# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S265
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Twentieth Chapter of the Revelation of St. John. 265

...something was lacking to them (this too is hinted at in the word "rest"): — when they no longer had any Christians left to rub up against, they felt an infinite emptiness, and did not truly live even then, while they still lived.

Finally, let us also consider the interpretation that is common and current. According to it, the passage means as much as this: those, the faithful confessors, died and yet lived; but the other dead — that is, all mankind who died within those thousand years outside the members of Christ — did not become alive again after death, and until the thousand years have elapsed it is likewise not to be thought that they will be called out of their graves to eternal torment: for until this period has run its course, the Last Day is not to come. Whoever takes the passage this way is told by it, in so many words, that no one should imagine that a general resurrection of the dead precedes the thousand years. But who even considers that here, and in what has gone before, there is any talk at all of a resurrection in the proper sense of the word?

"This is the first resurrection."

How, then, can the happily-ended struggle for the pearl of the Gospel — from which the thousand years take their name — properly be called a resurrection at all, when the bodies of the apostles and of other Christians rest in the grave, and nothing whatever has occurred that would allow us to infer any other condition of the blessed than that which had already been granted to the patriarchs? Indeed, precisely for this reason one must again and again go back to the words "with Christ." Christ's resurrection here gives its name to the victory of the Gospel over the heathendom of the old world, as the first thousand years after Christ celebrated it, so that in the end we are reminded of the cornerstone on which God has built the thousand-year kingdom. 1 Corinthians 15:20, 23 explain the word "first" sufficiently. "Resurrection" is the name given to this victorious struggle for the truth, with an eye fixed on Christ, the author and finisher of faith, who has said, "Without me you can do nothing" — precisely so that we should not think that the glory spoken of here is to be revealed in this body of death; just as the addition "first" likewise points us away from the old heaven and the old earth, and fixes for our gaze the goal toward which St. Paul jubilantly presses with the words: "But our citizenship is in heaven, from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ." (Phil. 3:20.)

V. 6. "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years."

This is an encouragement addressed to the Christians of the first ten centuries, meant to steel them for the struggle into which they are to be led — a trumpet-blast which, once the thousand-year kingdom has appeared before the eyes of the seer, rouses the ranks of warriors to take possession of it.

"Blessed and holy" — "Blessed" stands first, so that no one should think that we are to become so only through our own holiness.