Clough Dispensations Lesson 5

The Dispensation of Israel – Dispensation of Promise

Tonight we move into a new section of dispensations; up until this time we’ve been dealing with Gentiles, in other words, that time of history when there were Gentiles and Gentiles alone. We’ve had three dispensations; the dispensation of innocence, the dispensation of conscience and the dispensation of human government. These three dispensations are important because they basically give all of the institutions that the human race will face with one exception, which we’ll pick up tonight, and with this exception everything is complete and history from this point doesn’t really advance in the sense that there are great new radical things introduced in history, there just isn’t. So beginning tonight we switch and leave the Gentiles and move now to Israel; and from this point on Israel is the center of all of history. Israel is one nation of the Gentiles, picked out and elected for a specific role, and so from this point on we deal with Israel. And we’ll follow Israel on through to the culminate of the plan of God, skipping the Church Age, then we will come back to the Church Age and try to analyze what is unique for the Church Age and what’s different about it. So we’ll begin tonight with one segment of Israel and next week we’ll work on another segment.

Turn to Deuteronomy 4:31 and we will see as we did when we began dispensations, we began dispensations in Deuteronomy 4. Here you have outlined in the traditional Old Testament way the difference between Israel and the Gentiles. “(For the LORD thy God is a merciful God), He will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which He swore unto them. [32] For ask now of the days that are past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and ask from the one side of heaven unto the other, whether there has been done any such thing as this great thin, or hath been heard like it,” and it’s referring to the Exodus and the creation of the nation Israel.

So we gather from this that this was a tremendously significant thing in history and it basically hinged on what is called in verse 31 “the covenant of thy fathers,” this is the hinge of history. The covenant of thy fathers is the Abrahamic Covenant, and it’s that covenant that we’d like to concentrate on tonight. This passage, of course, further brings in the work of Moses and so on, but the first dispensation under the category of Israel will be what we call the dispensation of promise and it extends from Genesis 12 through Exodus 19. Let’s go back to Genesis 12 where this dispensation begins. If you master Genesis 12 I don’t think you should have any problem whatever with the problem of election when it occurs or as it occurs in any other place of Scripture because basically Paul builds his whole doctrine of election on the contents of Genesis 12. Paul is not introducing something new; Paul is simply building the principle from Genesis 12.

Genesis 12:1, the Scripture to this dispensation, I’m trying to give you four things on every dispensation, four categories; the Scripture for this dispensation if from Genesis 12 to Exodus 19, in other words from the time and the call of Abraham down to the time that God gives the Law to Moses. The second thing that I’ve been giving you is the chief characteristic of each dispensation and the chief characteristic of the dispensation of promise is the anticipation of the formation of an elect instrument by God to save the world. That, I would characterize, the chief characteristic of this dispensation. So that’s why this is called a dispensation of promise that’s largely anticipatory. Everybody is looking forward to what God is going to do. And it has another feature that I gave in this definition, not only anticipation but it’s an anticipation of the formation of an elect instrument by God to save the world. So here, for the first time, we are introduced to the concept of election. This is the first election; this is the election of Israel. Now let’s look at the election, the details.

Genesis 12:1, “Now the LORD said unto Abram,” by the way, at this time is Abraham a Gentile or a Jew? He’s a Gentile. “Now the LORD 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,” and this is always one great feature of an elect instrument; it’s always separate, there’s a separation that occurs, and here you have a geographical separation that Abraham literally, physically removed himself from the land of his father because he’s an elect instrument, he’s to have a special function and therefore because of this calling it makes him peculiar; it makes him separate, and so here you have this separation which you’ll always see, in the rest of your Bible. Every time election occurs you’ll have a separation occurring with it; the two are corollary of the other.

So you have the separation, that’s the first thing. Now it’s interesting that Abram is a Gentile; God is picking one Gentile out of many Gentiles; he is given the Abrahamic Covenant, in response he is now a Jew. And from this point on you have the origination of Israel from the Gentiles; of all the pieces of the Gentiles that we left them fragmented last time, remember the judgment of the tower of Babel, it fragmented the human society into linguistic, racial and cultural divisions. Now God picks a segment of the segmented human race and says I want that segment. And why He chose Abram, that’s up to God, He just chose Abram. There were probably other believers in his day but God chose Abram. And God chose Abraham for reasons only known to God; another feature of election. So therefore God chooses Abram and from this point on in history, this is where the Bible really begins. It’s interesting that chapters 1-11 of Genesis are almost an introduction and it’s interesting that you get the feeling Moses just tries to hurry up and get through the first 11 chapters so he can start with chapter 12, and this is where the narration slows down and you pick up details, from this point on.

