# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S257
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Vol. V.    September 1859.    No. 9.

(Submitted by Pastor Röbbelen.)
The Twentieth Chapter of the Revelation of St. John.

(Continued.)

V. 4. "And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given to them; and the souls of them that were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and who had not worshiped the beast, nor his image, and had not received his mark upon their foreheads and upon their hands — these lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years."

As the close of the verse plainly says, this passage is a depiction of the thousand years of which we have just been speaking. The vision therefore corresponds to the picture unveiled in vv. 1–3; it is, once again, as it were, the coloring of it.

"And I saw thrones": — Just as good eyes were needed to perceive, amid the tumult of the world, the angel with the key and the chain, so too these thrones, so far as the generation that stood upon the stage in those thousand years was concerned, by no means remained as uncontested as they counted, in heaven, for immovable, firmly fixed seats of honor. Indeed, they were in part overturned. Yet even in a corner they proved their strength, and wherever they were set up, the places that gave them room were, along with them, always thereby raised to the rank of cities set on a hill. Here too, then, the old rule holds: that prophecy is clear only to faith, while at the same time it remains exposed to the contradiction of reason. "I saw thrones" — while another, by contrast, saw only stages for good-for-nothings (cf. Acts 17:18). — What, moreover, is to be understood by the thrones needs no explanation, since here the glory of a kingdom is being disclosed, for the strengthening of the spirit that the wisdom of this world besieges — a kingdom of which One who knows well what he speaks of has said that its power is to serve (Matthew 20:25–28); they can mean nothing other than the office that bears the scepter and the crown of the congregation, which, as the bride of the Lamb, triumphs over the waves upon the rock-foundation of the Word — the very waves of which the ninety-eighth Psalm, verses 3 and 4, speaks.

Thus hidden, then, was — even within these thousand years, at bottom —