# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S266
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

266 The So-Called Thousand-Year Kingdom.

hidden character of the kingdom of God cease, and in place of the power at work in secret, a visible manifestation of it will emerge.

That is what the parables in Matthew 13 offer for our purpose. Let us now see how Christ's discourses concerning his coming to judgment, in Matthew 24 and 25, stand in relation to chiliasm.

Here the description of moral conditions comes first into consideration, as they will obtain around the time of the end, of Christ's appearing to the last judgment. "Then," it says, "shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved." That this end is the absolute end can be in no doubt. It is the time when the wicked will be cast out "into outer darkness, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (25:3); the time when the Son of Man will come attended by all his angels, when all peoples will be gathered before him and he will separate the sheep from the goats (v. 31, 32); when the wicked will go away into everlasting punishment, the righteous into life eternal (v. 46). This agrees exactly with what, in the Apocalypse, follows the end of the thousand years and the new uprising of Satan. So the moral conditions described here, too, must be those which take place beyond the thousand years, and our passage must run parallel to what is said in the Apocalypse of Gog and Magog. The seeds of such deep and widespread corruption, of such ecumenical apostasy, must also have been present during the thousand years. It lies in plain view that this does not fit the chiliasts' thousand years, that upon such an absolute golden age an absolutely iron one cannot immediately follow.

But this discourse of Christ offers us yet a second argument against chiliasm. The whole discourse knows only one coming of the Son of Man, the one with which the last judgment is immediately connected. The disciples ask, "what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world," and Christ's answer likewise proceeds throughout from the view that there is only one coming, one advent of the Son of Man, which has its type, its prelude, and its microcosm, its anticipatory representation, in the destruction of Jerusalem at the end of the present course of the world. Compare chapter 24:27 ("the coming, the parousia of the Son of Man"), 39, 44; 25:6, 10. That a coming of the Lord is prefigured by the judgment upon Jerusalem, the Lord likewise teaches also in Matthew 16:27, 28: "The Son of Man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and then he shall reward every man according to his