LESSON ONE * PART I
BOOK 3 of CONNECTING THE DOTS
Genesis – Revelation (Dispensational View)
It's good to see everybody in again this
afternoon as we begin Book 76. For
those of you out in television, we thank you for joining us and studying with
us. My, our letters just keep
encouraging us more and more, that for the first time in people's lives they're
enjoying their Bible. They're studying it, and they're reading it. And that just thrills us that we're getting
people to finally do what God really expects.
Because this Book, as I've said a hundred times on this program, was
made in such a way that plowboys in
So anyway, we're going to come right back to
where we left off with Connecting the Dots
of Scripture. We started this
series with Book 74 when we started in Genesis. It's just sort of an overview instead of verse-by-verse
like we've done for the last 16 or 17 years.
We're just doing a fast overview. We're following the timeline as we
come up through the Old Testament.
We've now come through the four gospels and the
Book of Acts. We have just come past Saul's conversion, which means it's the
beginning of Saul's (Paul’s) ministry to the Gentiles. That's where we're going to pick up, now, in
the Book of Acts, if you will join me. Come back to chapter 13 where Paul and
Barnabas have just begun their ministry to the Gentile world. Having left
Acts 13:5-7
“And when they were at
Now, do you get the picture? Here we have a Gentile that is open to the
Scriptures, and Paul and Barnabas are attempting to get to him so that they can
lay it out in front of him. But this
fellow servant, who was a false teaching Jew, a sorcerer, did everything he
could to keep Paul and Barnabas from him in order for this deputy or this
governor not to hear the Word. Continue
reading with me and see what happens.
Acts 13:8
“But Elymas the sorcerer (for so is his name by
interpretation) withstood them, (See?
Held them at bay and wouldn't let them see the deputy, or the governor.)
seeking to turn away the deputy from the faith. 9.
Then Saul, (who also is called Paul) filled with the Holy Spirit, set his eyes on
him,” Now, this is not just a response of an angry Jew against another
Jew. This is God's chosen apostle to the
Gentiles filled with the Holy Spirit.
Now look what he does. He sets
his eyes on him, and he says to this false teaching Jew--
Acts 13:10-11
“And said, O full of all subtilty and all
mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not
cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord? 11. And now, behold, (Paul puts it on him.) the
hand of the Lord is upon thee, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for
a season. And immediately there fell on
him a mist and a darkness; and he went about seeking
some to lead him by the hand.”
If you'll just turn the pages while we're in this
part of Acts to chapter 17, and now we get the big picture. Elymas the sorcerer was just a symbol, or a
picture or a type, of the nation of
Nationally these things happened, but that still
left the individual Jew with the opportunity for gaining salvation. So it isn't that it shut the Jew out
completely, but nationally they are no longer responding as the nation that
they were under Moses and so forth.
Now then, Paul and Barnabas come into their
ministry among the Gentiles. We pick them up again over in chapter 17, where
they have now begun their second missionary journey. They started up there at Philippi, and
they're coming down the Aegean coast in
Acts 17:5
“But the Jews who believed not, (That rejected Paul's
message now of Grace.) moved with envy, took unto them
certain lewd fellows of the baser sort, and gathered a company, and set all the
city in an uproar, and assaulted the house of Jason, and sought to bring them
out to the people.” In other
words, they were just adamant in their opposition to anything that Paul was trying
to do. And then verse 8.
Acts 17:8-9
“And they troubled the people and the rulers of
the city, when they heard these things. 9. And when
they had taken security of Jason, and of the other, they let them go.” All right, now as you follow on down, you see
that as Paul and Barnabas continue their ministry, it is constant opposition
from the unbelieving Jew. Now, when I say unbelieving, it is that they could
not recognize that Jesus was the Christ.
They were still orthodox. They
were still in their Judaism, but they could not accept that Jesus was the
Christ.
Here we have the fore view, then, that this Jew
on the
Here again, this is what God finally did with
the nation. Now remember, I'm emphasizing that individuals can still be saved,
but nationally the majority are rejecting everything.
Romans 11:6
“And if by grace, then is it no more of works:
otherwise grace is no more grace. But if
it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise
work is no more work.” In other words, you
can't have both ways. It's either works
or it's Grace.
