Introduction

Every theological dispute is ultimately a dispute about God. Arguments about prophecy, Israel, the church, and the end times can seem abstract — the kind of thing seminary students debate and ordinary Christians ignore. But underneath every one of those arguments is a more fundamental question: what kind of God are we dealing with?

Is he a God who tests humanity, watches it fail, and starts over with a new arrangement? Or is he a God whose purpose never wavers, whose covenant never changes, whose plan was never derailed, never improvised, never interrupted by human failure?

That is the question this paper is about.

Dispensationalism — the theological framework popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible and carried into millions of homes through books, films, and study notes — answers the first way. Reformed covenant theology answers the second. The difference is not merely academic. It determines how you read every page of your Bible, how you understand the church you belong to, and what you believe about the God you worship.

At Prosper CRC, we confess the second. This paper explains why.

What is Dispensationalism?

At its core, dispensationalism is a way to view how God works throughout history. It’s a philosophy and a framework for interpreting scripture. In this framework, dispensationalists hold that God’s will is distributed distinctly in different eras throughout the biblical narrative. ¹

The word dispensation translates the Greek oikonomia — meaning stewardship, administration, or economy. This framework is then applied to the whole breadth of God’s word. Leading to a distortion of the nature of God, the narrowness of salvation, and the importance of the church in the New Testament (to name a few).

In his study bible, which was the primary work that popularized dispensationalism, C.I. Scofield wrote that a dispensation is

”a period of time during which man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God.” 2

What Scofield — and dispensationalism — implies is that God works differently during seven eras or dispensations.

History of Dispensationalism

One important clarification about dispensationalism is its relatively novel history. Up until the 1830s, dispensationalism wasn’t a term in any christians minds, nor in the theology books. A man by the name of John Nelson Darby systematized and promoted dispensationalism.

Darby grew up in a well-connected family where he had access to the best schools and education. Upon becoming ordained in the Anglican Church, Darby suffered a horse riding accident. This turned out to to be a pivital moment his life. “While convalescing in Edward Pennefather's house in Dublin, Darby underwent a crisis in his religious beliefs. Finally deciding that an established church and its appurtenances were unscriptural, he resigned his curacy later the same year.” ³

It was at this time that he came to see the term “kingdom” in the book of Isaiah to mean something completely different from the church. Based on his study of Isaiah 32, Darby believed that Israel would experience earthly blessings in a future dispensation that were different from what the church would experience. He advocated for a strong distinction between Israel and the church. This is one of the major new discoveries that ⁴ Darby proposed: that the church and Israel are two distinct groups, two distinct identities, and two distinct futures. Acts 2 is a stop in God's dealings with Israel.

During this time, Darby started the Plymouth Brethren church with dispensationalism being one of the core beliefs. The Brethren were deliberately anti-creedal and anti- confessional — a detail of enormous significance for Reformed believers. They don't accept or require any kind of confession of faith to join. ⁵

Charles Spurgeon — Darby's contemporary — was not silent: Spurgeon regarded their hermeneutics as "warped," saying: "Plymouth Brethren delight to fish up some hitherto undiscovered tadpole of interpretation, and cry it round the town as a rare dainty.” 6

Scofield Reference Bible

No one event had more of an impact on the spread of dispensationalism than the Scofield Reference Bible. Edited and annotated by Cyrus I. Scofield, it popularized dispensationalism at the beginning of the 20th century. Essentially, it was the first study bible with a small commentary worth of notes on the same pages as scripture. These notes put forth a single view of the narrative arc of scripture, dominated by dispensationalism. This made it extraordinarily difficult for ordinary readers to distinguish the Bible's text from Scofield's theological notes.

Contemporary Impacts

The system moved from theological classrooms into mass popular culture with explosive results. The rise of figures like Hal Lindsey with his book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) brought dispensational premises to a wider, non-theological audience, interpreting current events as fulfillments of biblical prophecy. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (1995–2007) carried the system to tens of millions of readers with no formal theological background. The Critical Historical Argument

Dispensationalism has no roots before 1830. The entire Reformed tradition — from Bullinger (1534) to Calvin, Olevianus, the Westminster Assembly (1647), and the Belgic Confession (1561) — is covenantal to its core and knew nothing of a hard Israel-Church distinction.

