Hence, they are moral addresses of the Spirit with promises and threatenings.
From this last recognised state, this place of transition, in which Christ can deal upon earth (but in a spiritual sense) judicially, we are necessarily caught up to the throne, on which all hangs subsisting always, but now the only resource; because the manifestation of acceptable grace, with which the Lord can manifestatively dwell in spiritual presence upon earth, had ceased. Hence this part is not properly prophetic, but connected with things that are; and the prophetic character that it has, is entirely by the moral designation of the testimony of the Spirit; and we come back to the throne, μετά ταύτα. If John was to describe the government of the world on the throne, the Church being lost, he must first trace the Church as subjected to this moral judgment. The picture of the word would not be complete, had we not, after the Epistles which regulated the Church, as subsisting among the Gentiles, not only the practical account of the Apostasy, as in Jude, 2 Peter, 2 Timothy, 2 Thessalonians, &c., but the moral judgment of the Church, as passing from the state noticed in the epistles,—evidences that Christ never lost sight of it, and that when it ceased to be a manifestative
