# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1859_S289
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre [Doctrine and Defense].

Volume V.    October 1859.    No. 10.

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

(Continued.)

V. 7. "And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison."

On this the necessary things have already been said before. The Satan was loosed when the old heathenism — which in the first thousand years had been bound in the sense that it could not, in the long run, withstand the victorious power of the Word — regained its generative power in the Antichrist and false prophet Muhammad. This reversal may be compared with the suffering of Christ. Just as before his arrest the devil had everywhere been forced to give way, but then the disciples themselves were scattered, and just where, a few days before, the thunder of judgment against the scribes and Pharisees had sounded from Christ's own mouth, a unanimous "Crucify him" rang out — so now, likewise, there followed upon the age in which, despite the prevailing corruption already breaking in toward its end, the apostolic preaching had still enjoyed a similar freedom, as Christ had among hostile high priests when he went about doing good — indeed an age in which the antichristian powers could still, just as then in Jerusalem, be publicly threatened with God's wrath, without any punishment following upon it — an age of such a kind that no dog dared so much as growl against pope and Turk.

V. 8. "And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea."

"And shall go out" — that is precisely the new thing since the Lord's resurrection. When Julian the Apostate made the attempt to open his own prison, it did not succeed. Now no one need help him: he goes out by himself. The gates behind which he had formerly lain in chains suddenly become high gateways, which open to him with honors. In the streets no one notices that he has been so long in custody. His chains come to be regarded as equal to orders of knighthood.

A wonderful outcome of the thousand-year kingdom, that the devil goes out! But it was possible only because no one was prepared for it.