The deception of dispensationalism

 

The Deception of Dispensationalism

Well, praise Jesus today everyone. I had a brief amount of time here that I wanted to share about an important topic. And that topic you could call dispensationalism, or you could call it how God works throughout time or however you want to call this, but it is the idea how throughout different time periods or as the theologians call them dispensations that God worked differently. An example of that would be the Old Testament versus the New Testament and how God worked with the nation of Israel during the time they were in Egypt and the Exodus and then the Mosaic Law, the Torah, compared to the New Covenant and the New Testament that you find many years later. So clearly guys there was a huge difference between how God worked during the time of the prophets and how God works today. We know about Pentecost and how the disciples received the Holy Spirit. We know the difference between the Old Testament and the New. So the deception isn't that during different time periods God worked differently with His people. Obviously today we don't live in the first century. We certainly don't live in 700 BC, like the time Isaiah lived. And we don't live in the time of Noah nor in the time of Adam. So a lot of things have changed but one thing that has not changed and this is the big deception about this whole thing.

What has not changed is how God communicates to His children. God still communicates through His children right into our hearts. He speaks into the hearts of men and women. Now the deception more specifically with dispensationalism is there is this idea behind it that God used to speak directly to the prophets during the time period of Isaiah the prophet 700 BC. God spoke to Noah. You know God spoke to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and He did miraculous signs and wonders through some of the original big mega prophets. Like Elijah for example and Elisha and some of those big prophets.

And the deception is God doesn't speak anymore today except through just picking up your Bible getting into a church and learning what God said and learn about the things God used to say during the time of Noah. What this does to people especially when we are young is go you start to think God is dead and that God used to speak in Bible times but He doesn't speak anymore today. I had people get on to me about this. People would say things to us like “You think that you hear from God like it's biblical times like it's the time of Noah or back when they used to hear from God. We don't hear from God anymore. We only read the Bible. Get back into Bible study brother.” That is how they will treat you if you bring the fact up that dispensationalism doesn't matter to God. People are the ones who have been changing and drifting away from God for generations and generations. But God is the same in this matter yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever. Always, He has been speaking into the hearts of men and women and He is a personal and relational God from the beginning of time when He created Adam from the dust and breathed life into Adam. From that time God created men and women in His image and He loves each and every single one of us and that has carried through and not changed by God.

Now we just got so smart and we think that we can put words in God's mouth that God doesn't speak anymore. God is dead. Jesus died on the cross many years ago. And so now we need to interpret everything Jesus said. Even the plain and simple and obvious things, they must be too elusive for you to understand. So brother get into a Bible study and let big Bob and big Billy teach you what it really means because you can't possibly know the basic things of God. Why would God speak to you? That is what they're doing and if you believe that, that is really truly pathetic because God loves you. It doesn't matter what nationality, what color your skin is, it doesn't matter if you're black or white and if you lived 700 years ago or if you live in 2024, God loves you. And in these days that we're living, which is the new covenant, call it a dispensation if you want, we're living in this time that we have the revelation of Jesus Christ. We know for a fact that Jesus died on the cross, He resurrected. We have a ton of proof, as much proof as there is in the universe that Jesus died, He resurrected and He made the way for you and for me to love Him because He showed each and every one of us what love truly is. He laid down His life for us. And as we know from the scriptures, what greater love can we have than this, that a man lays down his life for his friend and that is what Jesus did for us. He cares for you and He cares for me and God has not changed.

But because men have turned their ears away from God and their eyes have become dull and they haven't taken eyes out, their ears are plugged up with wax. They turn away from God and they say, “We can't hear Him, therefore we think that we'll make up doctrines, we'll listen to teachers who scratch our ears and we'll tell everyone in our seminaries that the only way you can hear from God in this dispensation that we're in is through correct biblical knowledge, picking out words and doing word studies, making sure you know Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, make sure you know those because otherwise you can't know God, brother.” This is a huge fat lie about dispensationalism in Christianity.

You can hear from God the same way as the prophets did back in 700 B.C. if you want to follow Jesus. There have been other time eras that were a huge drought in hearing from God. If you look up the time of King David and some of these time periods, it speaks of in the Bible where they went through years and years, maybe several hundred years where people just didn't hear from God and then Samuel comes on the scene and he hears from God and people are freaking out that some kid can hear from God. It just doesn't happen. That happened years ago, maybe during the time of Adam and Eve, but certainly not in our time. So we have went through these cycles again and again and again and people have put their faith in lies that God doesn't speak anymore and they've put their faith in fables that if you just study the old language then you're closer to God. If you want to know the Lord, you have to do what the child prophet did. He said, “Here I am Lord, speak for your servant is listening”. And when that little child hearkened to the voice of the Lord, he became a true prophet. He heard from God, not because he was able to be taught that by his mentor. He was growing up and being taught all the things supposedly of God in the scripture and the Bible, supposedly he had the word of God at his fingertips, yet he had never heard from the living God. He had never had a word from God, but he knew the scriptures. But this little child, this boy, was able to hear from God and then he said, “Here I am Lord, speak to me for your servant is listening”. And then the living God spoke to him time and time and time again and continued to work with this boy until he was a man, until he became a mighty man of God.

