Ages and Angels
"How can a young man cleanse his way by taking heed thereto
according to Thy Word," Psalm 119:9. "Thy Word have I hid in my heart
that I might not sin against Thee," Psalm 119:11. "Thy Word is a lamp
unto my feet and a light unto my path," Psalm 119:105. "Jesus prayed
to the Father, to sanctify them in truth, Thy Word is truth," John 17:17.
"For the grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God shall
stand forever," Isaiah 40:8.
We we'll have a few moments of silent prayer so you can make sure that
you are in fellowship and ready to study the Word, then I will open in prayer.
Let's pray. Our Father, it is such a great privilege that we have to come
together to see one another and to be focused upon Your Word and to be reminded
that we are not standing alone. You, of course, are always with us. It is good
to know that there are other believers who we fellowship with who are standing
firm for the truth. Our Father, as we gather together this evening our focus is
upon You. It is upon Your Word and learning about Your grace; learning about
Your purpose in human history so that we can properly understand what is going
on in terms of Your plan and purpose, and understanding the basic themes and
structures of the Scriptures. Father, we pray that You would open the eyes of
our soul that we might have clear understanding of Your Word this evening; we
pray in Christ's Name, Amen.
We are continuing our study on dispensations and last time we looked at
the distinction between dispensations and ages. We are going to continue that
tonight. We are also going to have a quick review of covenants, which I believe
are the revelatory mechanisms through which God communicated a change in most
dispensations, not every one, but in most of them there was a new communication
via a covenant. Now the last time for the end of the class a couple of
questions came in from Mary from Georgia. We are going to answer those
questions as we go through tonight probably. One had to do with understanding
what does it mean to glorify God and how do you glorify God? The other question
had to do with why does God need to have His character vindicated? So we are
going to look at that within the structure of understanding the angelic
conflict. We will get to that I hope before the class is over with this
evening.
Just by way of review, we looked at these covenants last time. There
are the initial Gentile covenants, which I believe are modifications of the
same Creation covenant. There are similarities but differences. Those
differences are introduced because of sin. So you have some initial commands
given to man: that he is to be fruitful and multiply; he is to rule over the
fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and the beast of the field; he is to
take care of the garden; he is to take care of creation and give oversight
there. There is one prohibition: that is, he is not to eat from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. He is created in the image and likeness of God, so
that means that he is God's delegated representative authority over creation.
The word that is used is vice-gerent, not vice-regent. Don't flip the
consonants there. There is a word vice-regent. A regent is a king and a
vice-regent is the one who is his assistant or next in line. That is like the
vice-president, the one next in line in authority. A vice-gerent is someone who
is sent to represent the king and who stands as the king's representative with
authority over an entity whatever it might be, another country, an army,
something of that quality.
So the human beings are created as a vice-gerent. We represent God; we
are created in His image to rule over the creation as His representative. Now
when man sins, disobeys the mandate, the prohibition, then certain changes
occurred. There is a constitutional change in man. He becomes spiritually dead.
There are constitutional defects that reverberate through all of creation. So
that you then, at this point, you have the introduction scientifically of the
second law of thermodynamics. Prior to this matter the first law of
thermodynamics came into effect during the creation week. During the creation
week God creates matter, energy; at the end of the creation week creation
ceases and you have a finite amount of matter and energy. But starting with the
fall you now have energy running down, moving to a state of entropy. Sooner or
later that will run out. But everything begins to deteriorate, everything
begins to grow old, everything begins need, the grass needs to be cut; the
house needs to be painted, things rust; everything begins to deteriorate. But
essentially the focus in the Adamic covenant is on how the curse primarily
affects the actors that is the people who are actively involved in that scene,
the serpent, Eve and Adam.
And so there are changes that take place, and then that situation
continues until the flood and then there is a judgment on the planet. Everybody
is wiped out in the flood except for Noah, his three sons, and their four
wives. The Noahic covenant is still in effect, but there is failure again that
occurred at the Tower of Babel; and so instead of working through the entire
human race God began to work through one particular group, the descendants of
Abraham. He made a covenant with Abraham that promised him land, seed, and
blessing, and each one of those elements is further expanded in a subsequent
covenant. The Land covenant, the Davidic covenant, the New covenant.
The Abrahamic covenant went into effect immediately when God cut that
covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12-17. There are different stages of promise
and then the actual cutting of the covenant in Genesis 15 and Genesis 17. The
three subsequent covenants are expansions on the Abrahamic covenant and they
don't come into effect until the Lord Jesus Christ returns at the end of the
age to establish the millennial kingdom. I am using that term age in a rather
broad sense. In the Old Testament they did not understand all the different
dispensations that were coming. They just knew that at some time the Messiah
would come and establish a kingdom. That is when all of these three covenants
would be fulfilled. There is the one conditional or temporary covenant, the
Mosaic covenant. In contrast to the temporary nature of the Mosaic covenant,
the other covenants to Israel are permanent, everlasting and will not change.
