Clough Dispensations Lesson 2

Definition of Dispensations – Pre-Israel Dispensations

Part two or section two of dispensations, last week we went through various portions of the New Testament to basically prove one point and that is that there are such things as dispensations, mentioned in the New Testament. Maybe we oversold the point last time but I want to impress upon you that dispensations are something that arise out of a normal treatment of the Biblical text. They are not a figment of C. I. Scofield’s imagination or Lewis Sperry Chafer or someone else. This is the accusation, I don’t care where you go, you always hear it made, that dispensationalism is something that somebody invented and imposed upon the Scripture. It’s not invented and it’s not imposed; it’s right there in the text. So dispensations are important and they are rooted in God’s Word.

Now the last of the verses that we went through last time, Hebrews 1:1-2, as an example, a mention of dispensations in the text, has an interesting application for us as believers. “God, who at sundry times and in various manners spoke in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, [2] Has 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.” Now we mentioned that in the last part of verse 2, where it says “by whom also He made the world,” it’s speaking of God the Son. God the Son is the One that God the Father used to program these ages, and that’s what literally you have here, the Father, through the Son, programming these ages.

And therefore this leads to an important conclusion as far as dispensations are concerned and that is that Jesus Christ is the key to them all. In every dispensation you have something somewhere that centralizes on the person of Christ. The key to every dispensation is Jesus Christ, in some way, shape or form, and we’re going to take the first dispensation tonight and we’ll see how this operates.

Hebrews 11:1-3 also tell us something else. This has to do with believers claiming the promises form the Word of God. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. [2] For by it the elders received witness. [3] Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” And here we have an important statement made in verse 3 that “the worlds,” and there is the word in the Greek, aionos, which is the word which we defined last time as spans of time in sequence. And aionos always refers to history cut up in compartments, and so we have therefore in verse 3, “through faith we perceive that the ages,” or the aionos, “were framed by the Word of God.” And this again speaks of the Second Personality of the Trinity, showing that wherever you see the Second Personality you see God revealing Himself. You never have God revealing Himself as the First or Third Person, always in the Second Person of the Trinity.

So in verse 3, “Through faith we understand the ages were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen,” that’s historical events, this refers to anything in your personal life, in your real historical existence, “the things which are seen.” Now, what this says is that God the Father has not made history out of nothing, is literally the way it says it when you get through translating this, is that history is not just popping into existence and that each moment, as moments succeed moments God is saying I wonder what would be interesting to do the next moment. The picture here is that there is a plan and a pattern to history and that’s the whole point of Hebrews 11 because if you look at the last part of the chapter, the last couple of verses and you will see… Hebrews 11:37, speaking of the great men of faith of the Bible; these are all men who are cited as men who were exceptional in their faith, and yet you will have case after case here where I believe if you had some believers that even come to Lubbock Bible Church and they looked at some of these men they’d say oh, he couldn’t be a believer because of all of his sins. For example, Noah, Noah never repented of his sin in the last part of his life and he died a carnal believer. And so you have Noah mentioned in verse 7, and yet here in Hebrews he is cited as an example of a believer that operates on grace. You have men like Jacob in verse 21 whose very name means he’s a chiseler, he’s a cheat, and he manifests this trait all his life. And he is cited as a man of faith, and you have Moses, and then the many heroes of the faith.

And we have in Hebrews 11:37, “They were stoned,” this is the treatment that these men of faith received, “they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, they were tested,” the “sawn asunder” either refers to Isaiah or Jeremiah, there are two traditions; one says that Manasseh got tired of hearing Isaiah one day and he had some of his soldiers hold his feet and some hold his hands and he had another person cut him in half while he was still alive, and that’s how they handled Bible teachers in that day. I’m glad they don’t do that today. “…were tested, were slain with the sword; they wandered abut in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted and tormented, [38] (Of whom the world was not worthy); they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. [39] And these all,” and here’s the point we want to see about dispensations, “and these all, having received witness through faith, received not the promise, [40] God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.”

In other words, the point made here is that no dispensation will ever be complete until they are all complete. You’ll always have this pattern that you can’t have a single dispensation standing in thin air; you’ve got to take all dispensations as a unit. And that’s what it means here in verse 40 that the plan of salvation didn’t come to fruition, didn’t come to its total perfection in the times of the Old Testament because God was waiting to reveal some things through us. And so similarly God’s plan of salvation doesn’t reach its completion in this dispensation because God still have a few things He wants to show in the next one. But the point behind all this is that you could not claim promises from the Word of God unless there was a dispensational pattern to history; unless there was some sort of a pattern and a design to history you could not claim any promise in the Word of God because you’d have no guarantee that the promise was valid from one moment to the next. The only reason why you can claim promises from the Word of God is because in back of history there’s a plan and a purpose.

Now we come to the definition of a dispensation, we concluded with last time, and I want to add supplementary notes before we move into the first dispensation. Out of all these Scripture passages we derive this definition of a dispensation and that ultimately is the purpose behind all these verses. Don’t lose the forest for the trees here, the going into all the texts of Hebrews 3 and so on had nothing else behind it except to point to the fact that there are ages and dispensations mentioned in the Word of God.

Now, the definition we’re using is this one: A dispensation is a distinguishable economy in the outworking of God’s master plan.

