# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1855 05 08_S148
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

148

tion of His believers, before He meets the assaults of the devil. Therefore the time of the papacy has first been depicted from the side that God therein, upon the true Church, through the wonders of His saving and preserving love, has revealed His goodness and faithfulness. Thereupon follows now, as it were, the retrospect upon the tumult of war which the conflict with Antichrist has aroused:

1. in heaven. —

V. 7. "And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,": As the LORD with His hosts came to meet the devil from afar, when Saul in his bonds breathed out threatenings against the congregation in Damascus, so here Christ, who in this place, as in Dan. 12, 1, as the Son of God, as "the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person" (Heb. 1, 3), bears the name Michael, that is, Who is like God? puts a spoke in the devil's wheel. In the best of peace, so the devil juggled, the papacy stood with heaven. The Pope himself was the great prince Michael, who as Christ's vicar ascribed to himself the reflection of divine glory. As heir of Peter's chair he locked and unlocked heaven at pleasure. The angels served him, and everything that performed angels' offices was with him, together with the apostles and prophets. The whole world sank into the dust before the rays of his ban. And behold, in heaven itself Christ was the Pope's declared enemy and fought with all His angels against him!

Who meant better by the LORD Christ than the Pope and his following? He alone bore His name, he alone built Him altars; Christ received no soul unless it was fished for Him in the net of the alone-saving Roman papacy; even in purgatory he came to the help of the Saviour of the world's mercy, powerless without him, and stilled His misery? And behold, in heaven they judged of this thus: "the dragon fought and his angels;" they regarded it all only as enmity!

V. 8. "And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven". — Had not the papacy, then, prevailed? Did they not in Rome, even after the night of St. Bartholomew, with thunder of cannon, brand as a lie every proof from God's Word that was ever brought against its heavenly splendor? Ah no, they "prevailed not," they said in heaven, when the Roman tricks discovered one little device after another, in order to instill into the world, which holds shameless liars for victors as long as they let not their mouths be stopped, the delusion that God and His truth were on the side of the papacy.

The papacy built itself on and on. Into heaven the domes of its cathedrals towered. Who could doubt, then, that it stood? It had indeed castles and needed them not; for who disputed with it its churches and cloisters? It spread unhindered in all lands and could cry with head held high: I am the vine that covers the land, I possess the earth! — "Neither was their place found any more in heaven," so saith the LORD. Only on earth did the papacy flourish, only there did it take the cities and thrust in throngs the heirs of the kingdom from its broad streets into the wilderness; in heaven it was to be seen as a destroyed city, whose cities are no longer known."

V. 9. "And it was cast out" (while yet on earth he sat ever more firmly and the lie of the papacy asserted itself ever more undisputed) "the great dragon, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan" (that is, in heaven: for in the darkness of this world he was at that very time parading with the splendid titles which he had devised for his mask), "which deceiveth the whole world" (though he called himself the salvation of the world), "he was cast out into the earth" (where men exalted him into heaven), "and his angels were cast out with him" (therefore they had to serve the papacy and help to support it in pulpits, in professors' chairs and in writings; otherwise they would well have concerned themselves with God's Word and sought God's honor).

V. 10. "And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven" (on earth it was voiceless, like Abel's blood): "Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom, and the power of our God, of his Christ, for the accuser of our brethren" (these were such as the Pope did not think worthy to lick his shoes) "is cast down, which accused them day and night before God."

That is the Gospel, which echoes eternally in heaven. In the light of it the invocation of the saints and all the work-service of papistical idolatry appears as an accusing of those same faithful confessors of the LORD whom men in the service of the saints made into shameful idols, and that "before God," because men did it in prayer and misused the name of the Holy Trinity thereto, "day and night": for there was no ceasing of the hypocritical pomp. And besides, men cast the living saints into hell.

Here one sees how dreadfully the abomination of the papacy opposes the kingdom of heaven and hinders it. If he were not "cast down" and had not long since been overcome by Christ's suffering and death, God's kingdom could not stand.

V. 11. "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death."

This is likewise set over against the new holiness of the papacy, as the color of the wedding garment which those wear who are in heaven. From this it is sufficiently clear that the heaven which the papacy claims for itself is no better like the one in which God is enthroned than that for which, according to a well-known proverb, the drunkard takes it.

V. 12. "Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them". — That is as much as to say: Blessed is he who is already in heaven; on earth it is now hard to get in.

"Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time."

So the papacy on earth is not yet overthrown, but the more furiously it rages now, because the devil in heaven has received his sentence and sees the judgment drawing near. He must hasten to make booty yet.

This is the transition to the second part, concerning the conflict which the Church on earth has to endure:
2. how the Church on earth was persecuted by Antichrist and yet preserved, vv. 13—17.

This section falls into three parts, in which it is described how the devil through the papacy in manifold ways has oppressed the children of God without being able to quench the kingdom of God: first, in that he set up in the papacy a power with which the Church could not get along, so that great faith was needed by whoever wished to flee from it (vv. 13, 14); then through a stream of false doctrines which little by little came into vogue in the papacy, which however, as they had grown up in time, also withered away again in time ("the earth helped the woman"), vv. 15, 16; finally through persecution of those who from time to time became manifest as such who, in spite of the prevailing idolatry, served the true God of Israel (v. 17).

V. 13. "And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child". — The devil does not cease to show himself an enemy of God because he has been overcome through Christ, but becomes only the more incensed thereat. Hence the papacy has come. Just then the heathen idol altars had fallen and the banner of the cross had been set up on earth. That the wicked enemy cannot forget. He now attacks the Church all the more. But men on earth knew little of it, regarding the persecution rather as great favor and friendship. Therefore it must be said here. What everyone sees without this need not be revealed from heaven. The persecution was precisely the idolatry which men practiced with the Pope. This the devil introduced and thereby turned the hearts unnoticed away from Christ. Later it came indeed also to open persecution: for when the Pope here and there was recognized from God's Word as one who belonged only to the earth and was cast down in heaven, he caused the apostles to be silenced, who yet were the Church, the right woman, "persecuted" thus "the woman which brought forth the man child," although he did not say that he was an enemy of the apostles.

V. 14. "And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished