Clough Dispensations Lesson 10

The Millennium

We’re on the Millennium, not in the Millennium, we’re studying about the Millennium. Last time we started to deal with the chief characteristics of the Millennium. It’s important to see these chief characteristics for the reason that most people today think they can bring in the Millennium by all sorts of social legislation and by programs, economic panaceas and so on, so when we discuss the characteristics of the Millennium I think we should at least include the following things.

First, the Millennium is one thousand literal years in duration. We found that from Revelation 20:1-10. A second characteristic is a characteristic of great spirituality; throughout the Millennium there will be the signs and wonders and so on, dreams and visions and there’ll be ecstatics and emotions involved, and the reason that these things can exist in the Millennium whereas they do not in our own age is that during the Millennium Satan and his demons will be removed, therefore there will not be the problem of false religion.

A third thing that is characteristic of the Millennium is a great physical environment, like that of the antediluvian world. I would like to show you some verses on this; turn to Isaiah 65:20, it’s important that you see these for one reason at least, and that is to show you that these are to be taken literally, this is not just figurative, not just to be interpreted allegorically. This is a favorite way people have of dispensing with Scripture that gives them problems, instead of being honest and tearing it out of their Bible they interpret it allegorically; it does the same thing except it has a degree of piety about it.

Isaiah 65:20, “There shall be no more in it,” the Millennium, “an infant of days, nor an old man that has not filled his days; for the child shall die an hundred years old, but the sinner being a hundred years old shall be accursed.” The point here is that age is much longer than our age; the longevity of man increases. There will be no more death in the animal kingdom, verse 25, “The wolf and the lamb shall feet together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock, and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, saith the Lord.” And here you have a transformation within the animal kingdom that is not allegorical, that is literal transformation just as it is literal in the first chapters of Genesis.

You have other characteristics of this great physical environment; you have the increased light from the sun and the moon. Turn to Isaiah 30:26, “Moreover, the light of the moon shall be like the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be seven-fold, like the light of seven days, in the day that the LORD binds up the breach of His people, and heals the stroke of their wound.” So again, in the physical system you have changes made, brought in by God to set up and to cause the Millennium to prosper. Obviously this helps agriculture and so therefore there will be the ability of the earth to sustain a tremendous population during the Millennium. So the third great characteristic, summarizing, is a tremendous physical transformation that reaches across the face of the earth.

The fourth great characteristic of the Millennium is a social structure, a global social structure. You have world peace; turn to Isaiah 2 and please notice that Isaiah 2 is valid only if the Millennium already exists. Some of you have been to New York City and gone to the east side and gone over to the United Nations building; you just have to walk in the front door and here they’ve got Isaiah 2 plastered; you can’t pray to God in the U.N. but they’ve got the Scripture there. And Isaiah 2:4 is what they quote, of course they don’t quote the first part. “[And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many nations,” and I think the quote I’m thinking of starts with the second they, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares,” that’s disarmament and the transference of economic and material wealth that is currently employed in the military over into civilian pursuits. That is full scale disarmament, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” No military science. But please notice the context and background for this vision is the Millennium, and to quote verse 4 out of context is an abomination to the Lord. If you want to quote verse 4 be honest and quote the rest of the passage; don’t quote verse 4 out of context and say let’s give to Unesco and let’s give to this and give to that and all the rest of it.

Just go back to the first verse, look at the first verse in this chapter, “The word that Isaiah, the son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem,” it’s a prophecy of Isaiah. Second, look at verse 2, “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.” There’s your world capital and the world capital is located in Jerusalem, not New York City. So you see the context, the world capital is Jerusalem. Verse 3, “An many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths; for out of Zion shall go forth the Law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.” Now is that why people are going to the United Nations, to hear the word of the Lord; obviously not. So therefore don’t quote verse 4 if you’re not going to quote verse 3 and any time you hear this garbage put out by CBS or NBC or some other equally idiotic system of news reporting, when they quote verse 4 and I heard it quoted very recently on a network program, just forget it, just tune out because it’s being quoted out of context. Just ignore it. I’ve just written to the President of CBS and told him I regularly will ignore his program whenever Eric Severeid is on.

So we have all these characteristics of the Millennium. We have world peace, we have a just society without oppression, we have world government, we have regulated capitalism. Turn to Isaiah 65 and you will see that capitalism, not communism, is the ultimate system of economics in the Millennium; you have private property, no communes in the Millennium. So next time you hear some liberal preacher get up and cry that the source of the world’s evils is capitalism don’t believe it; the source of the world’s evil is man’s sin nature; capitalism has nothing to do with it.

Isaiah 65:21-23, “And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. [22] They shall not build and another inhabit, now what’s that talking about? The worker will enjoy the fruits of his production. But he still owns it, continue reading “They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for like the days of a tree are the days of My people, and Mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.” So they are working and they are enjoying the fruits of their labor. Verse 23, “They shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the LORD, and their offspring with them.”

