# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1859_S239
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Twentieth Chapter of the Revelation of St. John. 239

...sense. "Devil" means accuser or slanderer. So the Greeks call him. Mark this, you heathen — the Holy Spirit here calls out to us: he will accuse Christ and speak evil of you for his sake; that will be his business. Take care that you do not intrude into his office and do his work. But the warning has gone unheeded. Have not the heathen, for so long, accused and slandered the very one who had long since cast down the Accuser! Satan means persecutor and adversary. How well the Jews understood that name! They resisted and persecuted the one whom they should have hailed with rejoicing for having cast down the adversary of the children of men. That is why it must be stated here so plainly. "Which is" mocks human wisdom and holiness. Is it not wondrous, indeed almost absurd, that an enemy whose scepter the world has been subject to ever since Adam must still be described so plainly — as one shows a child its letters — to Jews and heathen alike, even though the Holy Spirit well senses that the Jews, in their conceit, will not be pleased by this, they who knew so well who the devil was that they called Christ by that very name? Ah, how greatly Christendom needs such a schoolmaster today! Does she not see everywhere the devil's workshop, where men take pains to make the church's labor unrecognizable with the filth of slander, and with proud spirit kick against the goad of truth? She indeed calls herself the church, and the one true church!

That it is stated so exactly whom the Lord Christ seized in his descent into hell is a warning prophecy of how hard it will be, in later times, to believe which enemy has been overcome by Christ. In part, men will not rate his threatening form so highly; in part, they will fall back under his power again without knowing it. Thus, thus — says the Holy Spirit therefore — does the monster look: mark it well against the time when it shall be loosed again, so that you do not then err in the choosing.

Now comes the nut. Whoever has teeth! Whoever has better ones than Luther! I fear the teeth-breaking. Nor do I have any wish to let the devil slip an empty nut into my mouth unnoticed. We have gotten enough wormy meal. A broom would serve us better, to sweep away the dungheap that makes one anxious even to find an approach of one's own amid the many interpreters of these few words. It is no small thing to come to terms with them. Even in the first centuries, not a few faithful teachers of the church — who were otherwise accustomed to see the fierce teeth of lions bared at them when they confessed God's word before the heathen — for that very reason shrank from taking the Revelation in hand. For the Chiliasts (that is, namely those who spin from our passage the doctrine of a thousand-year kingdom of peace for the church, and thereby strike the Lord Christ in the face, he who said: "But as it was in the days of Noah, so also shall the coming of the Son of Man be," Matthew 24:37, cf. Luke 17:26–30 and 20:21) have not been haunting [this text] only since yesterday, but in