Reblogged from servehiminthewaiting.com
Through out the centuries, God has had various ways He has dealt with mankind. In the garden of Eden, there was total innocence, and God walked with Adam and Even personally in the Garden. But when they disbelieved God about not eating of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and Eve was deceived by the serpent, (Adam was not deceived), then with the knowledge of sin, in the next Covenant man was guided by and judged on the basis of conscience. He knew what was evil, and yet, man still sinned.
In fact man was so sinful that we don’t even get out of Genesis before God has destroyed all but eight humans in a global flood. And not only that, but still before we get past Genesis, mankind is so rebellious that they have built a monument to themselves in the form of the Tower of Babel under human government, then a period when God made a Covenant with Abraham, and then a different covenant with Moses when He gave the law. At the end of the Old Testament, and through 400 years of silence on God’s part, as far as direct interaction with mankind through prophets, priests and kings, there came a period of excessive Grace. That is the condition that began with Messiah’s death, and is still in place in present time.
A term has arisen for these various conditions of God’s dealing with mankind, which is “dispensations” which, like the word Trinity, is not in the Bible, but the principle is clearly established. Same as the word Rapture although that word was in the Latin translations.
The purpose of these different ways and means of dealing with man, has been to prove (to man himself) that under each and every circumstance, that it is not the “environment” that leads to corruption and sin, but rather a condition of the human heart. Even during the Millennial reign of Christ on Earth, when Satan has been imprisoned for a thousand years and thereby unable to deceive the human heart, as soon Satan is released, the scriptures tell us he will succeed in leading yet another (and final) rebellion against the authority of God.
Why will God allow this? Because it will prove that the thoughts of man’s heart are only evil, left to themselves and their own thoughts and devices. Man cannot redeem himself. Man will gravitate toward darkness, rather than light, so there would be no “enlightenment”, no attainment of “godhood”.
All through history, salvation is solely in Jesus, though in the Old Testament, man was tasked with keeping the law, it was not for salvation, but rather for purposes of showing man his own sinfulness and inability to keep it. Their system of sacrifice was merely a pre-figuring of the death of the perfect lamb, Jesus, which at the time was yet future.
Read more: Serve Him in the Waiting
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