So here you have then, verse 21, “they shall build houses and inhabit them,” that’s private property, each person owns private property, “and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them,” private property. So don’t buy this line put out by the National Council of Churches that the kingdom of God is to be brought in by communizing the means of production and all the rest of it, and they claim they get it from the prophets; obviously they haven’t read Isaiah 65. So capitalism is not considered in the Bible to be at all the source of evil, that’s nonsense and just don’t buy it, it’s not there. The source of evil in the world is inside man, not in this economic system. That’s the fourth great characteristic of the Millennium, a great social structure.

The fifth characteristic of the Millennium; Israel will be the teaching nation to the Gentiles. We’ve seen this already in Isaiah 2, all nations will flow to the world capital to be taught the Word of God. So in the Millennium you have an idealization of what was supposed to have happened in the Old Testament. What was supposed to have happened in the Old Testament is that you would have one supreme nation, Israel; they would be supreme not because they were so great but because they were obedient to the Lord. The Lord would therefore respond to their positive volition, He would make them a great nation and they would dispense the Word of God throughout the world. So in the Millennium this actually is fulfilled, ultimately fulfilling the verse that we went back to when we started the series in dispensations, Genesis 12:1-3. Remember it said, “In thee shall all the families of the world be blessed,” and that verse attains its complete fruition in the social, economic and political sphere in the Millennium.

And finally, the last characteristic of the Millennium, and that is Isaiah 14, and this to my way of thinking is the most important characteristic of the Millennium because when I discuss the problems of society or the problems of where we’re going, political problems and so on, I find that inevitably in discussing this with people you find a blind spot and the blind spot that I find is a blind spot that is true for authors of books today, it’s true for practically all of the liberals with the exception of some that are coming to see this, it’s true, I’m afraid to say, even of the conservatives. And that is found in Isaiah 14:12-17, speaking of the fall of Satan, and ultimately when the Lord cast him out. “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, who didst weaken the nations!” And then the rest of the passage proceeds to describe what he has done in the past, but I want you to see something; that the Bible blames much of the tumult that exists in the world to supernatural causes. Much of what we see as tremendous problems that arise, that just seem impossible, is due to the fact that Satan is actively involved in history because it says here you are the one that weakened the nations.

So at this point we want to remember and recall the passage that we went to last time when we said how does the Millennium come about; it comes about when the Lord Jesus Christ cast Satan into the pit and puts him in jail. He takes him off of the earthly scene and only then can you have social reform and a perfect, you might say, political climate. Think about this by deduction, if it take the binding of Satan to produce a perfect political climate, what does that tell you about today? Satan is not bound, therefore a lot of our problems are actually satanic in nature. And here is why it’s tragic that people in our day have rejected the Bible because when they reject the Bible they’ve rejected the only system of diagnosis of the very problem they’re trying to solve. And who is it that’s crying that we should solve social problems? The liberals. And who is it in on the other hand that has destroyed the Bible? The liberal. And so here you have the paradox; the liberals are crying for social reform, crying about these problems, when with the right hand they’ve just destroyed the only solution to the problem. And then they wonder what’s the problem? They’re the problem You can’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg, and this is the point; you destroy the Bible and you’ve destroyed your only hope for solving the problem; the two go together.

So here we find the Bible accords the problems that we face on the world scene to satanic influence, there’s no getting around it. This is why no matter who is elected President you must always have a nation strong and well-armed because you’re always going to have threats of war, you will always have misunderstandings between nations until the Lord Jesus Christ returns; didn’t He tell you that? “For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom but the end is not yet.” So war is a normal feature of the present system. True, we don’t like it, but we shouldn’t allow our emotions to say let’s get rid of it, let’s hope, hope, hope, hope, that we can get rid of it.

And or course, every time we have these sentimentalists in our country…if we destroy two of our nuclear submarines then the Russians are going to destroy nuclear submarines; of course nobody ever goes over to check and see if they do it. But nevertheless, this is the big hope; if we don’t build more than 41 nuclear submarines the Russians aren’t going to build, I’ve got news, they’ve probably already more than 82. But nobody checks because everybody thinks they’re going to behave like nice boys. How stupid can you be, in a world run by Satan you expect people to behave like nice boys? They’re not going to behave like nice boys. So whether we like it or not, whether emotionally we like it or not, it’s not very nice to have war but the point is that if we’re wise, we will as Christian citizens, one of the conclusions we draw from the Bible is that we will see to it that we have a strong military, and anytime you have a movement to emasculate the Armed Services and to disarm you are right there seeing a satanic doctrine in operation. Any person that calls for disarmament in the face of danger, basically I’m not saying that they themselves know they are doing this, but whether they know it or not they are following the dogma of Satan. That’s exactly what Satan wants, exactly what he wants, to delude political and social leaders of our day.