Now under Judaism, of course, it was primarily
works. We're going to look at that
later. But under Grace, it's without
works—now verse 7.
Romans 11:7a
“What then?
Just get rid of all these Gentiles and their
oppression, and they could have what we call Shangri-La or whatever, or utopia;
if they could just get rid of all these Gentile armies. So they had that in their mind that that's
what they were looking for. But they
didn't want to do it God's way. They
wanted to do it their way, just like people today. And that was their problem.
You know, I've shared this I think more than
once on the program. One of the first
times that Iris and I were in the Holy Land, we were in
That's exactly what Paul is talking about clear
back in his day. They couldn't accept the fact that God still wanted to do all
these things God's way. No, they wanted
to do it their way.
Romans 11:7
“What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh
for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest
were blinded.” Just the small percentage of Jews that did
become believers is called the remnant. So the election hath obtained it, and the
rest, the vast majority, were what? Blinded. Not physically, but to spiritual things. Just exactly like the type that was set with
Elymas. He was blinded physically, but
it was a symbol of
All right. Now
Romans 11:25a
“For I would not, brethren, that ye should be
ignorant of this mystery,…” And I'm going to be coming
back to it. It's one of the mysteries
that I'm going to touch on in the next few programs.
Romans 11:25b
“…lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; (Now here is this
mystery. No other portion of Scripture
ever explained it to the point where people could believe it until we get to
this apostle.) that blindness in
part (a spiritual blindness) has happened to
Well, what's the fullness of the Gentiles that
Paul is talking about? The Body of Christ. When
the Body of Christ, the out-calling of Gentiles that we're going to pursue now
in a little bit—when the out-calling of Gentiles is complete and we're out of
here in the Rapture, then what can God do?
He can open the eyes of
God's not through with
Now that word after just reminded me of
another portion that we're going to look at.
Come back with me to Acts chapter 15.
And for sake of time, because we've looked at it several times, Acts
chapter 15 is a parallel with Galatians chapter 2. It's the
But anyway, here we are in the Acts account of
that
Acts 15:12-13
“Then all the multitude
kept silence, and gave audience (or listened) to Barnabas and Paul, declaring
what miracles and wonders God had wrought among the Gentiles by them. 13.
And after they had held their peace, (Everything quiets down. The
arguing stops with Peter, James, and John—who we're dealing with especially in
Galatians chapter 2.) James answered, saying, Men and brethren,
hearken unto me:” In other words, he's addressing his Jewish
congregation up there in
Acts 15:14
“Simeon (or Peter) hath declared (What took
place in the house of Cornelius back in Acts 10.) how God
at the first did visit the Gentiles, (Now watch the language.) to
take out of them (Who are the them? Gentiles. See, you've got to watch your pronouns. God is going to take out of the Gentile world
not everybody, but a small percentage.) a
people for his name.”
Of course no one but Paul ever uses the term the
Body of Christ, but here it is. Even
though Peter, James, and John didn't understand that that's what it would be
called. All they realize is that there are going to be Gentiles called out of
their paganism, or whatever, to become part of God's own modus operandi. Which when we get to Paul will be called the
Body of Christ.
So at the first, in Acts chapter 10, when Peter
went to the house of Cornelius, he witnessed that God would save Gentiles by
faith right on the spot—without repentance, without water baptism, without
anything else. Now verse 15—James is
still speaking.
Acts 15:15-16a
“And to this agree the words of the prophets: as
it is written, 16. After this…” See, that's what made me think of it. After what? After God has called out a people for His name
as we saw in verse 14. Or we could say, after the Rapture and the
Body of Christ is removed from the earth to Heaven. See how it all fits?
Acts 15:14b
“…to take out of them a people for his
name.” That’s when the fullness
of the Gentiles is brought in. So the
question is—when will that happen? “After this”—as we see in verse 16. So after this, the prophet says:
Acts 15:16
“After this I will return, (At His Second Coming! And,
of course, he's merely the spokesman for God Himself. So God says, I will return--) and will
build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and I will build
again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up:” That is when God shall set up His 1,000 year
earthly Kingdom after the Tribulation. And
the other word for tabernacle was temple, remember? He’ll rebuild again the tabernacle of David
which is fallen down and has been now for almost 2,000 years.
