Favorite Quotes from Wider Scholarship

Illustrating Covenant Creation Conclusions

The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there.”

— H. Richard Niebuhr

Special Video Clips Related to Covenant Creation

“It [Genesis 1] is as truly a sevenfold revelation of a beginning as the Apocalypse of St. John is a mystic revelation of an end.”(emphasis mine)

Milton S. Terry, Biblical Apocalyptics, p. 44.

"Let us be clear about this: The destruction of the temple and of Jerusalem was not merely the end of the Hebrew-Israelite-Jewish period of history that began with Abraham. It was the end of the entire Old Creation from Adam forward. The Church is the replacement not merely of Israel, but also the older and larger Gentile world that began with Adam and continued through the Noahic covenant. The Kingdom of Jesus is a wholly New Creation and nothing less."

James B. Jordan, Matthew 23-25: A Literary, Historical, and Theological Commentary.
Chapter titled, "The Judgment of the Old Creation," p. 69.

“Within the preterist framework, we conclude that the angels who sinned were judged in the first-century judgment on the Old Covenant. Perhaps this is why 1 Peter 4:5 says that Jesus is ‘ready to judge the living and the dead.’ The fall of Jerusalem was a judgment not only of apostate Judaism, but on the pre-flood generation as well. All the blood from Abel on were charged to that generation.”

Peter Leithart, The Promise of His Appearing: An Exposition of Second Peter, p. 71

David Chilton commenting on Revelation 21:

"John uses it here in order to underscore the picture of cosmic resurrection and regeneration: He sees a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, having fled from the face of the Judge (20:11). The old world is completely replaced by the new..." (p. 537)

"Earth's original uninhabitable condition of deep-and-darkness has been utterly done away with: There is no longer any Sea..." (p. 538)

"Salvation is consistently presented in the Bible as recreation. This is why creation language and symbolism are used in Scripture whenever God speaks of saving His people..." (p. 538)

"The City is now described in terms of jewelry, as the perfect consummation of the original Edenic pattern..." (cf. Gen. 2:10-12; Ezek. 28:13)... (p. 557)

David Chilton, Days of Vengeance

“The disciples understood the significance of this. They knew that Christ’s coming in judgment to destroy the Temple would mean the utter dissolution of Israel as the covenant nation. It would be the sign that God had divorced Israel, removing himself from their midst, taking the kingdom from her and giving it to another nation (Matt. 21:43). It would signal the end of the age, and the coming of an entirely new era in world history — Jesus Christ’s New World Order. From the beginning of creation until A.D. 70, the world was organized around one central Sanctuary, one single House of God. Now, in the New Covenant order, sanctuaries are established wherever true worship exists.”

David Chilton, Paradise Restored, p. 88.

“I believe the end of the age was the end of the old covenant age. And as my friend Kim Burgess says it’s not just the end of the old covenant age, but the end of the Adamic age as well.

Jesus is the second Adam. If you go through all of the steps in Jesus’ ministry, you’ll see that some of them are Adamic, and some of them come out of the other covenants as well.

I believe the end of the age took place in that transition period between AD 30 to AD 70. The apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:11 talks about 'upon whom the ends of the ages have come.'"

The Gary DeMar Podcast, “The End of What Age?” August 5, 2022 beginning 04:56.

"Because of the call of Abram, the nations were organized around Israel. Israel formed "the land" at the center of the world, like the land that emerged from the watery chaos during the creation week (Gen. 1:2). All other nations were part of the turbulent sea that threatened to overwhelm the land and turn the world back to confusion. The new creation that took place in Abram divided sea and land, but simultaneously established a necessary connection between the two. Israel alone was the land, but the nations became "the ends of the land" (Deut 33:17; 1 Sam 2:10; Pss 2:10; 22:27; 59:13; 67:7; Isa 45:22; 52:10; Jer 16:19; Mic 5:4; Zech 9:10) and "the islands" (Isa 40:15; 41:5; 42:4). Gentiles formed the boundary of Israel's land, and as such they were incorporated as the frontier of Yahweh's empire that had Zion as its capital. The Gentile sea thus belonged to the land of the children of Abraham, and this implied that the Gentile would eventually share in their redemption as light and life spread from Zion to the frontier, from Jew to Greek."

