But the Chaldean was not only a real, but a representative, or mysterious person. He stands forth in the prophets as telling us of coming and final judgments. His sword visited not only Judah and Jerusalem, but the surrounding nations. His was a day in which the God of all the earth was rising up, and the world had to keep silence. It was a miniature or inchoative judgment of all the nations. It was “the day of the Lord,” in spirit or in principle. The sword was furbished for the slaughter. The dominion went from “the daughter of Jerusalem,” for the house of David was reprobate, and the Chaldean took the throne under God, so to speak, away from the Jew.
Judgment, however, never closes the scene. As we said, glory touches judgment, in the ways of God. Judgment cleans out the vessel, and then glory fills it. It takes away what hinders the presence of the Lord, and then the kingdom is established and displayed, as Zephaniah, together with all the prophets, show us. The Apocalypse is the great closing witness of this. There judgment makes way for glory again; and that, finally—in other words, that which offends and does iniquity, the great reprobate, apostate energies, are all judged and removed, and the day of millennium brightness begins to run its course.
It is judgment, judgment; over them sing, over them sing; in continuous succession, because no steward of God has been faithful or given an account of his stewardship. Adam, the Jew, the Gentile, the candlestick, all in their day have been untrue to Him that appointed them, and “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty, He judgeth among the gods.” The garden was lost by Adam; the land of their fathers by their children, or Canaan by Israel; the Gentile was as faithless as they, and power passed from the head of gold, to the breasts and arms of silver, thence to the belly and thighs of brass, and then to the legs of iron, and the feet which were of iron and clay. There was no delivering up to God of that which had been received from Him. The stewards have been removed, one after the other, and their stewardships have been taken away from them, in the stead of their delivering of them up, or giving a just account of them. So it has ever been, and so is it still, and there is no exception to this until we look at Jesus.