As we look at history, as we look at how the dispensations are laid
out, we are talking about ages, The Ages
of Civilization. Just to give you an overview: we have ETERNITY PAST; and then the
first broad age, which incorporates three dispensations, is the AGE OF THE GENTILES. It begins with
the Creation in Genesis 1 and extends down past the Noahic Flood to the Tower
of Babel. It is with the Tower of Babel that God ceases to work with all of
humanity; they have united against Him as they did before the Flood and He
comes up with a new plan to work through one individual and that is Abraham.
This begins the AGE OF ISRAEL, because from
this point on God is going to work through Abraham and His descendants as the
primary path of blessing to the human race.
The Jewish people begin with Abraham; the nation doesn't begin until
Mount Sinai, but God's plan to work solely and exclusively through the Jewish
people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, begins in Genesis 12. So
the age of Israel extends to the cross, which is the first coming of Jesus
Christ and it is just after that that the church age begins on the day of
Pentecost. The church age extends to the rapture of the church and then there
is just a brief little seven-year period that actually goes back to the age of
Israel. That is the Tribulation, still part of the age of Israel, the last
seven years in God's timetable for Israel. Then the Lord Jesus Christ returns
at the Second Coming and we have the messianic age or the Millennium. When the
Millennium ends then there will be a rebellion again, a judgment and God will
then destroy the present heavens and earth and establish the new heavens and
new earth and we go into eternity future. That gives us an overview of these
ages.
Now we will go back to the earlier slide to look at these ages in detail.
We saw last time that an age is a large era or epoch marked by definite
boundaries. The word indicates a fixed time frame whereas a dispensation going
back to the initial Greek word. Everybody had a little trouble with this
because too often you heard dispensation defined as a period of time where the
period of time was the primary characteristic; administration if mentioned was
a secondary characteristic. You go back to Scofield and others who were not as
precise in their definition as they should be.
The reason I keep emphasizing this is the Greek word or the whole word
group, whether it is OIKONIMIA, OIKONOMOS, any of those
words, or OIKONOMEO, always refer to an administration or a stewardship.
You can look at a hundred Greek dictionaries and you won't find a single one
that includes anything related to time in the definition of OIKONOMIA. They all talk
about the fact that it relates to an administration, stewardship, a
responsibility. As I said last time, when we emphasize that aspect of it that
brings in something we can unpack in terms of the responsibilities that
distinguish each administration and these are related to the tests and the
failures of each administration. So obviously, any administration is bordered
by time. You can talk about the administration of Bill Clinton, and what you are
emphasizing when you do that and what comes to people's mind are the
characteristics and the qualities of that administration, not necessarily the
time period during which it occurred; but obviously it is marked by a beginning
and an end.
We looked last time at the age of the Gentiles which is the
first broad age that goes from the creation to the call of Abraham in Genesis
12:1, so it covers the first eleven chapters of Genesis. As such, it covers
three dispensations:
1. Dispensation of Innocence, Genesis 1:28 to Genesis 3:8
2. Dispensation of Conscience, Genesis 3:9 to Genesis 8:14
3. Dispensation of Government, Genesis 8:15 to Genesis11:35
These are the different dispensations in the first age of the Gentiles.
Now there are several characteristics we looked at last time. There is:
1. One language: everybody on the earth spoke one language. There were
no linguistic distinctions. Everybody could understand each other.
You cannot imagine the value of that unless you've travelled a lot
internationally or if you have tried to communicate the gospel or tried to
teach the Bible to people that don't understand your language. I remember years
ago when in the year 2000 I was invited by Jim Myers to come over to teach at a
pastors' conference in Almaty, Kazakhstan, we got there and the church
building, the room we were in, was rectangular. It was probably about half the
size of this room or a little bit less, and at night they push all the desk up
against the wall and the students would throw their pallets down on the ground
in there and a couple of other rooms. They slept there. The next morning they
would roll up their little pallet and put the little desks that they had back
in place, and then we would be ready. We would sit there all day. The
temperature in that room wasn't bad considering it was about 115°F outside. The
two air conditioners were window units, which you had to talk over, pretty much
kept the temperature down to about a comfortable 98 degrees, and then on top of
that you had a communication problem.
On one side of the room you had Kazakh speakers; on the other side of
the room you had Russian speakers. The Kazakh speakers had a Kazakh Bible,
which didn't have anything translated from the Old Testament. Half my stuff
had to do with the Old Testament. I was speaking
on spiritual warfare. How can you teach somebody about the fall of Satan in
Isaiah and Ezekiel when they've never even read the Old Testament? The Kazakh
translation they had was translated by a Baptist from the New International
Version, not from the Greek. So you really weren't sure what was going on. So I
would speak and I had a Kazakh translator who was excellent. She was the wife
of the pastor and she fluently spoke six or seven languages. Then I had a
Russian translator who wasn't that good because words like justification and
propitiation stumped him. He had been translating for American Christian
pastors for at least 10 years, but those words stumped him. That ought to tell
you a lot about what gets taught over there. Not much. And sadly nobody uses
that kind of technical vocabulary because he was stumped.
