The Waiting of the Invisible Church.
We may gather with all certainty from this wonderful revelation of the inner mysteries of the heavenly court (1) that God has a fixed time for the end of the world; (2) that God has fixed that time according to the measures of the work which He has to finish. Even as Christ had a work to finish on earth, so that we read again and again that His "hour was not yet come," in like manner now in heaven He has a definite foreseen scheme for the administration of His mediatorial kingdom; and according to the accomplishing of this work will be the time of His coming. So much in a general way, but in this passage we have something more definite and detailed.
I. He has shadowed out to us the nature of the work that He has to do before the end comes; that is, to make up a certain number whom God has foreseen and predestined to life eternal. This then in general is the nature and direction of the mystery of this seemingly entangled world Out of the midst of it He is drawing the children of the regeneration, knitting them in one fellowship, in part still visible, in part out of sight. When the Son of God passed into the heavens He began to draw after Him a glorious train of saints, like as the departing sun seems to draw after him the lights which reflect his own splendour, till the night starts out full of silver stars.
II. Again, in this gathering out of the mystical body of His Son, God is carrying on the probation of mankind. In the inscrutable secrets of His providential government, He is so ordering the strife of the seed of the woman with the seed of the serpent, of the Church with the world, as to fulfil the manifold purposes of love and of long-suffering. And (1) we see that this long-permitted strife is ordained for the perfecting of His saints. (2) This mysterious work has an aspect of long-suffering towards sinners. It is thus that God gives them a full season for repentance. (3) We see from all this what ought to be the master aim of our lives; that is, to make sure of our fellowship in that mystical number.
H. E. Manning, Sermons,vol. i., p. 333.