Clough Dispensations Lesson 1

Introduction

Tonight we begin a study on dispensations; this originally came about because of a request of some people who were greatly lacking in a lot of areas, and as always happens, when dispensations are neglected, and since they’re such a fundamental thing, you inevitably give rise to all sorts of oddball things. In fact, it’s interesting that you can trace every cult or every weird religious cult or sect today could not exist if dispensations had been made clear. It’s absolutely impossible for dispensationalism to coexist with liberalism, with modernism, with neo-orthodoxy, with Mormonism, with Jehovah Witnesses, with Seventh Day Adventism, with any of these, it’s absolutely impossible if dispensations are held to. But if dispensations are neglected then you open yourself up for the substitute forms for Biblical Christianity. And, unfortunately many of the cults today are winning people faster than any other segment that is openly identified with Christianity.

In fact, it’s almost alarming to think that the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in this town alone are expanding faster than all the other church groups combined. And the reason for it is that people want doctrine; people want something to believe and they are giving it to them; it’s false, but they are giving it to them. And people are basically fed up with being told that well, this is this opinion, this is that opinion, and some people think this way and some people think that way and if that’s really the case then why bother. So these cults have an advantage and that is that they are doctrinal centered, and you’ll always find that though they may be shallow in their knowledge of the Bible and inevitably they are but you’ll always find a cultist knows his doctrine. It’s a characteristic of them, and I think it should be a characteristic of those of us who are professing fundamental Christians that we should know the Bible better than anyone else in the community.

Therefore, dispensations, since it’s so central to this, warrants some treatment; so tonight we are going to introduce dispensations and we’ll just spend time leading up to a definition of what we mean by dispensations. I want to define this carefully and I want to spend considerable time on leading up to this definition so that you will understand something, if you forget everything else that’s learned at least you will pick up one thing and that is that dispensations grow out of an inductive study of the Scriptures. They do not come about because somebody likes to draw charts. The image that a lot of people have if you mention the word dispensation is that well, that’s something that C.I. Scofield or Clarence Larkin thought up and Clarence Larkin was a designer and he liked to draw pictures, so he liked to draw all these involved pictures of the Bible and all of a sudden that’s where we get dispensations from. This may seem kind of stupid but if you read such an authoritative work as Introduction to Biblical Theology by Bernard Ramm, you’ll find a very condescending article under the entry “Dispensations,” claiming that this is some sort of hypothesis that somebody picked out of the air somewhere and then jams, rams and crams all Scripture to fit.

Some dispensationalists have taken dispensationalism to an extreme and so it’s a nasty word and I want to warn you about that. Be careful whose company you’re in when you mention the word “dispensation,” or you may raise a few temperatures in the room and you’ll wonder why. The reason is that it’s a curse word in some areas. So for the sake of preserving harmony, if you’re around someone and you don’t know where they stand, rather than create a furor over a false word and false issue, just use the word “ages.” It’s the same thing. I believe there are certain ages in the Bible.

So let’s first look at dispensations from the standpoint of ancient history and the first thing we’re going to look into is that the concept of dividing history up into ages was very common in the ancient world. The ancient world looked upon history as a sequence of ages. You can find this, for example, in the early Greeks in the 5^th century; they taught that the world had different ages and that at the end of each age the world was burned, destroyed, and re-created. And then the world would go on for an age and then it would be burned, destroyed and re-created. So the early Greeks had a concept of the periodic breaks in history. You do to the Indian legends, not of North America but of true India, and the early predecessors of Hinduism believed in four ages, with the present history being part of the fifth. You go to the early Chinese and in early China they believed in ten ages. You go to the Icelanders and the Hawaiians and both of them, both island civilizations believed in nine ages. So the concept of looking at history from the standpoint of successive ages is not something that is unusual; it’s not something unusual at all.

Now we come down to the modern time and we designate history by ages; we say the atomic age, we say the electric age, we use all sorts of designations and by this we mean to characterize a certain period of history and we label as an atomic age, an electric age and so on. Now in the Bible, in the Old Testament, there was basically three major ages, and you find this in the Old Testament, you find it in the Gospels and you will find these terms in your New Testament. And these three ages are very well known; anyone who has studied in the Old Testament particularly is aware of these. One is called… you can divide history up into three parts; the first part is called “the former times.” Now these are expressions you’ll see as you study your Bible, and this is the image, you might say, that the people in the time of our Lord had. Then in the middle they had “the latter days,” that was the name of the second age. And then the third age was “the age” or sometimes “ages” plural, “to come.” And that was the three-fold way the people had of referring to history.