Jim had to fly his regular translator, Margaret, in from Kiev so that
she could handle the Russian translation. One day Juana, who was the Kazakh
translator, had to go down to the visa office to take care of some problems
with one of the students. So there wasn't a single student who could translate
English to Kazakh. But there was one who could translate Russian to Kazakh. So
I would teach and it would be translated by the somewhat barely competent translator
form English to Russian, and then the other guy would translate it from Russian
to Kazakh. I have no idea if they heard anything close to what I was saying.
That is the Tower of Babel. So that judgment came and after that God called out
Abraham. So initially there was one language.
2. One race and they still didn't get along. You couldn't cry racism
because there weren't any distinctions.
3. They had no canon of Scripture that we know of. There may have been
something because all those terms that we see, the repeated phrases that we see,
"These are the records of—these are the records of Adam; these are
the records of the creation; these are the records of Noah; these are the
records of Abraham"—indicate that they were probably writing
something down, but I don't know if there was any kind of transmission. There
is no indication of that.
4. Salvation was still by faith in Jesus Christ, but it was in the future
promised seed of the woman. They did not know the name Jesus Christ; they knew
there was a promised redemption through the seed of the woman.
5. There is no distinct administrative entity during that time.
6. The divine institutions are developed and are attacked by Satan from
the very beginning. Marriage wasn't just attacked recently; it has been
attacked all along.
That pretty much covers the first age, the age of the Gentiles. Then we
have the age of the Jews. Now the Scripture here is Genesis
12 through Malachi. The majority of the Old Testament covers the age of the
Jews except for prophetic passages that focus on the way things will be during
the millennium. Passages such as Isaiah 11, 35, 64, 65; Matthew, Mark, Luke,
John are included in this because they cover the period of the life of Christ,
and that was all during the age of Israel. Revelation 6-19 are also a part of
Daniel's 70th week, so that would be part of last seven year period of the age
of Israel. That is the Scripture for that. I have put the exception here of
John 13-17 because that is the last night before the Lord went to the cross
when he is teaching His disciples about spiritual life truth for the church
age. So that is somewhat prophetic. That wasn't what was enacted at that time,
it is telling them about the coming of the Holy Spirit and He is teaching them
about fellowship and walking by the spirit during that last teaching time with
His disciples.
The age of the Jews covers two dispensations:
1. The dispensation of the patriarchs sometimes referred to as promise,
from Abraham to the Sinai, from Abraham to the giving of the Law.
2. The second period, the second dispensation is form the giving of the
Law from Moses to Jesus Christ. Those are the two basic dispensations.
Now there is a third dispensation that I put in there and we will cover
it when we get there. Most people today don't recognize it, but I think it is a
distinct dispensation, at least it is a critical hinge dispensation, and that
is the messianic age or the period when Christ comes the first time and that is
the period of the first advent. We will cover that when we get there. I think
it fits the criteria, but we won't get distracted with that right now.
3. Then the Tribulation, which is from the signing of the covenant that
begins Daniel's 70th week to the Second Advent of Christ.
The basic characteristics of this age:
1. There are many languages now. At the Tower of Babel God scattered
languages. When everybody gets a different language then people tend to group
together according to those languages. That is when races developed because
when everybody got different languages these five or six people would go off
over here because they could not understand anybody else, and those six or
eight people were probably paired up male and female. God is pretty accurate
that way. And those eight people, four men and four women would go off that
way. It was probably a lot more, but you understand the principle. They would
divide up according to whom could understand them because nobody else could
understand them. You were pretty limited as to whom you were going to select
for a spouse, so they would select someone for a spouse. They would then have
children and over time certain genetic characteristics would dominate. I have a
sneaking suspicion that God didn't just randomly throw out those languages. But
He knew what the various genetic tendencies were in different groups and He selected
who would be in which language group in order to carve up the human race
according to certain genetic characteristics.
2. So many languages lead to many tribes or nations.
3. In the age of Israel there is a specific administrator throughout
the three dispensations and that is Israel. Israel was to give the gospel not
only to her own people but was to be a source of the gospel for those who came
to Israel.
In the New Testament the church was sent out. Israel was positioned at
the hub of the world. If you were on a trade route, if you were out driving a
semi-camel hauling goods from Egypt to Mesopotamia, you had to go through
Israel. If you were sending goods back and you first wanted to trade off some
things in the Caucasus Mountains you would haul goods up to the Caucasus
Mountains and get a new load of goods to take to Egypt and once again you are
travelling south and you go through Israel. All roads went through Israel. As
they would go to Israel, according to Deuteronomy, the system was set up so
that if the people were obedient to the law and were being blessed by God, then
people would be astounded by what they saw. They would see a nation where there
was freedom, a nation where there was tremendous prosperity and blessing, and
they would say:
What is it that makes a difference?
