As a counter to the rapture threads I'll just put up a couple counters.

https://www.monergism.com/critique-dispensational-premillennialism

Long but well worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj8GXw-gbg0&t=4000s

https://www.nokingbutchrist.org/what-is-wrong-with-dispensationalism/

Again, futureism, which dispensationalism is based on, and preterism were both concocted by Jesuit priests in the counter-Reformation. The history of doctrinal development is important.

I'm covenant theology all the way.  My wife says it seems weird.  She agrees with dispensation, and her favorite preacher is Johnny Mac.  He says he is a leaky dispensationalist.  I have called comparison chart of them both.  It's interesting.

Well, brother, keep working with her, don't give up. Thank the Almighty for the covenant of grace.

I believe that God created this world solely for the purpose of glorifying Christ and that all means of salvation presented to man were done so on credit, if you will, in advance of Christ’s work on the cross, based on one’s faith according to what was given at the time to have faith in.

I've always believed that he'll call when he needs me

Rightly divide the word.

I am starting today grateful that I have no idea what Dispensationalism is.

Wow.  A bunch of baby sprinkling Calvinists don't like dispensationalism.

What a surprise.

Dispensationalism has its errors, but nothing like Calvinism.

When you read the Bible and can't properly conclude that Jesus died for all sinners but instead died only for the "elect" - and you can't properly define the "elect" - and you don't know the difference between a physical nation with its physical inhabitants : Israel vs a spiritual people who have received a spiritual new birth: the church - and you can't discern between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven...

Well, then you might just believe covenantal/reformed/replacement theology.

And they can't be corrected, because according to them, you can only take the Bible literally when they agree that you can take that particular part of the Bible literally.  In all the other parts, you have to let them tell you what the Bible really means, even though their assigned meaning doesn't come close to matching the words on the page.

In other words, they are like almost every other group out there.  They believe the parts of the Bible as written when they want to, and reject the Bible as written when they want to believe something else.

And as a result there are groups diametrically opposed to one another.  And all of them are opposed by the Bible.

And the Bible is right and they are wrong.

So straight from that bastion of truth Wiki:

Dispensationalism is a theological framework of interpreting the Bible which maintains that history is divided into multiple ages or "dispensations" in which God acts with his chosen people in different ways.

Adams only duty was to not eat of the tree, he failed.  

The next dispensation was to do right according to his conscience.  Man failed and by the time of Noah man was so evil that God destroyed the world.

The bar was raised when the commandments were given.  Once again man failed.

The bar was raised when Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount "If you even think it in your heart", no man can be righteous to that standard.

Man could never be righteous on his own, he needs a savior, Jesus Christ.  That is what I get from dispensations.

No. Dispensationalism isn't Biblical.

It's a false religious belief based on the fevered hallucinations of a sick teenager, as transcribed by a Scottish Minister in the early 1800's. It attempts to explain the inconsistencies in the book created 300 years after the death of Jesus Christ by Roman bureaucrats and politicians. The book the Romans claimed was written by friendly god-spirits who somehow took over the minds and bodies of the authors and forced them to document God's will.

I'm in the JohnnyMac camp. Jeremiah 31:31 destroys modern dispensation theology better know as "replacement" theology. Whereas the church replaced Israel. That is false. However, I do believe in eschatalogical dispensation, same as JMac, that the church and Israel are handled separately in the end times.

This.
Matthew 15:8-10
King James Version
8 This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.

9 But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

10 And he called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and understand:

May as well be a leaky covenant advocate as well then...

1 Corinthians 13:2 AMPC (just for fun)
For now we are looking in a mirror that gives only a dim (blurred) reflection [of reality as in a riddle or enigma], but then [when perfection comes] we shall see in reality and face to face! Now I know in part (imperfectly), but then I shall know and understand fully and clearly, even in the same manner as I have been fully and clearly known and understood [by God].

Replacement theology is some clap trap criticism of covenant theology. Covenant theology teaches that those faithful in ancient Israel were the "church", but in it's infancy. We teach a continuity in that regard between all believers, from Adam, to Noah, to Abraham to Moses, to David, and on and on. There is one people of God...those that trust in Jesus Christ. Dispensationalism teaches 2 people of God, the Israelites, the earthly people, and the church, the heavenly people. That's an unbiblical teaching.

I’m amillenial. Not to be confused with a millennial.

I have certain postmillennial sympathies but at the end of the day I’m amill. But some of my favorite teachers are dispys. Like Erwin Lutzer and John MacArthur.