Things have not changed. The Lord wants to speak to you, He wants to speak to me, He wants to have a personal relationship with each and every one of us. But the reason why our generation, why many people don't hear from God, is because they want to hear from God without complete dedication. They want a microwave kind of religion where they pop the food into the microwave and it comes out in three minutes with their food and with their answers. And our generation is extremely cheap. We have things, today they're here, tomorrow we dispose of them, we throw them away, they're useless to us. So unless things are quick and fast and easy to digest, we don't care about it. And God is not cheap and easy to digest. We have to wait on Him in prayer, we have to be serious to love Him back, and we have to learn to communicate with the Spirit in such a way that we haven't ever learned before how to communicate with flesh and blood. It's easy to communicate if you've learned basic skills of communication, that is, with flesh and blood. We all, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, learned to write essays, we learned to communicate with our teachers, and if we did a good job, we learned how to get A's and B's and C's in class. So we learned how to communicate. We learned how to orally speak in front of the class. We learned how to articulate ideas. So we learned how to communicate because we know that human communication gets us money. It helps us have relationships with one another. It keeps us from being angry with one another. If we can communicate, then we can figure out alliances.

Now why does that not translate over to God? The people in church, especially some of these big churches today that have seminaries connected to them, they are not teaching that God is still alive and that Jesus Christ is alive and resurrected from the dead and still speaks today. They say, “Oh no, brother, the only way God speaks is through the Bible. So go to seminary, learn how to digest the Bible, make sure you go to the version of the seminaries that we approve of so that you can really understand from the biblical point of view of a Baptist or whatever your background is”. They want you to go to that kind of seminary so you can be slanted towards the doctrines that they approve of. But no one is pushing people towards Jesus to learn from Him. You know, the more people that are like you and your organization, the more your organization gets puffed up, the more you can make money. And a lot of people are very greedy.

But what did John the Baptist say? John the Baptist was on the scene before Jesus. He was prophesied about that he would be the one that makes straight the way of the Lord. Do you remember guys, what did John the Baptist say when everything was starting to come up? What did John the Baptist say? Did his pride get in the way? Did John say, “I am the Messiah, let me baptize more. I don't know about this Jesus guy. I don't know if Jesus should be lecturing.” But what did he say? John the Baptist said, “I must become less, He must become more. I must diminish. The Lord Jesus must increase”. If we want Jesus to increase in our life, then we have to be hearing from Him. We have to be founded on His words. That's why Jesus is the Word and that is why your church and your understanding of the Bible is not the word.

People have a lot of words. They have a lot of ideas. Everyone wants to share their opinion. We have to get to the point where we don't care what people think. If they try to slander us, we say, who cares? If I'm right with Jesus, I'm good. And if people try to flatter us and say, “man, you're as good as, you know, I don't know, Billy Sunday and you're as good as Billy Graham and you're as good as John MacArthur and you're like all these guys combined in one”. Don't believe it. There's people that will try to puff you up with pride and if you listen to that, you'll think that you're something great when you're not. And on the flip side of that, if you're always going around thinking, well, I'm going to be humble and I don't hear from God, I have to listen to this other guy, then you're also not going to hear from the Lord. There's a lot of people with a false humility, they put themselves at the seat of a false prophet and they listen to these guys and they never learn to sit before the feet of Jesus. If we have true humility and if the truth is in us, we will put ourselves before the feet of Jesus because Jesus said, “Make no one on earth your teacher or your father for one is your father, your teacher, and that is the Christ”.

Jesus is the Christ. He is the Son of God and he is our Messiah. He's our Lord. And if we're not hearing from Him, we're in big, big trouble. Abraham heard from God and he knew that he was to leave the area of Mesopotamia and travel to the Promised Land. He was a sojourner and in faith he left. He made his fair share of mistakes, calling his wife his sister and he ran into some problems along the way, but he had faith in God and the Lord continued to work with him. Isaac and Jacob. Isaac had faith that the right woman would come into his life and by faith the servant went out and found him a wife and that was led by the Holy Spirit. That didn't come to him by knowledge of the Bible or the Scriptures. Nowhere in the Bible did it say, Isaac, send your dad's servant out to such and such an area and find this woman by the well and she will feed your camels and water them too and then you will know that that's your wife. Nowhere in the Scriptures there wasn't such a thing. The Word of God came to them personally because the Word of God is alive. Jesus is alive and He speaks to His creation. He did that for Abraham, Isaac. He did that for Jacob. Jacob was a pretty messed up guy, but the Lord worked with him and the Lord wrestled with him and pushed his finger into his thigh and never again was Jacob the same, guys. After wrestling with the angel, that was Jesus Christ. He was changed. Jacob wrestled with God. He wrestled with our Messiah and he said, bless me, bless me God, bless me. Jacob was not looking for a Scripture to bless him. Jacob was not looking for an ordinary man or an ordinary king or an ordinary Melchizedek to give his 10% to. Jacob wrestled with the angel of God and the angel of God touched his thigh and Jacob was blessed and he had a limp to remember it by. That is Jesus Christ. Jacob wrestled with God.