How come the Israelites are like this?
Why are they such a great nation?
Then they would find out and they would take the good news back to
their nations. That is how God designed things. Now that failed. In the church
age we take the Word out to people and that is ultimately going to fail because
people will reject it. As we go through this study what we are going to see is
that in every dispensation and every age God sets up every possible set of
circumstances whereby people can succeed or fail. And they are always going to
fail because He is demonstrating something. He is demonstrating that unless
human beings are completely dependent upon Him nothing works. Whether or not
God's provision a little or a lot they have to be completely dependent upon Him
otherwise, nothing works.
4. Salvation wasn't on the basis of keeping the Law but through faith
in Christ, just as today, looking to the promise of the seed, the Redeemer, the
Seed of the woman who would redeem them for their sins.
5. Revelation from God. How did you know the truth? Revelation came
through Israel. They were the custodians of divine revelation. Not only did
they receive it through the prophets but they were to record it and preserve it
for the ages.
And so this lasts from Abraham all the way to the Second Advent with
the exception of the church age. The church age is sometimes called by
dispensationalists the great parenthesis because it was not foreseen or
prophesied about from the Old Testament. That is because they did not want to
give Israel a clue as to what might happen in the future. If Israel had known
that God was going to have another plan for another people in the Old Testament,
then they would have known; it would have been a hint that maybe they weren't
going to receive the Messiah. So by not announcing anything about the future
church age or the possibility of it the test of whether or not they would
accept a Messiah or not was a real test. They didn't know what might happen. So
that is why that was kept a complete secret, which is referred to as a mystery.
Then we come to the church age. In terms of the Gospels, the primary
teaching about the spiritual life of the church age comes in John 13-17, those
passages where Jesus is teaching His disciples the night before He goes to the
cross. The church age actually begins with the day of Pentecost and it extends
until the rapture of the church. So that is how we come to understand when and
how long the church age lasts—the New Testament epistles except for certain
portions that deal with the Tribulation. Revelation 1-3 covers the church age.
The only parts of the New Testament that don't
address it are prophetic portions that deal with the Tribulation. But the New Testament
epistles from Romans to Jude are addressed to church age believers. We are
given a sufficient revelation there. We are given everything we need to know
about living the spiritual life of the church age. So if there is something
that is not there, it speaks volumes because God did not think it was
important. But that is the primary focus of study for the spiritual life of the
church age, are those epistles.
Now that doesn't mean we shouldn't study the rest of Scripture because
the rest of the Scripture provides background and a tremendous amount of
information that we need in order to understand what is in the epistles. I've
known of some dispensationalists who only teach Paul's Epistles. That almost
smacks of hyper-dispensationalism. I've known of some dispensationalists who
will only teach Paul's later epistles. That really is more like
hyper-dispensationalism. But we are to teach the whole counsel of God. The
Scripture teaches everything from Genesis through Revelation. Not all of it as
directly applicable to us. Some of it is indirectly applicable but all of it is
significant. For example, when we study the Mosaic Law we study especially the
passages in the Old Testament that deal with government. It tells us a lot
about God's standards for government; it gives us a pattern for government, of
one government that God set up on the earth that is the government that is the
theocracy of Israel. That doesn't mean that other countries should just copy
that but it gives us a framework, a guideline, a pattern for how government
should function and how government should operate.
There are applications and implications from the rest of Scripture that
apply to the church, or can be applied to the church, rather than being
directly addressed to the church. There are two subdivisions in the church age:
1. The first is the pre-canon period when they did not have a completed
New Testament; when it was
still being written and still being put together. In fact, during this time
revelation regarding the nature of the church was still being given. When the
apostle Paul wrote his first epistle, which was Galatians, he did not have as
firm a grasp on some aspects of the church and the church age as he did later
when he wrote Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians. Those three prison epistles
really focus on a lot of key aspects related to the Christian life of the
church age. So there is a progress of revelation even within the narrow
confines of the two and a half decades or so in which the New Testament was
written. I believe the earliest book was either Matthew or James around AD 45, 46, or 47.
Then the Johannine Epistles, the Gospel of John, the whole body of Johannine
writings were probably written last between AD 85-89. So you
are roughly talking about a fifty-year period there when the New Testament was being written. But there is
even a progress of revelation during that particular time. So you have the
pre-canon period from Pentecost in Acts 2 until the completion of the canon in AD 96.
2. The second period is the post-canon period, which builds on what is
revealed in the canonical books of the NT from AD 96 until the
rapture, when God's revelation has ceased.
The issue there is why doesn't God speak like He did before? Because He
has already spoken, He has already given us the information. Now the test is,
are we going to go back to the Word, are we going to study the Word, are we
going to learn what He has revealed and apply it to our lives? That covers the
third age, which is the age of the church.
