# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S269
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The So-called Thousand-Year Kingdom. 269

-st drink wine with his own upon the old earth, one would fall from a refined Chiliasm into a crude and crudest one. There is yet a third passage in which the kingdom of God can only be the kingdom of glory in the sense of the church. In Matthew 25:34 the Lord speaks, at the general Last Judgment which falls after the thousand years, to the righteous: "inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world."

According to the teaching of the New Testament there are only two aeons, worlds, or ages: the present and the future, Matthew 12:32, Ephesians 1:21, whose powers reach into the present and prepare for the future, Hebrews 6:5. The place of the future one is the new Jerusalem, Hebrews 13:14. Chiliasm destroys this sharp division between the present and future world; it introduces an intermingling of the two within the thousand-year kingdom. One may not claim that the future age begins precisely with the thousand-year kingdom and then reaches its completion in the new birth. For between the thousand years and the new birth lies the time in which Satan is again given power, and in which the old world again asserts itself in the worst manner.

Alongside these more specific grounds, some more general considerations of the most far-reaching significance also arise against Chiliasm. Above all we must point out here that Chiliasm, in the most questionable way, encroaches upon the biblical teaching concerning the meaning of the cross. A thousand years of undisturbed happiness before the "transformation," with the old man still persisting — I ask every experienced pastor, every solid Christian, whether that is not an unthinkable notion, whether he does not shudder when he brings the touchstone of experience to bear on this thought. One need only recall in the Old Testament the saying: "So Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. He grew fat, thick, and strong, and forsook the God who made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation," Deuteronomy 32:15; or the time of the Judges, in which decline regularly follows prosperity; or the pious Hezekiah, whose heart was lifted up when he had seen the salvation of God. A thousand years of undisturbed happiness — in what contradiction would they stand to the word of the Apocalypse itself, 3:19: "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten," and to the word of the Epistle to the Hebrews: "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. But if ye be without chastisement, then are ye bastards and not sons." Were the cross not absolutely necessary for human nature before its transformation, why would the apostle, lest he be exalted above measure through the abundance of revelations, have been given a thorn in the flesh; why would he have had to groan so bitterly under the buffetings of Satan's messenger; why would his fervent prayer that it might depart from him have found no answer except this: "My grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness." In one of our old