-- Peter Leithart, Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective, p. 11.

"First and foremost is the undeniable fact that Paul, when considering the resurrection from the death of Adam, posited that resurrection as the fulfillment of God's promises to Old Covenant Israel. He directly cites Isaiah 25 and Hosea 13, not to mention the fact that he indirectly alludes to Daniel 9, Daniel 12, the Psalms and other O.T. prophecies (1 Corinthians 15:54-56). This means that the promise of resurrection made in the Garden is incorporated into YHVH's promises to Old Covenant Israel. So, the story of the Garden becomes the story of Israel."

--Don K. Preston, We Shall Meet Him in the Air: The Wedding of The King of Kings, p. 4.

In Matthew 23:34-36, Jesus said judgment on the Jews would come in that generation. It was to be a judgment so comprehensive it would encompass all the martyrs all the way back to creation (23:35)!

-- Don K. Preston, Who is this Babylon, pp. 266.

Notice that in Revelation 6:12-17 the response to the prayer of the martyrs was the promise that the Great Day of God was coming. The creation would be destroyed, and the wicked would "run for the hills." To put it another way, the martyrs would be vindicated at the Great Day of the Lord, when heaven and earth would pass away.

-- Don K. Preston, Who is this Babylon, pp. 267

[S]ince the Great Day of the Lord was to occur at the great Day of the Lord was to occur at the time of the destruction of creation, at the judgment of Babylon [Jerusalem], and since creation was to be destroyed at the end of the millennium, then the vindication of the martyrs, in the judgment on Babylon [Jerusalem], was to occur at the end of the millennium.

-- Don K. Preston, Who is this Babylon, pp. 268-269.

In the creation God finished His works in six days, and rested on the seventh. The history of the world contains six periods marked by the dealings of God with men. The first period is from Adam to Noah; the second, from Noah to Abraham; the third, from Abraham to David; the fourth, from David to the captivity in Babylon; the fifth, from the captivity to the advent of lowliness of our Lord Jesus Christ; the sixth is now in progress, and will end in the coming of the exalted Saviour to judgment. What answers to the seventh day is the rest of the saints — not in this life, but in another, where the rich man saw Lazarus at rest while he was tormented in hell; where there is no evening, because there is no decay. On the sixth day, in Genesis, man is formed after the image of God; in the sixth period of the world there is the clear discovery of our transformation in the renewing of our mind, according to the image of Him who created us, as the apostle says. Colossians 3:10 As a wife was made for Adamfrom his side while he slept, the Church becomes the property of her dying Saviour, by the sacrament of the blood which flowed from His side after His death. The woman made out of her husband's side is called Eve, or Life, and the mother of living beings; and the Lord says in the Gospel: "Except a man eat my flesh and drink my blood, he has no life in him." John 6:53 The whole narrative of Genesis, in the most minute details, is a prophecy of Christ and of the Church with reference either to the good Christians or to the bad. There is a significance in the words of the apostle when he calls Adam "the figure of Him that was to come;" Romans 5:14 and when he says, "A man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and the Church." 

Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book XII Section 12

"The cross and the parousia of Christ are in biblical eschatology what alpha and omega are in the Greek alphabet -- the beginning and the end. Our primary aim in this volume, as indicated by the title, is to show that Christ's cross and parousia (i.e., His presence or arrival commonly called the second coming) are the two foci of one complete, indivisible eschaton (end time) that pertain to the fulfillment of all redemptive history and prophecy within the closing period ("last days") of the Old Testament aeon (age).

The cross has been recognized generally as an eschatological event that forms the turning point between two covenantal aeons -- the Old and New Testaments or the Jewish and Christian ages." 

-- Max R. King, The Cross and the Parousia of Christ: The Two Dimensions of one Age-Changing Eschaton, p. ix.