So it’s almost as though God is saying what happened in the first 11 chapters is interesting but not too significant, the details of it, just get the broad outline, but now beginning in Genesis 12 is the important thing. And this is why the major portion has not to do with the Church, it has to do with Israel, and this is something some Christians forget once in a while. So let’s look at Genesis 12 to pick up some of the features of this characteristic of the dispensation of promise. First we have separation.

Now in Genesis 12:2 it say says, “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and I will make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.” Now this is a declaration of the sovereignty of God, and here, those of you who studied sovereignty and free will in the adult class should have this down. Always three things to sovereignty and free will. Every time you meet this in the Bible you generally have three parts to this interchange. The first pattern, you usually have a sovereign declaration by God that reflects what is going to happen, period, regardless of who does what, when, where and how. That is a sovereign declaration by God; that is what is going to happen in history. The second thing immediately following this, you usually have an appeal to human volition, and ultimately the volition always does what was predicted by that sovereign declaration, and in the end you have the fulfillment.

So what are we to say, then, about the sovereignty free will dilemma? We’re simply just saying that when God says something in His sovereignty, it includes volition. It does not coerce volition in any way, volition is not touched, but the sovereign plan of God includes volition; to get from point A to point B goes by means of free choices. And so therefore when He says this will come to pass, for example, let’s rephrase Genesis 12:2 in the light of what we know has happened. Instead of saying this, this terse short statement, “I will make of thee a great nation,” let’s forget that sentence and pretend now we’re God and we’re looking at history as it actually occurred.

Now what were the steps necessary for the great nation to occur? The great nation occurs in Exodus 19. There are about four or five hundred years of history before He fulfills this great nation promise and doing those four or five hundred years of history you have Isaac and you have him nearly blowing it, and he just makes it, then you have Jacob and if his father just made it, he barely made it, and it goes on like this. It’s almost scary to think that everything hinged upon these men’s volition. They weren’t coerced, God wasn’t standing over them like a puppet and manipulating them, that’s not what God’s doing in history. But this sovereign declaration that you see here, this short little sentence, “I will make of thee a great nation,” that sentence includes every free decision that is made from this verse on through Exodus 19. And that’s what I mean by saying the sovereignty of God includes the free will of men.

So Genesis 12:2 is a declaration of the Abrahamic Covenant, here’s where we’re going to pick up some of the pieces of this Abrahamic Covenant. But the first thing to remember about the covenant is that it stemmed from God’s sovereignty. Now why is Israel called “a great nation,” and why is Israel looked upon as the greatest of all nations? Certainly it’s not as far as land as is concerned; it’s not as far as resources are concerned; it’s not as far as perhaps even the percent of people that are saved are concerned, maybe not even that. What then makes Israel great? Why is Israel greater than the Gentiles? We have it outlined for us if you turn to Romans 9.

Paul outlines why or what it is that makes Israel greater than any other nation. Romans 9:4-5, and by the way in case you come across some idiot cult called British Israelism, let me tell you at this point that the Jews are Israelites and they are not Great Britain and America and everybody else. I don’t know where these people get these ideas but I got this literature coming across my desk where someone thinks the true Israelites are the English and the Americans because the word Britain somehow related, through all sorts of gymnastics, to something in the Old Testament. It came from Los Angeles so I guess that explains it.

Romans 9:4-5, “Who are the Israelites; to whom pertains the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law,” so let’s look at these. Here’s a listing that defines the greatness of Israel. First, the adoption, that simple word means election; it means that in God’s sight for some reason He picked that nation to perform a special task in history. That’s adoption.

The second thing that makes Israel greater is the glory, and the glory here refers to the fact that God makes His presence in Israel; remember the Shekinah glory, it was in the tabernacle and it was in the temple. That glory is not visible to the Gentiles, it was put in Israel and in Israel alone. The time that it is visible to the Gentiles is the Second Advent of Christ, when “you shall see the sign of the Son of Man coming in the heavens.” But the glory pertains to Israel; that’s the second thing.

The third thing, the covenant. Think back; can any Gentile nation ever claim to have entered a written contract with God? No! Only Israel has a written contract with God. This is amazing; it’s not found…Professor Albright in his resent book, Yahweh and the gods of Canaan, 1967, came out with a statement that in all of his study he has never found nations entering into a covenant with their god or gods. He had many nations that had covenants with each other, but never vertically. And isn’t it strange, Israel is the only nation in history that ever made a covenant vertically; all the other nations made covenants horizontally, one with another. Why did Israel make a covenant with their God? It’s a unique phenomena in history. That’s the third thing that makes Israel great.

The fourth thing, “the giving of the law,” and here we have the giving of the Law referring to God speaking, out loud, so that the millions of people could hear it. This is a phenomenal thing, a scary thing. The people that were there really shook in their boots when they heard this; this is God speaking.

