# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1859_S242
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...old and new covenant; why does one count the years from Christ, if not because the resurrection of the Lord gave the whole history of the world a visible turn, made the devil's power subject to the Word, and transformed into a trophy of victory the palace that the strong armed man could no longer defend against the Stronger One — whose invisible body, before this, could not even keep the prince of darkness in the promised land from holding what was his in peace?

But one must certainly not lose sight here of the fact that it is Christ alone, and He by nothing else than the chain of His faithful witnesses of the Gospel, who binds Satan. Where these bonds are not, there the devil is free. Victory enough. Whoever stirs the chain is free in that instant. Faith belongs to this; but Satan cannot overpower that.

So the horrors that have occurred even within these thousand years do not refute the word that ascribes to them so glorious a victory. Indeed, it is precisely because these horrors darken the Lord's victory like clouds of smoke that such a prophecy is needed. It shines around the ever-green bush that Moses saw with heavenly light: one would not recognize it without this fire at the evening of the world.

What a comforting promise for the church of the first ten centuries, struggling with the hostile powers of heathen darkness! She need not fear meeting insurmountable obstacles when she pushes into the dark forests among the savages with the torch of the Gospel. The struggle for the banner of the cross lasted exactly that long. Is it not worth the praise that idols were cast down everywhere wherever men made the preaching of the Gospel a matter of earnest? However much tares the enemy secretly sowed among the wheat, the work went forward unstoppably, so that the old heathendom was victoriously pursued and the old Jews were held in check. Indeed, one could set no more fitting inscription upon a monument of this millennium than this: "And he seized the dragon — and bound him a thousand years." Even afterward Satan could not regain the field in his old form; he had to, as testimony that he had been defeated, devise a new stratagem from then on.

Verse 3. "And cast him into the abyss, and shut him up, and sealed it above him, that he should deceive the nations no more till the thousand years were fulfilled; and after that he must be loosed for a little season."

"And cast him into the abyss" means nothing other than: condemned him. The devil openly and publicly received his sentence. It became plain to everyone that the idols he had served, for as long as the devil ruled, were nothing, and that whoever worshipped them belonged in hell. What a transformation of the world! The sanctuary was fled from as an abomination and "abyss" of hell.

"and shut him up" — this state of affairs held firm. The devil came back neither with the old heathendom nor with the Jewish zealotry