[Editor's note: this citation is the opening of the Preface, the first 3 sentences of the book - T.M.] 

“The reason that Jesus reflects both the Old Testament figures of Adam and Israel is because, as we have seen earlier, Israel and her patriarchs were given the same commission as was Adam in Genesis 1:26-28. Consequently, it is not an overstatement to understand Israel as a corporate Adam who had failed in their ‘Garden of Eden’ [c.f. Gen. 13:10; Isaiah 51:3; Ezekiel 36:35; Joel 2:3] in much the same way as their primal father had failed in the first garden. For these reasons, it is understandable that Jesus is called ‘Son of God’ partly because that was a name for the first Adam (Luke 3:38; cf. Gen. 5:1-3) and for Israel (Exodus 4:22; Hos. 11:1). Likewise, the expression ‘son of man’ from Daniel 7:13 refers to end-time Israel and her representative king as the son of Adam who is sovereign over beasts (recall that the ‘son of man’ takes over the kingdoms of former evil empires portrayed as beasts). Understandably, against this background, it is natural that ‘Son of Man’ [Adam] became one of Jesus’ favorite ways of referring to himself.”(emphasis mine)

--G.K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission, pp. 174-175.

“He found him in a desert land
And in the wasteland..

As an eagle stirs up its nest,
Hovers over its young…”
Deuteronomy 32:10-11 NKJ

“Moses uses two key words in this passage: waste and hover. Both of these words occur only one other time in the entire Pentateuch, and again they occur together, in Genesis 1:2. Waste is used to describe the uninhabitable condition of the earth at its creation ("without form"); and hover is Moses' term for the Spirit's activity of "moving" in creative power over the face of the deep. God is not careless with language.. . . The Covenant on Sinai was a re-creation, a reorganization of the world. Similarly, St. John borrows terminology from the same passage in Moses to present that message to the Church: God has brought to fulfillment the provisional re-creations of the old order. The coming of Christ has brought about the definitive re-creation, the New Covenant.” (emphasis mine)

--David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance, p. 320.

Beloved, I now write to you this second epistle (in both of which I stir up your pure minds by way of reminder), 2 that you may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us, the apostles of the Lord and Savior, 3 knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, 4 and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”
2 Peter 3:1-4 NKJ

“If 2 Peter is at all coherent, his discussion of the end of a world and the beginning of another are part of a discussion about Jesus’ promise to come within the generation of the apostles….

A third, related point may also be made. It was common for Jews to believe that Torah was begotten along with creation. Linking “Wisdom” and Torah, and reading this linkage into Proverbs 8, led Jews to conclude that Torah was the agent of the original creation, and that Torah was in fact the purpose for which God created the world. W.D. Davies summarizes this view under three headings:

1.) The Torah, like Wisdom, came to be regarded as older than the world. Thus it is the first among the seven things which were created before the world. Again in Sire on Deut. 11.10, Proverbs 8:22 is taken to mean that the Law was created before everything. ‘The Law because it is more highly prized (literally, dearer) than everything, was created before everything…’

2.) Secondly the Torah is brought into connection with creation: e.g. R. Akiba said: ‘Beloved are Israel to whom was given a precious instrument wherewith the world was created…’

3.) Thirdly, the world is claimed to be created for the sake of Torah. Thus R. Yudan said: ‘The world was created for the sake (literally: because of the merit) of the Torah.’ Moore also quotes a far earlier passage in this connection, the aphorism of Simeon the Just: ‘The stability of the world rests on three things, on the Law, on ‘worship,’ and on deeds of personal kindness” [Footnote 11]

Believing that Torah was eternal and unchanging in a quite literal sense, they did not believe it could be modified in the radical way the apostles claimed. Yahweh might well act in history, but the Jews refused to let Him act like that.

