Clough Dispensations Lesson 6

 The Dispensation of Israel – Dispensation of Law

 

We’re going to have a special presentation and so I’m going to introduce the dispensation of the Law and give some background on it and then I’ll turn it over to [?].  We’ve been working with dispensations and we’ve worked up through the dispensation of promise and how God is working with Abraham, and how God has elected a people for His name from among the Gentiles and these people, the seed of Abraham, has been defined in the Abrahamic Covenant that we’ve studied. 

 

Tonight we come to the next dispensation which is the dispensation of the Law.  If you have Scofield Bibles you’ll recognize the dispensation of the promise and the dispensation of the Law.  I have grouped all these into to large categories; first all the dispensations that fit in the Gentiles we’ve grouped as the Gentile dispensation, and beginning with the dispensation of promise we’ve started with Israel, because Israel is in a unique position in history.  Tonight we start with the dispensation of the Law and we’ll probably have time just to cover the first few aspects of this dispensation. 

 

Remember in this series we’re covering four categories of truth with every dispensation.  One is the Scripture, or that part of your Bible that deals with the dispensation.  The second one is the chief characteristic of each dispensation. The third thing is the amount of revelation given or available in each dispensation, and the fourth thing, the things that never change.  Just to show some people that have an a phobia, dispensational phobia I call it, evidently some people in this down you mention the word dispensation and their blood pressure goes up 30 points.  Now in case you happen to be one of those people just relax because dispensations have nothing to do with different ways of salvation, and if you’ve heard that you’ve heard wrongly, and obviously from somebody that doesn’t know what they’re talking about.  Dispensations have nothing to do with ways of salvation; it has to do with the amount of revelation or the content of revelation available in any given age. 

 

The dispensation of the Law extends in Scripture from Exodus 20 through…and I’ll explain this in a moment, it extends from Exodus 20 all the way through Revelation 19, minus New Testament epistles.  Exodus 20 through Revelation 19 minus New Testament epistles.  The importance of this is to underline for some of you who have friends who come to the book of Acts and derive all sorts of interesting doctrines that supposedly have something to do with the normal Church Age ministry.  And of course the book of Acts is the origin of the Church in Acts 2 but there are certain practices, such as going to the temple and so on that obviously no one does today.  So the book of Acts is not a normative book for Church Age truth.  Therefore anyone you meet who is trying to build doctrine out of the book of Acts has got the cart before the horse.  You cannot build doctrine out of the book of Acts; Acts is an account of experience.

 

Now we come to the second category in our dispensations, and that is the chief characteristic.  The chief characteristic of the dispensation of the Law—what is the chief characteristic.  Last time we said the chief characteristic of the age of promise was that Abraham and his seed was anticipating the fulfillment of God’s promises.  It was all a dispensation of promise, what God was going to do with that seed.  Now in the dispensation of the Law God has already created the nation in history and so therefore we have a new characteristic.  The characteristic now that continues on down through history is that blessings and cursings fall upon the nation Israel in accordance with their positive volition or negative volition toward God.  In other words, you have a system set up, the mechanics of history, where you have blessing associated with positive volition toward God and you have cursing associated with negative volition toward God.  And any course of history that does not include Israel and does not include God’s mechanics for Israel cannot give you a total philosophy of history.  It’s impossible to study history without studying the nation Israel. 

 

We quote two Scriptures in this section; the first one is Exodus 20 we’ll begin expounding some of the characteristics, showing you some of the Scriptures.  Now obviously the dispensation of the Law goes on long enough in the Old Testament that we could spend hours and hours on it; that’s not our intention to do this.  Exodus 20 gives us one quick summary feature of this dispensation of the Law.  And those of you who have been coming Sunday evening should know by now that the recent archeological findings show without a doubt what Scofield has said for years and years and  years, namely that the Mosaic treaty is a conditional treaty.  It is a conditional treaty and it was written in the form of what we call a suzerainty vassal treaty.  A suzerainty vassal treaty we might say in our modern 20th century lingo is like a mutual aid pact in which you have a great king called a suzerain and he would make treaties with these vassal kings and these treaties would…he’d be dealing with maybe four vassal kings.  For example, suppose the suzerain of the Hittite Empire made treaties with the King of Tyre, the King of Sidon and so on, he would legalize his relation­ship with these kings by means of these treaties. 

 

And fortunately for the fundamentalists these treaties had a datable predictable pattern.  No matter when this treaty, or under what circumstances the treaty was made it always had the same pattern up until 1000 BC, after that the pattern shifts and all the critics for  years and years have been saying that oh, this Law was a late product, Israel didn’t get her law until the 5th and 4th centuries and all the rest of it.  Now you can show from archeology that’s absolutely false, for beginning in Exodus 20:2 you have a format of a suzerainty vassal treaty; it’s unmistakable, and it’s the kind of a suzerainty vassal treaty that is dated before 1000 BC. 

