# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S208
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

208

The So-Called Millennial Kingdom.

Under this title Hengstenberg communicates, in the E. K. Z. of March of this year, a lecture that he delivered on commission from the Evangelical Society of Berlin. We take the liberty of laying it before our esteemed readers in such a way that, apart from the introduction, we reproduce in full the history of chiliasm, the counter-doctrine as Hengstenberg himself represents it, the chief arguments against it, and the refutation of the arguments for chiliasm, in part in extract.

"It has recently been said that in certain circles there is a danger that, in occupying oneself with the future developments of the kingdom of God, one may forget the truths of the catechism. That such a danger really exists, that a morbid exaggeration is asserting itself here, we see already from the one circumstance that people have of late repeatedly attempted to refer the petition, Thy kingdom come — which each is to pray, in the first instance, with regard to his own heart — exclusively to the millennial kingdom. We must never forget that, whatever the future of the kingdom of God may be, the demands and tasks remain, in the main, the same. Words such as these: 'It is told thee, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of thee, namely, to keep God's Word and to practice love and to walk humbly before thy God,' 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,' 'Believe in the Lord Jesus,' remain independent of that, and it is chiefly to these simplest words that the beatitude applies of those who meditate on the Lord's Word day and night, who hear and keep God's Word. Yet, on the other hand, it will not be fitting to take up an indifferent attitude toward the future of the kingdom of God. From the fact that Scripture, which nowhere serves mere curiosity or the desire for knowledge, imparts such comprehensive disclosures about it, it follows directly that not insignificant means of edification must lie here. And willfully to deprive oneself of such means appears least fitting in a time such as ours, in which the present state of the kingdom of God offers so many gloomy appearances, so many disquieting portents. Here it depends especially on preparing comfort and strengthening, on the one hand from the contemplation of the past, on the other from the contemplation of the future of the kingdom of God. The present appears in an entirely different light when it is grasped as a mere point of transit.

One of the main questions now in this field turns on a passage in the Revelation of St. John, chapter 20:1–6: 'And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years. And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled; and after that he must be loosed a little season.