Now by “the former times” they meant all the times up until the Messiah would come upon the scene, and when Messiah would come, then that would usher in “the latter days.” And the latter days would be days that would end ultimately in great tribulation, and of course since in the Old Testament the First and Second Comings of Messiah were blurred together, they weren’t separate and distinct, this whole time of the latter days was kind of a mystery, in the sense that you had latter days starting with Messiah and yet they end with Messiah. It’s not at all clear as to the Messiah’s relationship to this period of time known as the latter days. However, they are looked upon as the prelude to the age to come. The latter days are looked up as a time of…well, if you use the analogy of the age to come as the birth, the new birth, which is the analogy of the Old Testament, that the millennium and the eternal state is a new birth, of course we pick up the new birth on an individual basis because of the New Testament, but the latter days are looked upon as the time of labor in which all of heaven and earth struggle to bring about this new birth. And so therefore the latter days have a connotation of trouble, of tumult, of catastrophe. And this whole term, the latter days, extends from the First Advent to the Second Advent of Christ. This is how the term is used; so that’s why when you read in the New where it says, “we say in these latter days…” such and such and such and such, it doesn’t mean, as some of the liberals have said, that Paul thought that his time was definitely the last of the Church Age. The point is simply that Paul was using that term as any Old Testament person would have understood him to refer to the time of Messiah, the age of Messiah.

So these are, then the three-fold designation. Let’s look at some passages in the New Testament and watch how these terms come up. The first one is Matthew 24:3. As we go through some of these I’m going to try to give you a balanced presentation of dispensations in the light of all of the hot debate that’s been going on about them. I’m going to try to smooth over some of the rough spots that dispensationalists have left on the stage, so to speak. “And as He sat upon the Mount of Olives, the disciples came unto Him privately, saying, [4] Tell us, when shall these thing be? And what shall be the sign of Thy coming, and of the end of the world [age]?” Now the “sign of Thy coming, and of the end of the world” are two distinct things but for our purposes we just want to look at the second one, “the end of the world.” Now the word “world” here is the Greek word, and it’s the first of several words which we will examine tonight that are translated “ages” or dispensations in the Bible.

The first word here in this context is translated “world,” and in the Greek it is actually the word aionos, or transliterated, a-i-o, long o, n-o-s. This word means a span of time in a series of such spans of time. So it’d look like this; you have a ruler, divided off into your increments of measurement and each increment is a span, and so aionos looks upon a particular span of time bracketed by other spans of time. And this is why this is sometimes in the plural, “the ages to come,” and so to speak. And that, of course, refers to the millennium, to the eternal state. Well, the aionos then, the word used here, really gives you the wrong idea if you think of the end of the world because that’s not what the apostles are asking the Lord Jesus Christ; they’re not asking Him what’s going to be the sign of the end of the world. They don’t need that; if the world comes to a screeching halt you don’t need a sign. You know it’s there. Well, what is the sign of the end? Of what? Not of the world’s existence as we know the word world, but the end of this age…the end of the age. And of course here they are referring to the latter days, that in between period and they’re saying what’s going to be the sign when this latter day period comes to an end. And then Jesus gives you the information of Matthew 24 and 25.

Now the principle that we want to learn from Matthew 24:3 about ages and how the Bible looks at them is that there is a continuity from one age to the next. You’ll see this again and again and again. There are two things that you have to balance and keep them in balance when you talk dispensations. There are things that remain constant throughout all of history and then there are things that change from age to age. Now the early dispensationalists maybe oversold their case by drawing all the attention to the things that change from age to age, and forgot in their zeal of propagating dispensations to remind people that some things do remain changed from age to age, as we’ll see later. The mode of salvation has never changed…never changed, it’s exactly the same in Israel, it’s exactly the same before Israel, it’s exactly the same in the Church Age and will be exactly the same in the millennium. The mode of salvation does not change. Dispensationalists have been giving people the idea that they believe in seven ways to be saved or something, and historically this has come about through an unfortunate note in the Scofield Bible under John 1, I think. So in the first edition there was a note there that gave the people impression that dispensationalists were teaching many ways to be saved; not true, so don’t give people that impression. Salvation is always the same; the mode of salvation.

So you have the two principles in dispensations, you have some things that are continuous and some things that are discontinuous; some things change from one period of history to the next. Now that’s the word aionos, and that looks upon history as a series or a sequence of units of history.