The Reformed understanding of the history of redemption has much more in common with that of the Epistle of Barnabas (c. AD 120), Irenaeus (c. AD 180), Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and the Reformed orthodox than it does with the Dispensational understanding of redemptive history. From the 1520s forward, Reformed theology was covenantal at its core. To speak anachronistically, it was always anti-Dispensational. ⁷

Ironically, dispensationalism entered American Reformed and Presbyterian churches not directly through theological documents such as creeds or confessions, but through Bible conferences, study Bible notes, and popular evangelism — bypassing the very ecclesial structures of accountability that the Reformed tradition exists to maintain.

Errors of Interpretation

Seven Dispensations

One of the core beliefs of dispensationalism is that there are seven major sections, eras, or dispensations in which God works his will differently. They are:

1. Innocence (Genesis 1:1–3:7)

2. Conscience (Genesis 3:8–8:22)

3. Human Government (Genesis 9:1–11:32)

4. Promise (Genesis 12:1–Exodus 19:25)

5. Law (Exodus 20:1–Acts 2:4)

6. Grace (Acts 2:4–Revelation 20:3)

7. The Millennial Kingdom (Revelation 20:4–6)

Each dispensation has several defining characteristics: 1) a distinctive idea of God's revelation; 2) a specific test for obedience in relation to that divine revelation; 3) a failure of man under that economy to the divine revelation; 4) a judgment of God for the failure; 5) the beginning of a new dispensation. ⁸

Each dispensation is essentially a fresh test that humanity fails, requiring God to reset the terms of engagement. Dispensationalism would argue that history isn't organically unfolding toward a single promised fulfillment in Christ — it is a series of discrete, self- contained experiments.

One of the side effects of this system is that it creates commitments to views that directly contradict reformed theology. Three major commitments come to mind.

1. Israel and the Church are permanently distinct peoples with separate destinies. Since the Church Age is a parenthesis — inserted after Israel failed under the Law dispensation — national Israel retains its own set of unfulfilled earthly promises that the Church does not inherit. God has two programs running in parallel.

2. The hermeneutic must be consistently “literal." Because the dispensations are concrete and distinct, OT prophecy addressed to Israel must be fulfilled literally, in the land, through a national people. The Reformed typological/Christological reading of those prophecies is dismissed as spiritualizing.

3. The law does not apply to the Church in the Grace dispensation. Since the cross has ended the dispensation of the law — according to the dispensationalists — the Mosaic law — including the moral law — is no longer the governing standard for the Church. According to the Scofield notes: "The law is a ministry of condemnation, death, and the divine curse.” The Reformed threefold use of the 9 law collapses entirely under this framework. This is not an abstract concern. If the moral law — including the Ten Commandments — does not bind the New Testament church, then the entire structure of Christian ethics is unmoored. The Sermon on the Mount, which Scofield placed under the dispensation of Law, becomes a document addressed to Israel rather than to the church.² The Decalogue, which the Heidelberg Catechism calls the rule of our gratitude and which Paul upholds for the church (Rom. 8:4; 13:9; Eph. 6:1–3), is no longer the shape of the Christian life. The result is what the Reformation called antinomianism — the severing of grace from the obligation to obey. Scripture is unambiguous: Jesus himself declared that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and that "until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law" (Matt. 5:17–18). Paul insists that the gospel does not overthrow the law — "on the contrary, we uphold the law" (Rom. 3:31). The law was not abolished at the cross; it was satisfied at the cross, so that its righteous requirements might be fulfilled in us (Rom. 8:4). To say the law is simply gone — rendered obsolete by dispensational change — is to misread both what the cross accomplished and what the Christian life requires."

Reformed theology has never denied that God's one covenant of grace is administered differently across redemptive history. The question is whether those different administrations constitute fundamentally different economies in which God relates to different peoples by different means.

