# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1859_S236
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

and understand it, if we do not want to sink, together with it, as on a plank torn loose from a ship, into a flood of erroneous doctrines — none other than Christ Himself. That He is still there, that His footprint can be traced, indeed that His form is unveiled ever more fully, crowns everything that has happened up to this point with His church. Just as, in chapter 12, it was the greatest triumph of truth over the lie of the papacy that the church came again to light in the very same form as in the days of the apostles, so now the hosanna that has hitherto sung the fall of the Antichrist rises to the highest jubilation, to a true "Hosanna in the highest." "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today, and forever," is now, as it were, the full chord in which everything sounds together that we have already often heard singly.

First came the church with her servants, verses 11–19. She could, after all, do nothing without her Head. But she stood in the fight, and was, so to speak, the Lord's armor, behind which He concealed Himself. Now He Himself steps forward. Then all that is His casts its crowns into the dust and bows before Him, just as an army, after a hard-won victory, gathers around its leader, even though it was the army itself that drew every eye during the battle.

The Lord, then, is the angel whom St. John sees. But how so? "And I saw an angel come down from heaven." If we read a little further, it is as though we were here to learn for the first time, in earnest, the article of Christ's descent into hell. But then what is the point of the addition, "from heaven"? That directs our gaze to a further goal; it shows that Christ, after He had ascended into heaven, still had work to do on earth and in hell in the power of His descent into hell. From the devil's delusions, which had always wrapped the Lord's work in clouds of lies and slander and suppressed it by cunning and force, this word takes away their power to persuade. He comes down "from heaven": so His kingdom has not ceased, merely because it is stormed on earth — indeed, so far as one can see, is being overthrown; it stands in conflict, and even after the Lord's resurrection there is a constant descent of Christ into hell. Indeed, the trials that hide it from reason so little contend against its continuance that it is rather its very nature always to withdraw with Christ into heaven, to have there, in the unseen essence of faith, its walk, its refuge, and its home. From this it also explains itself why one can discover so little of it in the world. It is despised because it has no refuge here. And behold, while the sighs of those who belong to it seem to die away in the air, the Lord answers them from heaven and comes down to bless His own and to terrify His enemies. For this, to be sure, eyes are needed. But whoever has them no longer finds the destroyer terrible: the whole of world history is transformed before his gaze into this one spectacle, that he sees the angel of the covenant, whom the world imagines so far away, coming down from heaven — no longer only in a dream, as Jacob at Bethel, but with waking eyes, John 1:51.

"Who had the key to the bottomless pit" —: who else has it, but Christ Himself?