Now we come to another word and that’s found in Ephesians 3:1, we won’t spend time on the details of Ephesians, but we will spend time on getting Paul’s use of various Greek words here that are translated “ages” or dispensations. “For this cause I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles—” and then he stops, and that sentence is never completed. The next verse, verse 2 is an entirely new thought. If you were diagramming this sentence you’d have to leave a dash here, that sentence is not a complete though, “For this cause, I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles,” where’s the verb, there’s no verb in that sentence, it’s left off. So if you were diagramming that sentence you’d have a problem, there is no verb, and the reason is that when Paul gets to the word “Gentiles” his mind goes back to something interesting, and that something interesting is the position of the Gentiles in this age, the position of you, the position of me, and so at this point he stops, which, incidentally, is characteristic of Paul. If you want an exercise in diagramming sentences I suggest Ephesians 1:1-14, it’s all one sentence, and if you do that and diagram it properly I will guarantee you’ll have 3 to 4 sheets of loose-leaf paper spread out on the floor and the sentence will go off like this because Paul, it’s almost like he rambled; he starts off, drops the sentence, picks it up, goes out here, and then that makes him think of something else and he goes out here; it’s the sign of a genius because he never finishes a thought that he doesn’t think of something else and throws that in. And as he unravels Ephesians, that’s the longest sentence, incidentally in the Bible, I think, Ephesians 1:3-14. But here he does the same thing; he stopped after the word “Gentiles” because he wants to go back to the issue that comes up here immediately when you talk about Gentiles in relationship to salvation and so on.

Ephesians 3:2, “If ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me toward you,” he’s writing to Gentiles now and he’s saying now I just got to the Gentiles, “a prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles,” so he’s talking to the Ephesian Gentiles, “If ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God,” and here he starts talking, and he uses a word which is translated in your Bibles as “dispensation.” This Greek word is not aionos but it is the word from which the English word “economy” comes from; it’s oikonomia, and it’s simply the word from which we get in the English economy, or administration, or working. Now by exegesis here, the use of this word, oikonomia, in verse 2 refers specifically not to a dispensation as such. What it refers to is the way the specific work of God, in revealing this to Paul. So what he’s saying is, “If you heard of the working of the grace of God, which is given me toward you,” in other words, here is a special work of the grace of God. Now it is connected to the dispensation of the Church, I’ll show you in a minute how, but specifically he has in mind the special work that God worked in his life in a special way to bring about something, and that something is given in verse 3.

Again we have a principle that we can derive from Scripture at this point about dispensations, and that is that dispensations are not the product of human authors reflecting upon the Scriptures. You have the wrong image of dispensations if you think that way. It’s not that, like if you were to draw a Bible chart for your Sunday school class and just for convenience sake you would divide the Bible up into certain categories and say well, this is one category, this is the second category, this is the third category, and then some other Sunday school teacher might come in and draw the chart a little differently, and you’d have a different set of categories. It’s not that at all; it’s not the product of human authors reflecting upon the Scripture. These categories of dispensations in the Bible are real; they’re not projected unto the text by a human student of the text; they are actually in the text. These dispensations are real. If you were to write a history book, for example, the only real way you should write a history book is write a volume, or several volumes per dispensation and then switch. So dispensations are actually real times in history that represent real changes in God’s working.

Now at this point some people will object, they say now you dispensationalists are saying that… don’t you say that God is immutable and here you just got through saying that God changes. Now we covered this in the doctrine of anthropology, the fallacy and the argument is that God can be immutable in His character, His essence; He never can change, but parts of His plan can change. The master plan never does but for example, if you are to get up in the morning and you go to work and you have a job to do at the office. For one hour you may work on a certain thing; another hour you may work on something else, and work in an entirely different way. And then the third hour you’re working on something else. All those tasks are ultimately connected, if you have a sane job. And the fourth hour you might work on something. Now if I were an observer and walked into your office I’d say now what the heck are you doing, the first hour you’re over at this desk doing something on the calculator, and the second hour you’re in there talking with someone. What’s this got to do with it? Well, because you know your job, they do all work together, but to an outside observer it may be confusing. Now the same thing is true with dispensations. God does not have to change in His character to change the way He works from one period of history to another, and that’s the answer to that objection to dispensationalism.

Ephesians 3:3, this is what God revealed by Paul, “How that by revelation He made known unto me the mystery,” now the word “by revelation” is another feature of dispensations. Every time you have a switch in dispensations it is accompanied by a rather spectacular revelation. And this is why I say dispensations are not the product of Clarence Larkin, C. I. Scofield, Lewis Sperry Chafer or somebody else, or J. N. Darby. They are the result of the fact that in history God changes his mode of operation and announces it to men so that each dispensations starts itself off with a rather spectacular revelation and verse 3 shows you that the Church Age, of which Paul speaks, how that by revelation, here’s God making known to men the fact that He’s moving in a different direction, in a different way. “How that by revelation He made known unto me the mystery,” and the word “mystery” simply means something that was not before revealed, “(as I wrote afore in a few words,) [4] Whereby when ye read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ,” except in the Greek this doesn’t say “of Christ,” it says “of the Christ.”