The Reformed response is not "there are no differences between the Testaments" — it is that the differences are administrative, not substantial. One covenant. One people. One Savior. One gospel. Differently administered across redemptive history, but never divided into hermetically sealed compartments where God tests, fails, judges, and resets.

Christology: Dispensationalism Marginalizes Christ's Present

Reign

Because dispensationalist theology makes the church and the nation of Israel two separate peoples of God, Israel still has its own set of earthly promises that haven’t ¹⁰ been fulfilled, which the church will not inherit. In this disjointed view, God has two peoples with two plans of salvation running separately and alongside each other. In dispensationalism, the real focus of scripture is the future earthly kingdom for national Israel. When this is the focus, then Jesus’ reign over all things is not only downplayed, ¹¹ but it is denied.

Paul is clear in Ephesians 1:20-23:

20 that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22 And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. 12

Jesus is the fullness and the head of all things to the church, or the present New Testament people of God. To all who are able to be saved, Jesus the crucified and risen Lord is in authority over all things.

For nearly two thousand years, Jesus has been the high point of the biblical narrative. To some dispensationalists, the high point hasn’t come yet. At least not for Israel.

This view also contradicts one of the clearest doctrines in all of scripture.

The primacy and exclusivity of Jesus as the only way to be saved.

Jesus’ own “exclusive” claims

• John 14:6 — “I am the way… No one comes to the Father except through me.”

• John 10:7–9 — Jesus as “the door”; “If anyone enters by me, he will be saved.”

• John 3:16–18 — salvation tied to believing in the Son; “whoever does not believe is condemned already.”

• John 3:36 — whoever believes has life; whoever rejects the Son does not have life.

• John 8:24 — “unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.”

• John 5:23–24 — rejecting the Son rejects the Father; whoever hears/believes has eternal life.

• John 11:25–26 — life/resurrection bound up in Christ (“I am the resurrection and the life…”).

• John 6:40, 47 — eternal life attached to believing in Christ (“whoever believes has eternal life”).

• John 6:53 — “unless you eat the flesh… and drink the blood… you have no life” (life is only in union with him).

• Matthew 11:27 (cf. Luke 10:22) — only the Son truly knows the Father, and only those to whom the Son reveals him.

• John 17:3 — eternal life defined as knowing the Father and Jesus Christ whom He sent.

Apostolic proclamations in Acts

• Acts 4:12 — “There is salvation in no one else… no other name… by which we must be saved.”

• Acts 10:43 — “everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness… through his name.”

“One mediator / one name / only in Christ” in the Epistles

• 1 Timothy 2:5–6 — “There is one God, and there is one mediator… Christ Jesus.”

• 1 John 5:11–12 — “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son… does not have life.”

• 1 John 2:23 — “No one who denies the Son has the Father.”

• 2 John 9 — “Whoever does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God.”

• Romans 10:9–13 — salvation tied to confessing/believing in Jesus; calling on the Lord.

• Galatians 2:16 (cf. 2:21) — justification is not by law-works but “through faith in Jesus Christ”; if righteousness were through the law, Christ died for no purpose.

• Ephesians 2:18 — “through him we… have access in one Spirit to the Father.”

• Hebrews 7:25 — Jesus “is able to save to the uttermost” those who draw near to God through him.

• Hebrews 10:19–20 — access to God comes through Jesus’ blood and “the new and living way” he opened.

“No other foundation” (exclusive basis)

• 1 Corinthians 3:11 — “No one can lay a foundation other than… Jesus Christ.”

If dispensationalism is true, then it changes something about the God we worship. This God would be one of confusion by pronouncing — quite repetitively — that Jesus is the only way to be saved, and yet that is not true. Either God can lie to us, or God’s promises to one group of people can be given with theological earmuffs, as it were. Can God promise this exclusivity to the church and cover the ears of the Jews and say, “This message really wasn’t meant for you?” Reformed theology says no.