He goes on to say in verse 16, “and
I will build again the ruins thereof.”
Now, what does that mean? God is
still going to finish His Old Testament promises with the nation of
To rehearse their chastisement: well, first is
the Babylonian, remember. Then came the Roman invasion of A.D. 70. Now the one that is left is the seven years
of Tribulation and the Second Coming. Now
Amos has brought all three of these around. You can just jump in at verse 8 so
you get the flow, as I call it. Amos chapter 9 verse 8:
Amos 9:8
“Behold, the eyes of the Lord GOD are upon the
sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it (See what I talked about? The bad things
happen before the good things?) from off
the face of the earth; saving that I will not utterly destroy the house of
Jacob, saith the LORD.” See,
He's not going to totally annihilate them.
There's going to be a nation of
Amos 9:9-10
“For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the
house of
In other words, they rebel against all of God's
overtures. But now verse 11—after all the chastisements, after the horrors of
the tribulation are past, here comes the promise. And this is what James quoted.
Amos 9:11-12a
“In that day (When God is ready to
come back and finish His work with
And then you come down to the verses at the end
of the chapter. We might as well read them, because this is
Amos 9:13-14
“Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that the
plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of
grapes him that soweth the seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and
all the hills shall melt. (That is with blessings.) 14. And I will bring again the
captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and
inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they
shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them.”
Do you see what that is? That's just fantastic production. That’s the milk and honey that
Amos 9:15
“And I will plant them upon their land, and they
shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the
LORD thy God.” Well, when will it happen? After the Church has been completed and taken
out of the way. Now, that brings me back
to what I call the third reason that we can open up the timeline scripturally. We
have to do it scripturally; otherwise, we're just pulling it out of the woodwork,
as I said. But here we're going to have
the third reason.
The first one was that Elymas was a type of
I want to come back to that one now for the last
few minutes of this half hour. Come back
to Romans chapter 11 to, again, show that we have to have a break in the Old
Testament timeline. We've already got
it up here, so I better use it. Here we
come. We've come all the way out of the
Old Testament and up through the prophets since the Babylonian captivity in 606
B.C. Then
After He ascended back to glory, Peter and the Eleven thought that they'd go right on through into the
seven years of Tribulation and then the Second Coming and the Kingdom Age would
appear. Well, you see, that's where
most of replacement theology is even today.
They totally ignore this second line that has the Body of Christ here. They think everything just keeps on going
up here on the top line.
Well, years ago now, we taught those little
epistles at the back—Peter, James, John and Jude. And I know I shocked a lot of people. All those little epistles were written to
believing Jews in this point in time here between the ascension and the
Tribulation. The Tribulation certainly
hadn't started, but they thought it would at anytime. Here they are. So, all those little Jewish epistles were
written to believing Jews to prepare them for the horrors of the
Tribulation. They knew that if they
could get through it, they would have the glories of the Kingdom. It’s so plain.
But what nobody understood, and a lot of
Christendom today can't understand, is that God stopped the timeline right
there, and now we drop down to this one (Body of Christ). And we open up to what Paul refers to. We're
going to look at that all afternoon and maybe the next taping. But we open up this parenthetical period of
time that we call the Dispensation of Grace, where God is calling out the
Gentile Body of Christ. And when it's
full and out of the way, yes, then He's still going to finish this program up
here on the top line with the nation of
They just ignore Paul. It's just unbelievable the mail that we
get. I had one come—maybe I referred to
it before. I know I did to a couple of
my classes. I had a lady in a far part
of the country write me. And across the top of her newspaper she wrote “Now I
see what you mean when you say that people hate Paul.” Well, there was a letter to the editor in
there, and it was the most venomous language you could ever imagine and still
be printable—all against the Apostle Paul.
Some of the language was—they kicked him out of
Now, if you've got Romans 11:25, let's look at
it again.
Romans 11:25a
“For I would not, brethren, that ye should be
ignorant of this mystery,…” This secret that was
never mooted or hinted at anywhere else in Scripture except for what we read in
Amos. But what could you take out of
that if you didn't know it after the fact?