And when Paul uses the word “Christ” with the article, “the,” he refers to what we would call the Church. We would call it by the Church, the body of Christ. In the New Testament frequently the body of Christ is indicated by “the Christ.” It includes more than the person of Jesus Christ, it includes Jesus Christ plus all those in His body. It includes the structure called “the Christ,” which is the Church, Christ is the head and we are the body, and the whole unit together is known as “the Christ.” And this is what he says, “Whereby when ye read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery of the Christ,” now the fact that he calls “the Christ” a mystery means that it was not revealed, this is something new, something new in history.

Ephesians 3:5, he goes on to explain this. “Which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto His holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.” Now “which in other ages,” here we come upon our third word of the evening; we’ve already dealt with two, aionos, oikonomia, and now in verse 5 we have a third word that is involved, and that is genais, and genais refers to a generation of men, and we would translate that, perhaps more accurately in our English if we said “in generations,” “which in other generations was not made known.” And this draws emphasis to something else in dispensationalism and that is that history is primarily structured around man; it’s not that man is the center of the universe, God is the center of the universe but He works out history with the human race as the prime motivation, the prime function on earth. Now this is important, besides angels man is very important in history. And this is why evolution, as it has come into our school system, as it has come into our public life, is very satanic because what it says is that man is simply a chance byproduct, that the real thing in history is the universe itself, the physical universe, that’s the real thing, that’s the thing that’s been around for billions and billions of year and we’re sort of Johnny-come-lately, and we just popped onto the scene so we’re kind of irrelevant to the whole thing. That’s not the Biblical picture; the Bible centers everything on what God is doing with the human race.

So verse 5, “Which in other generations was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto His holy apostles and prophets,” now here’s the revelation, “by His holy apostles and prophets,” those two offices are the channels of revelation for the Church. Remember in Ephesians 2:20 it says the Church is built on the apostles and prophets. And the very imagery in Ephesians 2:20 tells you something about the claim that we have prophets and apostles alive today; the imagery in the Bible is that the Church is like a temple, there are many imageries, but one of them that it is a temple and you have the foundation, the apostles and prophets. Now in each generation you don’t relay the foundation; that foundation was already laid and finished when the New Testament canon was complete. You don’t keep building a house by keep building the foundation; once the foundation is built it’s done, they you get on with the task of building the house upon the foundation. So the rest of the Church Age is designed to building this building, superstructure, on top of the apostles and prophets.

This is why we do not have apostles and prophets. If you want apostles and prophets the only two consistent positions you could have would be Mormonism and Romanism, and that’s the only place to go if you believe that prophecy continues today. You might as well go back to Rome and be a Romanist and believe that the Pope is a living apostle; or you ought to go to Mormonism where you have a so-called set of living apostles. Now those are the only logical things and this is why it’s so dangerous today when people start talking about tongues and God revealing Himself and pouring out His Spirit and we need all these gifts. It’s absolutely anti-Protestant; they’re going right back to pre-Reformation times, the whole tongues movement, it’s very Catholic, it’s very, very Romanism. So when we speak of the holy apostles and prophets we’re speaking, then of the channels of revelation, the early Church, out of which came our New Testament. And that’s why the New Testament is closed; we no longer have prophets and we no longer have apostles.

Ephesians 3:6, and here’s the content of the revelation. We said that this age is introduced by a new revelation; what is the content of the revelation. Here’s the content of the revelation. “That the Gentiles should fellow heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ by the gospel.” Now the Gentiles; what has changed from the Old Testament to the New with respect to the Gentiles. In the Old Testament if you turn to Genesis 12 you see the place of the Gentiles in the Old Testament. It’s kind of important because to my knowledge we have no people of Jewish background here tonight so you’re all Gentiles. Gentiles place in God’s plan in the Old Testament, Genesis 12:1-3. “Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee. [2] And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. [3] And I will bless that bless thee, and curse him that curses thee:” by the way, notice in that verse the mercy of God; these people, the amateurs who teach religion courses in college campuses and elsewhere always make the cliché that the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath but the God of the New Testament is a God of love. Do you notice an element of mercy in there, if you look carefully at the structure of that sentence in verse 3, “I will bless them,” plural, “that bless thee, and curse him,” singular, “that curses thee, and there you have the idea that it’s not that God wants to curse people; He wants to bless mankind en toto, but if there is an individual that curses thee, He’ll curse them. So there you have the element of the mercy of God, right there in the Old Testament, but nobody happens to see it for some reason. “… and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”

There is your Gentile in the Old Testament; the Gentile blessing was to come through Jews, so you have a hierarchy then in the plan of God. You first have God at the top; then He works on earth through Israel, so He has His special nation Israel, and then through Israel the Gentiles are blessed, and so you automatically by this mode of operation have a hierarchy operating; you have Israel superior in God’s program to Gentiles; there’s no getting around it, this is the whole impact of the Old Testament, you can’t read the Old Testament without getting this impression, that God is going to bless the earth but the people that He’s going to bless is Israel. And the Gentiles are blessed as long as they submit to Israel. Now this is an absolute principle that is totally inviolate; it will never be violated, even in the Church Age because how were you blessed? To what do you submit to be saved? Jesus Christ is a Jew. Who wrote the book you hold in your hand? Jewish Christians. So still this principle is not violated in the Church Age; we are blessed and it’s through Israel; always through Israel, always will be. And this, incidentally, is the answer to world peace; how is world peace going to come about? Through Israel. It’s got to be through Israel; the world dictatorship, when there’s a world government that will bring world peace it will be through Israel. This is a mode of operation that’s absolute through history.

