God’s connection, in grace, with the earth before the temple was built—where David had prepared a place for the ark—contrasted with Sinai, the place of law to the earth. Whence, too, the law was to go forth in grace from the city of the great King,—that “Zion that bringeth glad tidings.”
Here, then, anticipatively of the time when the Lord God and the Lamb should be the temple of the heavenly Jerusalem—when withal on earth Solomon’s glory should be all displayed—stood a Lamb maintaining still this character, not yet appearing in that of Son of man, but now drawing towards His royalty, towards the earth, yet associated with his suffering people still, and with the perfect number of the remnant, having His Father’s name on their forehead, the manifestation of the character plain upon them in grace as children. Their great characteristic was having kept themselves pure. The dwellers upon earth, we read afterwards, had been made drunk with the poison of Babylon’s fornication, but these had kept themselves pure though Babylon was not yet fallen. They were redeemed from among men from the earth—a peculiar people in the power of their lives, in the midst of those professors, while Babylon stood—not the reign of Christ in blessing, not the
