# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S265
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The So-Called Thousand-Year Kingdom. 265

appears, just as it does during the "church age," as a mixed condition with gradual transitions, so that separating them is impossible and dangerous. The comforting word "then shall the righteous shine forth" shows that even during the thousand years they will not cease to be "the wretched," that their glory is a hidden one, and that they still have much to suffer from the sons of the evil one.

"Another parable," says Olshausen, "proceeds from the same image of sowing, but has in view another side of the conditions of the kingdom of God." Given the general connection of the seven parables, and the particular connection of these two, we must assume that the parable of the sower, too, embraces the same span of time, from the beginning of the kingdom of God at the first coming of Christ down to the last judgment. Accordingly, during the thousand years too, much seed will fall by the wayside, on stony ground, among thorns, and only a part on good ground. There, too, the evil enemy will come and take away, from many, what has been sown in the heart. There will be many who hear the word of God and do not understand it, many "temporary believers" who take offense when they must suffer for the sake of God's word. There, too, there will be distress and persecution on account of the word. The cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches will choke the word in many.

According to the parable of the net, which corresponds exactly to that of the tares among the wheat — what there is the harvest, is here the completion of the catch of fish — there will be, until the last judgment, until the time when the wicked are cast into the furnace of fire, all sorts of kinds of fish, good and bad; there will be wicked and righteous, and indeed indiscriminately mixed among one another. "By this arrangement," Olshausen aptly says, "the possibility of conversion is everywhere left open to the wicked, and the child of light is brought to completion in the struggle with his enemies." That does not fit the chiliasts' thousand years at all. Evil, in this parable, by no means appears as a vanishing element. It will possess great extent and power right up to the last day.

The parable of the leaven, too, is of significance for our purpose. The kingdom of God is like the leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. The woman corresponds to the church. The meal is the world. The three measures signify the three great divisions of the human race, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In the hiding is indicated the secret power at work in what is invisible and hidden. This hidden character of the kingdom of God continues until the whole, so far as it will let itself be leavened, has been leavened. Then at once the end sets in, the last judgment, according to the saying of the Lord in Matt. 24:14: "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations, and then shall the end come." In contradiction to this parable, chiliasm asserts that, even before the end of the