Matthew 12:29
Matthew 12:2929Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man’s house and steal his possessions, unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can plunder his house.
The Watchtower reads the strong-man-binding analogy as a general principle about Jesus's authority over Satan, not as a specific present-tense binding. The "thousand-year binding" of is treated as a separate, future event that begins after Armageddon — Satan is not bound now in the JW framework; he remains the ruler of this "system of things" until destruction. is read devotionally rather than eschatologically.
Jesus's argument here is decisive against the JW reading. He is defending his exorcisms against the charge that he casts out demons by Beelzebul, and his logic is: if Satan were still in control of his house, I could not be plundering it. I am plundering it. Therefore Satan is already bound. The Greek verb "bind" (deō) in is the same root as "bound" in . The thousand years of Revelation 20 begin where Jesus says they begin — at his first coming. Pair with and (Gentile nations no longer left in darkness after Christ), (the former bondage to "the prince of the air"), and ("the Kingdom of God has come near"). The amillennial and partial- preterist Reformed tradition reads the binding as already begun, the church age as the millennium, and the gospel going to the nations as the evidence. The Watchtower's scheme requires both the binding and the kingdom to be future — but Jesus's own argument requires both to be already present.