VOL.2                                                                                                                                                              No. 8

The Dispensation Doctrine Heresy

Many doctrines can be found in the Christian church which are based upon some long-ago, often uneducated or under educated minister’s misunderstanding of a word or a phrase which he then preached to his congregation and promoted among fellow ministers. Often ministers, even today, take the word of a fellow minister as gospel and preach the same message to their own congregation without ever checking the Bible authenticity of the doctrine and so the doctrine spreads. Sometimes these are minor errors with no significance to our salvation or spiritual victory and often the authors were walking in all the light they had or could get at the time. Other times, the doctrine does have spiritual significance whether because of serving as a placebo for salvation or causing a less than complete walk with the Lord. Far too many ministers, and I hope you are not one of them,  if they do see error in a doctrine they have preached, fear to admit it to their congregation in the mistaken fear that their congregation will lose confidence in them if they admit to having preached error. Such is the Doctrine of Dispensations, although in comparison to most of the other heresies we have studied in this book, the Doctrine of Dispensations is relatively new. 

It really became popular in the eighteenth century with men such as Pierre Poiret, John Edwards, and Isaac Watts, and was later arranged by John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) in the nineteenth century. Darby's work in 1827 provided a foundation for dispensational teachers in the present century. Prominent trinitarian theologians and writers who espoused dispensationalism were James Brookes, James Gray, C. I. Scofield, and L. S. Chafer. The doctrine  has been around a long time, but is not truly ancient. Darby, himself, was an Anglican minister who broke ranks with the Anglican Church and joined with the Christian Brethren.

In this doctrine, “God’s Plan of the Ages” is set forth as a series of separate and distince time periods in which God dealt, has dealt or will deal with man in seven (7) different ways (the number seven being believed by many who teach numerology to be God’s perfect number). However, other lists differ as to the number and time factor. Here I list, the 1. Dispensation of Innocence or Edenic , 2. the Dispensation of Conscience which is also broken down as Ante Diluvian and Post Diluvian, 3. the Dispensation of Human Government also known as Patriarchial, 4. the Dispensation of Law, 5. the Dispensation of the Church which is also subdivided as Grace and Messianic. (See another list below.)

Let’s go back to the meanings of words.  I first became troubled with the doctrine, because I saw the overall Bible teaching that God does not change and that the differences in the ages was not God’s change in His desire to seek, save and fellowship with mankind, but in mankind’s own attitudes toward God. So I first went back to the English dictionary and discovered that in English dispensation means the act of dispensing or the passive dispensing of a good or service in response to a given action or payment of charge. An example would be that a soft drink machine makes a dispensation of a soft drink when you put in the appropriate money and press the correct button.  A towel dispenser makes a "dispensation" of a towel when you grab the bottom of the bottom towel and pull it out, or push down on the lever or turn the crank according to instructions. It has virtually nothing to do with time other than how long it took you to pull the towel, turn the crank, put in the coin or whatever else was required to receive the "dispensation" of the desired thing.  Of course it is a given that it does require time, but the time is incidental, not primary to the dispensation.

A final definition in the Random House Dictionary says: “Theol. a period of time in which God dealt with man in a particular way.” There is no source for this definition, no root word or basis given, as is given for the other definitions.

When I first began challenging the Dispensation doctrine on the basis of the English definition, about twenty years ago,  a young Apostolic pastor who graduated from a Bible college where this doctrine is or was taught went even farther back and found the meaning of the Greek word "oikonomia" (oikonomia) translated Dispensation in the King James Version and he discovered that it relates to stewardship or being given a responsibility. This made much more sense than a period of time. When you read every one of the verses in the King James in which the word Dispensation occurrs it makes much more sense to read it as a responsibilitiy or a stewardship than as a period of time. Based on his own research, he discarded charts and a Bible study he had been teaching that was based on this artificial, man-made division of the relationships between God and man. A great deal of very heretical teaching derives from the teaching of the "dispensation doctrine." 