I agree, but as gently as possible, that dispensationalism isn’t biblical. Neither is much of anything else that started in the early 1800’s. Of all the various errors and cultish movements started in the 1800-1850 timeframe, dispensationalism is the ‘least bad’ by a long shot.

I would agree that dispensationalism is the least bad theology that sprang out of the 1800's, especially in the U.S. Mormanism, JW's, Christian Science, probably 7th Day Adventists. I would consider it heterodoxy more than heresy, although some of the classical dispys did or came pretty close to teaching salvation by works in the OT, that's a gospel rejecting heresy. I think MacArthur is a Christian, but an unfaithful pastor because of his dispy ways. I don't spend much time listening to unfaithful ministers.

I posted this in the other thread, but worth posting here.

A balanced, academic conversation of the history and beliefs of dispensationalism.

Considerably more level headed than what you'll get from arfcom.  

I actually started watching this last night. My wife has been bugging me from time to time to get off the computer. LOL. But I'll make it through. So far, it's been quite good. I found their comments about the complexity verses simplicity of Dispensationalism and Covenant Theology interesting.

https://www.ar15.com/forums/General/Religion/135/

For Covenant Theology folks, the name “Covenant Theology” implies you believe you are in a covenant with God. What is that covenant?

Covenant Theology just means that God uses and enters into covenants. Within the God head, and with His creatures. Christians are placed in the covenant of grace through faith in Christ. God made a covenant of works with Adam. Do this and you will live. He failed, and then God instituted the COG by promising them a redeemer. Covenant is basically how God's creation works. The Constitution, for instance, is a covenant...an agreement with stipulations and requirements. God requires us to keep His law perfectly, we won't and can't, Christ fulfilled that covenant of works that we fail at, thus the requirement of the COG.

Where is this Covenant of grace spelled out?

A covenant requires the consent of both parties to the covenant. No one, not even your god, can force a covenant on someone who doesn't sign up to be bound by the covenant. Christian theology cannot be based on covenants since most Christian theologies do not require the consent of the damned to be bound by the covenant. Most Christian theology is more like extortion than a covenant.

If your theology is based on Old Testament scripture then you are missing a pretty basic theme of the Bible.

God was talking to Israel, not the current church.

Darby got bucked off his horse into a barn door and while he was convalescing he read through the bible and he couldn't figure out how the promises applied to ancient national israel and the church, so he treaed them like oil and water and tried to seperate them.

That is the core and beating heart of dispensationalism.

The more you seperate ancient national israel from the church, the more consistent of a dispensationalist you are. This is what underlies virtually all of their unbiblical oddities and they force it onto the text.  It must be presumed. It (the seperation between ancient national israel and the church) cannot be gotten from the meaning of the text itself.

It is a filter: a set of colored eyeglasses.

Without it, you do not have and cannot have dispensationalism.

Born and raised in church my whole life (mostly Baptist) and let me tell you where I'm at having just turned 50:

I'm utterly flabbergasted by the idea that a God so great as to have created the universe sent his son to die for my sins.  He loves me so far beyond what i deserve that it is incomprehensible.

I have no real idea which flavor of theology has it right (if even any of them do) and I'm done pretending that I know.

I know for ABSOLUTE SURE that the rest of my life will be centered on loving my creator and my neighbors the best that I can.  That's it for me.  I don't need anything more.

It is actually all through the OT and NT. Genesis 3:15 it is first revealed...a messiah is promised to our first parents. Again it is revealed to Abraham as a promise from God to bless all the nations through his seed. Genesis 15:6 6 And he believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness. The OT temple worship and sacrifices pointed to Christ, the sacrifices and blood shed of bulls and goats and lambs could never really take away the sins of the people or produce a clean conscience. Wherever you see God promising salvation through faith in Christ, there is the COG. Like using the term Trinity to describe the God head, we use the term COG to describe salvation in Jesus.  

If you're looking for an exact phrase and flipping through the Bible like it was a glossary, you won't find it.

If you're looking for an argument, I apologize - I won't respond again. Arguing here is an utter waste.

If you're asking for an honest answer, I'd start in one of these places. There's no reason for me to try to re-explain what others have already said better than I could. Suffice to say that you'll find it throughout the entirety of Scripture.

If you're opposed to the notion of an overarching 'covenant of Grace' reading this won't help you, again, but if you're simply wanting to know where people get the notion of God working with men through agreements described as 'covenants' and how we derive an overarching theme of a 'covenant of grace' in Scripture, start here and you'll at least be able to understand where we are coming from:

https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/what-covenant-grace

https://www.opc.org/cce/covenant.html

https://www.monergism.com/covenant-grace-old-testament

https://www.apuritansmind.com/westminster-standards/chapter-7

You again? You just can't control yourself man.

