THE THREE DISPENSATIONS OF JESUS
Dr. Robert L. Lindsey
Many of us have learned from such sources as the famous Schofield Reference Bible that God has governed the world through somewhat different means and methods in various special periods or ages. It is said that there are seven of these and that the last will be a period of 1,000 years-the Millennium-still in the future.
It is further said that the sixth age or dispensation is the one we live in now on earth, usually denominated the "Dispensation of Grace." As evidence for this suggestion, the Schofield Notes take notice of the fact that Jesus described his Messianic role in Luke 14:18,19 by quoting from Isaiah 61:1,2, in which the Messiah is "...to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord but apparently deliberately leaves out the second phrase found in--Isaiah: "and the day of vengeance of our God."
This idea seems to be in every way sound, for in his quotation of Isaiah 61 :1,2, Jesus also left out any call to "bind up the brokenhearted'' and inserted a phrase from Isaiah 58:6: "set at liberty those that are oppressed." It was the habit of many teachers in the day of Jesus to make quotations of Scripture with deliberate changes, taken often from other contexts, in order to emphasize some point, and as the hearers knew Bible passages by heart, any change made them pick up their ears.
In Luke Ch. 4 it is clear that Jesus was explaining his activity in healing arid casting out evil spirits, an activity which the people of Nazareth obviously had heard about. Jesus indeed brought good news to
the people in the villages of Galilee for, as Peter said to Cornelius, "God anointed (made Jesus Messiah) ...with the Holy Spirit and with power'' and ''he went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil" (Acts 10:38).
The question I raise here, however, is whether the Dispensation of Grace is not the same age as
THE DISPENSATION OF THE KINGDOM
It is clear Jesus taught that his healing activities were a part of his role as Israel's expected Messiah and that this was truly "good news" to people oppressed by Satan. Before he would fulfill the role of judge, there would be a period of salvation for the world, deliverance and blessing. He would go about healing and freeing human beings from the Enemy. Those who accepted his would call him Lord and would themselves be given the power to heal and deliver.
What we often fail to realize however, is that the people given this power were the people who formed what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven (מלכות שמים), that is, the Kingdom of God. When John the Baptist sent messengers to Jesus (Matthew 11 :1ff), they said that John wanted to know if Jesus. was the "one to expect or not." From what we know of John's preaching, he expected the Messiah to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire (''fire" meaning judgment). He did not hear that Jesus was pouring out the Holy Spirit or bringing on the judgment of the great prophets which he had preached. He believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but if so, why was he not getting on with the job? When Jesus sent John's messengers back, he told them to tell John what they had seen:
The blind receive their sight
and the lame are walking
Lepers are cleansed
and the deaf are hearing.
The dead are raised up
and the poor have the good news preached to them.
Jesus also warned John that whoever was not put off by what he was doing would be blessed. What Jesus was doing was answering John's worry by reminding him that first there must be a period of blessing and help for a lost world. As in Isaiah Ch. 35; the picture of the messianic age included the -restoration of the hearing of the deaf and seeing of the blind. The lame would walk. ln Isaiah 26:19 we read: Thy dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. John knew these Scriptures. Jesus was saying, “John you have forgotten something in your zeal to see me become the Judge of the whole nation and world. Your view of the future-your eschatology-is all right, but you must remember the need for a great period of deliverance for this earth. It must come first."
OUR DISPENSATIONAL ESCHATOLOGY
What deeply concerns me is that evangelicals and other Christians tend to be too much like John: they
are anxious that the Lord get on with the job of bringing judgment on this world, and they fill their messages and sermons with lurid pictures of the awful things yet to come on the world in an effort to bring more into God’s Kingdom. There is truth in what they say, but the emphasis is all wrong.
For instance, even modern Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians have kept much of this emphasis on the judgment yet to come (and signs that Jesus’ coming is near), even while holding that God is still healing and doing great miracles today. They have forgotten how the lurid details described by earlier dispensationalists came into being and were used to delay the coming of the Kingdom in Jesus.