But there is something that changes and shifts and that is in Ephesians when Paul says “the Gentiles are now fellow heirs and of the same body and partakers of His promise in Christ, by the gospel.” Now here what you have is this: you have Israel but out of Israel… [tape turns] …to show you that as Gentiles you stand in a unique place in history because since 30 AD until the Church Age closes Gentiles share a fantastic position, that Gentiles have not shared in the past history nor will share in the future. It doesn’t mean those people were less saved; we’re not talking about salvation, we’re talking about position of the saved, the benefits they enjoy and the responsibilities they are to adhere to. So in verse 6 then, the great mystery that distinguishes the Church Age is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs of the same body and partakers of His promise.

Now, what is the application principle that we can draw here? The application principle that we can draw from verse 6 is very real and that is this, that “in Christ” there is no legitimate cultural, linguistic or racial distinction. Now this is revolutionary. Now here’s the answer to the people that are always crying about racial injustice, and we talk about racial injustice and so on. The real answer to racial injustice is the fact that when God goes to work in the Church Age, whether a man is pink, green, purple or violet, it doesn’t make any difference; he is as much saved as anyone else. He shares exactly the same position and in God’s sight is exactly equal. Now this may seem hard if you’ve come from certain backgrounds, to think, for example, of a colored person as exactly on the same plain as you in Jesus Christ but that’s the Biblical answer. And where the Church doesn’t say this clearly and distinctly the Church has become worldly. It has become worldly because what has happened, it has absorbed part of the world culture from its environment and sucked it in, and is now preaching this and it’s wrong, because the Bible teaches there is no difference “in Christ.” In position there is absolutely no difference.

Now this is important because in the early church this issue almost split the church. In that day it was between the Jew and the Gentile, for Jews to say that we’re going to have these Gentiles here with us? Are you kidding? And there was one church that never settled the issue. Do you know which church it was? Jerusalem. And you know that church turned out to be a lousy church because they didn’t have any vision, they got cloistered, and the whole missionary enterprise went right down the tube and guess what church picked it up? The church at Antioch and the church at Antioch had gotten this principle clear, that God was working with Jews and Gentiles and there was no distinction.

Now there was another thing about this that is kind of ironic in our day but the other thing that almost tore the early church up, besides the Jew-Gentile application to this truth was the male-female application of this truth. And for the early Christians to come along and say that women have exactly the same position in Christ as men almost drove the men crazy. In that day and in that culture this was a revolutionary statement to make, that women had equal position in Jesus Christ as men, just fantastic. And by the way, it’s ironic that a lot of the women who were crying for women’s rights in our day and so on happened to be very strongly liberal and atheist in their belief. But they ought to remember historically that they owe their freedom to Bible Christianity, and for them to go around knocking it is like they’re cutting their own thread because all I’d have to do if I was in a debate with one of them is to proceed logically and show them that on their own premises they should retreat back to the way women lived before Christ. So this has important repercussions and in the Church Age this is very, very interesting how this works out in verse 6.

Ephesians 3:7, “Whereof I was made a minister, according to the gift of the grace of God given unto me by the effectual working of his power, [8] Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of the Christ,” and there you get it again, “the Christ.” Now what does this tell you about Paul’s preaching? It wasn’t this rah-rah-rah-rah forty stanzas of Just As I Am and come on down rolling down the aisle. This is not the way Paul preached; he couldn’t have because what does he say in verse 8, “I preach the unsearchable riches of the Christ,” it means he preached, pardon the expression, dispensations; that was part of his evangelism. Now have you ever heard an evangelist message from the standpoint of dispensations? But that’s what Paul did, and he did not consider it a total presentation of Christianity until he had faced the Gentiles with their new position in Christ.