Yes, I know that the highly esteemed founding brethren of Apostolic Bible Institute in St. Paul as well as many other leaders in the Apostolic Pentecostal movement used to and some maybe still do teach dispensations, but that still does not make it right.  While "orthodoxy" and the number of teachers seem to be on the side of the Dispensation Doctrine, I am sure those who are honest truth seekers will soon discard this actually very  unscriptural doctrine if they have not already done so. After all, as Apostolics, we are criticized for not being "orthodox" in the matter of the trinity,  the question of water baptism being necessary to salvation and our denial of the common form of eternal security "once saved-always saved" doctrine, so why should we be concerned about being orthodox in the matter of the Dispensational heresy?

This is, however, one of the arguments proponents of dispensationalism use. They like to say that a majority of christendom accepts and teaches the doctrine. However, the overwhelming majority of so-called Christian churches also teach that the trinity is the orthodox  position,  while admitting that not one time in the entire Bible did God say to anyone that He was a trinity nor that the Godhead was composed of three persons.  And Jesus Christ, Himself, while plainly declaring His being One with the Father, He never once referred to Himself as the Second Person of the Godhead nor the eternal Son. Neither did He refer to the Holy Spirit as a person. In fact, He said that God Himself is a Spirit and that "A Spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have." Since as Apostolics, we can see that the teaching of the trinity is false, why do we want to espouse and promote another doctrine which also is not in the Bible as taught and which many modern-day theologians, even trinitarians, no longer believe, though the subject of dispensations now in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is hardly discussed by many who used to proclaim it loudly.  If God changed his way of dealing with mankind as a whole from one period of time to another, why does He say, "I am the Lord. I change not." 

The real danger I see and the reason I proclaim so loudly and strongly AGAINST the Dispensation Doctrine Heresy is the serious misuses I have seen through the years of the concept that God deals with the human race differently in different periods of time and therefore because someone was in this or that "dispensation" the relationship they had with God was predicated upon the time period and the dispensation wherein they lived and died rather than on their personal walk with the Lord. This is totally against the teaching of the Bible from Genesis through Revelation. It is the basis for a fatalist view that because I live in this "Dispensation," I am not personally responsible for maintaining a close walk with the Lord.  I live in the "Dispensation of Grace." 

Of course, before the "published" Ten Commandments and other written commandments from God through Moses, there was greater ignorance of God's will and law for God to "wink" at than afterward and when the whole nations of Israel and then Judah turned their collective backs on God and were sent into captivity, no small number of those who returned under Nehemiah and Ezra and before and after that may well not have had the thorough indoctrination of the Law of Moses that others before the national backsliding occurred, but it was not the nation as a whole but each individual, even as today, who had to choose to pray and seek God's face and whom God healed and provided for in an often miraculous way even while their nearby kinsmen received no such blessing. Repeated reading and rereading of the Old Testament will reveal this, if you don't catch it the first time through.

There was or may indeed have been a "first Occurrence" at a particular time when a particular event took p0lace in the life of some human, but the overriding principle of God's relationship with man never one time changed until the coming of "the Lamb of God" to be the once and for all sacrifice for sin.

Some would say,  This view means Adam would be subject to the law of Moses and in turn,  Moses within the permissive rights of Adam and Eve unless you make a distinction.

However , this is not at all true. The problem lies in making God change, not man. Of course, God can do whatever He will, but He has repeatedly, throughout the Bible, emphasized that His overall relationship with His creation, mankind, does not change. Man changes in the way he responds to God. 

Who would or could Adam and Eve have defrauded? With whom would either of them been tempted to envy or commit adultery? How much sin could they and their children invent to defy God when they had walked and talked with Him? Sin and evil have a way of compounding as more and more people begin to "talk story" and think up new ways to do wrong. But by the time of Moses, Abraham had tried to deceive both the Pharoah of Egypt and King Abimelech, Joseph's brothers had jealously sold him into slavery in Egypt, the children of Israel had been surrounded with the sins of Egypt for many years and wickedness and evil were commonplace. Thus, there was a need to codify the sin of the many things MAN had invented to defy and sin against God and establish punishment for it. This was not a change in God or His love, mercy and grace toward mankind, but a writing down the rules that He had basically put into everyone's heart as a matter of conscience before that, including Adam and Eve, Enoch, Methuselah, Noah and Abraham. As evil abounded, grace did much more abound in the setting down of a written law and prescribed punishment for the breaking of that law. 