So that’s the fifth characteristic of the Millennium, the reason actually for it all is that Satan’s bumped off the scene. So these are five characteristics of the Millennium.

Now let’s look at what revelation, our third thing on each dispensation has been the amount of revelation available in each dispensation. As always, we have most of the past revelations valid, minus two, and we’ll go through these that we’ve already covered and I’ll subtract two because two of these have changed. First, reproduction is still valid. And by the way, that’s one of the arguments for the pretribulational rapture; those of you who are involved in the find points of prophecy and you know the debate that goes on as to whether there should be an age that ends like this, Christ’s Second Coming and then the Millennium, or whether the age ends like this, rapture of the Church, seven years, then the Millennium. The proof that there must be a rapture separate from the Second Advent is the fact that the Second Advent in Scripture is a prelude to the Millennium and people have natural bodies in the Millennium because they reproduce. Sex is a modus operandi in the natural body, not the resurrection body. But if the rapture was coterminous with the Second Advent you’d have all believers in their resurrection bodies, then who would be the ones that reproduce during the Millennium? You wouldn’t have anybody. So you’ve got to have these two events separated in time; you’ve got to have people… if the believers are removed and changed into resurrection body you have got to have time to get another generation of believers so they can have some to start the Millennium in natural bodies. So all this fits together. You just have to see enough Scripture to see how it all fits.

The second great thing that we found in Scripture is the command to man to subdue the earth. The third thing we found was that man has a knowledge of judgment; he certainly will have a knowledge of judgment in the Millennium. Guess what they’re going to have in the Millennium, with all due apologies to the Supreme Court, they’re going to have capital punishment. Now isn’t that a nasty trick to pull off in the Millennium, going back to capital punishment. And you know who is going to institute it? The Lord Jesus Christ, the guy that you see in your Sunday School literature holding a lamb, He’s going to institute capital punishment, how nasty! And the fourth thing that man is going know, the knowledge of divine grace, they’re going to know grace, they’re going to know forgiveness in the Millennium.

The fifth thing they’re going to go is the knowledge of death; remember the curse is not removed in the Millennium; the curse is removed at the end of the Millennium, Revelation 22:3. So you will have people die by execution, that’s one of the main causes of death in the Millennium; people that don’t toe the line are just simply eliminated. The sixth thing that we know from the past, the divine institution of government executes God’s judgment in history. What is the instrument that executes God’s judgment during the Millennium? The government. Who runs the government? Jesus Christ.

Now the seventh truth that we have learned throughout our dispensations is now changed; we learned one truth that said divine institution is limited in extent and claim. In other words we said there’s no world government horizontal extent, and there’s the commitment to God or Caesar, the vertical. And government has horizontal and vertical limitations now. The government, there’s no legitimate world government; and secondly, government does not have total command over you. You worship God first, then you seek to provide Caesar with His thing. So government does not have an unlimited claim upon men. In the Millennium that will be true however, that whole truth will be just discarded, so that when Jesus Christ becomes the government then we can have total allegiance to the government because the government is God, literally. Now there are many systems of government that try to make government God now, communism is one, any form of totalitarianism, and the sheer arrogance of some of the people that run our government, you’d think they were God too. Now that is going to literally be fulfilled when Jesus Christ comes because He will be God and the government. And then there won’t be God and Caesar, God will be Caesar.

Then eight, the destiny of the world will be linked to Israel forever; that truth is still valid in the Millennium. Ninth, God will reveal Himself to the world, that truth is still valid in the Millennium. I hope as we’ve gone through from dispensation to dispensation you’ve seen that dispensations don’t chop the Word up into all sorts of pieces; we’ve got gobs of truth that carry over from one generation, one dispensation into the next.

The tenth thing that we’ve learned must be changed; we said that there was a peculiar set of rules for the elect only. Remember when Israel was established, you had God’s will for Israel versus God’s will for the rest of the world; there was a difference between the elect and the non-elect. Well, that’s not true in the Millennium. In the Millennium God’s will is uniform to the whole globe, simply because the Millennium starts out with all believers; the elect inherit it. So there you have the universally will of God throughout the world during the Millennium.

Eleventh, the condition of Israel nationally depends upon the response to the Law of Jehovah. That truth is certainly valid in the Millennium; because Israel has positive volition she has blessing. Twelve, God works politically through Israel and His rule of the world and that is certainly true in the Millennium.

So with the exception of those two items all of these great principles that we’ve picked up from these previous dispensations carry over and are still valid even in the Millennium. Now we have two additional truths that we pick up from the Millennium and add to our core of lessons. The first truth or the first amount of revelation that we have available in the Millennium for the first time that we’ve never had before is that now we are told to be obedient to a world government. And that is found in Psalm 2. “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry,” the word “kiss” is the oriental word which means do obeisance to. In other words, you submit because now there is a world government and it’s commandeered by Jesus Christ, He is God, therefore you submit to the world government. But there is no submission to world government in this age; that is for the next age to come, then you’ll have submission to a bona fide world government.