Nothing.
And the same way with other little statements. It didn't mean a thing until after it was
fulfilled.
It was a secret that was kept in the mind of
God. And what was the secret? That
Romans 11:25
“For I would not, brethren, that ye should be
ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that
blindness (a
spiritual blindness) in part has happened to Israel, until
the fullness of the Gentiles be come in.” In other words,
But we're not going to make a big issue of it
that you have to see every Jew saved before anything can happen, because God
has His own time table for the nation of
LESSON ONE * PART II
BOOK 3 of CONNECTING THE DOTS
Genesis – Revelation (Dispensational View)
For those of you joining us on television, in
case this is your first time catching us, we're an informal Bible study. And hopefully, I don't preach at
anybody. We just simply let them see
what the Book says. To me that is
paramount to everything—just understanding what the Word of God itself
says.
Well, we've only offered one book over the years,
and we've still got it. It's a series of
88 questions and answers from our previous programs. If anyone out there is interested, you just
give us a call, and the girls will get it out to you. We send it out with an invoice, so you don't
have to pay for it until you get it.
It’s the best $11 you will ever spend.
We're going to pick right up where we left off
in our last program. Now remember, we're
connecting the dots of Scripture by going from Genesis, and hopefully we'll go
all the way through to Revelation if the Lord tarries. But in the last half hour, we merely showed
our proof that there would be an opening up of the timeline. Because those three references we used make
it so plain that for a period of time Israel will be set aside and be dispersed
while God goes to the Gentiles.
Now naturally, when you have two such totally
different groups of people as Jews and Gentiles, you can't go with the same
thing. It just wouldn't ring true. So when God saves Paul, He doesn't just have
him go back and check with the twelve disciples, as we saw in previous
programs. Instead, He separated him
purposely, kept him from the twelve, so that he would not get mixed up with the
Kingdom economy. Because He's going to
begin something totally different with Paul, which we
call the Dispensation of the Grace of God as seen in Ephesians 3:2.
Now, I'm well aware that there are a lot of
people out there that detest the term dispensation. In fact, I had one fellow in my class one
time who just suggested to his pastor, why don't you ever preach a sermon on
the Rapture? He looked at him in shock,
and he said, “I wouldn't dare do that.”
He said, “Why not?” He said,
“Well, then they'd call me a dispensationalist.” As if that's the worst thing that can happen. I am aware of that.
And those of you who have been with me over the
years—I never used the word for the first eight or nine years, because I knew
it would turn a good number of people off.
So I would just speak of it in general terms. Don't you realize that when Adam and Eve came
out of the garden, everything was different?
When Noah and the family came off the ark, everything was
different? After God called Abraham, everything
was different? After God brought
So, after realizing that God was going to open
the timeline and make a parenthetical period of time, we don't know how long,
we call it the Dispensation of the Grace of God. And it came about through God's appointed
Apostle of the Gentiles, Saul of Tarsus.
I'm going to bring you now, just as an introduction to the
dispensational view, to Ephesians chapter 3.
We'll start at verse 1. Now
remember, Saul of Tarsus—the rabid, orthodox, rabbi, Jew—whatever you want to
call him, remember that God saved him on the road to Damascus and then
immediately instructed him that He was going to go to the Gentiles, which God
had never before done.
Ephesians 3:1
“For this cause (Because of what he's
written in the first two chapters.) I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus
Christ for you Gentiles.”
Now you've got to remember. Where
is Paul when he's writing? Well, he's in
prison in
Ephesians 3:2
“If ye have heard (And no doubt they had,
because after all, Paul's been out there now for 20 something years.) of the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to
you-ward.” See, that's where we
get the title for this period of time.
It's the Dispensation of the Grace of God. Now again, I've got to qualify. A dispensation is simply a period of
time. It can be short or long or
whatever. That doesn't matter.
But a dispensation
is a period of time during which God lays on a segment of people that He's
dealing with a set of rules and directions.
Now for the simplest one, of course, I always go back to the Garden of
Eden. When Adam and Eve were in the
garden, God gave them instructions. He
said that every tree in the garden is for your enjoyment except those two over
there. The one was the Tree of Life, and
the other one was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Of that tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil, thou shalt not eat. Just simple directions! Everything else is yours to enjoy. And that's all there was to it. And that's why we call it the simplest
dispensation.
