How firm of foundation, ye saints of the Lord is laid for your faith in his excellent word.

Welcome to Through the Bible. Before Dr. J. Vernon and McGee leads us through Hebrews 4, here's a special introduction.

I introduced you to a word last time and tempted to define it. It is the word dispensation.

It's a word that's hated in some quarters by the church. I graduated from a seminary, my denominational seminary,

where the Schofield Bible was forbidden and it was ridiculed. May I say to you that the word

dispensation is a very important word, and therefore it is a word that we need to know about,

because it actually, in one sense, is a key to the entire word of God. I'd like today to,

let's see how the Bible uses the word dispensation. Now, you find in Hebrews the first chapter. It says,

God who at sundry times and in diverse manners spoken times past under the fathers by the prophets

hath in these last days spoken unto us by his son whom he hath appointed heir of all things by whom also

he made the whirles. And that word whorls might give you a wrong impression if you think that

the writer there was referring to the planets. The word that he uses is the word ion. And it's a word

that actually means ages. You put one age down and another age down and another age down.

And it is a period of time in which God actually deals with a human race in a certain way, and then he changes that,

deals with it in a little different way. And I'm sure that you recognize that Adam in the

Garden of Eden was a little different arrangement than he was when he got outside the Garden

of Eden. God changed things, you things you see now that word is used

not only here in Hebrews but you'll find it used back in Matthew and Matthew is a gospel where

you need to be very careful in the way words are used and here we are told in the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew,

verse 38, the field is the world. Now the field is the world. What does he mean? Well, he uses the word

cosmos. I think that he means this universe we live in today, this little planet we call Earth,

covered with humanity.

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