# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1860_S243
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The So-Called Thousand-Year Kingdom. 243

-ings it says: "These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them — for he is Lord of lords and King of kings — and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful." That the faithful are thought of here as participants in the battle and instruments of the victory shows that the battle and the victory can only be a spiritual one, that it is won through the specifically Christian weapons as the holy Apostle Paul describes them in the letter to the Ephesians. It also points to the conversion of the ten kings and their peoples that the binding of Satan follows immediately upon the victory over them, so that he can no longer seduce the heathen, the peoples of those ten kings, until a thousand years are completed, chapter 20:1–3. However little Satan is merely a personification of ungodly lusts, it is nevertheless true that, according to the teaching of the whole of Scripture, Satan's influence goes hand in hand with the inclination that meets him halfway, so that when Satan is bound, the ungodly inclination must first be bound. The unclean spirit may only say: "I will return into my house from which I came out," where that same house is "empty, swept, and garnished" — swept and garnished for him precisely by being empty, by watching and prayer having ceased in it, Matthew 12:43–45. Only in the case of those who are sown by the wayside, only where, through the hearers' own fault, the seed cannot take root, does the evil one come and take away the word that is sown in their hearts. The Apostle exhorts in Ephesians 4:27: "give no place to the devil." (Not, as Luther has it: to the slanderer.) "Satan — says Stier — wants to get into our soul; we are not to make room for him to do so." "Resist the devil, James exhorts, and he will flee from you." Only the minds of unbelievers are, according to 2 Corinthians 4:14, blinded by the god of this world, and whoever puts on the armor of God, against him, according to Ephesians 6:11, all the wiles of Satan can do nothing — for him Satan is bound. That, then, is the second world-historical point: the conversion of the peoples who destroyed the Roman Empire, according to the testimony of the history of the peoples of the great migrations, chiefly the Germanic peoples. Since the thousand years begin with this point, we must try to fix it chronologically, so far as this is possible in the case of such facts, where the boundary is everywhere a fluid one. What matters is to find the principal turning point between heathendom and Christianity among the Germanic peoples. Here surely no one will be able to deny that this is marked by two men, by Boniface and by Charlemagne . . . Were we to single out one particular year for the beginning of the thousand years, it could be none other than the year 800 . . .

The only historically recognizable mark given for the thousand years is the binding of Satan, or — what, according to what has already been noted, is only another expression for the same thing — the dominion of the Christian principle in the life of the peoples from among whom the