Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Dragon Bound
Revelation 20:1-3
1 I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hand. · WEB
The dragon is bound with his own key's prison for a thousand years, and the binding's one stated purpose is the end of deception — on an earth with no one left to deceive.
I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hand. He seized the dragon, the old serpent, who is the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole inhabited earth, and bound him for a thousand years.
The scene must be read where it stands. The chapter before it ends with the beast and false prophet in the lake, the confederate armies slain by the sword of the mouth, and the birds fed Revelation 19:20–21; the chapter after it opens with the holy city descending Revelation 21:2. Between those two fixed points lies the thousand years — after the kings of the earth are dead, before the city comes down — and that placement answers most of the questions readers bring to it.
The fourfold name-list is repeated from the war in heaven Revelation 12:9 — dragon, old serpent, devil, Satan — with the résumé's summary title given one more time: who deceives the whole inhabited earth. And the binding's one stated purpose matches the title: that he should deceive the nations no more until the thousand years were finished Revelation 20:3.
Not punished yet — that waits Revelation 20:10. Bound from deceiving — and the vision has just emptied the field of the deceivable: the armies slain Revelation 19:21, the saints with Christ Revelation 20:4, the rest of the dead not living until the years end Revelation 20:5. The chain that holds the deceiver is, at its strongest, circumstance: a depopulated earth — the abyss, the ancient word for the unformed deep, the world become waste and empty as at the first darkness Genesis 1:2 Jeremiah 4:23–27 — Jeremiah's vision of the land without man or bird, cities broken down, describes the prison. The angel holds the abyss's key — the same lock the fifth trumpet opened Revelation 9:1 — and this time it turns the other way: the smoke's source shut, sealed over him, the deceiver confined to the ruin his deceptions made, with a millennium to inspect it.
The strange mercy of the sentence is its symmetry: the being whose whole industry was deception is sentenced to a thousand years with no one to deceive — the con artist locked in an empty theater. And the release-clause is the book's constant honesty about evil's endings: after this, he must be freed for a short time — one more act remains Revelation 20:7–9, because the story's justice requires the deceiver's final exposure before witnesses, not merely his disappearance.
held with reason What this mark means