We said there are certain things about this definition you want to be careful of; first, a distinguishable economy. In other words, when I say there’s a dispensation here and there’s not a dispensation there, there’s something that’s objective in the text of Scripture, it’s not me just categorizing the Scriptures arbitrarily; there is something really there in the text that you see and you report it as a dispensational switch. So this is not a figment of C. I. Scofield or somebody else and the other maligners of the Scofield Bible. This is an actual thing that’s embedded in the text of Scripture; a distinguishable economy in the outworking of God’s master plan, and this means that there’s a unity behind it.

Now, let’s go to the notes and comments on this definition in detail. First, there is a basic unity between all the dispensations. Now remember I said that, please, because sooner or later you’re going to be in the company of some person who’s going to say oh, I never meant a dispensationalist that didn’t have seven ways to be saved or some other absurd thing. No dispensationalist has ever advocated more than one way of salvation, absolutely not, and that is a straw man image that anti-dispensationalists will come to you with. There is a basic unity behind all dispensations; the goal behind all dispensations is the glorification of God, not the salvation of the human race. Now that’s a crucial point; the plan of God doesn’t have as its goal 100% salvation. If He does He’s going to flub it because we know there are going to be people in hell, so that’s not the goal of God’s plan. God’s overall plan is to glorify Himself and so that in eternity even hell becomes a monument to Him. Hell is a revelation of His righteousness and justice and of the volition of man.

There are parts to God’s master plan, two parts, that which deals with men and that which deals with angels. That which deals with men we label as the plan of salvation; that which deals with angels as angelic conflict. So there is the basic unity behind dispensations. Secondly, there is diversity and that’s the point that dispensations are trying to bring out, there’s a diversity in history. What is a diversity? The diversity basically is this; that in each age, or era, or dispensation, there is a certain amount of revelation available to the human race for which the human race is held responsible. For example, today the United States of America is being held responsible for its rejection or acceptance of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If you had been an inhabitant of this geographical location before 30 AD you would not have been held accountable for the specific knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ because you would be under the Gentile Jewish economy and your responsibilities would be different. So there is, then, a diversity and that diversity centers on the amount of revelation that God has made known to the human race.

Thirdly, and I think this is the most practical thing of all; you as a believer cannot be oriented to the will of God for you unless you know what dispensation you’re living in. For example, turn to Psalm 37 and I’ll show you a promise that you can claim and one that you can’t claim simply because of your dispensation. Psalm 37:3 and 4; verse 4 you’ve probably memorized, it’s a verse that’s on many memory lists; it’s an excellent promise, “Delight thyself also in the LORD, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Verse 5, “Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.” Now verses 4 and 5 can be claimed by any believer in this congregation right at the moment; any person in this room can claim verses 4 and 5, but you can’t claim verse 3 and the reason is because verse 3 was written and can only be applied under the dispensation of Israel, “Trust in the LORD, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.” Now that is talking about the literal physical land of Israel and it’s talking about the agricultural blessings promised under the Mosaic economy. You do not live in the land of Israel, we do not live under the Mosaic economy and therefore that promise is not valid in its original context; you can apply the principle if you want to, that God provides for His own, but you can’t apply that specific promise as it was originally written, simply because you do not live in the dispensation of Israel. You can apply verses 4-5 because that has not changed from dispensation to dispensation.

So here is such a thing as practical promises from the Word. Your knowledge of dispensations is important because sooner or later someone is going to claim verse 3 and say well, that doesn’t work, I got ejected from my house or something, so I’m not dwelling in the land any more, something like that, and you’ll misrepresent the Word of God. So you have to understand before you claim a promise, ask yourself, is this promise valid for the Church Age or not?

The fourth supplementary note on this definition and that is that dispensations arise out of a normal interpretation of Scripture…a normal interpretation of Scripture. And as we have tried to stress in dealing with these complicated problems of prophecy that normal interpretation of Scripture doesn’t mean wooden literalism. Now I don’t know why this happens, but you’ll go in some college class somewhere and some guy will misrepresent fundamentalists as saying, oh, the fundamentalists believe in literal interpretation and so when it says “the hills clapped their hands,” the fundamentalists sees the mountains clapping their hands literally. Now what kind of stupidity is this? Normal interpretation simply means I read this literature as people to whom it was originally written would have read it. That’s what normal interpretation means, and any idiot living in the tenth century before Christ would have recognized that when the hills clapped their hands it’s an idiom of expression, it’s an idiom and we interpret idioms for idioms.

But normal interpretation assumes two things. First it assumes, our whole approach assumes that the Scriptures are to be interpreted in the way in which the original readers understood. Let me give you a crucial example of that. Genesis; are the days literal in Genesis or are they ages? They can be nothing other than literal days in Genesis, absolutely nothing other because the people living in Moses day would have interpreted “days” as literal; proof, Exodus 20:11, Moses himself comments on the text. So if the people had intended those to be ages, Moses had a Hebrew word for ages, he had holam, he could have used it; why didn’t he use it? Because Moses meant those days to be literal, and so therefore we interpret the days literally because that is how the people in Moses day would have understood it. And we don’t start fudging on Scripture because we think we have some sort of problems with science; that’s a false, pseudo interpretation. And once you start that there’s no end to destroying the Scriptures.

The second great assumption underlying normal interpretation is that the Scriptures are a logical unit, from Genesis to Revelation, there cannot be a contradiction in there. We accept them as a logical unit, and so therefore any interpretation that has a contradiction must be false.

