“The law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” John 1:17

ONE evening, many years ago, when, during a summer holiday, I was holding meetings in a certain provincial town, I had an unexpected visitor. He was a medical practitioner in a neighbouring county, who had been converted the year before, and had already begun to tell the Gospel to others. He had come over, as he said, “to help me.” As we sat at tea, he began to rail at what. he called “dispensational truth.” I tried in vain to instruct him. I sought to show him, for example, that the death of Christ had made a change in God’s relationships with men. But he would not listen. “He could not tolerate that way of cutting up the Bible, and setting one part against another,” My thoughts were full of my evening meeting, and I dismissed the subject by saying that ignorance of “dispensational truth” would embarrass him in Gospel work.

In addressing the meeting he took Luke 14:16, 17, as his text, and with much iteration and earnestness he pressed upon the hearers that they were bidden to the great supper, and warned them against rejecting or neglecting the invitation. In conclusion, he read the following verses, one by one, commenting on each in turn. But when he came to the twenty-fourth - “I say unto you, that none of those men that were bidden shall taste of my supper,” he naturally became confused; and at last, turning round to look at me, he collapsed altogether. I rose immediately, and, identifying myself with the spirit of his words, I explained that, as with many another sermon, the text was wrong. The mission of Christ was primarily to the covenant people. "I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel;” “It is not meet to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs;” “He came unto His own, but His own received Him not.” As the parable tells us, the bidden guests -the 41 favoured people- made light of the invitation; and now, outcast sinners are called in - the waifs and paupers of “the streets and lanes of the city.”

I have already called attention to the forgotten truth that the Bible is the history of the covenant people. In the great drama it unfolds there is a double interlude. The New Testament opens with “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.” The Davidic covenant was put in abeyance when, because of their sins, the people were brought under servitude to Babylon. And then great Gentile empires appeared upon the scene. The Abrahamic covenant in its earthly aspect was put in abeyance when Israel rejected the Messiah. But neither covenant is abandoned. He has set aside His people, but He has not finally cast them away (for the seeming contradiction between the second and fifteenth verses of the eleventh chapter of Romans arises from the wording of our English versions). And the rejection, or setting aside, of them is “the reconciliation of the world.” It is not that the world is brought within the covenant, but that grace is free to all alike. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile as to condemnation, “for all have sinned;” (Romans 3:22,23.) nor yet as to mercy, “for the same Lord is Lord of all, and is rich unto all that call upon Him.” (Romans 10:12, R. V.) Under the covenant the Jew had priority in blessing, but not a monopoly. The antediluvian apostasy was wiped out in the judgment of the Flood. The post-diluvian apostasy, which produced Babylon - the perversion of every truth in God’s preceding revelations to the race - God met by making Abraham and his descendants His agents, as it were, on the earth. “Unto them were committed the oracles of God;” theirs were “the service of God, and the promises.”

The Jew sought to treat the agency as a monopoly; but that it was agency is clear, not merely from the New Testament, but from the Old, - witness, for example, the words of the Covenant itself, or of Solomon’s inspired prayer at the dedication of the Temple.

When an agent is false to his trust, the principal may change his system, and deal directly with all the world; but the suggestion that he would appoint all the world as his agents is grotesquely absurd. God has not raised the world to the position forfeited by the Jew, but He has relegated the Jew to the same level as the world. “To the Jew first” was the characteristic of the bygone dispensation; not “To the Jew only,” for that was never true. “There is no difference,”‘ is the characteristic of the present dispensation. It is not that “the same Lord is rich unto all” - that is the false creed of one phase of the Christian apostasy - but that He is “rich unto all that call upon Him.” “Salvation is of the Jews,” the Lord Jesus Himself declared. (John 4:22.) But now it is, “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” “Whosoever”

I remember a story of Harry Moorhouse’s about that word. After his first visit to the United States an American gentleman sent him a typewriter. And typewriters were scarce in those days. But he had some difficulty in obtaining delivery of it. For it appeared that he had a namesake living near him; and he was put to the strictest proof that it was for him, and not for his namesake, that the gift was intended. “I am very glad,” said he, “that the Lord made it ‘whosoever’ in John 3:16; for if He had put my name in the verse I never could have been sure that He didn’t mean the other Harry Moorhouse!” But here, again, the blessing is only for “whosoever believeth.” To suppose that the Gentile, as such, has attained to the place of favour formerly enjoyed by the Jew is sheer error.

