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With this Daniel 7 harmonizes; for, according to Dan 7:21, Dan 7:22, Dan 7:25, Dan 7:27, the little horn of the fourth beast carries on war with the saints of the Most High till the Ancient of days executes judgment in their behalf, and the time arrives when the saints shall possess the kingdom. Here we distinctly see the kingdom of heaven upon earth bearing the form of the cross, out of which condition it shall be raised by the judgment into the state of glory. The kingdom of the Messiah is thus already begun, and is warred against by Antichrist, and the judgment on Antichrist only goes before the raising of it to glory. (3) Auberlen adduces as a third argument, that (according to Roos, Hofm., etc.) only the people of Israel in opposition to the heathen nations and kingdoms can be understood by the “people of the saints of the Most High” (Dan 7:18, Dan 7:27), because Daniel could only think of this people. But to this Kranichfeld has rightly replied, that Daniel and the whole O.T. knew nothing whatever of such a distinction between a non-Israelitish and an Israelitish epoch within the kingdom of Messiah, but only a Messianic kingdom in which Israel forms the enduring centre for the heathen believing nations drawing near to them. To this we add, that the division of the kingdom of heaven founded by Christ on the earth into a period of the church of the Gentiles, and following this a period of a thousand years of the dominion of Jewish Christians, contradicts the clear statements of Christ and the apostles in the N.T., and is only based on a misconception of a few passages of the Apocalypse.
Daniel certainly predicts the completion of the kingdom of God in glory, but he does not prophesy that the kingdom of heaven will then for the first time begin, but indicates its beginnings in a simple form, although he does not at large represent its gradual development in the war against the world-power, just as he also gives only a few brief intimations of the temporary development of the world-kingdoms. If Aub. (p. 251) replies that the words of the text, Dan 2:35, “then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken to pieces together,” cannot at all permit the thought of the co-existence of the fourth world-kingdom and the kingdom of God, he attributes to these words a meaning which they do not bear. The “together” refers only to the breaking in pieces of the five substances named, of which the world-kingdoms are formed, the destruction of the world-power in all its parts, but not that this happened at one and the