We meet with this connection for the first time formally expressed: it seems to me connected with fidelity during corruption, during which the mediatorial work of Christ was confounded, corrupted, or denied, as the mediatorial glory is described by the terms “Throne of God and the Lamb,” “The Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it,” &c. So, in the true Bride, contrasted with the great Whore that did corrupt the earth with her fornication, we have the elect or heavenly Church (which is spoken of, therefore, as coming down from heaven), contrasted with that earthly system which connects itself with the kings of the earth. It is the Lord God that judges her. The kings of the earth have their war with the Lamb. “Firstfruits
earth; redeemed from among men. The body of the Church, in its heavenly character, had passed out of the scene before—had nothing to do with the earth. The refusing the beast after, is for preservation in an earthly place—a preservation enforced by a warning of unmingled wrath in the presence of the holy angels, the ministers of His providence, and of the Lamb, the Sufferer, whose grace, and power, and title, they refused and rejected in the great controversy. These hundred and forty-four thousand are more circumstantially like the Lord in his earthly portion and taking up. They were not corporately looked at as the Bride of Christ, but as holding a special place as virgins: still, as contrasted with the harlotry of evil in the protracted period, the remnant peculiarly and separately preserved; in the crisis, a special remnant which we have noted.