Now those of you who want a little bit of history on how dispensations arose out of a literal interpretation, I would suggest Charles Ryrie’s book, Dispensationalism Today, in which he traces it back to the second century; the second century to men like Irenaeus, Clement of Alexander, and Augustine. And gradually it came down, and the point here is that you want to remember that a lot of people think Scofield started this thing, and in some churches if you bring a Scofield Bible you’ll be burned at the stake for heresy or something. Scofield, to set the historical record straight, had his chief ministry around 1900 and 1910, now let’s get some dates correct here. The first man to basically come out with a complete dispensational framework was Isaac Watts, a man who wrote many of the hymns, and he lived 1674-1748, a little before C. I. Scofield’s time. In 1748 Isaac Watts died; that’s before the United States even became a nation, Isaac Watts had already established the basis of dispensationalism. So this is not a product of the Scofield Bible.

Furthermore, to show and trace this out further, to give you a little grasp of its significance, I think you should be educated to the history of dispensation in the United States on up to the present moment. Dispensationalism and the interest in Bible prophecy and so on actually came to its pinnacle, its first pinnacle, in 1878 when a group of fundamentalists held a conference and this time there were no independent churches. Keep in mind that you just had your mainline denominations, your Baptists, your Presbyterians, your Episcopalians and these were all that you ever had; your fundamentalists were inside those denominations. And this particular prophetic conference was held in 1878 at The Church of the Holy Trinity which is an Episcopalian church in New York City. So times have changed. But there was a prophetic conference in 1878 held at this church and it is there, at that prophetic conference, where the Bible students got together and beat out the system, and said now look, let’s try to summarize what we believe the Bible to be teaching, and it was at that conference that this first came into prominence in the United States.

Along about 1900 we had a fight in the United States with modern rationalism and rationalism; it came in like a flood and so between 1900 and 1920 the dispensationalists, the ones who held these prophetic conferences and so on, these dispensationalists got together with what we call the orthodox people. Now the two are different; they’re frequently confused. Both of them are called fundamentalists by historians; the only real fundamentalists are the dispensationalists in the technical use of the word, but the dispensationalists were men who believed as we do with the Scriptures and the framework, the orthodox people were men such as J. Gresham Machen, and men at Princeton Seminary who were orthodox on all the basic doctrines except they did not go along with all this emphasis on prophecy; they were amil to a large degree, they didn’t believe there was a millennium, and to some degree they were allegorical in their interpretation of prophecies in the Old Testament.

But these men, because of the issues of the day, felt so compelled to unite forces that from 1900-1920 there was, what you might call, an unholy alliance between the two. The men were all born again believers and they collided, and every denomination had its fight and historians and the text books, I’m sure if you pick up a textbook of your child is reading in school and you study the portion of the textbook that deals with this portion of American history you’ll see some snotty remark made about fundamentalists, that these were the schismatic, apostles of discord, that wracked the denominations across the country, when in fact all they were doing was standing up for the historical creeds of the denomination. Fundamentalists could actually operate as an Episcopalians, as a Presbyterian, as a Baptist, as anyone, if he would operate according to the original creeds of the churches. That was the big issue; it wasn’t the peripheral things about mode of baptism; that wasn’t the issue.

The issue was: is Jesus Christ God, is Jesus Christ virgin born, is He going to come again, it was these kind of issues that were being fought out in the 1900s. And this is where we have to remember, don’t apologize for the fighting fundamentalists because you wouldn’t be sitting where you are right now if it wasn’t for the fighting fundamentalists. The very fact that some of you are saved and sitting here in this room tonight is proof that these so-called fighting fundamentalists, the nasty boys, were the ones that actually held the line for God in these times of tumult. Now they had a very, very sour reputation and even today the word “fundamentalist” is a curse word, and that’s tragic; that’s very tragic. In fact, when I’m around liberals I love to parade myself as a fundamentalist just to irritate them. And I do this because basically they don’t understand the word “fundamentalist” and it’s always an opportunity for me to show them they don’t know what they’re talking about, which is always interesting to a liberal.

But the point here is that the fundamentalist is a clear cut, unashamed slogan and label for born again Christian, orthodox Christianity, dispensation, whatever you have. But dispensationalism, and here’s the importance of dispensationalism, it was the people, and you might say, they often say it’s the “low class,” (quote and end quote) Christians with their Scofield Bibles that refuse to go along with the denominational machines that bulldoze them. For example, in the Presbyterian Church you had a man who would get up and say in Riverside Church in New York City, preach the famous sermon, Fosdick, and those of you who lived in the 20s and 30s would probably know of some of his books, The Manhood of the Master, Understanding the Bible, and a few others; he was an excellent spokesman, a brilliant man, and Harry Emerson Fosdick was one of the most apostate anti-Christ that this country has ever heard. It was Harry Emerson Fosdick that one Sunday got up in Riverside Church and preached a sermon Shall the Fundamentalists Win, and that was the torch that was thrown into the dry haystack that just blew up the whole Presbyterian convention, because the next Sunday Clarence McCartney got up in his pulpit in Philadelphia and preached Shall the Modernists Win, and the battle was on. And all during the 20s there were these headlines across the papers showing that these fundamental agitators, as they were known in those days, the fundamentalist agitators, who were trying to suppress the free thinkers in all the denominations, and finally the fundamentalists, of course, as a matter of history, lost out by the politics of a lot of machines.

