# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S261
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Twentieth Chapter of the Revelation of St. John. 261

...could perceive with their own senses, of which the Lord here gives comforting news. This promise, too, is directed against the appearance of its opposite. The Word is, in the darkness of the world, the only sun in whose light one perceives the jewel that the world can glorify in no other way than with the bloody purple and the crown of thorns.

The sense of these words is clear. The world will suppose that it has rejected the apostles' testimony and thereby disposed of it. But far from it: it throws the grain of wheat out of its palaces and kicks it away with its feet from the streets; and so that grain finds a ground, precisely there, that has not been trodden down. Never has God more keenly wounded the pride of its princes. The more it raised itself up against the truth, the louder that truth became known. That amid the storm-winds of persecution the fire did not go out which the Lord had come to kindle on the earth was its finest proof. It blazed up highest exactly when Satan blew into it most fiercely.

Not only was the cause for which the witnesses of the truth contended only the more furthered by having to suffer oppression and persecution; the sacrifices, too, which they brought for their own persons, were not lost, but pleasing to God. Of their bodies, to be sure, nothing is said: for throughout these thousand years the saying was especially current, "Whoever loves his life shall lose it," etc.; but their souls — and it was these alone that they wished to save in this present evil world — found perfected in death the life which, on earth, they had breathed amid much tribulation. Could there have been for them a fairer triumph over sin, death, and the devil, over the world and all the gates of hell?

First of all, then, among those "who were beheaded" we are to think of the martyrs of the apostolic age. To this we are compelled, as has already been mentioned once before, by the word "beheaded." This properly means: killed with the axe, and it is the customary term for the death penalty that was in use in the Roman Empire. Why should it have been put precisely this way, and not rather, in general terms, simply "killed," seeing that many confessors of the Lord were also put to death in other ways — if there had been no reason to give us a pointer as to which period we are to set as the beginning of the thousand-year kingdom? Above all, by this the apostles are shown the honor due to them, of leading the round-dance of those who, through the victory-gate of a glorious martyr's death, amid hymns of a willing spirit, have entered into the wedding-hall of the Lamb. For of these the first, indeed — James and St. Paul — were beheaded. — But here too the steep mountain path soon descends. Standing right alongside those who, in the time of the heathen Roman empire, were put to death "for the testimony of Jesus," come to stand those who became martyrs "for the word of God." This already turns our gaze to the days of an Athanasius, in which emperors of an Arian mind persecuted faithful servants of the Lord — not, perhaps, for the name of Jesus, but indeed for its sake,