Peter’s response to the mockers is designed to address precisely this view. He is not responding to the notion that no historical changes can occur, which is too absurd to require refutation. He is responding to the claim that no historical changes can displace the ‘present heavens and earth’ to make room for ‘a new heavens and earth.’ Whatever historical changes might be made, Torah, temple, and Israel’s centrality will remain unchanged. Whatever historical changes occur, it cannot be said that they constitute the beginning of a new creation.”

[Footnote 11] W.D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology (Mifflintown: Sigler Press, 1998), 170-171. Adapting these claims to the gospel, Paul argues that Jesus takes the place of Torah; the apostolic emphasis on Jesus’ fulfillment of the Law is both a hermeneutical and theological point

-Peter J. Leithart, The Promise of His Appearing: An Exposition of Second Peter, pp. 90-92.

"The reason that Genesis 1 has been understood as material for so long is because our world has been so entrenched in a material ontology that it cannot think that there is even another possibility."

-- Dr. John H Walton, "The Goal and Purpose of Genesis One"

“Second, and as far as I am concerned absolutely central for Paul, there is the apostle’s understanding of the story of Israel, and of the whole world, as a single continuous narrative… Paul’s references to Adam and Abraham, to Moses and the prophets, to Deuteronomy and Isaiah and even the Psalms, mean what they mean because he has in his head and heart, as a great many second-temple Jews did, a grand story of creation and covenant, of God and his world and his people, which had been moving forward in a single narrative and which was continuing to do so.” (emphasis mine)

--N.T. Wright, Justification, p. 34.

“It is especially interesting to find that the description of God’s placing the man in the Garden also bears a strong resemblance to the later establishment of the priesthood for the tabernacle and temple.”

--John Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative, p. 100.

“Theologians sometimes use ‘Old Covenant’ to refer to the Mosaic covenant. There is truth to this in that the Mosaic covenant published most fully the distinctive character of the Adamic covenant under curse. Yet, ultimately, the Old Covenant is the covenant of the original garden of Eden. Ultimately, there are two covenants, Old and New. There are two Adams, Adam and Jesus. There are two heavens and earth, the first in Adam and the second in Christ.” (emphasis mine)

--James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes (1988), p. 311.

". . . . The majority opinion of Jewish elders (which still dominates the services of the synagogues) was that the Day of Trumpets was the memorial day that commemorated the beginning of the world. Authorized opinion prevailed that the first of Tishri was the first day of Genesis 1:1-5. It 'came to be regarded as the birthday of the world' (M'Clintock & Strong, Cyclo- paedia, vol. X, p. 568). It was even more than an anniversary of the physical creation. 'Judaism regards New Year's Day not merely as an anniversary of creation, but - more importantly- as a renewal of it. This is when the world is reborn' (Theodor H. Gaster, Festivals o f the Jewish Year, p. 109). . . .

"All this would naturally be in the minds of St. John and his first-century audience at the mention of the great Seventh Trumpet. Now, he adds a new dimension of symbolism, by showing the Christian significance of Rosh Hashanah, that to which it had always pointed: The Day of Trumpets is the Beginning of the New World, the New Creation, the coronation-day of the King of kings, when He is enthroned as supreme Judge over the whole world."

--David Chilton, Days of Vengeance, pp. 288-289, 290.

It is no accident that God "hallowed" the seventh day (Gen 2:2). The Hebrew word for the number seven, sheva, evokes a wealth of intended meaning. Sheva is the root word of saba, which means "fullness and completion"....

But the word sheva has a still-closer kinship with another word: shava. Shava is the verb for swearing a covenant oath. It's literal meaning is to "seven oneself." The verb for swearing a covenant is built upon the number seven....

By blessing the seventh day, God swore a covenant to His world. He is not just proprietor of creation. He is not just master to a race of slaves. He is Father to a family. If God had stopped on the sixth day, we would be his creatures, slaves, and private property. But he went on and blessed the seventh day, and took a rest, and invited humankind into that rest. That action represents the covenant relationship that he established with his creation. And what is a covenant? A family bond, a sacred family bond.

