# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S263
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The So-Called Thousand-Year Kingdom. 263

use of fornication in Holy Scripture, first to designate apostasy from God, then to designate the hypocrisy of love in the interest of self-love, of mere commercial friendship, and of the cunning policy that conceals its destructive lusts under the appearance of love — as goes hand in hand everywhere, down to the present day, with the raw violence of conquest-hungry peoples and emperors. It lies in plain view that in the Apocalypse fornication is used in this latter sense." Further, fornication appears in Rev. 18:3, as also in Rev. 14:8, as the "wine of wrath." "That does not fit apostasy from God; it fits only the love-hypocritical policy behind which lies concealed the wrath, the spirit of Cain's brother-hatred. With fornication, further, luxury is here linked. This indeed goes hand in hand with the self-seeking policy which provides the means for luxury, but it does not stand in so direct a connection with apostasy from God." — That from the parallelism in Rev. 17:3 and 12 — "the woman fled into the wilderness" — it follows that, because here the woman is the church, therefore in Rev. 17 too the woman must be the church, namely in her degenerate form, is an entirely unwarranted conclusion. The designation as a woman is not characteristic of the church specifically — compare Isa. 47:1 — but rather what is characteristic lies in what is further said of the woman. This, however, is on both sides entirely different. The connection between the two women is only that of contrast. Nor is it accidental that the wilderness occurs with both women. This is explained from Rev. 18:3 and Rev. 13:10: "If the unclean woman upon the many waters has driven the pure bride of the Lamb into the wilderness, has placed her in a state of suffering and privation, then that is the factual prophecy of her own devastation. Wilderness against wilderness — that is a world-historical law which has already often been realized."

Hengstenberg further maintains that the beast of the Apocalypse is the heathen, God-hostile state, so named from its low, earthly disposition, estranged from everything called God or divine worship. "The beast is now, in the Apocalypse, seized before the beginning of the thousand-year kingdom and cast into the lake of fire, Rev. 19:20. Until then it holds dominion on the earth. If the thousand-year kingdom is still to come, then the immediate consequence is that the heathen state, in its bestial character, still continues, and that up to that point there has been no Christian state at all. To assert such a thing would mean sinning against the word of Christ, 'I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,' and at the same time striking all historical truth in the face. Even now, in this present age in which Satan has been loosed from his prison, our states still bear the most essential marks of Christianity, and every sound feeling must revolt against their being consigned to the domain of the beast. If we consider our own fatherland, the accession of our King is marked by the words: 'As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,' and