Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher.

This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith,

ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ.

You don't have to settle for water down Christian teaching, and if you're ready to go deeper,

God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.

Welcome back, friends. All right, this episode is going to be a bit of a doozy, but that's

nothing new if you've been following my Instagram for the last couple of weeks, in which I talked

about dispensationalism, how it came to be, and how it impacts our view of the world today as

Western Christians. Now, if you're like me, you probably know a few of the pieces of dispensationalism,

but the word itself is really vague and confusing because we don't use the word dispensation

in conversation as a general rule. So the meaning of the term is usually lost on us, and once I

start explaining it, you'll most likely recognize exactly what I'm talking about, but the actual term

is foreign to a lot of people. And so we're going to go on a little history lesson and then a little

definition journey to talk about what dispensationalism is and how it impacts Christians today,

especially in their view of the end times. Now, like I said, I talked about this on Instagram,

I have an entire dispensationalism highlight, including my whiteboard, which is my favorite place,

spend my time, where I've sketched out some of the history and a timeline of this view and kind

of where it came from. But if you need a visual, that could be a good resource. Otherwise,

continue listening. So a dispensation is an era of time, and it's not a new idea to divide the

Bible up into eras of time or ways that God deals with man, but dispensationalism as we see it in

church history was, was an is a rather new doctrine. It began in the 1830s with John Nelson Derby.

And so though the idea of dividing the Bible timeline into different pieces or eras isn't new,

...