The fifth thing, “and the service of God,” and so Israel then has a privilege of duty; they are given a job to do. “And the promises,” these particularly pertain to Jesus Christ, in other words, the promises that relate to her Messiah are meant here. And then finally the last thing, Jesus Christ came out of Israel. So this is what makes Israel greater.

Now it’s not saying that individuals in Israel are any better than individuals in Gentiles; it’s saying as a national entity this nation is special in history. Some of you are studying world history in school or you have studied it. Let me suggest to you that you have never understood world history and cannot understand world history until you understand Israel. If any history course does not feature a curriculum that is centered on Israel it’s a false curriculum. In other words, it’s stupid to study world history without making Israel the center point; if you don’t, you don’t have a true picture of world history. So I guess I just zapped all the history courses.

Let’s go back to Genesis 12. What else was Israel given when God said “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and I will make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing.” Well, if you’ll turn to Genesis 15:18, this is something else that Israel was given. She was given real estate, and it’s outlined in verse 18 what the boundaries of that real estate were. “In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.” Now, those of you who can recognize Asia from Africa on a world map and you know where Israel is, if you look carefully, the modern state of Israel is infinitesimal when you compare it to the land that they have by right of God’s grace at this point because the River Euphrates is way on over to the northeast, so you have the whole Arabian Peninsula in here, and here’s little Israel where it is today. But they actually and ultimately will own all the way over to the Euphrates. So don’t tell the Jordanians about it, but that’s ultimately what’s going to happen. So here is the real estate that God has bestowed to Israel; that’s what He’s promised to Israel. So these are part of the blessing, the blessings of Romans 9 and the real estate.

What else are we given in this passage of Scripture? Well, it says I will “make thy name great.” Now that means that Israel will be famous; Israel will have a reputation, a unique reputation. And by the way, I might suggest to you, I told the teacher studying for the adult basics to employ this as a testimony to the existence of God. Few people realize this but Israel, the existence of the nation Israel is one of the greatest proofs of the existence of God. We’re always concerned with some philosophical argument to prove God exists, when basically you’ve got a beautiful argument that God exists and it’s the nation Israel. You say how does Israel prove that God exists? I suggest four things how Israel, just the existence of it, proves that God exists: first, Israel and Israel alone has a doctrine of creation out of nothing; no other philosophy, no other system of thought, no other nation has ever had this doctrine, that God in the beginning created all things out of nothing, for if you go back to the Sumerians and the Babylonians they always have some story that some mud was floating around in the middle of the universe somewhere and these gods copulated and out popped earth or something; that’s their story of Genesis. Well, it doesn’t really answer the question because what was there before the mud and the god, there’s no real beginning. And Israel is the absolutely unique position of having the only “creation out of nothing” doctrine there is. This, to me is a tremendous testimony to the fact this is indeed a true doctrine because it’s utterly different from all other thought systems.

The second thing that I suggest Israel as a testimony to the existence of God, is that she and she alone in history bears testimony to specific answered prayer. For example, you can read the prayers and the hymns of Egypt, and the prayers and the hymns of the Babylonians and the Sumerians, and they all sit around praising god and god did this and god did that, but when you get down to specifics their god doesn’t do anything. For example, in Egypt they would pray to the sun god Re, and Re would be responsible for bringing prosperity or something like this, but that’s general; you’d never find this kind of a prayer: we thank you, oh Re, for delivering us from the famine in the year such and such; specifically after we asked you, I mean that specificness is missing. You might find it once or twice but it’s not the general feature. So therefore the second thing about Israel is that she and she alone bears testimony to the fact that God really exists and answers prayer.

Thirdly, Israel and Israel alone bears testimony that God talks with her, because no other nation claims to have a verbal revelation from God and at the same time claims to enter into contract with that God. This is an utterly unique feature of history.

And the fourth feature of history is the long survival of this nation. If you study the history of the world you can’t, I don’t believe, name another group of people so small that have survived so long without intermingling. How do you explain this? Statistically that should not happen, and yet this nation goes on and its distinction is as marked today as it was when it began, even though everything has been tried to submerge the nation. People have tried to exterminate the nation, people have tried, for example, the Assyrians did, to interbreed the people to break down the racial distinction; they couldn’t do it, Israel still exists. And this is why Nikolai Berdyaev in The Meaning of History wrote this, and I think this is a tremendous testimony: “I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of people, broke down in the case of the Jews. Where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialist standpoint, and indeed, according to the materialistic and positivistic criterion, this people ought long ago to have perished. Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomena, demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination transcending the process of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. All these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.”