Now there is some distinguishing characteristics and these relate to
the unique assets that God has given church age believers:
1. First of all we union with Christ through the baptism of the Holy
Spirit. Nobody in history has had that kind of union with deity, but believers
in the church age have. We are united with Christ in His death, burial and
resurrection.
2. We are also indwelt. Every believer is indwelt by the Jesus Christ.
3. We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit who creates a sanctified temple. A
temple is a place where deity dwells. So the Holy Spirit makes our body be a
temple, sets it apart for the indwelling of Jesus Christ.
We have the universal indwelling of Jesus Christ; the universal
indwelling of the Holy Spirit
4. We have the universal ministry of the believer, our ambassadorship,
we represent the throne of God to this earth; our citizenship is ultimately in
heaven.
The problem that a lot of folks have is that they confuse their earthly
citizenship with their heavenly citizenship. We are talking about this in
Romans 13 because we actually have a dual citizenship. It is not one or the
other. There is a heavenly citizenship which overrides the earthly one but it
doesn't replace it. We still have everyday responsibilities of our earthly
citizenship in terms of whatever nation in which we live and being a good
citizen of that nation. But it is overridden by the fact that we have a higher
authority to which we are obedient and we have a higher calling, which is to
represent God to the human race. We have a priesthood, and this is how we
represent ourselves to God. Every believer is a priest and we are able to have
direct access to God by virtue of our High Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ, who
died on the cross for our sins. Nobody ever had that before in human history;
nobody will have that afterword.
We have spiritual gifts. There is nothing comparable to spiritual gifts
in Israel. There is nothing comparable to that in the future kingdom. There are
some things related to revelatory gifts, prophesy; for example, Joel 2:28-30,
talking about young men having dreams and young women seeing visions. That is
not ecstatics; ecstasy is the modus operandi of the pagans. Ecstasy is pure
emotion; that is how it is defined by anybody who has studied it. Ecstasy is
not biblical; ecstasy is the absence of thought and the domination of emotion.
This is what the priests of Baal did. This is what the priestesses of the
Ashtoreth did when they are dancing around the sacrifice there with Elijah,
weeping and wailing and screaming and gashing themselves to try to get the
god's attention. That is ecstatics.
The role of the prophet in Scripture was what God expressed and
communicated through his thinking. It could be through dreams; it could be
through visions; but it was content. When you look at those examples of Joseph
having dreams that is not ecstasy; that is how God is communicating to him.
That is rational, logical communication via a dream. That is not what you see
the priests of the pagan gods and goddesses do. There is nothing like the
biblical relationship with God that we have in the church age.
5. Furthermore, we have a completed canon of Scripture. Today we have
not only the completed canon of Scripture, we have about 1001 translations that
we can examine, not to mention all the tools that we have. It seems like the more
light that we have available the more darkness there is in the world.
6. We have the filling of the Holy Spirit to enable us in our
supernatural way of life.
7. We have a Salvation that is by faith alone in Christ alone. We now
understand the dynamics the work of Salvation. In the Old Testament they just
had shadows and pictures, but we have not only seen but have testimony of what
happened on the cross. We have its explanation in books like Romans, Galatians
and others to help us understand all the dynamics.
8. Also, spiritually, all racial/social/gender distinctions were
removed as regards our standing before God. Men are still male; women are still
female. Slaves are economically still owned by their masters, masters still own
their slaves; that physical reality doesn't change. But in the Old Testament if
you were not a free male you could not have direct access to God. That excluded
women, slaves and Gentiles. That is why you had the court of the Gentiles and
the court of the women in the temple. But once Christ died and the veil was
torn from top to bottom access to God was equal for all without regard to
social status, without regard to gender, without regard to ethnicity. It was
equal for all immediate access to God.
9. We are dead to sin. We are all dead to sin. We went through that
study in Romans 6 recently. That is unique. No believer prior to the day of
Pentecost was ever dead to sin. It doesn't mean that we don't have a sin
nature; it means that our sin nature is no longer the tyrant over us that it
once was. We died to sin. That never happened before. That explains why there
were some problems in the Old Testament. But even though we are dead to sin, we
still willingly submit to it and have the same problems they had in the Old Testament
when they weren't dead to sin. That is God's object lesson. He is teaching how
horrible sin is, and the control of sin. And even when they were still under
its control in the Old Testament they could not do anything about it. In the
church age we are not under its control but we willingly submit ourselves to
its control on a regular basis, more regular for some then others.
In the church age we have the mystery doctrine, which simply means
information that was not disclosed by God until Jesus was rejected as Messiah
by Israel. When that happens in Matthew 12-13 Jesus will begin to teach in
parables so that He is veiling the revelation. Only those who are believers are
going to get the clues to understand the parables. He intentionally veils His
message to those who have already expressed their rejection of Him. In Matthew
13 you start getting information related to the interim period until the
Kingdom comes:
1. The church is not revealed in the Old Testament. Issues related to
the church are not revealed until the later part of Jesus' ministry. He
prepares His disciples for that coming age.