--Scott Hahn, Swear to God

“[T]here is a close parallel between the biblical vocation of Adam in Genesis and the biblical vocation of Israel, and when we explore this we may find fresh ways through to the heart of contemporary puzzles....

Vocations of Adam and Israel. This is where I sense a strong parallel with the calling and vocation of the ancient people of Israel, and this is where we might glimpse some fresh light on Adam and the question of origins. Genesis itself makes a clear parallel between Adam and Abraham: "be fruitful and increase in number" (Gen 1:28) becomes "I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you" (Gen 17:6). Instead of the original paradise, with God present with his people, Israel is promised a land, and eventually given the temple as the place of God's presence. But the point is this: Israel, a small, strange nomadic people in an obscure part of the world, is chosen to be the promise-bearer: "through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed" (Gen 22:18). Israel is to be a royal priesthood (Ex. 19). Israel is to be the light of the nations (Is 42; 49). Israel is chosen out of the rest of the world in order to be God's strange means of rescuing the human race and so getting the creational project back on track. And God chooses Israel while knowing full well, in Paul's language, that Israel is in Adam: the people who bear the solution are themselves part of the problem. That, in fact, is the clue to the hardest bits of Paul's theology, for instance the problem of the law. That's for another time. But watch closely. Israel is chosen to fulfill this divine purpose; Israel is placed in the holy land, the garden of God's delight; and Israel is warned that if they don't keep Torah they will be expelled, sent off into exile. It will look as if the whole project has been aborted. That is the horrible problem faced not only in the exile but in the so-called postexilic period....

What might that tell us about the vocation of Adam, then? I do not know when Genesis reached its final form. Some still want to associate it with Moses; others insist it was at least edited during the exile. But whatever view you take about that, certainly the Jews of the Second Temple period would have no difficulty in decoding the story of Adam as an earlier version of their own story: placed in the garden; given a commission to look after it; being the place where God wanted to be at rest, to exercise his sovereign rule; warned about keeping the commandment; warned in particular that breaking it would mean death; breaking it and being exiled. It all sounds very, very familiar. And it leads me to my proposal: that just as God chose Israel from the rest of humankind for a special, strange, demanding vocation, so perhaps what Genesis is telling us is that God chose one pair from the rest of early hominids for a special, strange, demanding vocation. This pair (call them Adam and Eve if you like) were to be the representatives of the whole human race, the ones in whom God's purposes to make the whole world a place of delight and joy and order, eventually colonizing the whole creation. God the creator put into their hands the fragile taskof being his image-bearers. If they failed, they would bring the whole purpose for the wider creation, including all those nonchosen hominids, down with them. They were supposed to be the life-bringers, and if they failed in their task, the death that was already endemic in the world as it was would engulf them as well. This, perhaps, is the way of reading the warning in Genesis 2: in the day you eat of it you, too, will die. Not that death, the decay and disolution of plants, animals and hominids, wasn't a reality already; but you, Adam and Eve, are chosen to be the people through whom God's life-giving reflections will be imaged into the world, and if you choose to worship and serve the creation rather than the Creator, you will merely reflect death back to death, and will share in that death yourself. I do not know whether this is exactly what Genesis meant, or what Paul meant. But the close and (to a Jewish reader) rather obvious parallel between the vocation of Israel and the vocation of Adam leads me in that direction..."

--NT Wright, "An Excursus on Paul's Use of Adam" published in The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Origins Debate by John H. Walton, pp. 173, 175-77.

Circa Year 2000

“It won’t do, therefore, simply to go to Paul and say, 'There you are, Paul believes in Adam; that proves a literalistic reading of Genesis.' What this reading of the text exposes to view is the failure of the tradition to read either Paul or Genesis, because Paul’s whole point is to pick up from Genesis the notion of the vocation of Adam and to show that it is fulfilled in Messiah.  Unless we put that in the middle, we are not being obedient to the authority of these central scriptural texts.