If God changes the rules, how do you know He won't change the rules again tomorrow? After all, He can do anything He wants to. Maybe wickedness has become more prevalent in our day than He had expected and He will change the rules? That is where the heresy of timeline or dispensational teaching lies. And if you live long enough, each of you, dear readers, will encounter people who do even now believe that to be true - that God changes and has changed the rules. 

One error that is taught says, "The Bible clearly shows distinctions in mans stewardship to Gods righteousness. If this is not so, Abel should be accountable to the righteousness of the Mosaic Law. If not, one must concede and show a distinction in the stewarship Adam had to the righteousness of God revealed to him." 

The entire principle of the Bible is based on a loving Creator God who is merciful, graceful, compassionate and unchanging. That is Bible. There is a sense in which Abel was accountable to the righteousness of the Mosaic law in that all the components of the Mosaic law which had any possible application to Abel were already in his conscience. Dispensationalists like to refer to an age or "Dispensation of Conscience," and this is how that applies. So yes, Abel was indeed accountable for the Law of Moses and complied with it in the measure it applied to him. He obeyed many parts of the Mosaic law simply because the things codified in the law as sin had not yet been invented to do. However, more than ninety percent of the Mosaic law would not have applied to Abel because most of the sins specified and codified in the Mosaic law had not yet been invented and many could not have applied simply because of the lack of oth3er people to interact with in a sinful way. This was not a change in the way God dealt with Abel and Moses, but a change in mankind's actions toward or against God. There is no "time line" nor "dispensation" differenct to be found here even under a microscope!

Oh yes, some men are faithful stewards to the responsibilities set before them and some are not. And some are somewhere between. But through it all is God's love, grace, compassion and mercy. There is no real scriptural problem  dividing TIME periods into two, before the Atonement and After the Day of Pentecost. But then if you choose to use the term dispensation, whose stewardship do you go with? Adam's? Noah's? Abraham's? Moses'? Peter's? James or John's? Paul's? What about mine or yours? After all, each of these and millions more have had stewardships of the Gospel for a period of time from the time they were first called to be saints (set apart holy) of God until either their physical death or their spiritual death through backsliding. Do we name a "Dispensation" after each of these stewardships? Ridiculous! No.
It is the stewardship, the responsibility, the custody of the Gospel or of the Old Testament promise and charge given to that patriarch, not the time factor that is important. While time is involved, it is a totally indefinite commodity.

Some modern English dictionaries and especially Bible dictionaries do acknowledge the word dispensation as having to do with time, though many preface this definition with the parenthetical coding, "Theol." meaning Theological. But even the context of the words in the Bible demands the understanding of a stewardship or a responsibility or a custody or an authority rather than a period of time, though of course every stewardship or custody or authority or Power of Attorney bespeaks the time during which the person giving the stewardship, husbandry, custody, authority or Power of Attorney is absent and is automatically understood to become invalid upon the return and presence of the person holding or making the original ownership or title or power.  Thus, it is not the time factor but the presence or absence authority factor which is key to "oikonomia" or stewardship, not time. 

Even the one scripture most favoring the disensation doctrine;  "That in the dispensation of the fullness of times..." (Ephesians 1:10)makes more sense if you understand that as "That in the stewardship [of the Gospel] until the fullness of times is complete." In each of the scripture verses that do use the word dispensation in the King James Version and given below, substitute the word "Stewardship" for the word dispensation and see how it comes out.

   "That in the stewardship of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in Him:" (Ephesians 1:10). Here there is the indication that the stewardship or responsibility is not forever, but will end when all the requirements are met and all who will be gathered to the Lord have been gathered. This could be seen as being during Paul's lifetime or could include to our own time and until the Second Coming of Christ. So time, while a factor, is clearly not the is not the primary factor here, being for a very indefinite length.  Rather, the crucial point is the temporary physical absence of our Lord Jesus Christ for an indefinite period of time during which He is preparing a place for us and we have the stewardship of His Gospel to "Go ye into all the World and Preach the Gospel...." (Matthew 28:19).