The Wall Rebuilt: Dispensationalism Reverses Ephesians 2

Paul answers the two-peoples question directly in Romans 11 with one of the most vivid images in all of his letters. He pictures the people of God as a single olive tree — one tree, with one root system, one source of nourishment. Some branches, unbelieving Israel, have been broken off (v. 20). Gentile believers have been grafted in (v. 17). But there is one tree. Paul does not plant a second tree for the church alongside the first tree for Israel. He does not describe the church as a parallel program. He says Gentiles have been grafted into the same tree that was already standing — “the root of the olive tree” (v. 18), which

Ephesians 2 is Paul's theological explanation of exactly what happened to that wall between the branches:

¹⁴ For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility ¹⁵ by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, ¹⁶ and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. ¹³

In Ephesians 2:14-16, Paul writes that because of the cross, the “dividing wall of hostility” has been “broken down.” This was in reference to a literal wall in the temple that divided Jews from Gentiles. This was a physical barrier for Gentiles who wanted to experience God’s presence, which resided in the center of the temple in the holy of holies.

To re-introduce the separation between Jew and Gentile is not a minor theological adjustment — it dismantles the very argument Paul spent an entire letter making. The whole of Galatians is Paul's sustained case that the cross of Christ has created one new people, unified not by ethnic identity, religious pedigree, or ritual compliance, but by faith alone in Christ alone. When the false teachers in Galatia demanded that Gentile believers adopt Jewish identity markers — circumcision, food laws, calendar observances — Paul didn't treat it as a secondary matter. He called it desertion (Gal. 1:6). He called it slavery (Gal. 5:1). He called those who preached it accursed (Gal. 1:8-9). The reason the stakes were so high is that the Jew/Gentile distinction wasn't simply a social boundary — it was a theological one. There was a literal dividing wall in the temple that governed access to God by ethnicity, gender, and status. Paul's climactic declaration in Galatians 3:28 — "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female" — names each of those checkpoints and declares them demolished. Not reformed. Not softened. Demolished, in the flesh of Jesus Christ (Eph. 2:14).

What made Peter's behavior at Antioch so serious — serious enough for Paul to oppose him to his face and declare him condemned — is that Peter hadn't changed his theology. He had simply changed his table. He withdrew from eating with Gentile believers when the circumcision party arrived, and in doing so, he preached a different gospel with his feet. He acted as though Christ were sufficient to forgive the Gentiles, but not quite sufficient to make them clean enough to share a meal with. And that subtle, relational distinction was, in Paul's judgment, a reconstruction of the very wall Christ died to tear down. The Heidelberg Catechism states plainly what is at stake (Q&A 30): “To say that Christ is not enough is a most enormous blasphemy, for it then would follow that Jesus.

the old categories — any addition of ethnic, ritual, or cultural prerequisites layered on top of faith in Christ — does not deepen the gospel. It contradicts it. Prosper’s stance on Dispensationalism

Prosper Christian Reformed Church rejects dispensationalism and its theological interpretations. While we wouldn’t call this faulty belief system heretical, we would strongly declare that it is erroneous and an improper way to handle God’s word.

The failure in this theology is that it divorces God from his steadfast love, or covenant love. God’s covenantal love for his people becomes dependent on the time in which he speaks. God’s promises in the Old Testament become irrelevant to the New Testament church. That hermeneutic then dissolves any true need for the work of Christ. One — of many — things that breaks down is if the Old Testament is obsolete, and the New Testament tells us that Christ is our atoning sacrifice. What does atonement mean? Why would we need that?

The list of themes in the Old Testament that — not only shape but also — provide a theological basis for the New Testament is too numerous to cover here. Without the narrative of the Old Testament, the salvation that comes in the New Testament wouldn’t make sense.

Covenant Theology

As reformed believers, we believe that God works consistently through scripture. This belief is grounded in what the writer of Hebrews says in his letter by saying, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” ¹⁴

God works through covenants, or promises, where the collateral is your own life.

As reformed believers, we confess with the Belgic Confession that “this church has existed from the beginning of the world and will last until the end, as appears from the fact that Christ is an eternal King who cannot be without subjects” (Article 27). The church is not a New Testament invention. It is not a parenthesis inserted after Israel's failure. It is the one people of God, present in every age, always gathered around the same Mediator, always saved by the same grace.