This sends me back to Genesis, then, encouraged by John Walton on the one hand, and writers such as Richard Middleton and Greg Beale on the other, to look at the calling of Adam. The notion of the “image” doesn’t refer a particular spiritual endowment, a secret “property” that humans possess somewhere in their genetic makeup, something that might be found by a scientific observation of humans as opposed to chimps. The image is a vocation, a calling. It is the call to be an angled mirror, reflecting God’s wise order in the world and reflecting the praises of all creation back to the Creator. That is what it means to be the royal priesthood: looking after God’s world is the royal bit. And the image is, of course, the final thing that is put into the temple (here I draw on John Walton’s careful exposition of Genesis 1 and 2 as the creation of sacred space, and the seven days of Genesis 1 as the seven stages of temple building), so that the god can be present to his people through the image and that his people can worship him in that image.


One of the great gains of biblical scholarship this last generation, not least because of our new understanding of first-century Judaism, is our realization that the temple was central to the Jewish worldview. This comes through in various places in Paul’s letters.  The temple was where heaven and earth met; when Paul says in Ephesians 1:10 that God’s purpose was to sum up everything in heaven and on earth in the Messiah, we should’t be surprised that much of the rest of the letter is then about Jesus and the church as the true temple.”


-N.T. Wright, “Excursus on Paul’s Use of Adam” as published in The Lost World of Adam and Eve by John Walton, [2015], pp. 175-176.

“Adam, as God’s chosen, was the first man capable of achieving God’s kingdom, and that was passed down through his generations until Christ’s sacrifice at the cross changed the equation and brought a new covenant. Presumably any outsiders in Adam’s day would have been outside the covenant, and unable to enjoy this unique status…”  

“…As the first type of Christ, Adam may have had a similar mission. Adam’s task was probably to bring the word of God’s kingdom to the polytheistic heathen living all around him.”

--Dick Fischer, In Search of the Historical Adam: Part 1

"So then, the heavens and earth are a figure for the kingdoms of heaven and earth. The new heavens and the new earth are a figure for the glorious and ever-increasing reign of our Lord Jesus Christ." 

-- Douglas Wilson "Biblical Pictures of the New Cosmos" in And It Came to Pass, p. 29.

"That all kinds of animals are inclosed in the ark; as the Church contains all nations, which was also set forth in the vessel shown to Peter. That clean and unclean animals are in the ark; as good and bad take part in the sacraments of the Church."

Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book XII Section 15

"Jeremiah's vision is of the whole creation returning to it's primaeval chaos; in the first line he uses he uses the phrase tohu wahohu which is used elsewhere only of the empty turbulence out of which God created heaven and earth."

-- G.B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, p. 114.

[On Romans 7]

"I see Paul here, my personal view, I see Paul not talking about himself. This is not autobiographical. This is Paul using a rhetorical device. He is personifying both Adam and Israel... N.T. Wright says 'Paul's point is precisely that what happened on Sinai recapitulated what happened in Eden. What he has done here is to tell one story, that of Israel, that echoes the other, that of Adam.'

In other words, what we see in Eden with Adam as a single individual, we see again at Sinai with the nation... He is telling the story of Adam and Israel in the first person singular."

-- Pastor David Curtis, Berean Bible Church Sermon, "I Do Not Do the Good I Want" (Romans 7:14-25), June 23, 2024, beginning at 16:00.

"Equally important in [Gen.] 1:1 is the meaning of the phrase 'in the beginning' within the framework of the Creation account and the book of Genesis. The term beginning in biblical Hebrew marks a starting point of a specific duration, as in 'the beginning of a year' (Deut. 11:12). The end of a specific period is marked by its antonym, 'the end,' as in 'the end of the year' (Deut. 11:12). In opening the account of Creation with the phrase 'in the beginning,' the author has marked Creation as the starting point of a period of time. 'Hence will here be the beginning of the history which follows... The history to be related from this point onwards was heaven and earth for its object, its scenes, its factors. At the head of this history stands the creation of the world by its commencement, or at all events its foundation.'