Time Magazine said the same thing in June, 1965, from Paul to Paul Tillek, “it has been said that the survival of the Jews as an arm or limb must be of divine choice as a people forever.” So it’s recognized, thinking people recognize this. Now if you were talking to some sidewalk idiot who asked you to give a two-point outline of the existence of God he won’t understand it, but don’t feel obligated to condescend to his ignorance. But to thinking people these are influential proofs.

What else can we tell about Israel, “make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing.” Now the next verse, Genesis 12:3 gives us more about the Abrahamic Covenant, “I will bless them that bless thee, and I will curse him that curses thee:” now notice a switch from the plural to the singular, it’s very significant for those of you who may have been brainwashed by some religious teacher saying that the God of the Old Testament is a boogie man. Just look, here’s His love and here’s His grace. “I will bless them,” plural, “that bless thee,” but if there is one individual that curses thee, “I will curse him.” God does not want to curse; this is an expression of His lack of wanting to curse people. He says if they play around they’re going to get cursed. But when He expresses it He says hopefully the majority of people will bless thee and I will bless them, but if there be those that curse you, I will curse them. And this, of course, is why the Jews have survived. Now the modern Jew, the modern naturalistic Jew can’t explain his own existence, but this is the explanation, the sovereign working of God in history. And here’s the mechanics that have saved him, “I will bless them that bless thee, and I will curse him that curses thee.”

And this is one reason why we in the United States can be thankful for our existence; there’s two things that basically has saved the United States, not the intelligence and the sharpness of our foreign policy, but it has been due to the fact that, (1) there’s been a segment or a remnant of believers in this nation that have supported the missionary effort, and (2) this nation has never gone anti-Semitic. If one or both of those factors are ever changed this country will rocket down. And that basically is what’s supporting this country, I believe, in God’s sight.

“I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curses thee.” So here you have the basis for the historical existence of Israel. Now the last sentence in verse 3, “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed,” you could translate that “all tribes.” In other words, the whole world is going to be blessed through this nation and so therefore we come to the third feature that I usually outline in my little diagram of the Abrahamic Covenant. They have a real estate, they have guaranteed survival, and thirdly they are a worldwide blessing, so that from this point on, from verse 3 onward, when God blesses the world, you watch; He always blesses it through Israel. He always does this; the whole New Testament is Israel. He’s always blessing the world through Israel and this is a rule of history, and this is why I say a history course… I don’t understand how an unbeliever can study history; I never like history in school but I was a non-Christian when I studied it and I think that’s why, because when I was taught it in school it just seemed like a bunch of dates and fragmented events, and there was no pattern to it, nothing to tie it together. And then I began to study the Bible and see dispensations and see that history really does link together, there is a beautiful pattern in history, but you won’t find it listening to some unbeliever; you find it in the pages of the Bible, and then history becomes interesting.

“In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed,” so this, then, outlines the content of the Abrahamic Covenant. Now there’s another feature about this covenant that I want to underscore so turn to Genesis 15:7, I am always amused by this because you know you frequently hear it said that no one can bargain like a Jewish business man. And I often wondered if this is where he got his trait from because here is where Abraham hears God promising something and he says okay God, sign on the dotted line too. And here is where God signed on the dotted line because here in verse 7 watch what happens: “And he said unto him, I am the LORD who brought thee out of the Ur of the Chaldeans to give thee this land to inherit it. [8] And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?” You see, God’s already told Him once, but he wants a little more assurance than this business of just taking it orally, I want it in writing. So verse 9, “God said to him, Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she-goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” Now he wasn’t going to start a zoo; this was the way the ancient businessmen signed contracts. And it’s a peculiar way but I want you to see the custom or you’ll miss the point, what Abraham did and what God did, really, to Abraham at this point. Now watch what happens.

Here’s how a businessman signed a contract. They would take a heifer and split her in half so you’d have two big bloody chunks of meat here, and then each businessman would walk between them and when they walked between them that was the ceremony of signing the contract. Now watch—how many parties signed this contract? Genesis 15:10, “And he took unto him all these, and divided them In the middle, and laid each piece one against another: but the birds divided he not. [11] When the fowls came down upon the carcasses, Abram drove them away. [12] And when the sun was going down a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. [13] And He said unto Abram,” and this is God speaking, “Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a sojourner in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years. [14] And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance. [15] And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age. [16] But in the fourth generation they shall come here again; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.”

