"An alternative FP approach to squeezing the thousand years of Revelation 20 into the forty-years AD 30 to 70 is offered by Tim Martin and J.L. Vaughn in a very recent book [Beyond Creation Science] in which they subject both Young Earth Creationism and dispensationalism to devastating criticism.
I find a great deal to commend in this work and trust that it will attract a wide readership. I thoroughly disagree, however, with the authors' attempt to force the thousand years into the AD 30 to 70 time period, which involves equating this period with the ideal human lifespan of 1,000 years suggested in the Old Testament. Thus after noting that "all of the patriarchs 'died' before reaching the symbolic 1000-year mark," Martin and Vaughn refer to the millennium of Revelation 20 as the "symbolic life-span of the redeemed,” which means that John inserted the thousand years into Revelation 20 in order to indicate that the generation of believers who lived during Christ's earthly ministry in the first century was to be the first to be fully blessed by the arrival of the Kingdom of God. Subsequently, Martin and Vaughn apply the symbolic millennial lifespan to all subsequent believers in Christ. "The thousand years is a life-span signifying eternal life," they write, and "All those who receive the final redemption from the Adamic curse, 'the death,' live symbolically for 1,000 years."
Several arguments can be made against this symbolic lifespan argument...
