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A question arises here, What is the difference, if any, between the "word of God" and the "testimony of Jesus Christ?" Or is there any distinction intended by the Holy Spirit? Most readers as well as expositors view these expressions as identical.
By birth as humble as any layman who before or since his time has held the seals, Thomas Parker raised himself to the woolsack by great talents and honorable industry. As an advocate he won the respect of society and his profession; as a judge he ranks with the first expositors of English law.
In this chapter we read of the sealing of one hundred and forty-four thousand. How much confusion might have been avoided if expositors and Christians had not lost sight of two facts in connection with this sealed company. This sealed company therefore is of Israel, and will be called after the Church has been removed to her heavenly destination.
The first six seals, covering the time of heathen Rome's opposition to Christianity, and before the Devil succeeded in enlisting the nominal church of Christ in his interest, do not therefore furnish occasion for much controversy among expositors. Besides, the seventh seal covers much more time than all the others.
This is because expositors did not know that the Word is divine truth together with divine good or, what is the same, divine wisdom together with divine love. That these are the Lord Himself was shown in the treatise Divine Love and Wisdom, Part I, and that they are the Word in Doctrine of the New Jerusalem about the Sacred Scripture, nn. 1-86.
Those expositors are probably right who think that "with himself" is connected with "stood," rather than "prayed." It is in perfect accord with the narrative to intimate that he stood by himself he was not the man to mingle with the common herd of worshippers; but it does not seem congruous to intimate that he prayed with himself.
There have been poor, inept, banal expositors, doubtless; but even they turned men's minds to the Bible. Reading the Bible makes men thinkers, and so makes preachers inevitably. Witness the Scotch. James was raised in Scotland and believed in the power of preaching. At one time he wanted to settle endowments for the maintenance of preaching under government control.
Whatever amount of ground there may be for the judgment of some expositors that the three measures of meal in the parable represent spirit, soul, and body, the constituents of human nature, certain it is that if the leaven of the kingdom is deposited in the heart, it will not cease until it has interpenetrated the human trinity and conformed all to the likeness of Christ.
This was in part inevitable, since no society which preserves any tincture of Christian institution is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by the middle Roman law, but the proprietary disabilities of married females stand on quite a different basis from their personal incapacities, and it is by keeping alive and consolidating the former that the expositors of the Canon Law have deeply injured civilisation.
The word "wonder" in this verse, and also in verse third, simply means a sign or symbol; and the whole structure of the book requires that it be so translated. "Woman" is here the true church of God. Here most expositors fail to explain the symbol "heaven." Others say "heaven" symbolizes the church. Then we have two churches, a church within a church!
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