Now, we don't know how long they were in the
garden. There are all kinds of guesses
and so forth. Well, for however long they were in the garden,
that was all they had to do. Just simply refrain from eating of that one
tree. It was that simple. But they just couldn't cut it, and so they
ate. Well, when they disobeyed, they ended
that Dispensation of Innocence. God came
in with a judgment, a punishment, which required them to get out of the
garden.
Then a new dispensation began. So now, when Paul speaks of the Dispensation
of the Grace of God, he's speaking of this period of time following the death,
burial, and resurrection of Christ when He is turning away from Israel and
their whole system of Law and temple worship, and He's going to give to this
apostle what we call the Gospel of the Grace of God, which is I Corinthians 15:1-4. Now let's go back and look at it, even though
you all know it from memory. We keep
using it, and I'm finally getting some response. I had several write that their pastors are
actually using these verses in their preaching.
Well, praise the Lord, because here is the Gospel of the Grace of
God.
Now, again, it's not total. But there's enough of it here that you can
branch out and find the rest of it without any trouble. I Corinthians chapter 15 verses 1 through 4. So if somebody comes to you and says, well,
what's this Gospel that Les Feldick is talking about? You just tell them, well,
it's as simple as A, B, C. It's just simply believing in your heart for your salvation that Jesus
Christ, the Creator, God of the universe, went to that cross and died
and shed his blood, was buried three days and three nights and arose from the
dead.
That's it.
Believe it in your heart and God moves in and then everything else falls
into place. But here's where we have to
begin. I Corinthians
chapter 15. We might as well read
the whole four verses. We've got time
today.
I Corinthians 15:1a
“Moreover, brethren, (So Paul is talking to
Gentile believers over there at
And when he speaks of himself, it is I am “the”
apostle of the Gentiles, not “an” apostle.
That makes all the difference in the world. And that's what we have to recognize. Because
to this man and this man alone were these directions for this Dispensation of
Grace given. Let's continue on and get
back to our dispensational thought.
I Corinthians 15:1-2a
“Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the
gospel
(the one and only) which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye
stand; (As a believer you are positioned.) 2. By which also ye are saved,…” It's by this gospel you are saved. Now, isn't that plain? It doesn't say this gospel plus something
else. No. It's by believing this gospel that we're
saved. And that's the all-inclusive word of Scripture. Salvation—to be saved, to be born from
above—and all these things are tied up with our faith in this gospel.
I Corinthians 15:2
“By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in
memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.” In other words, you have to know what you
believe. You have to understand it,
otherwise it's for nothing. Now here it
is. This is the gospel!
I Corinthians 15:3-4
“For I delivered unto you first of all that
which I also received, (Well, where did he get it?
From the Twelve? No. But
rather from the ascended Lord.
The Twelve never fully understood it.) how that
Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; 4. And that he was buried
and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:”
Now, there it is. Christ died for my sins and that, of course,
includes His shed blood. He was buried
three days and three nights, and then He arose from the dead in power and
victory and glory, and that settled it.
That makes our debt paid in full when we believe it for salvation and
trust it plus nothing.
I don't know if I should take time this
afternoon or not. Maybe this is as good
a time as any. I've been doing research,
just in between when I can, to find the history of the 1611 King James Version
and how it came about. But not just the
King James Version, along with that I was studying in my spare time -- now, I'm
not one of these guys who just sits there by the hour and the hour and the
hour. I don't have patience for that. But I can get a couple, three hours in an
evening once in a while and maybe a little time on a rainy day and so
forth. But I'm not a nut at this.
But in between times, now, for the last several
weeks, I've been looking at the history of the King James as over these other
translations, and also the history of Christendom. Now, you'll hear me use that word quite
often—Christendom with a D-O-M—speaking of all aspects of so-called
Christianity. And, you know, it was a
shocking revelation—because we've all heard of the early church fathers: Justin
Martyr and Chrysostom and Origen, and then we jump up to Augustine and so
forth.
Well, you know, those church fathers didn't have
it all right either, especially Origen.