So therefore, the fundamentalists since World War II have either tended to become independent churches or they have tended to form their own denomination, and this is where we stand now, that the fundamentalists have essentially lost in their battle to control the denominational machinery. It’s an exciting chapter and when I get into the doctrine of the Church we’ll go through some of the nice bloody fights that the fundamentalists had in the 20s and 30s because I think some of you ought to learn this because I fear that a lot of people, I see this at seminaries, are too apologetic of the fundamentalists; we don’t want to be known as fundamentalists, let’s be known as evangelicals, it’s a lot nicer word.

You see, when you do this you’ve lost your militant attitude; now by militant I don’t mean be a jerk or a nitwit; as a fundamentalist you had no greater gentleman than J. Gresham Machen, and yet J. Gresham Machen was defrocked, thrown out of the Presbyterian Church. Why? Because he insisted everybody should believe that Jesus was virgin born. That was why the man was defrocked; that’s a story you never hear in your history books. J. Gresham Machen, a brilliant man, is pictured as some sort of an agitator, and yet the truth of the matter is in history the reason why he was thrown out was because J. Gresham Machen refused to give money to the Presbyterian Board of Missions when they would authorize missionaries who would not believe and subscribe to the virgin birth. He said you can have money but it’s not going to be mine, and they said we are going to have your money and he said you are not going to have my money and so they said well then you can get out of this church and J. Gresham Machen said fine, see you around. And that was the end of J. Gresham Machen and many of the people. And this is the background for this thing, it wasn’t this other thing that you get in your history books; this is a totally distorted history that’s taught here, and while we’re at this point I want to clarify this.

Children today in the school system are being brought up on a distorted history; it is not true history; it is a deliberate distortion of history. For example, the other day I came across a statement in a school text that went like this: the United Nations forces in World War II did thus and such. Well, would you please tell me how there could be United Nations forces in World War II until the United Nations wasn’t formed until after World War II. What kind of a statement is that to make. And so it makes the United Nations seem good to the children because they learn this in history, oh, the United Nations Forces, they were the ones that beat Hitler. The United Nations forces had nothing to do with Hitler because they didn’t come into existence until 1945, couldn’t have, there wasn’t any U.N. So you see this is what I mean by distorted history that you get, and it’s all through the public schools. So we are not immune and we want to stick up for our position and not be at all apologetic about fundamentalism.

Now let’s go to the first dispensation. This is commonly known as the dispensation of innocence, but before we do this I want you to turn to Deuteronomy 4:32. And since I’ve mentioned the fundamentalist controversy I want you to see something, I think we’ll have available a tape that we will play, a debate between Bishop Pike and Dr. Frances Schaeffer who is a leading fundamentalist pastor and I want you to listen to this tape; I think it will do you worlds of good when you watch what happens when you have an intellectual, one a fundamentalist and one a liberal and they clash. You’ll see the liberal never takes a position; every time the fundamentalist will say what’s your stand here, I challenge you, and the liberal sidesteps, well I don’t have a position; it’s like punching into cotton candy, you go t grab and there’s nothing there. You’ll see this, and it shows you that liberals don’t know what they believe, they’re just washing all over the place. So this will be a good history lesson to see how one of your contemporaries who was a well known liberal and supposedly very intelligent will argue on these issue.

Deuteronomy 4:32, “For ask now of the days that are past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man upon the earth,” the days that are past; that is a term which refers to the first broad category of dispensations which I will define as pre-Israelite, pre-Israel, or (parenthesis) (Gentiles). Now that is the first broad category of dispensations; simple, before the nation Israel came to be, as simple as that. Or, before about 2,000 BC, anything before about 2,000 BC we’ll consider as pre-Israel (or the Gentiles.) There was no Israel-Gentile distinction, everybody was Gentile and so for this week and next week we’ll be on this first category, the period of the time of the Gentiles, the period of the Gentiles when they had total dominance over the world. And this is “the days that are past.” To Israel, now in verse 32, they think of this period of time as “the days that are past.”

Now if you look at your Bible and you notice that these days that are past start with Genesis 1 and terminate with Genesis 11, that’s all the Scripture we’ve got to go on to reconstruct this category of dispensations, the Gentiles, the time of the Gentiles, Genesis 1-11. Now this immediately should raise some questions in your mind. Why, when you look at your Bible, just look at how thick your Bible is, and put your finger in at Genesis 11 and see how much of a percent of your Bible is devoted to this whole big category; actually less than 5% of the Bible deals with this whole first era of history. Now why? The answer is two-fold; first the revelation that is pertinent to us in Genesis 1-11 has been repeated for us in the Old Testament and New Testament; and two, the material that is not repeated for us is irrelevant for us today. This period before the nation Israel was a totally different scheme of things; a totally different scheme.

How does this affect how you read Genesis 1-11? Well, there are two things that you want to understand about Genesis 1-11; first, every bit of detail that you can get from the text of Genesis 1-11 [can’t understand word] it for all its worth because there’s not many details there and the ones that are there are very significant. There are no random insignificant phrases in Genesis 1-11; every word has been picked. The reason I say that is consider, if you had to write the history from the time of Jesus Christ to 1969 and condense it in 11 chapters of a book, would you have extra superfluous words in your history? I doubt it. If you had to jam the whole history from Jesus Christ to your day in a mere 11 chapters you’d write and certainly only cover the very significant things and you wouldn’t waste your time dealing with trivial things. Well, it’s the same thing with the author of Genesis 1-11; he is dealing with only significant things.