The second new truth that we have in the Millennium that we didn’t have before is that there will be a global rule, and a more or less uniform culture throughout the world. To see this, turn to Isaiah 11:9, “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD,” so therefore during the Millennium you have a saturation in the whole culture of divine viewpoint. That’s not saying everybody is going to be believers in the Millennium but what we’re saying is that the preponderance, the weight of the cultural kind of thinking is in favor of divine viewpoint whereas it’s not today. The whole world systems of culture weights against us. Students who try to articulate divine viewpoint in class quickly discover where the intellectual climate is today; you get clobbered in the face with human viewpoint right away, so you know what the weight is today. That’s not going to be true in the Millennium; in the Millennium the weight will favor divine viewpoint.

Jeremiah 31:34, you’ll see this same factor come out again. Again, indicating that we have a situation of maximum saturation with divine viewpoint. “And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” Now by way of direct interpretation this verse applies to Israel. By way of application we can include the whole world during the Millennium. There’s a tremendous saturation going on the Millennium, and we would say then that culture is very, very favorable to divine viewpoint, whereas it is not today. And I also want you to notice the correlation between world peace and prosperity and an acknowledgement of the Word of God. The two go together, and you can dream all you want about having world peace by some human program and we can pick up communism, we can pick up some other program, and all the programs we want but still the Bible insists again and again and again that world peace and prosperity come only in a positive correlation with the dissemination of the Word of God. That’s just the way it is; that’s just exactly the way it is, and I believe that this dynamic works in our present day.

I think that it peaks in the Millennium but the principle is still valid today. Areas that are saturated with the Word of God will tend toward economic and political prosperity. For proof of this all you have to do is take a map of the world, trace a map out of any atlas of the world and take two colored pencils; with one colored pencil color in every geographical area that, oh, in the last 330-440 years has had a saturated or at least a reasonable amount of the Word of God disseminated within it. For example, you would shade northern Europe; England, Ireland, eastern and central Canada, the United States, you’d shade certain sections in South America, but very small sections. Then with your other colored pencil shade the areas that have democracy, and I think you’ll find that the shadings almost coincide. Isn’t it strange that no other areas beside those areas has ever produced a viable republic or democratic system. And the reason is that you don’t have a republic or democratic system unless you have a responsible citizenry who are able to control their sin natures, and where you have animals you must have a government suitable for animals: totalitarianism. And where you have people that can behave themselves you have the mature kind of government. It’s just that simple.

And it’s not any accident that our forefathers came over to this country to get away from the cesspool called Europe. And they didn’t say oh, we’re going to take a vacation to Europe to get culture; they took a vacation to America to get culture, to get away from it and came over here where they could have some freedom, get some fresh air, and they produced a tremendous system. Don’t ever forget that these men were saturated with divine viewpoint, even those who were unbelievers among them were controlled and swept along with a preponderance of divine viewpoint. So it’s not an accident, it’s nothing to be apologetic for. Russia, Russian communism is not going to produce a great civilization; it simply cannot because it doesn’t have the power to do so. And no communist system ever will produce a great civilization because it cannot deal with man as an individual person; it can’t solve his problems. So it’s just holding there by sheer force, that’s all.

What can we learn then, summarizing the Millennium. What are the lessons that we pull out of this by way of things to look back on the whole picture. I’d like to summarize the lessons of history as we’ve worked through all of the dispensations because tonight we’re going to end with Millennium, and then I want to start with this particular one dispensation, the dispensation of the Church in which we live. But let’s look at the end of history and think about some of the things that are in the book called history, for I believe in eternity we’ll spend much of our time examining history in detail because it’s from history that you actually see God Himself revealed.

What are some of the lessons that we’ll learn from history. First we’ll learn about the nature of God and man as we’ve said before. We’ll learn for the fact of Deuteronomy 8:3 that man cannot live by bread alone but he must have the Word of God. Adam had to have it before the fall. Every creature needs the Word of God. You need the Word of God. If Adam needed the Word of God and he had no sin, how much more do we, who have sin natures need the Word of God. Then we find that there’ll be tremendous lessons to learn from the angelic conflict. We’ll learn that conscience was proved insufficient for a stable social order with sinful people. Conscience is not sufficient for stabilizing society so where you hear this jazz about well, I believe in following my conscience, that was tried and what was the dispensation? The dispensation of conscience, and what happened to it. It come crashing down into the flood, not a very glorious climax. That’s what happens when people trust their conscience.

