# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1859_S234
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

234 The Twentieth Chapter of the Revelation of St. John.

are infatuated with the thousand-year kingdom, hold it against me that I take precautions, especially since the old, faded picture of their passion has only recently been freshly repainted, and cannot bear even the gentle touch of my weak hand? At least the esteemed circle of readers of the "Lutheraner," I hope, will bear with me if for this reason I spend a few more words in what follows on the notorious chapter of our book.

In order to find our bearings in this chapter, everything depends on our noting the connection in which it stands with the previous one. That, however, left our gaze resting on the farthest boundaries of the horizon, into which chapter 11:18 had already framed the movement that has been our feast for the eyes up to now. The dawn of the Last Day has now crowded out every other object, just as, at daybreak, one considers worthy of notice, in the whole sky, only the rays that herald it. Time has run its course. Whatever of it still occurs can only be the very same thing that has already been shown to us. That we may now expect such a retrospect upon earlier visions is self-evident. What a running start we had to take in chapter 12, merely to get back over the gulf of the papacy into that Canaan which wicked fathers, without God's command, had exchanged for the bondage of Egypt — although it had already been shown to many a Moses from the mountain! And was it now, into eternity, to proceed in a single leap?

Let us follow this hint which Revelation itself gives us concerning the key to our mysterious chapter. If it does not lift the key for us, we shall, after all, not be able to draw back the veil that hides it from us. Let us therefore seek nothing new, but rather something that is, if possible, still older than what chapter 12 again brought before our eyes. For at that time the church, which was to rise again, needed only a train-bearer. And now the Lord Himself intends to come again!

But since one best pictures such things to oneself in images, let us call our imagination to our aid and think of a play. St. Paul, too, did not disdain to transform, as a bee that was to prepare the honey of the word out of what had been misused by the heathen, into the sweet dough of spiritual contemplation (cf. 1 Cor. 9:25). — For just as, at the moment when the play is to begin, the curtain that has hitherto hung down before the stage is rolled up, so in this chapter the holy seer, at the beginning, gathers together the whole span of the New Testament — to which, after all, this book is solely devoted — in such a way that it arches over the Hero, in harmony with chapter 12, like a triumphal arch, the Hero of whom Jacob testified that he would come, so that the peoples should cleave to him. And just as, at that same moment, the spectators look upon the open stage, so the end of our chapter unveils to us the majesty in which "the Son of Man" will appear on the Last Day, when He comes again to judge the living and the dead.