Ephesians 3:9, “To make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world has been hidden in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ.” And there the word fellowship is oikonomia; it’s that word that’s translated “dispensation” in verse 2. Now this is one thing, some of you have asked me from time to time about different Bible translations, and this is why I tell you that the best Bible translation is the ASV or the American Standard Version because of the policy of translation. The policy of translation of the ASV is a one to one translation, meaning that one Greek word will always be translated by the same English word, and they won’t have this switching going on. For example, with the Holy Spirit, you’ll always find the Holy Spirit, to my knowledge, translated as the Holy Spirit in the ASV but in the King James one place it’s the Holy Spirit, the next place it’s the Holy Ghost. Here you see the same thing, oikonomia in verse 2, translated “dispensations,” but then when they get down to verse 9 they translate it “fellowship.” And if you’re studying your English Bible you’ll think it’s a different word and it’s not a different word. But don’t think you need Greek to unravel it, all you have to do is have a good concordance and look the word up and the concordance will tell you.

So here in verse 9, “make all men see what is the dispensation,” now here you see the word dispensation clearly used to refer to the working of the Church Age or the economy or the mode at which God works in the Church Age, “which from the beginning of the world has been hidden,” and this teaches something else, that this particular dispensation in history has a mysterious character to it. Why did it have a mysterious character to it? The reason why the Church Age has a mysterious character to it is because of human volition. You see, God can’t lay all His cards on the table without making history determinative; for example, suppose God had said to Israel, here you come Israel, I give you My Messiah and you’ll reject Him and I will set up the Church Age. Now what kind of a prophecy is that? It makes the people kind of have to reject; I mean this is what the prophecy…what do they do, how can Christ make a genuine offer of Himself in that case? Well He can’t, and so in this way the Church Age is a mystery because God kept in abeyance so that at the time that Jesus came He could literally offer Himself and say Israel, accept your king and you can have your kingdom now. And that was a genuine offer that Jesus made to the nation; a genuine offer that He made. But nevertheless, God knowing they would reject had prepared the Church Age to handle this problem after the nation rejected Christ.

This is why if you want to diagram the book of Acts in one simple block diagram; the book of Acts can be diagramed very simply, it’s a hard difficult book but think of a rectangle and draw a line from the lower left to the upper right hand corner of the rectangle, put in the top Israel and put in the lower part Church and there’s the book of Acts for you. In other words, as the book of Acts goes on Israel gradually fades out of the picture. As the book of Acts goes on the Church gradually takes over and assumes prominence, but Acts is a transition book and that’s because this Church Age kind of sneaks in, and it’s revealed through Paul

Now Ephesians 3:10 gives you the hint as to why the Church Age is so important, “To the intent that now, unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places, might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God,” and this goes back to the angelic conflict, and that is that going on in history there’s a tremendous other aspect of God’s program. God’s master plan has two aspects; one, the plan of salvation that deals with men; two, the angelic conflict that goes on in the heavenly places, the war in heaven, so to speak. And verse 10 teaches that the Church Age has a strange impact upon the angelic conflict. This is why in Ephesians 6, the same epistle, what does Paul say? “We wrestle not with flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers” and so on. Why does he make that statement? Because in our age the holy war that existed in the Old Testament, remember the Holy war in the Old Testament, Israel against the nations, and that was a horizontal battle going on in the Old Testament, Israel versus Gentiles. Now in the New Testament the battle shifts and it becomes vertical between men and angels and this is why the Church’s holy war is not against countries. The Church’s holy war is against these supernatural powers. So therefore verse 10 should orient you to the fact that in our dispensation, in our age, and we’ll get into these things later in detail, our main struggle is with spiritual wickedness, not with human power. Now repercussions and so on in politics we’ll be covering as we go into the Church Age, but I want you to remember that; verse 10 teaches that the main objective in the Church Age is vertical, not horizontal. Horizontal, the battle was going on horizontally in the Old Testament.

Now we have another reference to dispensations in the Bible, Ephesians 1:10, “That in the dispensation of the fullness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth, even in Him.” Now let’s check first the word dispensation, we’ve had this word translated several times. What is the word here? It’s the Greek word, oikonomia or economy or working. So the Greek word behind dispensations in verse 10 is oikonomia, or special working that God uses.

The dispensation or administration of “the fullness of times,” now the word “times” here is a fourth word which we haven’t picked up yet and that is the word kairos, and kairos means season. It doesn’t necessary have to refer to seasons in sequence, like summer, autumn, winter. A season would be like this is a season of rejoicing. When I say that to you I don’t think of what went before the season or what comes after the season, I just tell you this is a season of rejoicing. In that context I would use the Greek word kairos, in other words a period of time that is looked at because of a particular or peculiar characteristic. Kairos looks at a peculiar characteristic for a period of time. So what does this say then? “That in the administration of the fullness of the seasons,” in other words, what this says is that if you take all the peculiar things of the Bible, all of history and all of the unique features of the Church Age, of Israel and so on, and you consummate these together, in the end, in the total consummation, in the administration of the fullness of these times the goal that these times work toward “He might gather together in one all things in Christ.”