There are plenty of reformed who practice believers baptism.


Yes, you can define the elect. Everyone who believes the gospel.

Now play games with words and go for "but can you tell me everyones name who believes the gospel?" and than act like that scores a point.


Now that's hilarious.




Yep, clearly has no idea that there's physical ancient national israel and those who are of the spiritual nation.

(oh, btw, some dirty gentiles had gotten into ancient national israel. You could become a jew... by believing and taking the outward sign)

"Replacement theology" - when someone says that, you know you're dealing with someone who is either ignorant, or if they know, they don't care that they're lying and slandering people. We teach that the church that was confined to ancient national israel has been expanded beyond that, to ALL people groups ... and why yes, when we say all, we mean all, and that included those in ancient national israel, and their physical descendants today, and those who live in modern secular israel. To call this "replacement" is shockingly ignorant at best. We also teach that the church existed IN ancient national israel, it was formed by the believing remnant who were "circumcised of heart" (aka, regenerated, or had been born again).

We are not the ones that teach that the church age is a parenthesis and that God has stopped dealing with israel until the church age is over - an actual meaningful "replacement" of israel by the church in God's purposes until some time near the end of time.



That's a lie. You are lying. Stop it.

Unfortunately, the dispensational theologians wound up doing what the liberals did... chopping the bible up and saying these parts are not for you.

I disagree, God, in Genesis 2:15-17 commanded our first parents they may not eat of the tree, He didn't get their consent for the covenant of works. God chose the Israelites, He didn't get their consent.  Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:35-36 came to understand that God is absolutely sovereign and does as He wills with His creatures.  I don't subscribe to the idea that men are the masters of their own destinies. And covenant is all over the scriptures. God's complaint against Israel is that they broke His covenant many times.

Wrong, both testaments are about Christ, both testaments are for the Christians benefit.

Ding ding....you are correct brother.

Thank you, good stuff.

My advice to you then, is to keep studying. God gave us His scriptures that we know and understand them. ALL of God's truth is important to know and believe to best of our abilities. The more we know God's scripture the lest likely we are be swept away by the teachings of some wolf, and most importantly, the closer we can come to and love our God.

I have some amazingly good news for you - God can and has and does make unilateral covenants with men.

12 Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, [q]terror and great darkness fell upon him. 13 Then God said to Abram, “Know for certain that your [r]descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, [s]where they will be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. 14 But I will also judge the nation whom they will serve, and afterward they will come out with [t]many possessions. 15 As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you will be buried at a good old age. 16 Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the wrongdoing of the Amorite is not yet complete.”

17 Now it came about, when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, a smoking oven and a flaming torch appeared which passed between these pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying,

“To your [u]descendants I have given this land,
From the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates:

19 the land of the Kenite, the Kenizzite, the Kadmonite, 20 the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Rephaim, 21 the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Girgashite, and the Jebusite.”

And once you understand that, and you begin to understand grace - real grace, which comes entirely from God to man, not because man is smart enough to accept it, but because God *makes us* willing - the idea growing increasingly precious to you.

God loved sinners enough to save some of them in spite of themselves. Had he waited for us to be willing to make a bilateral covenant, we'd still be lost without hope, dead in our sin.

And perhaps, just maybe, the better you grasp Scripture, the better you can accomplish that (noble!) goal.

People used to say 'I don't want doctrine, just Jesus'. But if you ask them who Jesus is, and what exactly it was that He did that made Him so precious to them and why men needed what Jesus gave them....well, there you are in doctrine again.

I think John 4:24 teaches - in the words of Jesus - that we should worship God truthfully, and such cannot be done if we refuse to wrestle with the entirety of Scripture. As I've already hinted at - I see the question in this thread as largely a secondary matter. It isn't unimportant, it just isn't the 'main thing'. So I appreciate where you're coming from - I just think you'd end up benefitting from digging into some of the harder issues.

In other words, Christians are under both covenants.

Me too.  I know all I need to know and that along with faith will get me there.

@Rodent I just want to say that the Lord works in mysterious ways, as evidenced by you coming into this thread to express your gratefulness. I'm genuinely glad you found something to be grateful for. Ain't God good?

Thanks for stopping by.