The Heidelberg Catechism echoes this when it defines the church as the Son of God gathering, defending, and preserving a community “chosen for eternal life” from “the beginning to the end of the world” (Q&A 54). These are not new ideas developed in

God makes these covenants throughout scripture, all of which lead to the coming of Jesus the messiah. Every covenant leads to a single redemptive point, where the Father saves his people through his Son.

Covenant of Works & Covenant of Grace

Covenant Of Works

There are two major covenants in this grand story we find in the bible. First is the covenant of works. This covenant was given to Adam (and Eve) in the garden (Genesis 2:15-17). In this covenant, if Adam and Eve could obey God’s law, they could:

1. Stay in the garden

2. Have the protection and comfort it offered

3. Live in unity with God

4. They wouldn’t need a mediator

5. Live in harmony with creation

6. Remain in a state of innocence

7. Live with the ability not to sin

This covenant was wholly dependent on Adam and Eve’s ability to obey what God had commanded them.

But we know that happened in Genesis 3.

Covenant Of Grace

Because Adam and Eve sinned and broke the covenant God had instituted in the garden, and sin had corrupted God’s good creation, they couldn’t live in the garden with God as they had before. God then chose to give grace to Adam and Eve — rather than putting them to death right then and there — he allowed them to live. As God did this, he made a promise to them (a new covenant). He promised to redeem them and reverse what they had brought into the world. This is the point where all of redemptive history changes. Previously, humanity could keep the covenant by their obedience, but now they must be saved.

From here on out, God must step in and save his people from their sins. All the covenants lead to this action. God saves sinners by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone — and this has always been true, in every age, for every person God has ever saved.

The Mosaic covenant does not replace the Abrahamic. The New Covenant does not start over. Each is an administration of the same grace, pointing to and finding its fulfillment in the same Mediator. The Westminster Confession puts the Reformed position plainly: "There are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same, under various dispensations.”

Crucially, in covenant theology Christ is the center and goal of all history — not national Israel, not a future millennial kingdom, not a restored temple in Jerusalem. Every covenant pointed to him.

One Consistent God: Immutability

Scriptural Proof of Immutability Against Dispensations

Psalm 102:26–27

26 They will perish, but you will remain;

they will all wear out like a garment.

You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away,

27 but you are the same, and your years have no end.

28 The children of your servants shall dwell secure;

their offspring shall be established before you. ¹⁵

The psalm was written by a people under affliction pressing toward the promise of redemption, and the ground of their comfort is precisely God's immutability: "the church should continue in its stability, because it stands not upon the changeableness of creatures but is built upon the immutable rock of the truth of God, which is as little subject to change as his essence.” ¹⁶

Exodus 3:14 — "I am that I am"

Charnock argues this is the foundational assertion of immutability: "If his essence were mutable, God would not truly be; it could not be truly said by himself, 'I am that I am,' if he were such a thing or being at this time and a different being at another time." This name is not incidental — it is the ground of every covenant promise.

Malachi 3:6 — "For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed."

This is the direct covenant-immutability link in Scripture itself. God's unchangeableness is explicitly given as the reason Israel was not destroyed. The covenant people's preservation hangs not on their faithfulness but on God's immutable nature. Charnock cites this passage as God's own assertion that immutability governs his will and counsel.

Numbers 23:19 — "God is not a man that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent."

Charnock uses this to establish that change in God's will would require either deficiency of wisdom (he didn't foresee the circumstance), deficiency of power (he couldn't execute), or moral instability — all of which are impossible. Therefore his covenant decrees stand.

Hebrews 6:13–18 — The oath of God to Abraham

This is perhaps the most direct biblical statement connecting immutability to covenant. Hebrews 6:17–18 says God "interposed with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement." Charnock calls this explicitly "the immutability of his counsel." This passage is foundational because it reaches back to Abraham and forward to the new covenant church — the same immutable counsel, one continuous covenantal promise.

