ing judgment on subsisting things, and calling for true worship to recognise God in the supremacy of His ministrations as the source of all things. The connection of the hour of His judgment being come and the call for true worship, supposes a Gospel preached in the midst of apostasy and corruption, before the judgment, I believe the principle of this began at the Reformation (though it was by no means the accomplishment of it), and that it will not be fulfilled till the testimony to all—even the heathen nations—for a witness, be fulfilled. The striking feature is the announcement of the hour of God’s judgment[1]
- ↑ When the everlasting Gospel then goes forth, it is not the bringing in a universal state of blessedness, but a call to fear God amongst wide-spread apostasy of all sorts, “for the hour of His judgment is come,” as “this Gospel of the kingdom must first be preached to all nations, and then shall the end come,” i.e. of the age; and this last, while I fully recognise what precedes as involving the principles, is the strong final sense of the passage, and therefore, as noticed in the preceding note, God is announced as a Creator, who had a right to His creatures, and presented Himself as such to men on the earth, as against all their idolatries, resuming (first in testimony) His place as God in the earth. Babylon, which had been the great corrupter of the earth, and the centre of idolatry, is next judged of God.
There is another point connected with the pamered and forty-four thousand and the everlasting Gospel. The hundred and forty-four thousand are redeemed from the earth, where the testimony is already a redemption from the midst of prevailing evil in
