Revelation 20:9
Revelation 20:99And they marched across the broad expanse of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. But fire came down from heaven and consumed them.
is central to the Watchtower's post-millennial test doctrine. After Christ's thousand-year reign, Satan is released and deceives many resurrected humans into rebellion; fire from heaven consumes them, and they suffer the "second death" of permanent annihilation. The verse functions as the eschatological climax of JW teaching about the final test of integrity that resurrected humans must pass to gain everlasting life on a paradise earth.
John describes the rebels surrounding the camp of the saints and the beloved city, with fire from heaven consuming them. The image is judgment imagery — drawn from and — depicting God's final defeat of organised opposition to his people. Whether the fire is literal or symbolic, the result is the rebels' cessation: they go from alive to not-alive. That transition has a name in Scripture, and the name is death. This is the apologetic problem the Watchtower's reading cannot escape: 1 Cor 15:26 says the LAST enemy to be destroyed is death — yet on the Watchtower timeline, death is still doing its work here, after Adamic death has supposedly already been undone during the Millennium. Either death is the last enemy or it is not; Paul's chain does not allow death a final outbreak after it has been destroyed.