I’ll give you two examples of where you have to be careful in interpreting Genesis 1-11. First, the first example I’ll give you to show you this rule is Genesis 3 with the curse; the curse comes on in Genesis 3 and it looks trivial; here you are reading along and God comes walking in and says all right, now when you farm you’re going to have weeds. And you know, you pass that off as well, you know that’s not too interesting, so you have weeds, I know what they are, and you go on, and you never catch what God has just said until you come to the New Testament, all of a sudden, in Romans 5 and Romans 8 Paul develops a whole big doctrine on Genesis 3, the curse. The whole doctrine of spiritual death, the unity of the human race, all this is grounded on the curse of Genesis 3, so you see how tremendously important it is. In Genesis there’s just a little bit of material; in the New Testament it comes out to be gobs of material. It goes all the way over to Revelation 22, still talking bout the curse.

A second example I can give to show you why you have to be careful about each detail in Genesis 1-11 is Enoch. Take for example a little insignificant thing like Genesis 5 where you have these great preachers before the flood, and it lists them; so and so died and so and so, Methuselah lived so and so, and all the rest of it, it sounds so boring as you read through there, men’s names and so on, until you get over into the New Testament, in the book of Jude you have a sermon that Enoch preached and it tells you what he preached, in Jude 1:14-15. And there you’ve got the whole scope of Enoch’s ministry and Enoch’s ministry isn’t even mentioned in Genesis. So it shows you there’s a lot of detail that’s not covered in Genesis 1-11 in the text. So those things that are covered are really emphasized.

Now we come to the first section of this large category. This is the large category, stretching from Genesis 1-11, the Gentiles. Everybody is a Gentile here, no Jews; everybody is a Gentile. Now the first subdivision of this category, the first dispensation, we’ll say is the dispensation of innocence. Turn to Genesis 1:28, here is the beginning of the dispensation of innocence, the creation of man. This dispensation, or this first category, extends in your Bible from Genesis 1:28 to Genesis 3:6. It’s usually known as the dispensation of innocence; Genesis 1:28-3:6. Why is it known as the dispensation of innocence, you mean we don’t have innocent people any more? Not in the theological sense. Innocence is simply the label for the chief characteristic. As we go through these dispensations, those of you who are taking notes let me give you an outline of elements; I’ll repeat myself in every dispensation.

The first thing I’m going to do every time I hit a dispensation, I’ll give you the Scriptures that cover the dispensation; that’ll be the first sub point under each dispensation. The second thing I’m going to tell you is the chief characteristic of each dispensation. Then I’m going to tell you the amount of revelation available in each dispensation, and then the fourth thing I’m going go point you back to the things that have remained unchanged. So there’s four things every time we hit a dispensation we’ll so through these four things.

The first thing I’ve given you in the dispensation of innocence is Scripture. Now I’ll move to the second thing; what are the chief characteristics of the dispensation of innocence. The chief characteristic is that you have a creature with volition that has not experienced good and evil; he has not had the experience of becoming enmeshed in the good versus evil struggle. The struggle is foreign to this creature and that why we mean innocence. Adam and Eve at this point, or man and woman, for Eve is not known as Eve until after she falls, at this point it’s just ish and isha, man and woman, and here the first human pair are completely…they’re naïve. That’s the way to describe them, they are naïve, they do not participate in or have any experiential knowledge of the battle and struggle of good and evil. To them it’s something…they might hear about it, and God might have briefed them about it but it doesn’t register anything with them because it hasn’t become a part of their experience. So this is what we mean when they’re innocent.

Now the key feature about this whole period of time is that these people are naked. As you look at Genesis 2:25 you’ll start to see this element and I want to trace this element through because the theological significance is tremendous on this point; people look at this and wonder, what’s the matter, didn’t they have clothes in the Garden, what happened. Genesis 2:25, this when the skirts got so short there wasn’t any. “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” All right, watch what happens, now watch this theme; this is not an accidental theme that the author is doing; it’s a fundamental theme in this whole thing. Now watch; it first appears in verse 25, now your next reference is in Genesis 3:7 and look what happens: “And the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” Notice, they were naked before the fall and after the fall but something happens, now they know it. And the final reference in the chain is 3:21, after they believe and receive Christ as Savior, God the Father clothed them “For Adam also and for his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.”

Now this theme of nakedness is the thing that ties this whole dispensation of innocence together. It’s not an incidental thing, it’s an essential thing. These people are naked. Now what does nakedness mean? Well, you pick up the hint in verse 21, when God clothed them, what is that a picture of from that time and the rest of the Bible? It means imputed righteousness. It means that at this point God clothed them with a righteousness which they did not have. Now this is why, if you remember the basic series when we went through the gospel I said be careful that you don’t say, when a person is justified it’s just-as-if-I’d never sinned, because it’s wrong. Adam and Eve, before they fell, did not have imputed righteousness, they were naked, and that’s the point.

Back here in innocence they are not just-as-if-they’d never sinned; if God restored you to the point just-as-if-you’d never sinned you’d be back as innocence, and that’s not what God does at the point of salvation; He doesn’t make it as though you never sinned, He makes it as more important than that.