Now Genesis 15:17 is important, “And it came to pass that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp passed between those pieces,” but Abraham never did, therefore who is the party to the covenant? God and God alone. And this is what we mean by an unconditional covenant; there are not two parties, and this is what is fundamentally different from Abraham’s covenant and Moses’. In Moses’ there are two parties to the covenant; it is a conditional covenant. This is a one party covenant. Abraham hasn’t signed it. What does that tell you? It means that it is not dependent upon what Abraham is going to do; it is totally dependent on what God is going to do, and therefore this is a covenant of grace. Here’s where you pick up grace; God is doing the doing, man does the receiving and from this point on you can see this pattern; God does the doing, man does the receiving, and religion and legalism when they come into Bible Christianity always mess it up because they always turn it around and have men doing the doing and God doing the receiving; the great things I’ve done for God and I did this for God and I do that for God. Now that’s completely reversing it. God Himself wants to do it, we do the receiving. So that’s grace versus legalism.

And here you have now, when Israel begins it’s a nation that is grounded in grace and what disturbs Israel and…[tape turns]… they’re busy doing and haven’t got time to receive. So this is the other feature of the Abrahamic Covenant; it’s a one party unconditional contract; you wouldn’t label this as the content of the covenant but it’s a feature of the covenant.

Now when does this all come to fruition. Turn to Exodus 15; here’s after the nation has been delivered from Egypt, through the plagues, the nation has been miraculously delivered through the wilderness and they’ve come to Mount Sinai. Now after this salvation of the nation…by the way, look at Exodus 14:30, “Thus the LORD saved Israel,” there is for the first time, and mark this, because as I have said before and will say again and again and again that New Testament doctrine cannot be understood unless you have the Old Testament picture. And everywhere you people weak in the Old Testament you will find weak Christians. You saw the Passover demonstration and I think it was a very graphic illustration that anybody that knows that has certain doctrinal categories all set up and you don’t get al this fuzzy business going on. It’s the same thing here, watch, verse 30, that is what “saving” means. It always mean God delivers a person or people from a hopeless situation. That is the total picture of salvation. This is why people who today claim to be Christians, and in many cases are, but do not believe in eternal security, basically have a problem; they do not understand the word “saved.”

When we say that God saves a person we mean it in exactly the same context as this word back here in Exodus 14. Did Moses save Israel? Did Israel save Israel? No, it was an absolutely hopeless situation and God came in and miraculously delivered. That is the concept of salvation; it didn’t depend on Israel, it did NOT depend on Israel. It depended upon God’s omnipotence to deliver them. That’s the picture of salvation. And if you see these categories in the Old Testament when you come into the New Testament none of these things should bother you, you pick it up just like that, no problem, if you just understand the basic context of these words.

Exodus 15:2, this is the song that Moses sang and the children of Israel, the so-called song of Miriam. “The LORD is my strength,” now this is the hymn that they sung to celebrate their salvation. If you want to change the lyrics, if you ever feel like singing something like this, in place of Pharaoh you could put Satan because he is the typology that would fit. And so instead of being delivered from Egypt and from the bondage of Egypt you would say I have been delivered from Satan and the bondage of the world. The two are the same, but let’s read it the way they originally sung it, and the way this should be sung, evidently is for verse 1 to be injected between each verse. In other words, verse 2, then you go back to verse 1, then you sing verse 3 and go back to verse 1; then you sing verse 4 and go back to verse 1. But we’ll just go through and I am not going to sing it, fortunately for you. “The LORD is my strength and son, and He is become my salvation; He is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt him. [3] The LORD is a man of war; the LORD is His name. [4] Pharaoh’s chariots and his host has He cast into the sea; his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red Sea. [5] The depths have covered them; they sank into the bottom as a stone. [6] Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power; thy right hand, O LORD, has dashed in pieces the enemy. [7] And in the greatness of Thine Excellency Thou hast overthrown them that rose up against thee; thou sent forth Thy wrath and consumed them as stubble” and so on and so on and so on.

Now I’ve heard of churches that don’t believe in singing hymns like this; I heard of one church that doesn’t believe in singing Onward Christian Soldiers because we can’t have any militaristic terminology in our services. And of course, if you do that consistently you’d have to tear out half the New Testament but you see, there was a militaristic air about this; there’s nothing wrong with this, we live in a fallen world and it’s just part of the world so might as well enjoy it. This is a militaristic celebration over God’s triumph.

Now, that’s our second thing that we said about the dispensation of promise; we’ve given you the Scripture, we’ve given you the characteristics. Again the chief characteristic of the dispensation of promise is that it’s an age of anticipating God’s bringing to existence this new elected instrument to perform His will. It’s looking forward; Abraham has the promise, Isaac has the promise, Jacob has the promise but they don’t have the fulfillment. It’s not until Exodus 14 and 15 where you have the nation actually existing and that’s when the promise reaches its first stage of fulfillment.