By commencing this history with a 'beginning,' a word often paired with its antonym 'end,' the author has not only commenced a history of God and his people but also prepared the way for the consummation of that history at 'the end of time.'

The growing focus within the biblical canon on the times of the 'end' is an appropriate extension of the 'end' already anticipated in the 'beginning' of Genesis 1:1. The fundamental principle reflected in 1:1 and the prophetic vision fo the end times in the rest of Scripture is that the 'last things' will be like the first things': 'Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth' (Isaiah 65:17); 'Then I saw a new heaven and new earth' (Revelation 21:1). The allusions to Genesis 1 and 2 in Revelation 22 illustrate the role that these early chapters of Genesis played in shaping the form and content of the scriptural vision of the future.

Already in Genesis 1:1 the concept of the 'last days' fills the mind of the reader."

--John H. Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative, pp. 83-84.

“More deeply, there is symmetry between the beginning and the end of the Bible, which is the beginning and end of history. God created a world and planted a garden; at the end of Revelation, a garden city descends from heaven. At the beginning, God placed a man in the garden and built a woman; the garden city itself is the bride, the new Eve, where the Last Adam dwells. Before we get to these recapitulations of creation, we have a recapitulation of the fall, when Satan “deceives” nations as he enters the garden to “deceive” Eve. As Revelation winds to a close, we see Genesis 1-3 in reverse:

A. Genesis 1-2: Creation of cosmos and garden, Adam and Eve.

B. Genesis 3: Seduction of Eve; initial judgment on the serpent.

….

‘B. Revelation 20: Seduction of nations; final judgment on Satan.

‘A. Revelation 21-22: New creation of cosmos and city, Lamb and Bride.

More deeply still, the dragons’s concluding history mimics that of Jesus. In Revelation 20, Satan is seized, bound, thrown in to the abyss, which is shut and sealed over him until he is released (20:2-3) to gather the nations for war (20:7-8) before being tossed, this time permanently, into the lake of fire (20:9-10). This follows closely the last days of the gospel story: Jesus is seized (Matt. 26:4, 48, 50, 55), bound (Jn. 18:12, 24), and put into the grave with a stone at the door, and the grave is sealed (Matt. 27:66). After three days he is “loosed” from the agony of death (Acts 2:24) in order to gather his disciples and commission them to spread out to the four corners as numerous as sand on the seashore.

Of course, the similarity between Jesus and Satan highlights the contrasts. Jesus goes into the grave, but death cannot bind him. Jesus spends only three days in the “abyss,” not 1,000 years. Once Jesus is loosed from death, he never dies again. Instead of being tossed into the lake of fire, he ascends into a cloud to reign from heaven. Satan’s final history is a counterfeit of the death and resurrection and Great Commission of Jesus. Satan is Antichrist to the end. Satan is released at the “completion” (the verb is used in vv. 3, 5, 7) of the millennium.”

Dr. Peter J. Leithart, Revelation 12-22: International Theological Commentary (Part 2), 2018, p 329.

"It is important to remember that Judaism is not Old Testament religion at all; rather, it is a rejection of the Biblical faith altogether in favor of the Pharisaical, Talmudic heresy. Like Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Unification Church, and other cults, it claims to be based on the Bible; but its actual authority comes from the traditions of men. Jesus was quite clear: Judaism denies Christ precisely because it denies Moses (John 5:45-47). Orthodox Christianity alone is the true continuation and fulfillment of Old Testament religion (see Matt. 5:17-20; 15:1-9; Mark 7:1-13; Luke 16:29-31; John 8:42-47)."

--David Chilton The Days of Vengeance

"Time, as known by man, MAY end along with this present material world, but man's ultimate and eternal state does not depend upon such an event, nor are we given in the Bible arcane information about the probability of such an event. Redeemed saints of all ages who have departed this life are just as securely and permanently established in the new heaven and earth now as they ever will be throughout all eternity - for ever and ever (Eph. 3:21)"

-- Max King, The Spirit of Prophecy, p. 399. 

[Compare to Beyond Creation Science pp. 358-359 and 428-430]