# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1859_S238
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

what a great honor, when before it lay under the feed-sack! — But: He is not to be mocked, — the chain rests in His hand.

Verse 2. "And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years."

This is here singled out especially, for this reason, out of the history of Christ's resurrection, into which the previous verse led us back, in order to grant us, as it were, from the foot of the mountain we have climbed, the full view of its height — because it has lain wrapped in deep darkness, and the devil, through the superior power he later regained, has given the lie to the apostles who write of it. If, accordingly, what is said here and in the verses that immediately follow is to be compared to a flashing sword, which the Lord's rescued host draws against the enemy who boasts of having long since trodden into the dust the banner around which they would gather again — for that is exactly what the resurrection is — then one might call the close of the following, third verse ("and after that he must be loosed a little season") its very point. For what enabled the hellish Goliath to have the impudence to declare his own fall a mere fable was precisely the license which God, by His premeditated counsel, had granted him shortly before the time of the Reformation. But now he must hear that thereby not only was no harm done to the work of the Son of God, who bound him in the descent into hell, but that everything which arose from it also lay within God's plan of love, and has therefore redounded to His glory.

With great courage of victory, in holy defiance of the gates of hell which dispute the matter with the Lord, he who sees such things thus cries out: "And he laid hold on the dragon," etc., and heightens the jubilation as he heaps upon the fallen enemy all his titles of honor: "the dragon!" — who has such piercing eyes, before whom everything flees — of him He became master, him He overcame, him He seized; "that old serpent!" — for that makes the victory all the greater, that the enemy had ruled so long that no one could withstand him. It is a comfort that he is here called "the old serpent," who calls to mind the fall into sin and, through Eve, brought all corruption into the world — because his overthrow stops up the source of all misery — "which is the Devil, and Satan" — this both explains the previous titles and heightens them at once. The names are Greek and Hebrew. The Greek one stands first. If one wishes to find something in that, it might indicate that both the heathen and the Jews alike were overpowered by the devil when Christ came — in short, that he who has previously been described as, in his very nature, a terrible foe, ancient in point of time, is also an utterly universal enemy, and that for this reason all the children of men ought to rejoice over his fall. At the same time it is thereby suggested how altogether differently things will turn out than one might suppose. For it is otherwise always said: "to the Jew first, and then to the Greek"; but now those lead the dance who, in their own language, say "devil" when they sing of his defeat. In the meaning of the names, too, there lies a good