Let’s move to the third thing that we can say about the dispensation; the amount of revelation that they had available. As we did last time, first the old revelation is still valid. What is the old revelation? Again, you want to pick this up in dispensations, just because you move from one dispensation to the next doesn’t mean you drop everything that you had before; it’s cumulative, you start here with the dispensation of innocence, you carry on the doctrine you learned there; you start with the dispensation of conscience and you carry on the doctrine that you learned there. You deal with the dispensation of human government and you carry on the doctrine that you’ve learned there. So what are all these three dispensation’s worth of doctrine.

First, man has at this time in history he’s inherited the doctrine that he is to reproduce; he has inherited the doctrine that he is to subdue the earth; he’s inherited the doctrine of the knowledge of judgment, the knowledge of grace, the knowledge of death. He’s also picked up the idea that government is to be man executing God’s judgments in place of God doing the direct judging and also he’s picked up the principle that the government is limited as to its extent and to its claim; it’s limited to its extent in the sense that God has fractured the human race so that nationalism, not internationalism is the mode of existence today. And he’s limited the claim in the fact that the God/Caesar issue is still here; our ultimate claim is to God, not to Caesar. This is why Jesus Christ could look His judges in the face and say I’m going to obey you but the power that you have isn’t from you; it was given to you. And this is the Christian’s attitude; you may disagree with the civil official but fortunately we can say we don’t obey the government because we happen to like the establishment; we obey because the government is a divine institution, because God told us to do it. We may utterly despise the office holders but fortunately for them we obey still, not because of them but because of the God who told us to do it.

Now what has been added to this old revelation? What are the things that have been added in this new dispensation. This is just three things that have been added in this new dispensation. The first thing is that from this point on the destiny of the world is intimately linked with Israel and will always be intimately linked with Israel. Now those of you who are world history students remember this, that you cannot explain history from this point on unless you keep a careful check on what is happening to Israel throughout all this.

I suggest this applies two ways; the destiny of individuals in the world is linked to Israel. How are individuals saved but by hearing the message that was revealed through Israel. So their destiny, the individual’s destiny, the reason why you’re sitting here, if you’re a believer and have accepted Christ as your Savior the reason why you’re here is because of Israel. You’ve heard through a Jewish book.

Secondly, and we’ll get into this when we get on the so-called social gospel, but the world in its community, the world in its corporateness, that destiny is also dependent upon Israel and to see that hold the place and turn to Romans 11 so you see this applies on an individual and a social level. This is why it’s stupid to talk about the social gospel unless you’ve had dispensations. Romans 11:11-12, here’s where Paul outlines the destiny of human society as a whole, and he says this: “I say, then, Have they,” Israel, “stumbled that they should fall? God forbid; but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles to provoke them,” Israel, “to jealousy. [12] Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fullness.” See Paul’s argument? He says look at the blessing that spilled out all over the place when Israel rejected; now turn it around, imagine that Israel comes back to her God nationally, what’s that going to mean for the world. When she turned away from her God the world was blessed, see here you have the Abrahamic Covenant still cranking away, I will bless the world through you, and I’m going to bless the world and if they reject Christ I’ll still bless the world through Him, see, it still goes on, unconditional covenant.

But now what Paul says is look, you’ve got all this blessing that’s spilled out all over the world, the gospel, salvation, but this whole thing spilled out to the world when she rejected; what’s going to happen if she accepts Christ nationally, when she fulfills the prophecies of Zechariah. What’s going to happen then? We know what’s going to happen, world peace is going to happen. There is where you’re going to have the whole world situation stabilize. Now that is why in one sense, although this is not the total sense, in one sense the snag to all programs to world peace and social reform, the snag in all the programs is Israel. Until Israel gets straightened out these programs haven’t got a ghost of a chance of accomplishing anything, because God’s mechanics for history is that when blessing occurs in history it’s going to be by Israel, according to His terms. So this is why it’s stupid to look to the United Nations to bring in world peace. All these Christians get all excited about the United Nations; it’s stupid, they don’t read their Bible, they should get excited about Israel. The United Nations isn’t going to do a thing until Israel gets straightened out. So Romans 11:12 basically is the crucial reference, Paul recognizes this and if we had time we’d go into the prophecies of Zechariah.

So that’s the first thing that’s been added as far as dispensational truth that the destiny of the world from this point onward is linked to Israel’s destiny. Secondly, God Himself will save the world and reign through Israel. This is the hope; remember it says I am going to do this, I am going to do this. And so basically the promise here is that God and God alone is ultimately capable of handling the world. And by the way, when we get into the next section of material I want to show you that Messiah, that Israel should have looked for, and I want to show you that there’s two lines of prophecy that are ultimately, it sounds as though they are paradoxical. On the one hand I’ll take you to many, many passages of the Old Testament that says God, Jehovah is going to reign; He’s going to reign because He alone can reign. And then I’ll take you through another section of Scripture that says the son of David is going to reign, and ultimately how can they be fulfilled unless you have a God-man, and there you have the hypostatic union of Christ, which is the logical outcome of the Old Testament.