Let’s diagram this in three stages and we’ll track this clothing issue; the first category, here they are without clothes; this is the innocence of the creature without God’s righteousness. So they have –R at this point, no righteousness before God. They haven’t sinned though, now watch this, this is why lack of righteousness and sin are two different distinct concepts. They lack righteousness but they have not sinned. What do I mean then by lack righteousness? I mean that they lack a positive perfect obedience to God. That is what righteousness is; it’s more than lack of sin. A person could have sat in Eden; Adam could have slept for 1300 years in the Garden of Eden and still lacked righteousness. What is righteousness? Righteousness means positive obedience toward God’s will; that’s what righteousness is, and this is why Adam did not have it in innocence, by definition, that’s what innocence means. He hasn’t had this. Now theoretically he could have gotten; theoretically if he had not eaten of the tree for defined interval of time God would have concluded the test and say Adam, you perfectly obeyed, now you have +R. But Adam had to earn it; absolute righteousness has to be earned. Now catch the concept because this is important in salvation. Righteousness has to be earned by works; that sounds heretical until you see what’s going to happen. Absolute righteousness has to be earned by obedience, by works done to fulfill God’s will. Now Adam could have earned his salvation, then, in the Garden of Eden, by obedience, but he didn’t; but theoretically he could have, he could have gotten +R this way.

But he didn’t, and he fell, so here he is, –R and now in the second stage in 3:7 he knows he has no R and now he’s got sin to top it off; now he’s got the problem, how do I forgive sin, and why does it say now they knew they were naked? We’ll dwell on that a little bit more next time but the point here is that his conscience was awakened to the fact that he doesn’t have any assets to claim forgiveness with. At this point he suddenly is aware of the fact that he needs assets, he needs something that’s going to erase the sin that he’s just committed, and suddenly it dawns him, I don’t have any assets. I’ve got nothing to pay for my sin with. And that’s what it means when he was naked and his eyes were opened. I’ll go into the physical aspect in a moment but catch the theological aspect here. The theological aspect at this point is that Adam, it suddenly dawns on him, I have zero assets; no assets whatever to handle my sin problem.

So therefore, the net result is in Genesis 3:8, “They heard the voice of the LORD God” and they hid themselves. They hid themselves, God didn’t even have to speak but their conscience already worked and they realized, I have to righteousness and I have sinned, I have nothing to balance accounts with, I’ve got nothing! Now God comes along, promises forgiveness, and in addition to wiping out sin, which is the doctrine of redemption or forgiveness, in addition to that He adds plus righteousness; now God didn’t have to do that. If God did what most Christians think God does, He would just have forgiven their sin and that would have been it. Now most Christians you meet always say this, that when you accept Christ God forgives your sins, period. Now that is not true, that is not true, that’s the incomplete gospel. We have a group of people talking about the full gospel and by full gospel they mean adding on all sorts of accessories and extraneous junk but by full gospel here I mean the fact that God not only forgives but in addition to forgiving you from your sins He credits to your account perfect obedience. That is justification; this means that this business about holding onto your salvation just goes right down the drain now; you don’t have to worry about holding onto your salvation because there’s no act of disobedience you can possibly do that’s not covered by this. That’s the point of justification. There’s grace. You see, this is why the New Testament is so excited about the grace of God; it’s not just grace of God forgives sins but not only is He forgiving your sins, He even credits you with having gone through a test that you never went through.

Maybe it would be like this: suppose you flunk an exam, God not only erases the flunk but he credits you with 100% in all exams. Now that’s real grace; see, it’s not just as though you hadn’t flunked when He gets through with you, is it? It’s just as though you’d gone through the course with perfect grades, that’s what it means, and that’s what the imputation of Christ’s righteousness means.

Now I said that righteousness has to be earned, and you can say to me all right, then how come God can credit me with perfect obedience if I haven’t earned it? Because guess who earned it? Jesus Christ earned it; that was the point. Jesus Christ earned it and you’re borrowing off His assets. That’s the grace of God, He’s giving you these assets, His own personal assets that He earned Himself, He turns around and gives to you; now that’s God’s grace. And that’s why you have to understand doctrine to love God. This business, oh I love God and all the rest of it in these flim-flam hymnals that we sing, it’s silly, how can you love God without seeing these things. You have to see these things first, then you love God in response to what you know; you can’t love an image, that’s mysticism, that’s not Christianity. So when we understand what God has done now we can love Him, now we can respond to His grace. Now some Christians have an awful hard time with this. I sometimes wonder as I look out in the congregation, if the grace of God came up to a man and kicked him in the behind whether they would respond; really, some Christians are that slow in thinking about God’s grace, they’re so tight, so tense, so legalistic, always got to find fault with something, particularly with themselves, and they carry around a big guilt complex. Now that’s so stupid, when the grace of God is so fantastic. You can relax; the grace of God covers these problems.

So here, then, is God’s grace and the central characteristic of this dispensation is innocence and has a physical symptom of nudity. Now this is something that I want you to see so that you’ll see why you have to believe in a literal Adam…[tape turns] … explain the fact that people don’t have hair, but that’s not true. The reason why God has created all of us physically in need of clothing is a graphic illustration in life that we do not have that which is necessary to complete out being. Man essentially is an incomplete entity, he was destined to have clothes and he never got them. And that’s the point why man constantly has to wear clothes; he constantly has to wear clothes. Think of the clothing bill if this wasn’t true, you’d save your budget. But the point is that the man has to wear clothes; he just has to, and you go out on the street and people say oh, it’s social convention; it’s not just social convention. So the very fact that physically Genesis depicts the original couple as without clothes is a graphic physical explanation for a social trait.