You will find in the notes of the Schofield Bible that we now live in the Age of Grace and that Jesus offered himself as King and his Kingdom of God to the Jews of the first century but, on being rejected by
the Jews (a questionable way to put it if we are not careful to remember that all the first believers in Jesus were Jews), he put the Kingdom of God on the shelf until the yet future day when Israel, through personal manifestation of Jesus; would as a whole accept Jesus' offer of the Kingdom.
There is not a word of Jesus in the Scripture that describes this kind of offer, for Jesus did not describe his Kingdom of God as a political entity but as (1) the rule of God that made it possible to cast out a demon by the finger of God and (2) the body of his believers who were given the same power he manifested on earth.
We have been taught that although Jesus is even today 'Lord and King, his Kingdom of God and its universal inauguration on Earth has been delayed or postponed until he can return with sword in hand and literally slay his earthly enemies. At that time, he will set up his throne in Jerusalem in the restored Temple and begin again the ancient sacrificial system and rule the earth as the greatest King ever known. Some of his subjects, it is said, will be saved and living in resurrected bodies while others will simply obey as ordinary human beings afraid to go against Jesus' divine Government.
The same people that taught us these things, taught us that the age we live in now is only a period allowing us a chance to decide for Jesus before the great and imposed Kingdom Jesus will bring when he
comes, but that this age is not an age of miracles and personal deliverance from the devil as it was in the
apostolic age: "When," they say, ''the Bible was closed, the age of miracles was over; we today have the greatest miracle and it is the Bible, and we need no other miracle." What evangelicals have said in all this is that even if it is not completely true that God no longer does miracles, we actually live in a dying age that must pass away so Jesus can set up his political and spiritual kingdom on Earth and start the real Kingdom of God.
JESUS TALKED OF THREE DISPENSATIONS
In the same story in Matthew Ch. 11 in which John questioned Jesus' emphasis and Jesus pointed to his role as healer and its importance as the first task of the Messiah, Jesus said of John that there has been no greater man born to woman than John but that the "smallest in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than John.”
The Kingdom of God is Jesus' Movement, as this verse makes clear, He was saying that John had not joined the Kingdom of God simply because he had not followed Jesus but had his own movement.
He was also saying that to follow him in the Kingdom Movement is the most important thing in the world.
Then he explained: John was of the dispensation of the law and the Prophets: ''the law and the prophets are until John."
That is Jesus' first dispensation.
The next of his dispensations we see poorly because of the translation of Matthew 11:11: "From the days of John...until now the 'kingdom of heaven has suffered violence...."
As my good friend and colleague, Professor David Flusser, discovered, what Jesus was actually doing was hinting at a famous Messianic passage in the Old Testament, Micah 2:13. In that passage, God says he
looks upon the people of Israel as a large flock of sheep. The shepherd puts them behind a rough, low drywall in front of the sheltering rock for the night. In the morning, he comes to the wall and tears open a hole in it and all the sheep go running out pell-mell in their happiness to get to their grazing:
The breaker will go up before them and they will break through and pass the gate, going out by it. Their king will pass on before them, the Lord at their head.
Jesus was hinting at this passage. The word (Greek, βιάζεται, biazetai) obvious is a translation of the Micah Hebrew word פורץ “poretz,” which means the "breaker." We must translate Matthew 11:12 as follows: "From the days of John until now the Kingdom of Heaven is breaking out...."
Jesus was talking about his Movement, the Kingdom of God. It was expanding and growing and bursting forth at the end of the preaching of John. John's dispensation of the Law and the Prophets had ended with him. Now, with Jesus, had come the healing, organizing Lord and his Kingdom. His was the
DISPENSATION OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD
Almost certainly Jesus then told two of his famous parables. The first tells of how the Kingdom of God is "like a grain of mustard seed which is the smallest of all seeds but when it has grown...becomes a tree...." The second tell of how the Kingdom of God is like "leaven which a woman took and hid in three 'measures of meal until it was all leavened." In other words, his Kingdom Movement with the healing, delivering power of God was growing by leaps and bounds and nothing would stop it!
Actually, this is one of our Lord's greatest prophecies. It tells precisely what he saw happening both now and in the future. This is why Jesus trained the Twelve and sent them out healing and casting out demons and telling everyone that the Kingdom of God had come.