2. Passages that talk about the Mystery are in Ephesians 3:1-11;
Colossians 1:25-27; Romans 16:25-26.
1 Corinthians 2:7 Paul says, "We speak God's wisdom in a mystery,
the hidden wisdom, which God predestined before the ages to our glory."
That is the glory for the Church Age believer.
So the scope of the church age goes from Pentecost in Acts 2 to the
Rapture.
Then we come to the age of Christ. The Millennium covers 1,000 years
during which time Jesus Christ personally rules the earth from the throne of
David in Jerusalem. The time begins, depending on how you want to divide it,
from His Second Coming. There is a 75-day interim clean-up period at the end of
the Tribulation before the Millennium rule itself actually begins. Key
Scriptures are given in Isaiah 11, 35, 62, 64, 65; Revelation 20. Then I am
just going to cover some basic points about the millennial kingdom, the
messianic age:
1. The Second Advent of Christ kicks things off. Jesus returns to the
earth, Revelation 19:7-8; 14-15.
2. There are also references in Jude 14-15; 1 Thessalonians 3:13; that
begins the period.
3. There is the removal of the abomination of desolation; there is a
cleansing. There has to be a cleansing of Israel from the abomination that took
place during the tribulation period.
4. The Antichrist and the false prophet are going to be cast into the
lake of fire. This all occurs in this 75-day interval that Daniel speaks about
in Daniel 12:11 that takes place, this clean-up period.
5. Satan is cast into the Abyss. Notice the Antichrist and false
prophet are sent directly to the lake of fire. Satan is cast into the Abyss. I
believe that Satan and all of his demons are cast into the Abyss. Not just
Satan, but all the demons because their released at the end of the millennial
kingdom. I don't think it is just Satan, but I think it is all the demons for
one last hurrah before they are completely destroyed and sent to the Lake of
Fire.
6. There will be a judgment of Jews.
7. There will be a judgment of Gentiles.
8. Resurrection of Old Testament saints. All of
this occurs there in that 75 days interval between the Second Coming of Christ
and the establishment of the kingdom.
9. Resurrection of the Tribulation saints.
That all takes place right at the beginning, and then we have the most
perfect dispensation or age in human history.
1. There is no satanic worship, no satanic activity; only true worship.
The millennial kingdom begins with all believers, no unbelievers, everybody
that starts are believers, but when we get to the end of the age, after a 1000
years, there are millions upon millions of their children, grandchildren and
great grandchildren that will willingly follow Satan in deception and rebellion
against God. And notice, it is not because they are not living in perfect
environment; it is not because they do not have the right kind of government;
it is not because they do not have the right kind of educational system; it is
not because they do not have the right social system; it is not because there
is no social justice; all of those things are going to be perfect. It is
because their sin nature is oriented toward rebellion and they choose to reject
God, the Lord Jesus Christ, anyway.
2. It is gong to be a period of the greatest period of spirituality
according to Joel and Isaiah.
3. Israel will be restored to their land; all of the land God promised
them, not just the amount that they have held in the past, but all of the land
that goes from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates. That will cover most of the
Transjordan, Modern Transjordan, most of Syria, some of Lebanon, and some of
Saudi Arabia. All of that will be part of Israel's domain during the millennial
kingdom.
4. There will be genuine universalism at that time. There will be
universal peace and prosperity, perfect world government; and a universal
knowledge of God so that everyone will know the truth to the degree that no one
needs to be taught anymore. Everybody will know it according to the principles
of the New covenant in Jeremiah 31:34.
5. There will be radical changes in nature; creation will be loosed
from its bondage to sin. Now that doesn't mean that it is going to be perfect,
but it is going to be more like it was between the Fall of Adam and Noah, in
some ways better. The wolf will lie down with the lamb, and so the antagonism
among the animals will not exist. It will be like it was before the fall. A
child can put his hand in a viper's den, in an adder's den and not be bitten,
so there will not be poisonous snakes. There is not going to be carnivorous
animals anymore; there is going to be some sort of biological physiological
shift that takes place in their systems, a reversal of what happened at the
fall. Animals lose their ferocity as indicated in those verses; plant life will
abound, Isaiah 35:1-2; Isaiah 35:7.
6. Life will be extended on the earth, Isaiah 65:20. This passage
taught that if a person dies before they are a hundred (this is hyperbole) they
will be thought to have died very young. Most people will live to be a
thousand.
7. There will be a perfect administration of justice by a perfect
Judge.
8. All unbelievers are removed before the millennium begins.
9. Those born during the millennium will need salvation. So there will
be a lot of evangelism; there will be a first hand accounting; they will be
able to see Jesus Christ. So faith that is not by sight is not going to be as
operative as it is now. They will be able to see things that people today don't
and they will still reject. But salvation is still the same, faith in Jesus
Christ.