These guys had true faith and the Lord came down and He worked with humanity. He worked with His people and the same God hasn't changed. This was passed on through the household of faith to those that believed. Joseph was part of this household of faith who believed and had visions from God. Even Nebuchadnezzar being a man that was not an Israelite. He wasn't Hebrew. This guy was even having visions from God and he was a crazy man. If you look up this guy in history, he is nutty guys. But Nebuchadnezzar even had dreams of God. This stuff is recorded even outside of the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar II. And even God loved Nebuchadnezzar. Jesus Christ had a relationship with this dude. He went into pride and because he had pride he became like a beast of the field. He grew birds like a feather and his fingernails grew out and the dude drenched his back. And then finally he came to his senses and he said, Lord, or he said God, “you are the one that created heavens and earth. You created the seas and you created everything in them. I will worship you.” As soon as he acknowledged that the one true God was God and not him, not Nebuchadnezzar, not that image of gold that he set up. Once that happened, he was restored everything. A man can't restore, the Bible can't restore, but the word of God can restore. The word of God came to this guy. He wasn't, this guy wasn't like in the household of faith as far as we understand it. He would have been a Gentile, but pre-Gentiles basically.

Faith has not changed, but people have changed and they don't want to have faith. Most people don't care to have faith. And so they build other structures that they think they can build their house on. And Jesus described those other structures as the sinking sand. A lot of these seminaries and these churches and these denominations are all built on sinking sand. Believe me, they have their principles. They have their doctrines and all of them they can trace back to, you know, the book of Romans and Titus and Philemon, some stuff from James, I suppose, but they don't like James very much. These guys build their entire faith on the sinking sand. And instead of building on the truth of Jesus and bowing before their Messiah, they bow before their little elders, their deacons, their boards, their politics, and then suddenly they're not following God and they wonder why they haven't been hearing from God for 200 years.

Who is hearing from God today? There are people that are hearing from God in miraculous and wonderful ways. But there's others who haven't heard God in their whole lifetime even though they've been raised in the Bible belt. They've been raised in church their whole life. They've went to church camp. They've done mission trips. Their families have been missionaries and they've never heard from God. We have a generation of young people who are growing up and they're so depressed they're going out, they're getting tattoos to try to fill that void. They're drinking and partying. They're just kicking back, living for themselves, trying to fill that void. They know that they're hypocrites, but they cover over the hypocrisy with acting like they're biblical. Some of these young men and women, they start their own churches to try to even further cover over their guilt. And they get more and more people tithing to them and then they build a whole generation of people that are built upon the sinking sand.

Don't believe in the lie that we're in a new dispensation and that God no longer speaks in our dispensation. Don't believe the lie that the only way God speaks is through the pastor in church through his Bible study. If you want to hear from the Lord, pray and you have to say, “Lord, convict my heart. You're the one that created me. You're the one that knows how to communicate with me. You're the one that knows how to open my eyes and open my ears.” I've read the scriptures for years. And just pray to the Lord and ask Him to open your heart and open your mind to the truth.

Most Christians are very close to the truth. They would rather believe that they're in a dispensation, that they can sin, that they can be under hyper-grace, that they don't really have to truly repent because we live in this dispensation of hyper-grace. We live in this dispensation of sin. And they make the dispensation whatever they want. It's just a cover for sin and choosing not to repent of what they know they should.

We have to be serious to be men and women who will fix our eyes on Jesus and go with Him even if other people don't. It would be better to leave the crowd and walk with Jesus even if no one's following you. Like the song says, “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back. Though none go with me, still I will follow, no turning back.” I believe that song was written by a guy who was not originally a Christian or born into the household of faith. I believe he was from India if I remember correctly. But a really wonderful song that is because if we're serious to follow Jesus, even if the people in our life are not true believers in the Lord, if they're a different religion, maybe they're Buddhist, maybe they belong to the Indian religion, maybe they belong to a cult group, I don't know, but wherever we are, we have to sever ourselves from people that are causing us to live an ungodly life. And that will be painful. Jesus never said it would be easy, but He did promise that He would be with us through trials and tribulations and people deserting us, all those things. And He would be with us through it all even to the very end of the age, to the end of our life. And that is a promise that we have, that Jesus will never leave us and He will never forsake us.

So that's all I have for today, guys. I want to pray for those of you that want to grow in the Lord and that you want to hear from Jesus and have revelation from Him. “So Lord Jesus, I pray for your true church. I pray that people's eyes can be open, that they would have the eye salve and that their ears would be open, that you would touch the eyes of the blind and open the ears of the deaf, that people can hear and see and know you for real and not be deceived by the old devil behind the pulpits. I pray that people can walk into the newness of life with you and partake in eating your flesh and drinking your blood and be part of your new covenant, that they would walk on the straight and narrow path, that this world is not worthy to walk. I pray that you would make them worthy, that they would be in their white garments, that they'd be made holy and pure as the crystal and glass that is pure before God. May we worship you and adore you, Lord Jesus, and follow you all the days of our life. In your name I pray, Lord Jesus, Amen.”