Now what’s the third thing? We’ve had the destiny of the world linked to Israel; we’ve had God Himself and only Himself saving the world. Thirdly, and this is important for us as believers; from this point on you have a peculiar set of rules that God lays out for His elect instrument; in this case the rules applied to the nation Israel. It didn’t apply to the Gentiles. When God said I want you to keep the Sabbath, He didn’t mean the Gentiles keep it; pardon to the Seventh Day boys…. But He has nothing to do with Gentiles, He never asked Gentiles to keep the Sabbath. It’s just the Gentiles somehow think they’re trying to be Jews or something, I don’t know. But these cults come in with all of this stuff and it they understood the Old Testament, understood dispensations, it would never occur. This is why we’re having this series on dispensations. Any concept of taking truth that is unique to Israel and applying it to Gentiles is absolutely wrong; absolutely wrong. The Ten Commandments wouldn’t apply to the Gentiles either, unless God rephrased them in the New Testament. And He did rephrase them except one, and that’s keep the Sabbath. If the Ten Commandments had not been rephrased in the New Testament I would be under absolutely no obligation to keep any of them. So truth has to be repeated to those who are to be responsible to keep that truth from this point on in history.

So here you begin to see Israel having a set of rules and the Gentiles are out here with this truth. The Gentiles still go on in history with the truth picked up in innocence, conscience, and human government and that goes on in history. But now you start with a new flow, you have a set of rules down here for Israel that apply only to Israel. And this is important because as Christians we’ve got another problem; we’ve got, you might say the will of God that applies for us as believers it doesn’t apply to the unbelievers and here’s where we have problems in making these non-Christians behave as though they were Christians in society, passing all sorts of Christian legislation for non-Christian; it’s absolutely stupid; they’re not called upon to follow that legislation. So this is the things that have been added in this dispensation.

Now let’s conclude with the fourth thing about dispensations and that is what are the principles, the abiding principles out of all this. We again review the principles that we’ve already learned. First, we’ve learned something about the nature of God and the nature of man; that doesn’t change. We’ve learned about the fact that man as a creature needs verbal revelation from God; “man does not live by bread alone.” We’ve learned about the angelic conflict and the plan of salvation; that goes on through history. We’ve learned from the dispensation of conscience that conscience is insufficient for social order. Conscience is insufficient for social order and that’s why those of you who heard Pike on that tape, remember he got up and said that the Christian should follow his conscience. Well, suppose your conscience is empty? What do you do then? Suppose I am a Nazi in World War II and I followed my conscience and I killed Jews; how do you condemn me? Do you see where that thing backfires, you can’t have people following their conscience all over the place; it wound up in the flood. So that’s a great lesson we learned.

We learned also that a plus environment cannot be properly dominated by man. We learned that from the antediluvian world, when man had a plush environment, and men still foul up, so the problem isn’t his environment. We found that angels were not to intermix with man; we found from human government that in the sinful world man cannot even handle his own government problems by himself; this is what’s going to lead to the fact that God Himself is going to have to rule. We also found that judgment may be delayed by God but never postponed.

Now to those principles we add two that we pick up tonight. These are just principles that again, remain true throughout all of the Bible and they are, more or less, you might say application to dispensational truth. First, salvation must always come by God’s sovereign gracious plan and not by man’s effort. This ultimately is the fundamentalist’s answer to the socialist gospel, is that social salvation as well as individual salvation cannot come but by the sovereign grace of God, and if you have to wait and let the whole society go to hell, then we wait and let the whole society go to hell. You don’t stand out in front of a locomotive that’s coming your way at 60 miles an hour unless you want to get squashed; and that’s basically the fundamentalist’s position, that the society will be saved by God’s sovereign gracious program, not by ours.

The second principle that we learn is that man is blessed as he trusts God to work out His plan. Now this is the feature that you want to see, probably in conclusion, the most important one of the dispensation of promise, and I think why the old timers that set up the Scofield Bible called it the dispensation of promise. Consider Abraham, when was Abraham blessed in his life, just physically when was he blessed? When he trusted the promises; when he began to doubt what happened? He went down into Egypt and got his wife involved in a problem with Pharaoh and all sorts of things happened. And then his son came along, Isaac, and he did the same thing his father did, he got his wife in trouble. And then come Jacob and he did one better, he got his whole family in trouble. In every case… in every case of the cursing and the crisis and the sorrow and the heartache that came into these families, in every case, as the author of Genesis, whoever compiled Genesis, whether it was Moses or Moses had someone else do it, he’s trying to show you something there. He doesn’t start out, it’s kind of clever the way he does it, but he’s saying don’t you see? Don’t you see every one of these men what they’re doing? If they will trust God to work out the promise then they’re blessed, and the moment they begin to doubt that God’s going to do and they pick the problem with their own hands and try to run with the ball they drop it every time.