   "If ye have heard of the stewardship of the grace of God which is given me to you-ward:" (Ephesians 3:2). Here, Paul is speaking of the responsibility God has given him for the promotion, promulgation, proclamation, preaching or teaching of the Gospel. Is time any factor here?  Only in the sense that Paul has a limited time to spread the Gospel during his lifetime while awaiting the return of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 

   "Whereof I am made a minister, according to the stewardship of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God;" (Colossians 1:25). Again, just as a Power of Attorney is given to authorize another person to act on the behalf of the person giving the Power of Attorney during that person's absence, the time is only of significance when the original giver of the Power of Attorney returns to resume his (or her) own power.  We see all of these illustrated in the two Parables Jesus gave about the servants to whom the master gave varying numbers of talents and whose responses and stewardship during his absence dictated their own rewards. 

  "For if I do this thing willingly, I have a reward: but if against my will, a stewardship of the gospel is committed unto me." (1 Corinthians 9:17).  In this instance Paul is saying that if he accepts and fulfills "this thing," his stewardship willingly, he will be rewarded, but if he feels compelled to fulfill his stewardship responsibilities against his will, perhaps as the servant who hid the talent or the pound in Jesus' parables that unfulfilled or half-heartedly fulfilled responsibility to willingly and diligently meet his Master's expectations will be his downfall.

A few dictionary definitions follow:

Dispensation, noun.  -1. the act of giving out; act of distributing. Example: the dispensation of food and clothing to the flood victims. 2. a thing given out or distributed. Example: They gave thanks for the dispensations of Providence. 3. rule; management. Example: From 1558 to 1603 England was under the dispensation of Elizabeth I. 4. the management or ordering of events by divine Providence or Nature. Example: The dispensations ... of Providence continued to be strange (Lytton Strachey). 
5. a religious system. Example: the Christian dispensation, the Jewish dispensation. 
6. in the Roman Catholic Church: a. official permission to disregard a rule, law, obligation, or the like, without penalty. b. the writing giving such permission. 7. a doing away with or a doing without something. World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia/Dictionary ©2003 World Book, Inc.
 

Dispensation - A period of time under which mankind is answerable to God for how it has obeyed the revelation of God which it has received. The term dispensation is found twice in the NKJV: "The dispensation of the fullness of the times" (Eph 1:10) and "the dispensation of the grace of God" (Eph 3:2). The KJV uses the term four times (1 Co 9:17; Eph 1:10; 3:2; Col 1:25). (Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Copyright ©1986, Thomas Nelson Publishers)I certainly do NOT, nor should you, consider the fact that the Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Copyright © 1986, accepts or defines the word as a period of time as any more authoritative than asking the Pope if he believes in baptism in Jesus' name! 

The "dispensation of innocence" and the rest of that list of so-called dispensations is totally unbiblical and heretical. God does not change. The ONLY differences in God's dealings with mankind, is the Old Covenant requiring the shedding of the blood of sacrificial animals and the New Covenant under which God "provided Himself a LAMB" that paid the full price of redemption for all of us to this day, HALLELUJAH! We receive this sacrificial gift by the Grace, love and Mercy of God who first of all paid the price, then assured us the opportunity to hear and believe it and the pricked heart of conviction to repent and be baptized in Jesus' name. Before Jesus, the Holy Spirit spoke to men of faith and even appeared as a theophany to some. Adam and Eve, Cain, Abraham, Jacob, Moses and even Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar to name a few. He also brought conviction of sin to some Old Testament patriarchs and prophets who were tuned in to hear His voice.  Just two quick examples being Abraham, who repented of his deceit and lack of faith in Egypt again with King Abimelech and was restored in his walk with God, and  the prophet Nathan who was tuned to God and went to King David, who heard, felt conviction and repented. 

It is a given that a stewardship is for a period of time, but time is not the significant part of the stewardship. While the Master or Lord is absent, the Steward has the dispensation of the stewardship. When the Lord returns, it is understood that the Steward returns the stewardship, hopefully with a handsome profit to the Lord and Master.  Time and function are taught by dispensationalists to be coequal and essential in understanding the term dispensation. "One is not, without the other," they claim, but as has been pointed out and definitions prove,  it is NOT the matter of time, but the presence or absence of the one giving the dispensation of stewardship, husbandry, custody or Power of Attorney

