My Dear Bible Study Partners,
It was my intention to get started on 1 Corinthians 12 this morning, but we had to finish looking at God’s Plan for the Ages. We studied out the first two principles for a literal understanding of scripture the last two weeks.
1. There are distinct dispensations of time — God reveals his progressive revelation through successive dispensations or economies or administrations or stewardship arrangements. The attached chart reveals the seven dispensations:
Innocence, Conscience, Human Government, Promise, Law, Grace, and the Kingdom Age.
2. Always take scripture literal until it is impossible to take it literal. 2 Timothy 2:15, 3:16-17
The Bible says what it says.
And, today’s lesson was all about clarifying God’s future plan for Israel.
3. The dichotomy of Israel (God’s estranged wife in this age) and the Church (the Bride of Christ). Israel and the Church are different. “Things different are not the same. Things different are not alike.”
God was married to Israel! Jeremiah 3:14-15: Turn, O backsliding children, saith the Lord; for I am married unto you: and I will take you one of a city, and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion: And I will give you pastors according to mine heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.
God and Israel are currently divorced. Jeremiah 3:8: And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also.
Isaiah 50:1: Thus saith the Lord, Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away.
God will restore Israel to her former glory, and even greater glory at the 2nd Advent!
Jeremiah 31:31-34: Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, 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.
Please take a moment and read Matthew 24:15-22, Romans 11:25-26, and Revelation 12:6-17 to see God’s plan for Israel in future events.