Then we found that plus environment does not solve man’s problems; that was proved in the antediluvian world. We found that culture does not satisfy man’s problems, that was proved in … [tape turns] … that was proven during the age of Israel. We’re going to find out that man throughout history was basically kept in line by fear, fear of judgment. That was learned both in the age of human government and in the age of Israel. We’re going to find that perfect rulers were needed, and a unified citizenry to build a perfect society and that’s going to be true and valid and shown through the Millennium.

And then we’re going to find one final lesson that will surprise us all, it’s in Revelation 20. After the thousand years are finished God is going to run a little experiment. He’s going to say answer the problem that men have posed for generations and that is, can’t you culturally acclimatize a person so that after he’s lived in a certain environment long enough then it’s going to reinforce his behavior and perfect him so that having lived through one thousand years of the Millennium certainly the generations that have lived through this, who have lived under a perfect government will have been conditioned to behave rightly, and so God is going to blow the argument. And here He does it in Revelation 20:7, “And when the thousand years are ended, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, [8] And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. [9] And they went upon on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city; and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.” In other words there’s a global revolt.

All He has to do after a thousand years of perfect environment is let Satan play games for about fifteen minutes and you got a war going. So see what I mean; if you’re going to take the Scripture seriously you’ve got to attribute modern political intrigue and warfare largely to supernatural causes. And once you see this picture, once you see this picture then you’ll be thrown basically to you knees and say that man cannot solve the problem, God has to solve the problem. And the tendency for that, that when you reach that particular point of insight and perception, you will have a relaxed attitude about it, not in the sense that you won’t do anything, but in the sense that you realize that the power to cause righteousness and justice to prevail has to come from God. There’s just no human scheme capable of handling it because it comes from the supernatural. And the solution also has to come from that area too.

Now that summarizes every dispensation in history except one, the present one. Are there any questions about the Millennium, about Israel, about age of the Gentiles, about judgment, because now we’re going to move to the Church and the present age. Any questions?

[Question, can’t hear] Believers who are Gentiles and Jews. They will be people who survive the tribulation, they are the people Jesus says I gather My elect from the four winds, and then He says and I gather the goats and the sheep in front of Me and I said to the sheep, inherit My kingdom, and I said to the goats, depart into everlasting fire. And the sheep are the believing Gentiles and they are known as Gentiles because that’s when the cup of cold water comes in, and they’ll say well Master, when did we know that you were around, and He said when you gave a cup of cold water to these ones, and the Gentile believers will have the characteristic that during the tribulation when the believing Jews are being persecuted by the unbelieving Jews and by unbelieving Gentiles, these believing Gentiles will be the ones that shelter them in their homes and so on, at risk to their life. And that will be one of the manifestations of faith in the tribulation, when this happens. And so when the Lord starts everything off it starts out with perfect environment, no Satan, no evil forces and all believers. There will only be one problem in the Millennium; we’ll still have the sin nature.

[Question, can’t hear] Evidently, must be because he does it. In other words, the pattern you get from the Word of God is that the Lord doesn’t have a superfluous effort; everything has a meaning and a purpose behind and you might amplify, change, shift the emphasis on why he’s loosed but there’s a reason for him being loosed. I think it has something to do with the fact that God’s trying to disprove this conditioned argument, but it could have other reasons behind it, why He does it. But it is kind of interesting that after a thousand years the whole thing goes and blows; it must have something to do with the fact that after the Lord Jesus Christ sets up a perfect government, which has never happened before, then this is put in, come in like a test to see what happens, whether the perfect government has really produced something. And it shows that apparently it hasn’t, because the moment Satan’s back in the ballpark things go.

[Question, can’t hear] The question is about who inhabits the Millennium. Well, it starts out as believers, all believers, but because these people are in their natural bodies they have children and there’s where you begin to pick up your unbelievers because these children are born, they’re born with a volition, a free volition, they don’t have to believe what their parents tell them and they obviously don’t because toward the end you’ve got a pretty healthy array. Plus the fact that prophecies in the Bible, in Isaiah, particularly if you survey them carefully you see that there obviously are unbelievers there, because they’re killed because they don’t get with it.

[Question, can’t hear] Well that goes back to why I pointed out why we have to have this seven year tribulation period between the rapture and the Second Advent because during the seven years we pick up a tremendous number of believers from the tremendous global evangelism that occurs, and these are the people that are going to be around to start the Millennium, in their natural body because it would do no good to make the rapture coterminous with the Second Advent of Christ because if you did that you see what would have happened. Suppose you do this, suppose you identify the rapture where Christ comes and at that time Paul says all living saints will have their natural bodies transformed into resurrection bodies. All right, now suppose that happens. If every believer at that point has a resurrection body, then how are you going to get reproduction in the Millennium. It’s impossible. So therefore there’s got to be believers that start the Millennium who are bona fide believers but who have a natural body, and the way they come is from the tribulation.