Now this verse is important, particularly those of you who have come out of churches that do teach dispensations or have come out of that tradition. One thing you want to remember and that is verse 10 shows you something that early dispensationalists did not appreciate, and that is they left their opponents with the impression that dispensationalism teaches Israel and the Church as parallel lines, that somehow never have anything in common, that God is bifurcated here, He’s working one way with Israel and He’s working one way with the Church and they’re not tied in together. Well, verse 10 teaches you they are, that in the end everything fits together, and so the Church and Israel aren’t parallel lines, the Church and Israel are converging lines, that in the end all these things will work together and will have a pattern.

And in the end, “the dispensation of the fullness of times,” when we get it and we develop it here you’ll see the role of the Church in the eternal state versus the role of Israel and the Gentiles in the eternal state; it all will fit together. It turns out, preview of coming attractions, that the Church basically is the temple of God; you people, we, who are born again in the Church Age actually have the high position for all eternity of being the temple of God versus the believers in the other ages who will be there and worshipping God. This is why in the Gospels, for example, you have the people invited to the feast; you remember that, and they’re clothed with garments, they’re believers, that’s imputed righteousness, these people are invited to the feast and you get the hint that it’s kind of a marriage feast but there’s no bride there. And all the Gospels have this invitation of the feast, come on in I’m throwing a blast, come on in to My party. But it’s never told what the party is all about until you get into the Church, and that’s why the party’s there. So the picture in eternity is that you have a party and the people that are invited to the party or the feast are believers from all ages, and the bride, the reason for the party, is the Church. So this is how they all fit together.

Ephesians 1:10 is very important because it will show that true dispensationalism doesn’t have God bifurcated between two different things, two boats going in opposite directions, everything ultimately is tied together.

Now Colossians 1:26, again Paul in a very similar context to Ephesians speaks of the mystery. And here he uses our two words again that are involved in this study of dispensation. “Even the mystery which has been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to His saints.” Now the word “ages” is aionos, the word that means spans of time in a sequence so what he means is that all the ages of history, this has been hid; and “from the generations,” and the word “generations” is interesting. Why is generation used here with the word age? Because ultimately God isn’t interested in just ages, He’s interested in the men that live in the ages and that’s the point. Now in verse 26, “the mystery which has been hidden from the ages and from the generations,” means that basically God is concerned with people, the people that lived in those ages, that’s His central concern. And again we have the principle that men are the key actors throughout the dispensations.

Now we come to a final reference, two references in the book of Hebrews. First Hebrews 1:1, “God, who at sundry times and diverse manners spoke in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, [2] Hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds.” First notice verse 1, “God, who at sundry times and in various manners spoke,” now this draws your attention to the fact that in the Old Testament there were different ways God spoke; He spoke directly only once to our knowledge, once in a spectacular sense and that is the giving of the ten words or the Ten Commandments. It says He spoke to, probably three million people; you can imagine the noise, just the natural…everybody just half quiet but you multiply it by three million people and you’d have to have a pretty high P.A. system to reach them all. Well God did, in the Ten Commandments, He literally spoke so that three million people heard, so that if you had been there with a tape recorder you could have gotten a tape, barring some supernatural effect or something. So that was one time.

Now how else did God speak in the Old Testament? He spoke through dreams, He spoke through visions, He spoke through symbology in the temple and the tabernacle, He spoke many ways and that’s what he’s getting at here, but “in these last days” and there you have that three-fold division that I told you about before; the Jews looked upon history as three-fold, former times, latter days, age to come. And that, incidentally, is why Jesus said the unpardonable sin shall not be forgiven in this age or the age to come, it means forever, and here in verse 2, “has in these last days” means the Messianic age, the era, the Messianic era, that middle period. “Has in these last days spoken unto us by His Son,” and this, notice again, this is not a figment in the imagination of the author; this is a real specific change or switch in God’s way of working. So here in verse 2 God is working in a peculiar way, He switched so that now He’s speaking through His Son, whereas before He spoke through the prophets.

Some of you should challenge me on this point; you should say wait a minute, didn’t God speak through the holy apostles and prophets? Didn’t you just get through saying that? And here it seems to indicate a switch. Yes, but who commissioned and sent out the apostles? Jesus Christ. And remember He said in the upper room discourse and at the end, before He was to die He said I will ask the Father and the Father will send the Holy Spirit and He will teach you, so Jesus is the instigator behind the holy apostles and prophets; they’re kind of secondary to Him, and remember He says that they will teach you all things of Me. So Jesus is basically looked upon as the last great prophet; there’s no more prophets after Jesus of Nazareth. And this is why in the tribulation, the prophets that occur in the tribulation are recalls, they’re not new prophets raised up during the tribulation, they are people that have died that come alive in the tribulation. And most scholars believe they are Elijah and Moses. And the reason is because the prophetic order is stopped, there is no more prophets. Once Jesus died, that was the end, absolutely no more prophets today, except those men that have been personally commissioned by Him.