He was a rascal. And he had a lot
of corrupt ideas. In fact, Origen -- now
I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right.
I've looked and looked and tried to find a dictionary that gives me the
pronunciation and I can't find it. So if
somebody will let me know. But it's
O-R-I-G-E-N. I can give you the spelling
of it. But anyhow, he's in the first century. He's within a hundred years of the Apostle
Paul. And he was the first of the church
fathers to come up with the idea that God was all through with the nation of
Now, you've got to realize that between the loss
of Paul and Peter, probably around A.D. 68, just before the
But anyway, if you go back and look at it, these
little groups of people, like humans are prone to do, would say, well, let's
just get together once a month and we can fellowship in a larger group. Well, that's all well and good. But as time went by, there were too many of
them to all go, so what would they do?
Oh, they'd form a committee. And
boy, you know what a horrible thing a committee is. Then these committees would meet, and after a
time they said, well, now you know, there's a group of our committees over
there in North Africa, and we're over here in
And that's the way the thing started
growing. And so it was. It was growing rather slowly. But then you get to A.D. 315, one of the high
marks in human history, and what happened?
Constantine, the Roman emperor, became a quote, unquote Christian. And what did
But outside of this big conglomeration, there
were always these little, small groups of true believers; and they were always
hated, persecuted, and driven from one valley to the next. Okay.
Now you come on up to A.D. 400, about 75 or 80 years after
Just look at how long we've had this idea that
we teach suppressed. The masses embraced the replacement theology, and
replacement theology rests primarily—not exclusively, of course—but primarily
on the four gospels. And as one writer
of history put it—and I'd never seen it in that way before—they rested only on
the Sermon on the Mount. Well, now, you
just watch even today your news reports.
How they'll refer to the fact that Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount is
what transformed the world. Did it? Not
really. Now, it's got high, lofty
premises, no doubt about it. But see,
that's not what transformed lives.
So anyway, Augustine picked up on Origen's
replacement theology and, with the mass increase of the organized church, it
led up to? Roman Catholicism, of course,
is going to come out of that. So
replacement theology became the number one tenet for Christendom. What did that do with the Jew? Hated them. Persecuted them. And they were just running from one place to
the other. Okay. So Augustine was really the father of Roman
Catholicism. And out of that came, of
course, the appearance of the popes and the hierarchy and all the rest.
And now, if you know anything from secular history,
A.D. 500 to A.D. 1500 is called what in history? The dark ages. Well, what did that mean? The sun never shone? No.
Where was it dark? Spiritually. Because you see, the organized church now had
proclaimed that the average believer could not read the Scriptures
himself. So they confiscated the
Scriptures, really, and kept them locked up in the monasteries. The average man didn't have the Scriptures of
any sort—except, again, these little fringe groups maintained it.
Now you've come all the way up through the dark
ages. In A.D. 1500, or a little after, who was the great awakener? Martin Luther. So Martin Luther comes out with what we call
The Reformation—the idea that all this religion was totally wrong—the just will live by faith; they're saved
by faith. Which on the surface
sounds so good, doesn't it? But is that where Martin Luther stopped? No.
Martin Luther came right on and embraced all the other stuff that he had
been so-called hating. He brought it out with him and made it part of basic
Lutheran theology, and that incorporated, of course,
infant baptism and the hierarchy and replacement theology.
Now then, you just keep rolling. Out of Luther's reformation, here came the
next big reformer—John Calvin. Now John Calvin sets up his headquarters in
Now then, it jumps across the pond and we come
over here to the early colonies and especially the likes of the Puritans and so
forth. Oh, they were so thrilled to escape
that heavy hand of persecution in
Well, anyway, you bring it all the way up to our
present time. The vast majority of
Christian preaching and teaching is the four gospels, the Sermon on the Mount,
with a little bit of Old Testament thrown in, and that's where it's been. I mean, you can't argue it. It's in secular history just as plain as day. So now then, these fringe groups believed
like I do. So what am I? Yes, we're out on the fringes. The vast
majority of people aren't going to listen to my message. They don't like it. They hate Paul, as I've already
emphasized. But, you see, if you're going to ignore Paul, you're ignoring the basic
message for this Dispensation of Grace, because it was given to him to give to
us in the Body of Christ.