Now you come to people that would advocate nudism and they say well let’s be as nature originally intended man to be. What is that really saying? That’s really saying that man, all God intended man to be was some sort of an ape; man has no higher being, man doesn’t need clothes. And what nudism, the theory of nudism really says in fact is that man does not need righteousness, that man somehow in his natural state is nothing more than an animal and he can live like an animal. Now theoretically this would be the position of the unbeliever. It’d be interesting to get in a debate some time and see if you could shove an unbeliever into the position that to live logically to his own system he should take of his clothes; but it would be kind of interesting to see if he would accept that. But the point then is that the innocence of the creature is physically portrayed in Genesis; physically portrayed by man’s lack of clothing.

Now what else can we say about this first dispensation; we’ve told you the Scripture, we’ve told you the chief characteristic, now we come to the amount of revelation and this is the thing that’s going to change as we go from dispensation to dispensation. What changes? The amount of revelation. Did I say the plan of salvation? No I didn’t say the plan of salvation; I said the amount of revelation changes, not the plan of salvation. People are saved in every dispensation by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, period. Now they’re saved by responding to a different amount of revelation; there are two things to notice about the revelation available to man in innocence.

The first thing is in Genesis 1:28… now think of this for a moment. Man in innocence needed the Word of God, even before he sinned he needed the Word of God; how much more then after he sinned does he need the Word of God. Adam was not autonomous in the Garden; God didn’t say Adam, here’s a garden you can live from now until the millennium or whatever happens, there you are, discover it for yourself. Now I want you to see this because this is tremendously crucial in education. In education, schools, if you operate on the public school theory, and the theory of all higher education today, namely that man can learn, can move out into the world by scientific experiment and learn everything, why did God have to tell them something in innocence? Why couldn’t Adam have discovered this for himself? Why couldn’t Adam have discovered the nature of God for Himself? Because he can’t, and this is why you need the Word of God, I need the Word of God, not just because we’re sinners but because we’re finite individuals. You need the Word of God because a finite creature cannot know the infinite God unless the infinite God reveals Himself to us. And therefore this is why Jesus said, “No man can live by bread alone, but He must live by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” Now that’s a law of creation and that applies to the believer as well as the unbeliever. The unbeliever is living today because he is borrowing from the Word of God. He may be unconscious of it but he is; he’s borrowing his concept of morals, he’s borrowing all sorts of things from the Word of God. So man in order to live must borrow from the Word of God either unconsciously or consciously.

Now the first thing in this amount of revelation available in the dispensation of innocence is in Genesis 1:28, physical reproduction, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth,” this is a command for physical reproduction, God wants a human race that will dominate the world. Now this command is abridged later on in the Bible but at this point it was a clear cut command to “be fruitful and multiply,” and this is the answer to where Cain got his wife from; everybody says well where did Cain his wife? Well he got one of his sisters; where else do you think he got her from. There’s only mother and father, where else could he get her from, he didn’t marry an angel, he married a girl, it was one of his sisters and it wasn’t incest because the first couple, the first couple that lived on earth had genetic purity. They had a high genetic potential, they didn’t have all this mutation and this weakness that we have today and they interbred freely, so there’s no problem here where Cain got his wife from. And 930 years and you have a new generation every 30 years you can figure out how many generations that lived while Adam was still live, that Adam and Eve themselves had. So there was no problem where Cain got his wife from; in fact the problem probably is that he had all sorts of girls to pick from.

So the problem basically is not that, that’s the facetious way of saying it, the real principle here in the physical reproduction is simply this: it must be said in our time, that sex preceded the fall. And unfortunately in some fundamentalist circles you’d think sex is something that happened after the fall. And the way everybody feels guilty about sex it sounds like automatically that this was a sign of spiritual death. It’s not a sign of spiritual death; it’s a sign of the inherent property of the human race. Genesis 1:28, sex before the fall.

The second basic principle we derive from Genesis 1:28 under the category of physical reproduction is that all men, no matter what race they may be, are unified. It’s interesting to me in this talk of segregation and particularly the Negro race, it’s awfully interesting to watch that the evolutionists have difficulties at this point for most of your liberals are ardent integrationists. And yet you take a man, I can’t think of the man’s name now, a famous anthropologist, his point is that all anthropological data would say that the Negro is 25,000 years behind the white man in his stage of evolution. Now you see, this is kind of embarrassing for the evolutionist, because he on the one hand wants to be a strong integrationist, and yet on the other hand his theory seems to say that there’s an evolutionary difference between the races. But not so in the Bible; the Bible says they are all out of one.

So then this is the first great area of revelation; that man is to physically reproduce, a command of God.

The second great statement of revelation that was available to man, Genesis 1:28 also and this is “subdue the earth,” this is the other responsibility. Not only have children, but subdue the earth, and by subduing the earth the Word of God means that the whole plant and animal kingdom is to be brought under man’s control, the implication being that the plants and animals would freely respond to man. Take the converse of the curse in the Garden. What was the curse in the Garden? Adam, you’re going to sow your seed in the field and out will come not the plants you wanted but weeds. Well, what’s the converse of that? Before the fall the point was that whatever man did to plants they conformed to his wishes; the animals would conform to man’s wish. Man has domain over the animal and plant kingdom.

