it is the protraction of that state of things, till the Church, as a dispensation, is spued out of Christ’s mouth; and the things that shall be hereafter are the actual intervention of the throne of God afresh in the government of the world.
I believe the Holy Ghost has ordered it so as to leave ground for both these applications, as the Church knows the throne mystically now in the exaltation of her Head, and actually in its future judicial and open intervention in the affairs of the world.
Accordingly, the second and third chapters are addresses to the churches, but, on moral principles, extended to every one that had ears to hear; connecting the actually existing bodies with the condition in which the Church might find itself in after-ages. The things that are, are, more properly, what then was. The addresses to the churches, the exhibition of the protracted prolongation of the dispensation of the Church, mystically perfect, yet ruined; the throne being set up already, but its full manifestation, as for the world, not yet brought out. Within this
they were not, historically, then shut up, till Paul’s intercourse with them at Rome (Acts xxviii); and even so, it was blindness in part, not stumbling to fall; and there was a remnant according to the election of grace.