The “olive-tree” position of Romans 11: (which must not be confounded with union with Christ as “the Vine") symbolizes the place of earthly privilege and responsibility, accorded to the Church of this dispensation, the Church designed by God to be His household upon earth, the sheepfold of the sheep, the nursery and home of His people during their sojourn here. But the maintenance of the “olive” relationship by the “professing Church” was made conditional upon faith and faithfulness. And how has that condition been fulfilled? In a passage of striking solemnity and force Dean Alford deals with this subject. The parable of the cast-out demon that returns with seven others to find the house empty, he refers primarily to the Jewish people. And he adds: - “Strikingly parallel with this runs the history of the Christian Church. Not long after the Apostolic times the golden calves of idolatry were set up. What the effect of the Captivity was to the Jews, that of the Reformation has been to Christendom. The first evil spirit has been cast out; but by the growth of hypocrisy, secularity, and rationalism, the house has become swept and garnished by the decencies of civilization and the discoveries of secular knowledge, but empty of living and earnest faith. And he must read prophecy but ill who does not see under all these seeming improvements the preparation for the final development of the Man of Sin, the great repossession which is to bring the outward frame of Christendom to a fearful end” (Greek Testament, Matthew 12:44).

“The Christian Church” soon ceased to be a company of Christian people. The real Christians within it became a petty minority. And “Church and World” has ever since been a false antithesis. The Church is itself the world, in a specially subtle and evil phase. Even while His Apostles were still on earth, the Lord uttered these solemn words of warning to the Church’ “I will spue thee out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:16.) And the time seems hastening on when the further word will go forth “Come out of her, my people, that ye be, not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” (Revelation 18:4; cf. Jeremiah 51:6.) Meanwhile, Christians can remain in “the professing Church.” But let them, while using their several “denominations” in their Master’s service, keep in mind the precept about "using the world as not abusing it” (that is, using it unduly).

In days when the historic apostasy of Christendom has well-nigh captured the National Church, and the new infidel apostasy, hiding under the veil of “the Higher Criticism,” is leavening all the churches, it behooves the Christian to “keep himself pure.” For every true Christian will echo the words of the great Dr. Chalmers’ “Who cares about any Church, but as an instrument of Christian good?” Have, then, the gates of hell prevailed against the Church? No spiritual Christian, - no man of intelligence, indeed - can arrive at any other conclusion.

“But,” it will be demanded, “does not this falsify the Lord’s emphatic words?” Most assuredly not. When the Lord declared that the counsels of hell should not prevail against His Church, He was not speaking of "the outward frame,” as Alford calls it - the professing Church on earth, entrusted to human administration. The apostasy of that Church is clearly foretold in Scripture. “I know not” - says Canon Bernard in the Bampton Lectures, 1864 - “I know not how any man, in closing the Epistles, could expect to find the subsequent history of the Church essentially different from what it is.”

But the Lord was speaking of the Church of which He is the builder, “the Church which is His Body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.” That Church, we know, can never fail His care for it can never cease, and His provision for its perfecting is assured? (Ephesians 4:11-13.) More than this, we have His promise, “Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them.” And the fact that this promise was given before the beginning of this Christian dispensation, is a further pledge that it will stand until the end. By its very terms, moreover, it is, as Dean Alford remarks, “independent of particular forms of government or ceremonies, and establishes a canon against pseudocatholicism in all its forms.” Wherever two or three are gathered together in His Name, there His presence is assured.

Having regard to the incalculable importance of the subject, no apology is needed for this digression. Of the many who go over to Rome, and of the multitudes who are seeking to undo the work of the Reformation in England, there is not one who is not the dupe of false views about “the Church.” And in other ways, and in wholly different spheres, Christians are misled or troubled by ignorance or error upon this subject. Do not such false beliefs lead many to “bite and devour” their fellow. Christians because of denominational differences, or to accept the ministry of false teachers, and even of unconverted men, because this Church or that accredits them, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” someone will exclaim. But the very chapter which opens with these words (Matthew 7.) contains the warning, “Beware of false prophets “; and upon us it casts the responsibility of detecting them. The precept against judging relates to motives; the injunction to judge refers to the life and teaching of men who claim to be His ministers.

To combat these false beliefs is strictly germane to the purpose of these papers. “Salvation is of the Jews,” the Lord declared at the time when the apostasy of the nation was near its climax. For theirs were “the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises.” But not even in the days of its pristine purity and power did the Christian Church hold a position analogous to that of Israel under the former dispensation. For the Israelites, as such, enjoyed a vantage-ground of favour, in virtue of the Covenant. But in this dispensation the Church and its ordinances can do absolutely nothing to raise unregenerate men above the common level of sin and guilt and doom. Whether within the Church or outside the pale, they are “aliens from the commonwealth and strangers to the covenants.” Salvation is only and altogether in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. “Salvation is of the Jews,” was true in the former dispensation. “Salvation is of the Church” was never true; and any Church which makes such a claim is anti-Christian. With Cyprian, who championed the error, its falseness was modified by the fact that he meant the universal Church. But men soon forget “that there is a deeper unity than that of external form. For the true communion of Christian men - the communion of saints upon which all Churches are built - is not the common performance of external acts, but the communion of soul with soul, and of the soul with Christ…Subtler, deeper, Diviner, than anything of which external things can be either the symbol or the bond, is that inner reality and essence of union - ‘the unity of the Spirit.’”