So this is the lesson that we learn that we can apply in any dispensation, is that you and I are blessed as believers when we trust the promises, and if we’re having problems and so on then generally it can root back to somewhere along the line where you’re just not trusting the Lord to work out His promises. It basically is a theological problem in other words.

That’s the conclusion of the dispensation of promise and next week we’re going to get to the dispensation of law and pick up Moses.

[Question asked, can’t here] Clough: The question is how was the world back in the ancient times blessed through Israel. I would suggest several answers to that; first of all in a negative way, if they left Israel alone they’d be all right. If they’d play with Israel they’d get burned. Every time it happened; so that’s the negative way. The question is, just leave Israel alone. And by the way, this principle handles to the Church and it seems to be this, although I’ve never heard this stated anywhere, and it’s never explicitly stated in Scripture, but I deduce from this that God may allow people, unbelievers, the system, to tamper with individual believers but when that system threatens to engulf His instrument, His elect instrument He rises up in wrath. And you might have the Gentiles affect certain individuals in the nation Israel but when the Gentiles threaten to destroy Israel en toto, God rises up in wrath, even though Israel may be disobedient, to pick her up again. And it’s the same thing in the Church Age, when Satan and satanic holds begin to affect the Church God always pulls the church out of the fire; always, it always happens. And it seems like God is very jealous that His elect instruments are left alone and not picked on. So that’s a negative way.

I suggest a second answer to the question would be to look at Solomon’s reign and in Solomon’s reign we have nations blessed. I will name some: Egypt was blessed, how was Egypt blessed? Egypt was blessed, one way, she has always had a problem keeping the Assyrians and the Babylonians off the frontier; with Solomon and the great kingdom there, she had absolutely no military problems, Israel prospered and it was a time of great prosperity in Egypt while Israel was prospering. Another way in which the nations were prospered is that if you think of a map of the ancient world and think of where the trade routes went, and there’s been some research but actually not enough to confirm it beyond the shadow of a doubt, but it’s convincing to say this, that here you have the Mediterranean, you have Europe here, Egypt here and Africa here; all the trade routes of the ancient world went through Israel. Now it’s untterly inconceivable to imagine that the world was ignorant of Israel, and so we’ve had scattered reports, for example, up here in China of cases where they have tried to build temples similar to a temple that they saw in this land near the sea. We have reports down here in Egypt of people trying to imitate the temple, trying to imitate the priests, as though there was tremendous witness that Israel had in history, and that was so impressive to these nations that they really wanted to mimic her.

The world’s destiny was tied in with Israel in another way, which we’ve just gone through in Deuteronomy 20 although I didn’t really make too much of an issue out of it and that was that Israel was to expand, and during the days of the expansion of Israel, David and his son Solomon, these nations were blessed in that if they lay on the frontier they would have the Israelites come in and challenging them to submit to Jehovah or not; in other words, they were being evangelized. You can see this in the book of Jonah. A friend of mine did his master’s dissertation on Nineveh and he found that Nineveh was just a third, fourth, fifth rate city out here until Jonah came in and had a tremendous revival, and actually that revival of Jonah built up Nineveh so that Assyria became a great world power. So there’s numerous indications that wherever Israel interacted with nations when she was in fellowship with her Lord it led to the blessing of these other nations.

[someone says something] Our problem, why we don’t see this as clearly as we do is because we haven’t had enough Christian scholars to take the historical data and dig for it. When they have dug for it they’ve found it. It’s just that nobody’s tried to build a whole philosophy of history on this principle and I think it’s kind of stupid because it seems to me the Bible is giving us the key to understanding history and if Christian scholars would do this we could come back to the Marxists on the campus who says that I alone have the key to history in my economic determinism. If Christians would do this we could say no we have the key alone to world history. But nobody wants to do this, somehow, I don’t know, they’re just lazy Christians that really don’t want to d this kind of thing. But it’s a wide open field and I think that the more you study in it the more richly rewarding it would be to point out this connection. You can point out the Hittites, the same thing with the Hittites to a lesser extent, that they were blessed in the sense, that for example, one way in which these nations were blessed was the moral and ethical principles of Israel rubbed off on them and this was a tremendous thing because you tended to have these nations go down as a degenerate thing. And for example, the Ninevites here, you had all sorts of practices that were destroying Assyria from the inside out and after Jonah got through in that revival, it completely reversed the whole thing and Assyria grew to have mighty armies, had discipline in their armies; they never had that before. Of course the secular historian doesn’t recognize the connection but I think it can be proved.

Let’s close in prayer….