Also he has domain over the earth itself and so Genesis 1:28 today comes down and this changes and I’ll show you the changes that come down, but today this is the basis for scientific research. It’s in the Bible; scientific research is a blessing of God because it’s fulfilling Genesis 1:28; man learning how to bring things under dominion and to control and the Bible has a mandate to engage in scientific research, subdue the earth.

The last category of revelation is a peculiar one and it’s found in Genesis 2:15-17, “And the LORD God took the man, and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and to keep it. [16] And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; [17] But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat.” Now here the words are different. Whereas back in Genesis 1:28 it said go out on the offensive and subdue the earth, here in Genesis 2:15-17 it’s completely different, and here you have man in the Garden and he’s said to defend it. And so the Garden is being attacked from the outside. And of course this is why I put the fall of Satan before Genesis 1:2 and not after the end of chapter 2 because to me this speaks gobs of the fact that what is he defending the Garden against if there’s nothing out there. The reason he’s defending it is Satan, that’s who he’s defending it against, and Satan has fallen by this time.

So we have Genesis 2:16-17. The command is to defend the Garden of Eden. Now what is the Garden of Eden? By the way, the Garden is not Eden itself, the Garden was in an area of earth known as Eden; this is what it says in Genesis 2:8, “the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden;” in Eden, Eden is a region, the Garden is inside.

Now I want to close with one development of the word “Eden.” What was Eden like? Eden, evidently at this time in history was a place on earth that would become the New Jerusalem. Eden here, you might say, is the basic foundation that God was laying on earth to set up His temple. How do we make this deduction? Let’s look at Genesis 1:10 carefully, “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it parted, and became four heads.” Just remember that, the river is leaving Eden and watering the whole earth.

Now turn to Ezekiel 28. In Ezekiel 28:13 the prophet is addressing the king of Tyre as Satan. Where was Satan? He says, “Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald” and so on, “the workmanship of thy timbrels and of thy flutes,” see Satan was the first choir leader, “was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created,” here he had tremendous musical talent. Verse 14, “Thou art the anointed cherub that covered, and I have set thee so; thou wast upon the holy mountain of God;” Eden here is the holy mountain of God. Commentators have debated, is this Eden the same Eden as Genesis? The answer is no because Satan is said to be thrown out of the holy mountain of God unto the earth.

So this Eden, mentioned here in Ezekiel 28 is an Eden in heaven. Why, though, is it tied to earth; why do these two places have the same name? You’ve got an Eden in heaven; you’ve got an Eden on earth. The answer is resolved in Revelation 22. It’s interesting, Revelation 22 should be read in the light of Genesis, it’s almost a direct fulfillment of it. Revelation 22:1-2, remember what I said about the water coming out of Eden and watering the whole earth. Now here’s your new universe; here’s the New Jerusalem: “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. [2] In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, there was a tree of life, which bore twelve kinds of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were the healing of the nations.” And here you have the New Jerusalem, when it finally is set up on the new earth, fulfilling that for which the former Eden looked like it was being designed for.

So our deduction from all this Scripture basically is this: that Eden in Genesis is reference to a particular geographical location which I think probably is that exact spot that ultimately is going t become the spot of the New Jerusalem, will correspond in the new earth to the New Jerusalem, and that Eden was a crucial place, and that’s why man was put there, at that crucial point, that crucial place, because had man obeyed, had Adam obeyed God, brought that world into dominion, the temple of God would have been set right there. Man, in other words, is the instrumentality by which God is going to rule in the universe, and that makes man very significant…very significant, in fact, more significant than the angels. And some commentators, such as Eric Sauer speculate on the fact that that’s one reason why it bummed Satan, to have this little nitpicker down there, man, going to usurp Satan’s position, and Satan got jealous; that’s one of the theories of it.

But the point here is that in the dispensation of innocence you have this creature here lacking this…that’s his chief characteristic, he lacks righteousness. The revelation given to him, notice I haven’t said anything about the plan of salvation, the gospel was not revealed at this point. There’s nothing about salvation revealed in Genesis in the innocence, nothing about sin, except the threat of it, nothing like this. In fact, you can’t even find grace in Genesis. So only thing that we’re revealed is that man is to physically reproduce, he’s to defend Eden and to subdue the earth. And there was to be no death; remember he was ordained to eat herbs, poor guy, he couldn’t eat meat. The reason is no physical death, and those of you who with me in anthropology know why; that animals and man possess a spiritual life.

And then finally the fourth thing we can about this dispensation is what are the things true of this dispensation that are true for us today? The nature of God and the nature of man; the essence box of God, the essence box of man remain unchanged; the concept of the Word of God remains unchanged, they had to have the Word of God just as we have to have the Word of God. And by the way, what does that tell you about eternity? It tells you for all eternity you’re going to have the Word of God. You’ll have to study the Word of God, so I don’t know what some Christians that are lazy minded, that hate the Word, you know, it’s going to be boring for them for all eternity, just think, they’re going to have to study the Word for all eternity, millions and millions of years they’re going to have to study the Word of God; some Christians will hear that and say I’d rather go to hell. And then finally, the other thing that remains unchanged is the angelic conflict and the plan of salvation.

But these things we’ll develop and next week we’ll take the second and third dispensations and show the shifts and changes that come in and apply them to our life as believers.