[Question, can’t hear] Before the Millennium? The same way Jesus does in Matthew 24 and 25. He dismisses them some place and some how; how He does it it’s not really clear from Matthew 24 and 25 but He just says “Depart from Me, ye workers of iniquity.” [Question, can’t hear] Yes, at the end of the Tribulation and He just removes them. That is why many believers are confused; they read that passage in Matthew 24 and 25 about one shall be taken and one shall be left, and they say oh, rapture. Well, it’s completely reversed, the rapture, the one who is taken is the believer and the one who is left is the unbeliever, but then you come down to the end of the Tribulation and the one who is taken is the unbeliever and the one who is left is the believer. The two passages are not the same passages at all.

[Question, can’t hear] During the tribulation, yes, thousands and thousands, the book of Revelation says there’s a multitude that can’t be numbered as John looked upon them that were saved. [Question] Well, there’s never really a point beyond which people can’t be saved. What the tribulation is doing is that the pressures are intensified…it’s doing in the tribulation what God did to the Egyptians. In other words, what happens is that you have people with free volition that choose for or against God, if some go positive and some go negative and what God does by brining pressure on, He strengthens positive volition and strengthens negative volition, known in the Bible as hardening the heart, and the Bible says that Pharaoh hardened his heart and next to it it says and then God hardened his heart. It’s as though Pharaoh made a decision, I reject You. And God says fine, you reject Me I’m going to heat it up until your heart turns to stones, and so that way, that same principle operates in the tribulation, where God just brings the pressure on and it says in the…I think it’s Revelation 13 where it gets down to the point where everyone worships the beast except the believers. I mean the heat gets so strong on the world population at that point that a person that has negative volition just goes with the system. And so as the tribulation goes on what you have is a sorting process to the extreme. So you wind up at the end of the tribulation with boom, two camps way out here whereas you started with kind of a hazy mix.

Okay, now we’re going to start with the dispensation of the Church. Now I saved this for last because number one it’s our own private dispensation, and number two it has a dimension about it that’s a little different and we have to redraw the dispensation chart. So I’d like to, at this time, draw the two kinds of charts that you can draw about dispensations. One starts here, goes on through the times of the Gentiles, that was the first dispensation. Remember we said innocence, conscience, and human government, so you have the age of the Gentiles, then you have Israel, then you have a break, and then you have the Millennium; you have sort of one movement this way. Now with the Church it’s as though you start all over again here. The new creation begins and here you have a line, the Church, including the tribulation, the Millennium and the eternal state; it’s as though God starts a new track and He begins it in Acts 2. So the Church is important because the Church, the dispensation of the Church sets in motion another kind of program that’s being worked here.

And the Scriptures for this dispensation run from Acts 2 to the end of Revelation 3, or if you want to, some people like to go into Revelation 4. So that’s the Scripture passages, Acts 2 to Revelation 4. Now I would like to deal with the chief characteristic of the dispensation of the Church. I’m going to phrase this in a way that’s a little peculiar; it may seem peculiar to some of you. I do this because I’m afraid that dispensationalists in the past have made the mistake of suggesting that the Church has absolutely nothing to do with these other dispensations back here, that somehow God just dreamed up something else, and it’s kind of like a parenthesis. Well, that concept is valid except it wasn’t a parenthesis in God’s mind. You know, He didn’t just get to the cross and say whoops, now what do I do, and dropped in the Church Age, well, I’ll just kind of spin my wheels for a few generations and then start all over again. And really, that’s the impression that you get from a lot of dispensationalists, that the Church is kind of an afterthought. That’s not true at all, the Church is one of the most crucial dispensations of all; it’s not an afterthought.

So in order to fight that I’m going to rephrase the chief characteristic of the Church Age. I believe the chief characteristic of the Church Age is a preparation for the final kingdom by the training of the royal family in a spiritual warfare. In other words, the Church Age is a preparation for the final kingdom, by final kingdom I mean both the Millennium and the eternal state; the Church is the vestibule of these two ages. And it is characterized by a training program directed toward what will become the royal family of the kingdom. That’s what the Church is, so the Church is very much related to the whole program; the Church is going to be the royal family that reigns in the kingdom. Now guess who’s the royal family? You are. Didn’t think you were royalty? Well you are. If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ in this dispensation, you are going to be a member of the royal family in the kingdom. You say what do I do, what am I going to do?

We’ll get into what you’re going to do but the point is that the reason behind the trials of your life in this dispensation is to build into you qualities that God wants to use as you are members of His royal family and these trials and accidents and pressures that come into your life aren’t accidents; they’re there by design. God has an individual training program tailored for every one of us. He take you, He designs you, He knew what you would be like millions of years before your parents ever got together, He knew your entire genetic structure, and He knew that you would be a member of His royal family and He set up history in your personal experience to put you under pressure that you need, and I need, to develop as members of the royal family. So the suffering and the pressures that we encounter are there for a reason; God trains His people under pressure.

