a church still being armed rather than a church commemorating a closed war. Whether that later language describes a genuinely still-open second stage, or a pastoral urgency addressed to people who had not yet grasped how completely AD 70 had already settled everything, is the actual point of disagreement — and it is one this book is going to leave for you to weigh rather than settle on your behalf.

The two-stage pattern both partial preterism and the kingdom material in Part One keep finding — real, inaugurated victory at the cross; final, still-future completion at Christ's return — is either the master key that unlocks the New Testament's own consistent shape, or it is a compromise imported to soften full preterism's more demanding conclusion. Which one it is depends on how the rest of this comparison, doctrine by doctrine, actually holds up under its own weight.