In the course of God’s dealing with men, we may observe that He is again and again testing them, and yet always providing for the failure in which He knew this testing would end.
He began thus with Adam in the Garden. He put him to proof, setting him as under law. But in the mystery of the sleeping man and the woman taken out of him, He would have us learn, that from the very beginning He knew where this would end, and provided another and a better thing.
So it was with Israel afterward. He tested them by the law; but He revealed to them “the shadows of good things to come,” the pledges of grace and salvation; knowing that man would again destroy himself, and be ruined under the Law of Mount Sinai, as he had already been under the law or command delivered to him in the Garden of Eden.
Then, by the ministry of the prophets, the Lord was leading the people back to obedience, if they would be led that way. But by the same prophets, He was anticipating the grace in which a self-ruined and incorrigible people must finally stand, if blest at all.
John the Baptist then came, according to the prophecies which went before upon him, as the Voice, the Messenger, the Elijah, of Messiah. But he was also, in another aspect of his ministry, the Witness of the Lamb of God, and the Harbinger of the Light of the World; characters in which the prophecies had not foreshown him, but which put him in company with the Messiah, or the Christ, as dispensing grace and salvation to Israel and to man, on the clear assumption that all would fail under the ministry that was then about to test them.
By the Lord’s own personal ministry in the cities and villages of Israel, the same process is conducted. He is testing His people by a proposal of Himself to them again and again; but He is likewise witnessing sovereign grace and redemption, knowing, as He did, that they would but again destroy themselves under the trial that was then being made of them. By His commission to the Twelve and to the Seventy, He was doing the same-for such ministries were but a reflection of His.
And it is thus to the end. The Apostleship at Jerusalem under the Holy Spirit upon the ascension of Christ was still testing the Jew; and the Jew failed under it again. But “times of restitution” and of “refreshing” were looked at in the distance. And then, in the last commission instituted by Him, that is, in the Apostleship of Paul, the good news of God’s salvation was sent to the ends of the earth to gather the elect that they might act and shine as the Body of Christ; but in that same apostleship He anticipates what the end of that ministry would be, and makes provision accordingly. This is seen in 2 Timothy; confirmed as that is by the challenge of the candlesticks in Revelation 1-3; and further, by the judgment of Christendom in Revelation 4-19. (I shall have to look at these Scriptures more particularly by and bye.) These thoughts may naturally introduce my subject: “Dispensational Truth.”