(Revelation 11:11-12; 20:4)
The First Resurrection is the resurrection of the martyrs who did not worship the beast.
“Those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received the mark on their foreheads, they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.”1Rev 20:4
Thousands of saints were killed in the papal inquisitions of the Middle Ages, and thousands more were killed during the Reformation. The earliest Protestants, the Waldensians, were burned at the stake in the 12th and 13th centuries. In 1198, Pope Innocent III declared, “Anyone who attempts to construe a personal view of God that conflicts with Church dogma must be burned without pity.”2Pope Innocent III, 1198, Papal Bull Many, even bishops, who did not believe that the bread and wine consecrated during the mass became the physical body and blood of Christ were burned at the stake, and many others were drowned because they tried to baptize through immersion in rivers.
The apostle John said that the great harlot was “drunk with blood of the saints.”3Rev 17:6
In 1467, after the Moravian brothers declared their independence from the pope, they were hunted in the woods of Bohemia for three and a half years. Then, in 1471, their oppressors, Archbishop Jan Rokycana and King Prodebrady, died. This ended the “time, times, and half a time” and marked the start of “the First Resurrection,”4Rev 20:5 the reign of the martyrs with Christ for 1,000 years.
John said, “They heard a loud voice saying, “Come up here!” They went up into heaven in the cloud, and their enemies saw them.”5Rev 11:12 The Hussite martyrs ascended straight to heaven and began the 1,000-year reign of the martyrs with Christ. Their blood speaks for the truth for 1,000 years.
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