What I have said so far is that we divide these periods into ages. They
have things in common: the age of the Gentiles, the age of Israel, the church
age, and the messianic age or the Millennium. Now these will then be divided
into dispensations.
Now let's look at an important factor as we begin this study because
really dispensations focuses on history, understanding human history. One of
the questions that has plagued mankind is: Why did God create Adam and Eve? I
recognize that even with this answer people are going to say, well, why did God
even create the angels? Ultimately we do not know the answer to why God created
anything other than the theological conclusion that it appears that God desired
to have creatures who would worship Him, honor Him freely of their own volition
without being forced, and that there were ways in which He would be able to bless
them out of His own desire—not because He needed too, but because He
wanted to. That is a difference we see, for example, with Islam, where you have
an eternal singular deity who needs, if he is loved, as Islam asserts, although
it is not there. Love is not ever used to ascribe an attribute of Allah. Allah
is not a loving god. If Allah were loving Islam would have a real problem
because there is no one for Allah to love in eternity past.
If Allah is loving then he would be dependent upon his creatures so
that he would have an object for his love. So he can't be loving, because if he
were loving he wouldn't be god. He is not loving he cannot be God either. So
you are left with a conundrum that Allah, by the definition of his attributes,
really can't be a self-sufficient god. If you are a god who is not self-sufficient
then you are not much of a god. He is dependent, he becomes a slave as it
were to his creatures, or he is just a tyrant and there is nothing good or kind
or loving about him. God is self-sufficient but He desired to create creatures
who would have freewill to freely choose to obey Him so that He could share,
bless, enjoy that fellowship with His creatures freely.
The first creatures He created were the angels. The original creation
is mentioned in Genesis 1:1. Genesis 1:1 states, "In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth." Now at the recent Chafer Conference
Elliot Johnson takes a slightly different view, a view that is held by some
scholars. That is, the difference between his view and my view can be explained
with this illustration. Let's say you are looking at a book on the life of
somebody and in the book, you get this photo album and the cover says,
"The Life of John and Mary", and that is on the front cover. You open
it up and the first photo is their wedding picture. Now you do not know
anything about when they were born or where they were born, who their parents
were, if they have any siblings, where they are getting married. You just see
the title page and when you open it the first picture something has already
happened. You know they have already courted, they have already met each other,
they have decided to spend their life together because now you are met with the
visual evidence of their marriage.
That is the way that Elliot explained it; that is his view of Genesis
1. Genesis 1:1 is like the title page. When you get to Genesis 1:2 you have
opened the album and you have a picture and the earth is without form and void
and darkness covers the face of the earth. That is the first picture you see.
So you realize that something has happened already. And in his view, as in my
view, what has happened is something that is dramatic, something that is
related to a judgment. So on that we can agree. I disagree with that view
because it doesn't tell us anything about original creation. I believe it is
important; I believe that in his view Genesis 1:1 is often paralleled to
Genesis 2:4; Genesis 2:4 is a concluding statement; Genesis 1:1 is just an introductory
statement.
I disagree with that. I believe Genesis 1:1 tells us in the beginning
God created the heavens. Now that is the heavens. The heavens are a finite
entity, they are not infinite. Often we are told in modern science that the
heavens are infinite; they are without end. Only God is infinite; you can't
have two infinites. Study philosophy; that is a mutually exclusive concept.
There is only one infinite and that is God. God created the heavens and that
means they are finite. There is an end to the heavens. He created the heavens
and He created the earth. It doesn't say anything about stars. We read stars
and we think heavens. No stars are hanging in the heavens. The heavens are just
a spatial entity; there is nothing there. It is just bounded by space.
When I was in the seventh grade I did a science project where I took a
box that a refrigerator had come in. First of all I painted the inside all
black and closed it all up with duct tape and cut an opening at one end so you
could see in. And in the back corner I put a yellow Styrofoam quarter of a ball
that I had painted, a big one to indicate the sun and then I put all the
planets, and I painted little stars on the background. Now when God created the
heavens it is like when I took that box and painted it all black. There were
not any planets yet and there weren't any stars, there was just the space, just
the heavens. Then God created the earth. We do not know anything more about it
than that. There are the heavens, there is a spatial entity, and there is one
entity in there, and that is the earth. The sun is not created until later on.
The stars are not created until later on and the moon is not created until
later on. The words that are used there don't mean God made them appear. That
is really bad Hebrew. The word there is asah.
He made them; He created them at that point. So at this point you only have two
things.
