(which was not disclosed to people in former generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit),

Paul is saying we are in a new timeline. There is a before and after. Christ was the line in the sand.

Jesus said the law and the prophets were in force until John; since then, the good news of the kingdom of God has been proclaimed, and everyone is urged to enter it (Luke 16:16).

Before, it had been about the law, about Moses, about a temple, about approaching God through the blood of animals; it is God telling Israel He is their God.

Now, on the other side of the line, we have the declaration of the kingdom of God, which knows no human geography and which reaches inside of us.

Jesus said He and the Father will come and take up residence with us (John 14:23), and He will pour out His Spirit on all people (Acts 2:17). Simply put, it is the breaking of all barriers.

And then Paul is talking about the mystery of Christ (v4), about the people reading and understanding his insight; this is about something to know, not so much about what to do.

The writer of the book of Hebrews wrote that in time past God spoke to the fathers through the prophets, but He has spoken to us in His Son (Hebrews 1:1-3).

There is again that communication of a line. It's still the same God, but with a new approach, a new understanding of who He is and how He is.

God comes to the foreground; He comes into sharp focus as He is revealed in the Son. In a way, we see His face (full of grace and truth [John 1:14]), and that changes everything, since God hid himself because of man's sin, and angels mediated between man and God (Galatians 3:19; Hebrews 2:2).

And looking at it another way, it is not God hiding; it is us with a cover on our eyes.

God gave Israel a land and demands obedience in return; now He demands obedience, and He promises us a heavenly kingdom.

So we live by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7) and rejoice in the hope of the glory of God (Romans 5:2). And the writer of the book of Hebrews says that here we have no lasting city, but we wait for the city that is to come (Hebrews 13:14).

“For God has consigned all people to disobedience so that he may show mercy to them all” (Romans 11:32), and “the law had become our guardian until Christ” (Galatians 3:24); those phrases show the same line.

And when it comes to righteousness, Paul said Israel had zeal, but not in line with the truth; they did not submit to God’s righteousness as a gift (Romans 10:2–3).

He said that when Moses is read, there is blindness, but when we turn to the Lord, the veil is removed. That still communicates the new age upon us.

Jesus himself mentioned the new covenant in His blood (Luke 22:20), as opposed to the old covenant in the blood of bulls and goats (Hebrews 9:13; 10:4).

He said his blood is shed for us, and the writer of the book of Hebrews repeatedly tells us that a line has been crossed in what is possible in the relationship between man and God.

The challenge for preachers who have the 66 books of the Bible to preach from is to do what Paul said: “teaching the message of truth accurately” (2 Timothy 2:15), to draw the right line and not mix things up.

While it is one God, it is a different dispensation, and I am talking about a small-d dispensation, NOT dividing the Bible into seven dispensations, i.e., Innocence, Conscience, Human Government, Promise, Law, Grace, Kingdom.

I am a small-d dispensationalist, with Christ as the only dividing line. That is the grid we see in the Scriptures: the New Testament versus the Old. Paul said the old things were only a shadow, but the reality is Christ (Colossians 2:17). In another place, we learn that we are not under law but under grace (Romans 6:14).

There was grace in the time of the law (the grace was because of the law), and now there is law in the time of grace (the law is because of the grace), since we see the need to obey Christ and follow him.

But to blend everything together means we cannot speak with conviction that now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6:2). The point is: we have crossed a line and entered into a new dispensation, so to speak.

Even though there was a “gathering” in the wilderness, that was not the true church with Christ as the head. Since Christ has not died and then raised up to then be the head. And it is not one church with the old and the new together. That is mixing up categories and not accurately communicating the truth, in my opinion.

Maybe in an attempt to repudiate the capital-C Catholic Church during Martin Luther’s Reformation, we want to erase the biblical distinction between the old and the new, so to speak. In so doing, we blur the lines in other areas and lose the edge of our conviction. We make a lie of the fact that God said He will do a new thing (Isaiah 43:19).

We make a lie of the watershed revelation through Paul.

We say the old is not so old and the new is not so new. With the blurring of the distinction, no wonder we breed atheism by the dozen in nations with reformed theology, and in a place where there is a small-d dispensationalism, we have the flourishing of Christianity, in my estimation. No conviction means no depth of evangelistic fervor. Teaching have consequences (Matthew 16:6, 12).

Paul was speaking dispensational-ly - small-d.

But with the blurring of distinctions, there can be no conviction is what I am saying, and there is an emphasis on the kingdom as being of this world, since we see too much of the old in the new. We gain the world in scientific advancement and prosperity, but lose our souls in the generation coming after becoming atheists. We don’t have to gain one and lose the other.

Again, without conviction, there would be no fervor for evangelism. If Jesus thought that the kingdom of God had always been there, how could He speak with conviction that repentance was necessary because the kingdom of heaven is near (Matthew 4:17)?

If there is nothing fundamentally different between this time and that time, what is the point of anything?

I am critiquing an aspect of reformed theology that blurs distinctions, which is what I am doing. But I am not calling for hard-d dispensationalism either.

The people of old see whatever came before the law not as several dispensations, but as background to the law, and there will be a time when everything is restored, which we definitely are not inside right now.

That is Jesus being a small-d dispensationalist.

It is clear that Moses was not trying to flesh out some dispensations before the law, but rather to build a storyline leading us to the formation of the nation of Israel.

And Israel, we would later find out, was the preparation of a body for the emergence of the Christ (Hebrews 10:5). And there is also the formation of the body of Christ from that.

There is a Christo-centric necessity to my understanding of scriptures. Christ is the through line for all times. He does not just have a segment of time called grace. Everything was leading to Him, and He is the source of all things (Romans 11:36).

And the book of John also tells us about another before-and-after: “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), and “the Word became flesh and took up residence among us” (John 1:14)—and the Word has not gone back to not being flesh.⁠

When Paul used the word “now” (in the focus verse), he was talking about a door swing. Like a door closed and now opened. And what came pouring out was the Holy Spirit on all flesh (Acts 2:1-4). Mark that down as another line: in Genesis, God said, “My spirit will not remain with mankind indefinitely” (Genesis 6:3), and Jesus said the Father will give us another Advocate to be with us forever (John 14:16).

Small-d dispensation is so obvious in the scriptures that there has to be a strong, compelling reason for people to expend their mental energy to blur it out with the idea of continuity. And they blur the image of the son in the same stroke. Maybe they want to blur out the hold of the capital-C Catholic Church. But we do not have to fight error with error.

Some might say, does that not result in saying Israel becomes the church and the church is now Israel? My answer is, the church can be Israel in a figure, but Israel is still Israel.

I understand the instinct to reject all ideas of dispensations when we see the results of bad exegetics. But it seems plain that there is a dispensation defined by the coming of the Son of God, and then Paul said, "Hey, see holy apostles and prophets have divine disclosures!”