Where was this Kingdom of God? Where Jesus was; and later where the Holy Spirit was empowering Jesus' disciples. The Kingdom was only where Jesus was Lord, of course. Neither Europe nor America, nor any other country or area is the Kingdom of God, as some have supposed. Only where Jesus is King-where men call him Lord-is to be found God's Kingdom. Later Jesus was to call his Movement the Church, for this would be his עדה Edah, or witnessing body after he returned to heaven.
But, of course, there is what I call ''fall-out" from the Kingdom. The world in many parts is much better because of Jesus' followers. The age we live in may very well be the Golden Age of the Prophets! Their hope for a better world was not for a perfect earthly world-the child in that age would die at a hundred years of age (Isaiah 65:20). It would seem that the Age of Grace is indeed the Age of the Kingdom of God.
JESUS' THIRD DISPENSATION
In Matthew Ch. 11 Jesus mentioned only (1) the Dispensation of the Law and the Prophets and (2) the Dispensation of the Kingdom of God. We have to go to Luke 18:18-30, to the story 0f the Rich Man, to find Jesus going beyond the Dispensation of the Kingdom of God to his final age. We need only remember that when Peter reminded Jesus that he and the others had left their homes to follow him, Jesus joyfully replied and said:
There is no one who has left home for (2) the sake of the Kingdom of God who will not receive much more now in this time, and in (3) the Age to Come eternal life (Luke 18:29,30). Jews of Jesus' day of course spoke often of העולם הבא haolam haba, the world to come (or Age to come) and this is clearly our Lord's designation of
THE NEXT AGE OR DISPENSATION-THE WORLD TO COME
But Jesus also mentioned in this passage the Present Age or Dispensation of the Kingdom of God. Thus, Jesus in Matthew. Ch. 11 mentioned dispensations (1) and (2) and in Luke Ch. 18 dispensations (2) and (3). There are of course large differences between each of these ages. In the first period of the Law and the Prophets, it was the age of the training of a very earthly people through selected and limited leaders. In the second period, God had visited his people in his own Son and had introduced a period of earth's history which was half-earthly and half-heavenly, or supernatural.
In the third period Jesus envisaged and taught that it would be a totally supernatural period he would inaugurate when he is seen by all of earth's inhabitants at the day of the Lord. If you are on a roof; in a bed, in a room, or wherever; you go straight into God's supernatural. This is the World to Come, or Heaven. Obviously, it is not the age of earth or an age of earth. So far as I can see from these words of Jesus, there are no other dispensations.
Dr. Robert Lindsey's (1917-1995) preparation for biblical research began when his local pastor in Norman, Oklahoma, encouraged him to study Greek and Hebrew for a deeper understanding of Scripture. Dr. Lindsey pursued his studies at the University of Oklahoma, where he earned a B.A. degree in Classical Greek. He continued to concentrate in classical languages and biblical studies during his graduate career at Southern Baptist Theological Seminar and Princeton School of Divinity.
He first came to Israel in 1939, spending fifteen months acquainting himself with the country and people and refining his knowledge of the Hebrew language. This initial exposure to the Hebrew Scriptures in their natural setting marked the beginning of a long and remarkable career in biblical research. He returned to serve as pastor of the Narkis Street Baptist Congregation in West Jerusalem from 1945-52. After completing his doctorate in the United States in 1954, he resumed his work in the church in Israel; eventually returning to the Baptist Congregation in Jerusalem where he continued to serve until the 1980’s.
In addition to his work as pastor, Dr. Lindsey distinguished himself in New Testament scholarship; focusing particularly on the Gospels and working closely with leading Israeli Jewish scholars in the field. His years of carefully studying the Greek texts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke have revealed their profoundly Hebraic character, and led Dr. Lindsey to conclude that it is possible to form a far more reliable picture of the person and life of Jesus than is commonly held by scholars today.
A number of other Christian and Jewish biblical scholars in Jerusalem joined Dr. Lindsey in forming the Jerusalem School for the Study of the Synoptic Gospels, which is dedicated to tracing Christianity back to its original Hebraic roots.