Hebrews 1:10–12 (citing Psalm 102)

The author of Hebrews applies Psalm 102:25–27 directly to Christ, identifying him as the "You are the same" of the Psalm. This is decisive: the immutability of God is not merely an abstract attribute — it is personally located in the Son. Charnock notes the Christological force of this: Christ's eternal unchangeableness is the anchor of the covenant of grace. Immutability of God's Knowledge

In his book on the attributes of God, Stephen Charnock establishes that God's knowledge is eternal and unchanging: "God knows all things from eternity and therefore perpetually knows them... by one simple knowledge he considers the infinite spaces of past and future." More pointedly: "God does not know creatures because they are, but they are because he knows them... He knew them when they were to be created in the same manner that he knew them after they were created.” ¹⁷

Now apply this to dispensationalism's foundational claim — that the Church Age was not revealed in the Old Testament, that Israel's rejection of the Messiah was not anticipated in God's original plan, and that the Church is a mystery hidden from the ages.

Dispensationalists argue this mystery means the Church was a genuinely new thing — not foreknown as part of the original program but inserted in response to Israel's rejection of Christ. But if God's knowledge is immutable and eternal — if "all his works were known to him from the beginning of the world" (Acts 15:18, which Charnock cites directly) — then there is no moment at which the Church was unknown to God. There was no divine discovery. There was no pivoting to a new program.

The dispensational "parenthesis" doctrine requires that at some point — whether at the cross, at Pentecost, or at Israel's rejection — God shifted to a plan he had not originally purposed. Immutability says this is impossible. His knowledge does not admit succession or surprise.

Immutability and the Pattern of Test-Failure-Reset

Charnock gives the razor that cuts dispensationalism's structural logic: "There can be no reason for any change in the will of God. When men change in their minds, it must be for want of foresight, because they could not foresee all the rubs and bars that might suddenly offer themselves — which if they had foreseen, they would not have taken such measures."

He identifies only three possible causes for divine change in purpose:

1. Want of foresight — God didn't see the failure coming

2. Natural instability — God is morally unstable

3. Want of power — God couldn't execute the original plan

Now run the dispensational pattern against this. Each dispensation ends in failure and a new economy begins. But if God is immutable in knowledge, he foresaw every failure before the dispensation began. If he foresaw it, why structure the dispensation as a test whose outcome was unknown? The answer dispensationalism must give is that God didn't know how humanity would respond — or that he structured the test anyway knowing failure was coming. The first option denies omniscience. The second makes God's entire management of history a theatre of the absurd — testing what he already knew would fail, judging what he had already foreknown, resetting to what he had already purposed.

The Reformed framework has a clean answer: there is no series of failed experiments. There is one immutable decree of election and redemption, administered across different covenantal epochs, each pointing forward to the same end. "The wickedness of former ages altered not his purpose." God was not surprised by Adam's fall, Israel's failure, or the

Conclusion

The dispute over dispensationalism is not ultimately about Israel or the church, the rapture or the millennium, the seven dispensations or the one covenant of grace. It is about God.

The God of dispensationalism describes is a God who tests and watches and waits — who offers a program, absorbs its failure, judges it, and begins again. He is a God whose purposes can be interrupted, whose plans can be parenthesized, whose original intentions were not accomplished until the seventh attempt. He is, in the end, a God who is surprised by what his creatures do.

The God of Scripture is not that God.

He is the God of Psalm 102 — the one who endures while the heavens wear out like a garment, who remains the same while all creation changes, whose years have no end. He is the God of Malachi 3:6, who declared that he does not change, and therefore Israel was not consumed. He is the God of Ephesians 1, who chose his people before the foundation of the world, who works all things according to the counsel of his will, whose eternal purpose in Christ Jesus was never interrupted, never parenthesized, never improvised. He is the God whose eternal decree to send his Son to die was not a contingency response to Israel's failure — it was the immutable, pre-temporal, unstoppable purpose of the triune God, who does not test and reset, but redeems and restores.

This is the God we confess at Prosper CRC. This is the God our confessions describe. This is the God whose one covenant of grace has gathered one people from the beginning to the end of the world — not two peoples on parallel tracks, not a primary program and an inserted parenthesis, but one body, one bride, one church, built on one foundation, saved by one Mediator, secured by one immutable promise.

