Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
(1802- 1869)

The Christology of the Old Testament (1829)

Christ Came Again

(On Daniel's Seventy Weeks)
"it was then regarded by the Jews as relating to a still future occurrence -- the yet impending conquest and destruction of Jerusalem." (Com. 2, page 584)

(On Malachi 3)
'Malachi passes by the first coming of Christ in humiliation altogether and leaves the interval between his forerunner end the judgment of Jerusalem a perfect blank.' (Nature of Prophecy. Christology, vol. iv. p. 418)

(On I Corinthians 16:22)
"The word Maran-atha, which is so striking in an epistle written in Greek, and to Greeks, is in itself a sufficient indication of an Old Testament foundation. The retention of the Aramean form can only be explained on the supposition that it was a kind of watchword common to all the believers in Israel; and no expression could well have come to be so used if it had not been taken from the Scriptures. There can hardly be any doubt that it was taken from Mal. 3:1." (vol. iv. pp.256,257)

(On the Non-Occurrence of Prophecy)
‘If the Christians of the first centuries had foreseen that the second coming of Christ would not take place for eighteen hundred years, how much weaker an impression would this doctrine have made upon them than when they were expecting Him every hour, and were told to watch because He would come like a thief in the night, at an hour when they looked not for Him!’ (Hengstenberg, Christology, vol. iv. p. 443.)

WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID

Alexander Brown
"Let us not forget that once in the Church's history it was the common belief that John's 1000 years were gone. Dorner bears witness that the Church up to Constantine understood by Antichrist chiefly the heathen state, and to some extent unbelieving Judaism (System iv.,390). Victorinus, a bishop martyred in 303, reckoned the 1000 years from the birth of Christ.

Augustine wrote his magnum opus 'the City of God' with a sort of dim perception of the identity of the Christian Church with the new Jerusalem. Indeed we know that the 1000 years were held to be running by the generations previous to that date, and so intense was their faith that the universal Church was in a ferment of excitement about and shortly after 1000 A.D. in expectation of the outbreak of Satanic influence. Wickliff, the reformer, believed that Satan bad been unbound at the end of the 1000 years, and was intensely active in his day. That this period in Church history is past, or now runs its course, has been the belief of a roll of eminent men too long to be chronicled on our pages of Augustine, Luther, Bossuet, Cocceius, Grotius, Hammond, Hengstenberg, Keil, Moses Stuart, Philippi, Maurice." (Alexander Brown, Great Day of the Lord, p. 216.)

Gary DeMar
"Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg writes that 'the poor Russians have been here very unjustly arranged among the enemies of God's people.  Rosh, as the name of a people, not not occur in all the Old Testament." (Last Days Madness Obsession of the Modern Church, Atlanta, GA: American Vision, 1996, p. 364)