 

For example, the first element that you see, “I am the LORD thy God, who have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” and so on.  Now “I am the LORD thy God” would correspond to what we call the preamble section of the suzerainty vassal treaty.  Those of you who have gone through Deuteronomy with me recognize that the first chapter of Deuteronomy would correspond also to this format. The rest of verse 2, after you see the comma, you have a relative clause describing what God did, I am the God “who have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”  And here you have item 2 of a suzerainty vassal treaty, namely you have the historical prologue, and this always describes what the great king did on behalf of the vassal king.  Then the third thing you have is the stipulations which in this case are the Ten Commandments.  Then you have a disposition of the text in public reading.  We’ll go into this on Sunday evenings.  Then you have another thing called the witnesses, which is a study unto itself, and the cursings and the blessings.  Now all these features of the suzerainty vassal treaty prove without the shadow of a doubt that fundamentalism has been right all along and that Moses truly entered into a two-part contract with God at this point.  And so in place of the suzerain you don’t have any human king, Jehovah is the king; and in place of the vassals, you no longer have the vassals, you have the twelve tribes.  And so it seems to me that modern archeology makes it quite clear from our viewpoint what is going on. 

Now if you’ll turn to Exodus 40 you’ll see another characteristic of the age of the Law.  Not only do you have this fact that God is locked into a legal relationship with a physical nation, not only do you have that but you have something else that’s amazing.  In Exodus 40:34, “Then a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle.”  Now what’s “the glory of the LORD?”  It is an actual physically present glory that if you were there with your camera you could have recorded it.  You could have taken a picture of this, it’s something physical, it actually was there literally.  And so the second great feature of the dispensation of the Law is that God shows His local presence in the nation Israel, as He has never done in history before.  He is locally present.  Now that’s not violating His omnipresence, obviously God is omnipresent; He’s always present everywhere, but in a special sense He’s present in a geographical location and here was the tabernacle and the temple, and this goes on throughout part of the dispensation of the Law.

 

Now we come to the last section which I want to cover tonight and that’s Leviticus 26.  In Leviticus 26 you have the key to understanding the history of the Old Testament, in fact the key to understanding the history of the world after this point.  Leviticus 26, you have five degrees of discipline.  Now God has blessing for the nation Israel but He also has discipline and cursing upon the nation.  And when the nation fails to adhere to the Word of God there is discipline, just like the individual believer today.  If you get out of line you don’t lose your salvation but you are going to guarantee that you’ll make your life miserable and God has all sorts of ways dreamed up from eternity past to make you miserable until you get back in fellowship with Him.  So the analogy is the same in this age for the individual. 

 

But notice these, beginning in Leviticus 26:14, here’s your first degree of discipline, verses 14-17, “But if ye will not hearken unto Me, and will not do all these commandments, [15] And if ye shall despise My statutes, or if your soul abhor Mine ordinances, so that you will not do all My commandments, but that you break My covenant, [16] I will also do this to you: I will appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning fever, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart; and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.”  And so to summarize we would say the first degree of discipline includes physical disease, enemy military operations resulting in national fear and sorrow.  This is the first degree of God’s discipline.

 

Then he says beginning in Leviticus 26:18, “And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto Me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.”  And so this is the second degree of discipline, verses 18-20, and we summarize this second degree of discipline by saying that it results in climatic adversity and agricultural failure.  So you have the first degree of discipline and there’s no response, God intensifies His discipline to the second degree.

 

Now the third degree of discipline, Leviticus 26:21-22, “And if you walk contrary unto Me, and will not hearken unto Me, I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins. [22] And I will also send wild beasts among you…” and so on.  So we might summarize the third degree of discipline expounded in verses 21-22 by saying it increases the intensity of what preceded and it also adds that they will have hordes of preying beasts; now these aren’t praying,

p-r-a-y, it’s p-r-e-y, for those of you who’ve been brought up in the Lubbock School system where they teach you sex before they teach you how to tell time.

 

Now for the fourth degree of discipline, Leviticus 26:23-26, this is the degree where it intensifies even more; if they do not respond to the third degree, God increase, “And if ye will not be reformed by Me by these things, but will walk contrary unto Me, [24] Then I will also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.  [25] And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the vengeance of My covenant; and when you are gathered together within your cities,” etc. etc. etc.  Summarizing this briefly we’d say the fourth degree of discipline means enemy occupation and food shortages, these are two that are brought up here. 

 

And then the fifth degree of discipline, Leviticus 26:27 and following, “And if you will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto Me, [28] Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.”  And then the last thing, verse 33, this last fifth degree of discipline means, “I will scatter you among the nations, and will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.  [34] Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths,” and so on. 

 

So I want you to see this, for one reason to understand the Old Testament; another reason to understand the Christian life, because this principle still applies to individual believers, you can see it in Hebrews 12 and other passages, that if we do not follow in the will of God He disciplines us.  This is the other side of the coin to eternal security.

 

Now lest you think that Israel, by the fifth cycle has been removed from the plan of God, I conclude by drawing your attention to Deuteronomy 30.  Now this is discipline but it does not knock Israel out of God’s program.  It means that Israel suffers for not following the will of God but it does not mean that Israel has been forsaken.  Deuteronomy 30:1, “And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, to which the LORD thy God has driven thee, [2] And shall return unto the LORD thy God, and shalt obey His voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, [3] That then,” notice verse 3, “That then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations where the LORD thy God has scattered thee.”  Now that shows you that discipline does not remove Israel from God’s plan, although it means that Israel is going to suffer. 

 

We’re cutting it short tonight because of our special presentation, but next time we’ll pick it up from here and examine in more detail how the mechanics of the age of the Law worked out in history.  Application for us as believers tonight is to remember that while we do not lose our position in Christ by our personal acts of sin, we do something that brings upon us discipline, just like Israel did, and we see this in Hebrews 12 and other passages.