# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S264
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

264 The So-Called Thousand-Year Kingdom.

on the dome of the Royal Palace the inscription meets our eyes: "Neither is there salvation in any other."* Our rulers count it an honor to build our churches and to be present at their dedication. Our diets are opened with a worship service. In the speeches from the throne, honor is given to God. Our laws command that the Lord's Day be kept holy. The foundation of our school system is, to this very day, the Word of God. However much Satan may scheme, and however much he may partly succeed, we still see, at every step and turn, and even in the negotiations over the marriage law, that the beast has already been seized and cast into the lake of fire.

These are the arguments against chiliasm which the Apocalypse itself offers. Let us now turn to the remaining books of the New Testament; here, above all, the parables of our Lord concerning the kingdom in Matthew 13 draw our attention. Let us first consider the parable of the tares among the wheat. The practical tendency of this parable, as it emerges especially in the words which the Lord's servants speak to him — "Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?" — is to guard against the offense that arises for faith out of the conflict between the essence of the kingdom of God and its outward appearance. This contradiction continues until the time of the harvest, until "the end of this world." Then "the Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father." The end point of the conflict marked here falls beyond the thousand years. After these events, and the new uprising against the church that follows them, have been reported, it is said in Rev. 20:12, 15: "And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. — And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire." It lies in plain view that the lake of fire corresponds to the furnace of fire. Accordingly, things go on during the thousand years no differently than during the time which our chiliasts disparagingly call the "church age." There is tares in it too, much tares — so much that one might easily become doubtful about the heavenly sower. There are in it, too, numerous sons of the evil one, offenses, those who do wrong, a spirit of sleep. In it, too, history has two factors, the Son of Man and the devil, whose binding during the thousand years must be carefully limited, if one does not wish to fall into direct contradiction with this word of the Lord. The one who sows the tares, the sons of the evil one, is identified as the devil. The state

* In the time of the beast's dominion, other inscriptions were customary. The epitaph of Darius Hystaspis, for example, ran, according to Athenaeus: "I was able to drink much wine and to bear it well."