I find the entire premise of those dispensations to be harmful to our contextual study of God's word.  We cannot pick and chnoose which scriptures we will accept at face value and which we will discard because the truth is not "orthodox" or according to the teaching of some revered leader. Take any verse or passage of the Bible used to teach the "Dispensation" or "Time-line" doctrine and apply the same tests you apply to Godhead or water Baptism or other original Apostolic doctrine scriptures. You read the immediate context, then the book context, then the Covenant (Old or New) context and finally the whole Bible context. Who is speaking to whom?  What is the writer trying to communicate to what kind of reader or hearer? How does this fit with the overall Bible teaching on the subject? In the case of the time line or "dispensation" doctrine is there any scripture that indicates that God varies or varied His dealings with mankind in general at or during some specific time frame?  Does not scripture rather indicate that beginning with Adam and Eve and then Cain and Abel, God always dealt with the individual who placed his or her trust in Him and the cases in which God's dealing was at a national level was it not man's actions toward God rather than any change in God's policy toward mankind that brought judgment upon wickedness?  Can you demonstrate a difference in the way that God dealt with anyone differently during the so-called "Dispensation of Conscience" or the Dispensation of Innocence" or the "Dispensation of Law" based upon the time or times during which the person lived?  If you cannot demonstrate that God's policy in the instance was because it was during one of the so-called "Dispensational" periods, isn't it time for you to discard this unscriptural doctrine?

Some churches and preachers teach that since you and I live "in the Dispensation of Grace," once we are truly "saved, we can never be lost." The "Dispensation Doctrine" is used to bolster this error.  And likewise because we live in a "dispensation" in which there are doctors and modern scientific medicine, we can throw out divine healing since it was for the first Church dispensation. Similar arguments I have debated against because now we are in the Grace Dispensation were men who argued that the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues is no longer valid because "God doesn't need to do it that way in this Dispensation." and "...whether there be tongues, they shall cease..." (1 Corinthians 13:8).

The most serious problem with the time line or dispensation doctrine is that it makes it seem that God does change in the ways He deals with mankind whereas the only scriptural difference was brought about by the fulfilling sacrificial death, butial and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.

One of the fallacies of this doctrine is that various ways in which God has dealt with man in the past are said to be invalid for our day. Many say, for example, that divine healing is no more because we have skilled doctors today. We no longer have tongues and interpretation nor prophecy because according to 1 Corinthians   that “…has been done away.”,  but that same passage clearly states in the same breath that knowledge will also vanish away, yet we have the greatest boom in knowledge today that the world has ever seen, so if tongues and prophecies have ceased, so has knowledge and we know for sure that is not true!

While there are variations and other time periods given by other dispensationalists, some of the more common teach had a series of up to 18 themes  covering 7 Dispensations. 1. Innocence or Edenic; The dispensation of innocence in Eden. 2. The Adamic dispensation of promise (Genesis 3:15) after the fall, down to the flood; the remembrance of the promise being kept alive by sacrifice. Also called the Ante Diluvian Dispensation; 3. Post Diluvian Dispensation or The dispensation of Noah, similar to that of Adam, requiring, besides the duties of the light of right and wrong shown by nature, repentance for sin, faith in God's mercy, hope of the promised Savior kept alive by animal sacrifices; to which were added the permission to eat animal flesh, but specifically not the blood and the prohibition to shed blood the of man on penalty of death, (Genesis 9); extending from the flood to Abraham.  4. The Patriarchial Dispensation or The Abrahamic covenant of more explicit promise (Genesis chapters 12; 15; 17; 22; referred to in Galatians 3:1), extending to the dispensation of  the Law.  5. The Dispensation of the Law, which was parenthetically introduced to be the schoolmaster until Jesus Christ, the end of the promise and the law should come.  ; 6. Dispensation of Grace, the current dispensation. "If ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to youward: (Ephesians 3:2 KJV); and 7. Messianic or after the Rapture of the Church or Second Coming of Christ depending upon the particular teacher's viewpoint

I had bookmarked the web site of a prominent Radio and TV evangelist whom many of you would recognize and intended to use his teaching of dispensations as an example in this Talk to Ministers to show of some of the scriptural problems of dispensation or time line preaching, but in 2003, could no longer find any mention of "dispensations" on his site anywhere. Maybe my letter to him several years ago persuaded him that it was not scriptural and he may have dropped it.  I did not write to him this time to ask.