Now verse 2 is an interesting verse; it’s always interesting to those who say the New Testament never speaks of the deity of Christ, “Has in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things.” Do you know what that’s saying? Jesus Christ is inheriting the universe. That’s rather a magnanimous claim for a human individual, you know, what was left to you in the will? The universe. See, I mean it’s so stupid to say that Jesus is a mere man. Here He’s inheriting the universe. “…by whom also He made the worlds,” now the word “worlds” here is the word “ages.” Now isn’t it interesting what this is saying? It’s saying that through Jesus Christ God the Father set up the ages. What does that suggest? It suggests the other principle of dispensations and that is that Jesus Christ is the center of the whole plan, that ultimately these strands that you pick up, God working with Israel, God working with the Gentiles, God in the angelic conflict, all these strands come like… Lewis Sperry Chafer used to say back in the time when the railroad was dominate, it’s like Grand Central Station, all the tracks come together.

And the focal point of all of them is Jesus Christ, and this is what verse 2 is essentially saying, that by Him He programmed history. And that’s why some people, it becomes kind of a cliché, but history, it’s interesting, there’s no accident the way that very word is spelled, it’s His story, and basically that’s what history really is, is the story of Jesus Christ. And this is why, you say well, schools are safe, secular schools are safe. Are they really? How can you study history without looking at it either from a Biblical or a non-Biblical position? See, it’s not just the realm of sex education, it’s all over the board you find it; either you have to approach these subjects from a Scriptural point of view of you have to point them from an anti-Scripture point of view, there is no neutral ground. So in lieu of the fact that we don’t have Christian education in depth we have to make sure that our young people get a maximum exposure to the Word. That’s the only way they can meet the test.

Now let’s conclude. What is the definition of a dispensation? A dispensation is a distinguishable economy in the outworking of God’s master plan. A dispensation is a distinguishable economy or mode of operation in the outworking of God’s master plan. And by this we mean it’s, first, distinguishable; it’s not a figment of my imagination or yours, it’s really there and if it’s not really there let’s forget about it. But if it’s really in the text of Scripture, then it’s a dispensation, it’s a real switch in history. So it’s a distinguishable economy, and by economy we mean the fact that God operates a certain way. Now this is why it’s so silly to get involved in social gospel activities in the Church Age when the whole point of the Scripture is that society’s problem en toto will be solved by Jesus Christ in the millennium. Now what people are trying to do is to try to force the millennium into the Church Age by this socialism and communism. Basically communism and socialism are just counterfeits to our millennialism. And they’re trying to bring the millennium about by human works, and human activities. This is why communism and socialism basically are religions of salvation by works. And it’s an old, old heresy, just an old, old heresy.

A dispensation is a distinguishable economy in the outworking of God’s master plan. And I say “God’s master plan” because I want to include both the plan of salvation that has to do with men and the angelic conflict that has to do with angels. Dispensations ties the two together; they, to some degree, are like Israel and the Gentiles, they’re kind of parallel.

Now I want to finish by making a few closing remarks and we’ll pick this up next time. One closing remark would say that the classic work on dispensations that will be the most clear, up-to-date if you want to study on your own in detail will be Charles Ryrie’s book, Dispensationalism Today,” put out by Moody Press. This is a book that’s had a tremendous impact because Ryrie is a very smooth writer and he’s been able to get rid of some of the objectionable features of early dispensationalists. There’s nothing with dispensations, it’s just that the first person that states it, you have to improve, that’s all. And Ryrie I think really has improved it in this book, Dispensationalism Today.

I want to make one further note on this definition and that is, and I’ll add to these when we start the class next time, but one thing you want to remember about this whole thing is that there’s a basic unity and the unity is expressed in the last three words of the definition, “God’s master plan.” That is the unity behind all the dispensations, so when we start talking about God working this way over here, God working this way over here, God working this way over here, don’t lose the forest for the trees. Behind all these differences there is one sweeping unity and that’s His master plan, which has as its goal a saturation of the whole creation with the knowledge of Himself. Those of you who here for the early basics, remember when we went over the doctrine of God’s master plan we said that its goal is a saturation of all creation with the knowledge of Himself. This means that hell serves a purpose in the plan of God because in hell there will be an experiential permanent eternal display of His righteousness and His justice. Hell serves a function in God’s master plan; a hell-less universe would not be a universe in which God was fully revealed. In a sense, hell has to be there because there has to be a revelation of His righteousness and His justice, and hell is an eternal monument to it.

Now as I said, the parts of this master plan are the plan of salvation and the angelic conflict. We’ll expand this definition a little bit next time and pick up any questions you might have at the beginning of the class so you’ll have a chance to ask questions.