Okay. Now
there it is, all in a nutshell. And
don't take my word for it. I've got to
give you another one. I'm free. Here awhile back I had a gentleman call. I think from
Well, you see, I forget about the internet. Before the afternoon was over, he called
back—about 4 in the afternoon, and he said, “Les, you did.” I said, “I did what?” He said, “You blew me out of the
saddle.” I said, “Oh, are you the guy
that called about Lent?” And he said,
“Yeah.” I said, “What did you find
out?” He said, “Just that I couldn't
believe my eyes. There were several pages.”
I said, “Do you mean you've already been down at the library?” He said, “No, I got it off the
internet.” Well, dumb me, you know, I
don't think of that. So anyhow, I said,
“What are you going to do with it?” He said, “I'm downloading it. I'm going to lay it on my pastor's desk and
let him read it.”
Well now, I know many of you know what
Britannica says about Lent. But I'm not
going to tell you. I might get thrown
off the air. You go and find it
yourself. You just look up the word
Lent—L-E-N-T—in a good encyclopedia and it'll tell you exactly what it's all
about. But, you see, it's not in Paul's
epistles. It's not in Scripture.
Now come back to Ephesians chapter 3. I didn't intend to give you that
history.
Ephesians 3:2
“If ye have heard of the dispensation of the
grace of God which is given to me to you-ward:” Now, I've done this
before. This is all review. So, how did we get all of these doctrines of
this dispensation? From
Paul.
Now, if that shakes people up, then just go back
to Exodus. How did
Ephesians 3:3a
“How that by revelation,…” A revealing—a
supernatural outpouring from God in Heaven of these new directions for
mankind—mostly for Gentiles, but it's also applicable to
Now, in this period of time, just like the
period of time in the Garden, however long it was, that doesn't matter. But in
this period of time that covers the Dispensation of the Grace of God, we have
our own set of directions; just like Adam and Eve had—you can have everything
but that tree. Okay. Our set of directions is just about that
simple. And what are they? Recognize
that you're a sinner and you're lost.
And when you do, recognize that Jesus Christ, the Creator, the Son of
God, went to that Roman cross and shed His blood and died, was buried three
days and three nights, and God miraculously raised Him from the dead.
And that finished our plan of salvation. That's our directions. Now, is that so hard to follow? Now then, after you get the basic directions,
then naturally when we're a believer and the Holy Spirit comes in, we begin to
see all these other aspects of Scripture.
Then everything starts falling into place. In fact, let me show you what the Scripture
says about that very thing. Come back
with me to I Corinthians. I think we
touched on this recently. I Corinthians
chapter 2 verses 13 and 14. Now, this is
all part of our instructions after we've become a believer.
I Corinthians 2:13-14
“Which things also we speak, not in the words
which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Spirit teacheth; comparing
spiritual things with spiritual. (We
compare Scripture with Scripture, not Scripture with some secular book.) 14.
But the natural man (the unsaved person) receiveth not the things of the
Spirit of God: (The Holy Spirit can't deal with the unbeliever so far
as his daily experience is concerned.) for they (these things of the
Spirit) are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are
spiritually discerned.” He can't
understand these spiritual things. Now,
isn't that obvious? But we have to start
with the basics, and that is we have to believe the Gospel. And once we believe the Gospel for salvation,
then everything else falls into place.
LESSON ONE *
PART III
BOOK 3 of
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Genesis –
Revelation (Dispensational View)
Okay, it is good to see everybody back again. We’re
going to keep right on going. We’ve got
so much to cover, and of course it’d be great if the Lord came before we
finished today. I’m ready, so I wouldn’t
mind a bit.
We’ll pick up where we left off on Paul’s revelation
of what we call the Dispensation of the Grace of God. It is something totally different from what
God was doing with
And it’s working, because the girls in the office hear
it everyday. How many people are finally
seeing it for the first time, and it just thrills us beyond your
imagination. All right, chapter 3 of
Ephesians, we’ll pick up where we left off, but we’ll go back to verse 1 as a
refresher.
Ephesians 3:1
“For this cause (because of the first two chapters) I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus
Christ for you Gentiles.” Paul is in prison in