The God of Scripture does not run experiments. He keeps his word. And because he keeps his word, his people are not consumed.

Bibliography

Charnock, Stephen. The Existence and Attributes of God. Edited by Mark Jones. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022.

Clark, R. Scott. "Can Dispensationalists Be Reformed? (Part 1)." The Heidelblog. October 9, 2023. https://heidelblog.net/2023/10/can-dispensationalists-be-reformed- part-1/.

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Gribben, Crawford. "Darby, Dispensationalism, and the Rise of Evangelical A n t i s e m i t i s m ." T h e G o s p e l C o a l i t i o n . J u l y 1 0 , 2 0 2 4 . h t t p s : // www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/darby-dispensationalism/.

• N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism*. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

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Mangum, R. Todd, and Mark S. Sweetnam. The Scofield Bible: Its History and Impact on the Evangelical Church. Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2012.

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Mohler, Albert. "J.N. Darby, the Father of Dispensationalism … or Maybe There Is More to the Story — A Conversation with Historian Crawford Gribben." Thinking in Public. Podcast. AlbertMohler.com. July 10, 2024. https://albertmohler.com/2024/07/10/crawford- gribben-2/.

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Footnotes

1. Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism, rev. and exp. ed. (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2007), 33.

2. C. I. Scofield, ed., The Scofield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909), 5.

3. "Darby, John Nelson," Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press / Royal Irish Academy), https://www.dib.ie/biography/darby-john-nelson-a2398.

4. Michael Vlach, "Dispensational Theology," The Gospel Coalition, https:// www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/dispensational-theology/.

5. Albert Mohler, "J.N. Darby, the Father of Dispensationalism … or Maybe There Is More to the Story — A Conversation with Historian Crawford Gribben," Thinking in Public (podcast), AlbertMohler.com, July 10, 2024, https://albertmohler.com/2024/07/10/crawford-gribben-2/.

6. C. H. Spurgeon, Commenting and Commentaries (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1876), 28.

7. R. Scott Clark, "Can Dispensationalists Be Reformed? (Part 1)," The Heidelblog, October 9, 2023, https://heidelblog.net/2023/10/can-dispensationalists-be-reformed-part-1/.

8. Matt Marino, "Dispensationalism 101," The Reformed Classicalist, April 29, 2023, https:// www.reformedclassicalist.com/home/what-is-dispensationalism.

9. Varner J. Johns, "Dispensationalism and the Scofield Bible," Ministry: International Journal for Pastors 18, no. 3 (March 1945), https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1945/03/ dispensationalism-and-the-scofield-bible.

10. Rather than the reformed veiw the church and Israel are two names for God’s chosen people.

11. Dispensationalists believe that the return of the Jews to Palestine is one of the prophecies that needs to be fulfilled in order for the Second Coming of Jesus to occur. Rather than favoring the conversion of Jews, dispensationalists view support of Jews as part of Christian doctrine. Dispensationalists cite Genesis 12:3, in which God promised Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse." Christian Zionists interpret this covenant with Abraham to apply to his descendants, the Jews, and thus they believe that supporting Israel, considered as the community of Jewish people and, since 1948, the Jewish state, is imperative to their own blessings as Christians. Gary Burge, a theologian in the Christian Reformed Church, states the Reformed position clearly: Christian Zionism takes the land promises of God in Genesis 12, 15, and 17 and applies them to the modern state of Israel. Therefore, despite Israel's own declared intention of being a secular state, modern Israel still benefits from a 4,000-year-old promise. Reformed theologians believe something decisive happened in Christ. His covenant affected not simply the covenant of Moses, making a new and timeless form of salvation, but also every other Jewish covenant, including Abraham's covenant. Reformed theology does not split Israel and the church; it finds rich continuity between them. Paul did not "become" a Christian; he realized the deepest meaning of his Jewishness when he chose to follow Jesus.

12. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2025), Eph 1:20–23.

13. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2025), Eph 2:14–16.

14. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2025), Heb 13:8.

15. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2025), Ps 102:26–28.

16. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. Mark Jones (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 6.

17. Stephen Charnock, 24. 17