# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S260
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...from the summit the path slides downward. For just as "given," in this connection, can also mean "remitted" (compare the German usage: to remit someone's penalty), so it came about, with time, that the apostles' holy office of punishing and judging was buried along with them. In their name, those who sat upon their thrones pardoned the enemies of the cross of Christ. This, then, also meant: judgment (that is, condemnation, punishment, curse, and damnation) was given to them (to the apostles and their thrones) — they had to suffer it — that is, they themselves were judged. In Luther's day one could lay hold of it. For in fact there had by then been set up, above, upon the apostolic thrones, such as shame and horror recoil even from naming here.

Indeed, where, then, does the thousand-year kingdom remain in all this? There would, to be sure, be nothing left of it, if God had no dwelling left for his own besides departure from the earth. But he who has said, "In my Father's house are many mansions," still knows a remedy, even when the Antichrist himself, within the very temple of God, already raises his claws against God's children. He simply takes to himself those from whom the thousand-year kingdom has taken its name, and opens to them the asylum of heaven. In sum: from beginning to end, the thousand-year kingdom is nothing more than a procession of those who despised the earth and its glory, into the temple whose door Christ's resurrection had burst open. What more has been seen of it on earth than its shadow? When it stood at its fairest, the Roman emperors beheaded its citizens; and when they wished to wrap Lazarus in their purple, he had already been carried off by angels; in his place a brood had itself borne into the palace — a brood that soon, after the old custom, learned to wield, in the service of the hellish dragon, the scepter it was permitted to lean upon.

This very fact — that God could find no ground on earth for the thousand-year kingdom, but had to rescue it into heaven — is expressed by the following words:

"and the souls of them that were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God" —: Let those who seek the thousand-year kingdom on earth, where they will not find it until the Last Day, take a look at this very passage. For if it expressly lets only "the souls of the beheaded" appear, that is proof enough that here one is to think as little of a visible glory of the church on earth as of a resurrection of the body. Rather, even within these thousand years, according to our prophecy, the gospel will stand in conflict, and this precisely will be the glory of the church: that champions for the truth are found, and their battlefield draws the eyes of angels and of men, even while whole centuries often pass without the world at large becoming aware of this struggle at all. For the prophecy would indeed be superfluous, if the ox-eyes of reason could discern the victory, if men could perceive the peace with their own senses