If you are talking about the old covenant and new covenant OT, NT then that would be no. There is a continuity and discontinuity between the old and new, especially as is related to the differing aspects of the law. The NT, because these things are fulfilled in Christ, has done away with the ceremonial laws, the dietary laws, things I refer to as the holiness ordinances that were meant to separate the Jews from the heathen nations around them. We don't do sacrifices in a temple anymore. The moral law continues from the OT. Does this help you?

It's the reason you see all those left behind books on the shelf and so many "this bit of current news and events fits the end times and here's why and *insert crazy math thinking meme.* There are so many of these because stuff like that is inherently more flashy and draws people in. It's a form of "well the prophecy says X, and here it is, X is happening! end times!" That grabs people's attention far more than "this is what the time from the crucifixion to the end will be like, it will be a pattern of wars, peace, unexpected wars, gaps where people have some peace and gather themselves up, famine, natural disasters, in a rolling unpredictable way, sort of like how in natural childbirth you never know when it's "time" until you see the kid crowning."

In recentish history (say, the last 100 years) it's a huge central pillar in what's called fundamentalism here in the states. For most people, the two viable knowable options were either flaming liberals (modernists, they called them back than) pushing german skepticism and worse, OR ... your local dispensationalists, who were trying to take the text seriously and apply it to life.

Groups like the OPC and such were very much small actors at the union wide scale.

It's also why your parents and grandparents heard of the scofield bible and it's notes (the first edition now being infamous for doing things like all but virtually saying there were multiple ways of salvation). The scofield was a huge coup for the movement, the publisher never had really done things like that and it was (in its time period) the "first" popular study bible, with notes on the same page as the bible text. It got to the point that people would argue over it's notes as if they were the biblical text itself.

The dispensational movement basically *made* the bible colleges as we know them and it established full seminaries, like DTS (dallas theological seminary).

It got to the point where if you didn't exhibit the same beliefs as the dispensationalists, some of the more hardcore ones would act like you were out tribe, to be tossed into the trashbin along with the theological liberals.

It took a long time for them to start interacting with people like sproul, and o palmer robertson, and etc., to find out that no, they (dispensationalists) weren't the only game in town. This is how jmac got "leaky" aka didn't hold as hard a seperation between israel and the church, and how we got "progressive dispensationalists" who have done the same.

It would have be unthinkable for DTS to have people teaching openly there who held such viewpoints, but now (from what I hear) they have such.

You have long been my all time favorite ARFCOMmer, but this post just cements the position. All the way, brother.

You're disagreeing with the definition of covenant. Perhaps your translator made a poor word choice. The Hebrew word used in Genesis 2:15-17 is the word for "command." There is noting that suggest any concept of a covenant in that passage. A command is not a covenant.

Sovereignty is a completely different issue. There's nothing in Daniel 4:35-36 that says anything about covenant.

God's complaint with Israel is that they broke his commands and didn't follow his orders many times; not that they violated an agreement into which they had entered as an act of free will, also known as a covenant.

Being the master of one's own destiny is yet another entirely different subject that has nothing to do with covenants. Why did God give us free will if he didn't create us to be the masters of our own destinies? What is the point of free will if not that?

No such thing. That phrase is an oxymoron.

The word "covenant" didn't even exist until the 1300's.

The word covenant is used for the first time in Genesis 6 with Noah. The Genesis 2 encounter has the essence of covenant. If Adam obeys, God promises life. Its unilateral. Adam's consent wasn't required. God sovereignty applied it to him. It wasn't like he could refuse. If you want to say the actual word didn't exist until you say, fine. The English word still rightly translates the concept. Unless of course, you want to say all English translations of the Hebrew are incorrect...do you?

Calvinists can't follow their own system.

Here is a Calvinist, who supposedly believes God preordains everything that comes to pass, blaming me for lack of control when the god of his system preordained me to make the post he criticizes.

Calvinists only follow their system in theory - they always fail in real life application.

Saying both sections of the Bible are for the Christian's benefit is very different from saying that everything God spoke to and about Israel directly applies to the church today.

I thought dispensationalism is when you shake the vending machine and a free bag of chips falls out

That's not even accurate Calvinism.  One does not have to currently believe to be elect according to Calvinism.  In Calvinism those who are predestinated to be saved are elect, whether they believe now or not.

But scripturally:

There is one nation that is elect corporately and its people: Israel  Isaiah 45:4

There are elect angels: 1 Tim 5:24

And THE ELECT - Jesus Christ: Isaiah 42:1; 1 Pet 2:6

And finally, individuals become elect once they are in Christ in multiple places throughout the New Test.