Now the crucial thing to deal with here is the angelic conflict and because of our time I don’t want to get involved with that tonight, we’ll take that up next time. The angelic conflict is the reason for the Church Age. But I would like to take you through the book of Acts very rapidly to show you something that happened so that you’ll get a feeling for this concept of the Church that grows out of the New Testament. The Church doesn’t suddenly appear in the New Testament, it kind of oozes our slowly, and as you read the New Testament all of a sudden it becomes more and more clear what happens. As I said before, you can diagram the book of Acts by making a rectangle and drawing a diagonal from the left lower corner to the upper right, and labeling the top triangle as Israel, and labeling the lower triangle as the Church. And that will give you a basic idea of the book of Acts, and this is why, don’t get snowed by somebody that says oh, do you know what the book of Acts says; in the book of Acts we have the Church having signs and wonders and we’ve got to get back to the Acts type of church, we’ve got to get back to the New Testament kind of church. And how often have you heard that? That’s a bunch of bologna. You don’t want to get back to this, this is an age of transition. The Church met in the temple, where’s the temple? You gonna’ have a temple; if you want to get back to the New Testament church you’d better get a Jewish temple around some place or a synagogue because that’s where they met. And you’d better go to the temple three times a day because they did that also. So we’re not going back to the New Testament church, thank God.

Now we start in the book of Acts and I would label, at this point I put a label: To the Jew only. Underneath I would say: o the Jew first. And over here I’d say to both Jew and Gentile without discrimination. This represents the flow of the Word of God and I’ll prove it to you in a moment. You start the whole thing off without the Church. In Acts 1, let’s go to it so you’ll see this. Acts 1, there’s a little theological discussion that occurs with the Lord Jesus Christ in Acts 1:6, the Lord is going to ascend into the clouds, He’s going to leave them, and the disciples are Jews, they’re thinking in Jewish categories and what do they say to the Lord in verse 6? “When they, therefore, were come together, they asked of Him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” Now notice that, what is the kingdom? The Millennial kingdom, they all knew it, a Jew would recognize the kingdom, it’s not this stuff the liberals say it is, the kingdom of heaven is in the presence of Christ or something. The word “kingdom” would connote to a Jewish person a literal, physical political kingdom and they’d ask a legitimate in verse 6 and Jesus sidetracks them in verse 7, He simply says “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has put in His own power.” He does not deny that the kingdom is going to come, He simply says I’m not telling you when it’s going to come. “But,” then He adds in verse 8, “ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Spirit is come upon you.”

What Jesus is doing is postponing the kingdom at this point for a reason. Here you have Jews only; then Acts 2 you have actually the creation of the Church at Pentecost, though as you’ll see if you study Acts carefully it’s not apparent the apostles realize what really happened at Pentecost. It really did happen but they were slow to wake up to what happened until way on down in church history, two or three decades later, then the apostles began to think back and understand what really happened on the day of Pentecost. It literally happened here but they were slow to wake up to what happened, for reasons again which, if you study the book of Acts you see.

Turn to Acts 4:1-4, here you have the first persecution against the Church, against the believers. I want you to notice the flow of what happens. We’re just going to hit passages very, very rapidly and go all the way through to Acts 28. Watch the trend. “As they spoke unto the people, the priests, and the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees, came upon them. [2] Being grieved that they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead. [3] And they laid hands on them, and put them in custody unto the next day,” so here you have the persecution of the Sadducees.

Turn to Acts 5:33, here you have the Pharisees move in. First you have the Sadducees in Acts 4; now in Acts 5:33, “When they heard that,” that’s the Pharisees, “they were cut to the heart, and took counsel to slay them. [34] Then stood up one in the council, a Pharisee, named Gamailiel, a teacher of the law, held in reputation among all the people…” and he made his famous statement, Gamailiel, but the point here is that the Pharisees are divided about this question.

Turn to Acts 7:51, here’s Stephen, preaching to the Jewish people. Remember the whole program is still Jewish here but notice the shift that’s slowly occurring. In Acts 7:51 Stephen says “Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you do always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you.” Now that’s not very diplomatic preaching. In fact, he got the preacher stoned in this particular instance, but nevertheless this is how, in our modern terminology Stephen socked it to them and he was told to do so by the Holy Spirit. And so here is Stephen persecuted.

Turn to Acts 13:43, here’s Paul at Antioch, “Now when the congregation was broken up, many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas, who, speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God. [44] And the next Sabbath day came almost the whole city together to hear the word of God.” And by the way, we got on heathenism Sunday morning and I told you be careful of the statement that they haven’t heard; you look at that verse again, those apostles came and a whole city almost came out to hear it. A lot of people heard the apostolic message. And these are just a couple of men but think of the dissemination; they did it without TV. Verse 45, “But when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy, and spoke against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming. [4]6 The Paul and Barnabas grew bold, and said, I was necessary that the Word of God should first have been spoken to you; but seeing ye put it from you, and judge ourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles.” So here at Antioch you have the apostles turning to the Gentiles.

