From Dispensational to Covenantal Part II

It's difficult to pin point the exact time and place my journey away from a dispensational worldview began. What I can say for sure is the subject which first began to cause my head to turn - I became disillusioned with end times as it was taught and publicised by the likes if Thomas Ice, John Walvoord, and especially Tim Lahey, Grant Jeffrey, Hal Lindsay and Jack Van Impe, who all seem to exploit the Christians desire to see Christ's return in order to make a buck. The phrase: "My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves!" comes to mind.

However, my purpose here is not to build a case against a particular end times view, though a certain amount of polemics against the dispensational perspective is inevitable. Let me just state some highlights that began to make me question my dispensationalism:

Two Separate people and plans of salvation:

I was told that in the Old Testament salvation was for the Jews alone (ethnically speaking), but that because the Jews rejected Christ God rejected them, and thus salvation was now made available to the Gentiles (implying quite strongly that salvation was not available to the Gentiles in the Old Testament except on rear occasions). However, due to unfulfilled prophecy in the Old Testament pertaining to ethnic national Israel, God will one day turn his attention back to his chosen people in Abraham, physically speaking, This will occur when the time of the Gentiles is complete.

At that time things will revert back to the way God operated on the Old Testament dispensation of Law. The Temple of Solomon is to be rebuilt and the sacrificial system is to continue; the purpose of this reversion is so that God may fulfill unfulfilled prophecy concerning Israel's Messiah, Jerusalem, the promise land and the Coming Kingdom. All of this boiled down, as I understood it, in the fact that one day "all Israel will be saved" - thus keeping God's promise to Abraham.

For me this last point raised some serious questions regarding the doctrine of soteriology: namely, how are we to understand God's saving of "all Israel"? Should we understand this to refer to all the ethnic Israelites living at the time of Christ's return, or to all ethnic Israelites who ever lived? And what exactly is this salvation process going to look like? To 'save all Israel' is God going to force the Israelites accept their Messiah against their will or is God going to simply bestow unmerited favor in granting them salvation despite their rejection of the Messiah and failure to keep the Covenant?

This in turn raises questions about how salvation 'worked' in the Old Testament. If, when the dispensation of grace and the age of the Gentiles is complete (along with the removal of the Holy Spirit I am told), the dispensation of Law in the Old Testament with it's sacrificial systems is reestablished, then perhaps in understanding how the ancient Israelites were saved we will answer the question of how they will be saved in the consummation of that dispensation to come? Were the Old Testament Israelites 'saved' by keeping the Law as the Old 1909 Scofield bible said? Or were they 'saved' through their sacrificial systems or by their circumcision or by some other means (perhaps simply because of their genes)?

As I often verbalized these questions as they come to me, the answers were (to me) quite unsatisfying. The answer most common was to accept that fact the bible explicitly said that "all Israel will be saved", therefore everything else is deduced from this fact:

Someone once told me that every Israelite in the Old Testament (whether they kept the Covenant or not) were kept in 'paradise' until Christ could come and set them free after the crucifixion. He then concluded that 'paradise' has been 'filling up' again with Jews ever since, and they will again be paraded out of there when the Messiah comes to set up his Kingdom. And that is how 'all Israel will be saved' he told me. Who cares whether or not they accept the Messiah! Who cares how they live, if they obey the Law, if they sacrifice animals, if they are circumcised, etc. etc.! All that matters is that they will be saved - as the bible said.

My Beef With God!

Growing up with a dispensational worldview, these questions were not so much directed against dispensationalism as they were directed at God. You must remember that I had no idea that dispensationalism was a particular theological systematic perspective; for me this view (which I did not know was called 'dispensationalism') was simply the view! There was no other view, no other way of approaching the bible. The fact that there were two separate 'elect' people of God, the natural election being ethnic Israel and the spiritual election being the Christian Church, seemed quite evident to me. The bible itself splits this two elect people apart in the form of the 'Old' and the 'New' Testaments, and I remembered a verse in the bible that said 'Law' came through Moses while 'Grace' came through Jesus.

So my 'beef' wasn't with dispensationalism as a system (I accepted the system as being true), my beef was with God!

See, how I understood it, the God that I thought was no respecter of persons turns out is in fact a respecter of persons. Selecting Israel for eternal election as an ethnic racial group, not requiring anything from them, saving them unquestionably while condemning the rest of humanity to hell until the Christ would appear. The God I thought was unbias turns out to be bias; the God I thought was 'just', turns out to be unjust in his dealings with humanity as a whole; the God I thought to be a God of purpose turns out to be a God of arbitrariness, as he arbitrarily selects one ethnic group to eternal salvation while condemning the rest. This God is racist in reverse, instead of hating one ethnic group, he favors only one and sends the rest away as uncircumcised infidels.

For me, this dilemma was no paradox, it was no contradiction, it simply seemed unjust.

The Old Testament was nearly altogether irrelevant. The bible as the oracles of God was viewed in pieces and broken up. Sure we can garnish life principles from the stories in the Old Testament, but as a whole we are to understand the Old Testament as pertaining specifically to the elect of Israel which has no bearing on the Christian Church. What is the point of the bible as whole? Or rather how can we even mention the bible as being 'whole' in the first place? Nearly everything in the Old Testament, or more broadly speaking, everything in the history of mankind from creation to Christ, were the arbitrary workings of an arbitrary God.

All of a sudden everything at this point seemed so shallow to me. As a person who loves history it was extremely disappointing to discover that the great majority of history had no point at all.

A Turn in the Tide

When it happened I don't remember exactly, but quite frankly one day while questioning this doctrine that "all Israel will be saved" I received a humbling yet sharp realization. The kind of realization that happens too few and far between and has the effect of rocking ones world and altering ones entire perspective, tearing down his presuppositions, and smashing his worldview to pieces.

I was that 'one', I was lying in pieces on the floor of my life, I was humbled into repentance over the 'beefs and questions' I accused my God of. For it wasn't God who was unjust in his dealings with mankind, it was my misreading, my misconceived worldview, my erroneous approach to God's oracles that were dreadfully flawed... and I never had a happier realization in my life.

I had discovered that everyone always misquoted Romans 11:26, that one day "all Israel will be saved". Why did they always hang their theological hats on this verse while ignoring it's context?

Without cutting those words from the pages of the bible, the text seems to be mysterious, less clear then everyone always made it out to be. Putting those words back into the biblical context where they are supposed to be, it reads:

"And in this way all Israel will be saved..."!

In what way will all Israel be saved? Well read back a little further and putting it all together you'll discover that "a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved". This realization caused me to ponder the fact that this verse was not as naively explicit as I was led to believe.

I also discovered within the overall context of Romans 9-11 a verse in 9:6 which reads:

"not all Israel are Israel"! What does this mean? This could be an earth shattering verse!

While Romans 11:26 was highly centralized and abused, Romans 9:6 remained highly marginalized and ignored.

So it was Romans 11:25-26 in context and taken in conjunction with Romans 9:6 that blew my mind into a crashing humility of realizing I was wrong. That there was something deeper and more mysterious to this idea called "Israel" then I was allowing for. Consequentially I decided it best to investigate into this whole matter before I tossed any more accusations towards God. Could it be that it was not God who was being unjust, but my own system, my approach to God oracles, my own fallibile approach to God's Word that needed to be examined, abandoned and my worldview radically altered, this erroneous thing called dispensationalism?

"Not all Israel are Israel" but when the "fullness of the Gentiles has come in, then all Israel will be saved".

How are we to understand this idea called Israel?

Derek
www.pensees-derek.blogspot.com