Based on Ezekiel 28 this is Eden the Garden of God. It is a different
type of planet then what we have today. This is the original earth of Genesis
1:1 and also of Ezekiel 28:14ff. Then we have the Fall of Lucifer. He probably
had his location there in the Garden of God because Ezekiel 28 says, Eden the
Garden of God. The terminology and the description is very different from the
description of Genesis 2. So then we have the Fall of Lucifer and a judgment
upon the planet. The lights are turned off and it is packed in ice. When you
turn the lights and heat off it is going to go to absolute zero and everything
is going to be packed in ice. And then the Spirit of God moves upon the face of
the deep and there is a renovation of the planet.
The words that are used there in Genesis 1:2. If you had just one of
them I would think that maybe all this is talking about is the unformed building
blocks that God is going to use to do the creation, but you have three terms: tohu wabohu, the darkness, and the deep.
Later on in Scripture these terms all relate to sin and judgment. If you go to
the opera, as soon as you hear the base, you know that the villain is coming on
the scene. These are three base notes that are sounded in Genesis 1:2: tohu wabohu, darkness and the deep, the
villain has arrived and there is judgment on the planet. So there are then
stages of creation. God creates the sun, He creates the stars, and we have the
new creation where God is going to place man. So we have to understand what
happens here in terms of the original creation. There are the angels that have
volition. Satan falls according to Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28. I am not going to
get into it.
A lot of people take Ezekiel 28 as the fall of Satan even though they
may not take Isaiah 14 as the fall of Satan, but both of them refer to the fall
of Satan. The Ryrie Study Bible is
the only study Bible that I know of that is still treats both as actually the
fall of Satan. I usually get into discussions with this with pastors and others
because there are a lot of places where people no longer believe this in a
scholarly way. We will look at this a little bit, but it has been defended in
some pretty stout significant academic publications, doctorial dissertations
and people just chose to be willingly ignorant of these sources. So God brings
darkness, chaos, and judgment on Satan. There is no death prior to this time.
The angels don't die; they don't have physical death; they continue to live.
There is no pre-Adamic race; there are no fossils, no stratification at this
point. It is not a long period of time. This view used to be called the Gap
view. I call it the Old View.
If you look at older dispensational books, almost all of them start
talking with the fall of Satan. They understand that God's plan in human
history is directly related to what happens with the fall of Satan. It is odd
that among some recent dispensationalists they cut that connection. But I don't
think you can cut that connection, I think that human history is going to be
related to understanding what happens with Satan's fall. So Satan is going to
fall and then there is going to be a restoration of the planet in order to
demonstrate something. I want to close with this because I opened with the
question that Mary in Georgia asked: How can God vindicate His character? If
you look at the concept of vindicate, vindication is to prove in a court of law
that you are not guilty. To demonstrate or validate what you have done. So
there seems to be a charge. This is a theological deduction that Satan has
brought against God.
How do we know that? We know that because in Matthew 25:41 Jesus talks
about the lake of fire which was prepared (perfect tense, in the past
completed) for the devil and his angels. That means that it has already been
prepared. Why isn't Satan there? Why aren't the demons there now? If it was
prepared for them why aren't they there now? Something caused a delay in the
application of their judicial sentence to the lake of fire. Now what we
extrapolate is based on, for good cause, what happens in Job 1-2 and what
happens in some other places in Scripture. It appears that Satan somehow
challenged God's authority to send Him to the Lake of Fire. I don't think it is
simply as simple as say, how can a just God send His creatures to the lake of
fire? I think it is more complex than that. That is a summary. I think it is
more complex than that.
What we see is that he is challenging. Is this a judicially righteous
decision? How can a loving God send a creature to eternity, the eternal pain of
the lake of fire? What crime merits that? I mean punishment should somehow fit
the crime, right? How can that punishment fit a crime? One of the things God is
demonstrating in history is that the basic crime in human history is that Eve
disobeyed God and ate a piece of fruit. Not something most people would think
is a great awful terrible thing to do. She ate a piece of fruit, but it was
unauthorized; it was a disobedience to God. What God is demonstrating is that
that simple little act of disobedience, even though it seems innocuous, that is
the source of all war, all violence, all famines, all physical suffering, all
disease, all heartache, everything miserable in human history was the result of
eating a piece of fruit.
What God is demonstrating is that something that brings that much
heartache and misery and horror in human existence is worthy of punishment in
eternity in the lake of fire. He is demonstrating that this is a righteous judgment
in human history. He has validated that eternal sentence in the lake of fire.
That is what I mean He is vindicating His righteousness. He is demonstrating
this was a righteous and just decision and in the midst of this His love and
His grace are bestowed and everybody is given the opportunity to respond to His
grace. Now we will get into that in more detail next time. We will start next
time with how the angelic conflict relates to the dispensations.
Father, we thank you for this opportunity to study these things
tonight. We ask that You give guidance and direction to our thinking and help
us to understand what You have revealed and understand our role in history that
we may glorify You by being obedient to You. If we are obedient to You that
brings glory to You because it honors Who You are and it reflects the goodness
and righteousness of Your Character. We pray this in Christ's Name, Amen.