Turn to Acts 18:5-6, here you have apostles at Corinth. In Acts 13 they were at Antioch, now they’ve moved to Corinth. “And when Silas and Timothy were come from Macedonia, Paul was pressed in the spirit, and testified to the Jews that Jesus was Christ. [6] And when they opposed themselves, and blasphemed, he shook his raiment, and said unto them, Your blood be upon your own head, I am clean. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.”

Turn to Acts 19:8-9, here you have Paul at Ephesus, “And he went into the synagogues, and spoke boldly for the space of three months, disputing and persuading the things concerning the kingdom of God.” Imagine the arguments he must have had, in ninety days. “But when some were hardened, and believed not, but spoke evil of that way before the multitude,” and by the word, the word “Way” should be capitalized in your Bible because that was the name of early Christianity, the Way, “they spoke evil of the Way before the multitude, he departed from them, and separated the disciples, disputing daily in the school of one, Tyrannus.” And here you have Paul again separating himself from the Jewish people.

Acts 22:22, here you have a Jewish riot in Jerusalem over the Word of God, “And they listened to him until this word, and they lifted up their voices, and said, Away with a fellow from the earth; for it is not fit that he should live. [23] And as they cried out, and cast off their clothes, and threw dust into the air,” you’d say he caused a little reaction, wouldn’t you. People started tearing their clothes off. I have never yet seen a preacher in the 20^th century cause that commotion. “The chief captain commanded him to be brought into the barracks, [and bade that he should be examined by scourging, that he might know for what reason they cried so against him.]” Please notice it was the police, those of you who don’t like the police, I just point your attention to verse 24 that saved the apostles, so they saved him from the riot.

Turn to Acts 23:10, “And when there arose a great dissension, the chief captain, fearing lest Paul should have been pulled in pieces, commanded the soldiers to go down, and to take him by force from among them, and to bring him into the barracks.” And here again the Roman army protected the apostles. Do you see now why in Romans 13 Paul says you obey the government, even if it’s a totalitarian government because it in the end does protect you. So here you have a Jewish riot.

In Acts 25:10 you have Paul now no longer appealing to the Jewish rulers at all, but by the time of Acts 25:10 Paul says, “I stand at Caesar’s judgment seat, where I ought to be judged; to the Jews have I done no wrong, as thou well knowest.” And now he appeals and turns his case over to the Roman legal authorities.

Finally in Acts 28:17, here he makes his final commitment at the end of book of Acts. “And it came to pass that, after three days, Paul called the chief of the Jews together, and when they were come together, he said unto them, Men and brethren, though I have committed nothing against the people or customs of our fathers, yet was I delivered prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans. [18] Who when they had examined me, would have let me go, because there was no cause of death in me. [19] But the Jews spoke against it,” and finally if you drop down to verse 25 Paul makes the final pronouncement, “And when they agreed not among themselves, they departed, after Paul had spoken one word, Well spoke the Holy Spirit by Isaiah, the prophet, unto our fathers, [26] Saying, Go unto this people, and say, Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive. [27] For the heart of this people is become obtuse, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have the closed; lest they should see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. [28] Be it known, therefore, unto you, that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, and they will hear it. [29] And when he said these words, the Jews departed and had great disputing among themselves.”

So I think you see the thrust in this book of Acts. The apostles do everything they can to confront the Jewish nation with the gospel and every time they do it they’re cast off, and so at the end of the book of Acts they say fine, from now on we’ll present the truth to Jews and Gentiles but we’re not making special effort. And this is the way it ends, and I might just summarize at this point that if you want to match this with the Gospels you can think of the whole problem as having two teeth, or two crisis points. In the Gospels you have one major crisis; in the Acts you have the other major crisis. What are the crises? In the Gospels it was rejection of Jesus as Messiah. What did Jesus do after He was rejected? He carefully worked with His own disciples and He let Himself be crucified, and it looked for a moment as though God’s plan had come to naught, but the just as the crisis point, when Christ was crucified and rejected, what happened? Through that rejection came salvation to the world; God had another hand that Satan had not seen.

And now you come to the book of Acts and God tries again to present the kingdom offer to Israel, He presents it and presents it and presents it and presents and they reject and reject and reject and once again it looks like God’s program is in danger, it looks like it’s going to fall through but what happened? Then He reveals to the apostles that I have formed the Church and from now on the emphasis is upon the Church and the preaching to the Gentiles. So next time we’ll go into this in more detail and we’ll develop the angelic conflict as background for the Church Age but I want you to see that God has done something new here. There’s a shift in history, and you don’t understand our phase of history unless you see this shift.

[Tapes covering the Church Age are not available]