Join Dr. Darrell Bock as he explains the dispensational understanding of Scripture in this short course. Dr. Bock describes the core biblical themes in dispensationalism, corrects some common misunderstandings, and demonstrates how dispensationalism interprets God’s plan for salvation history. Whether you consider yourself a dispensationalist or not, this course will encourage you to think critically about what the Bible teaches.
“The dispensations—which basically represent a stewardship; that’s what the word actually means—talk about the different ways in which God has managed the program of salvation through time. The dispensations come alongside the covenants, which dispensationalists also embrace, to explain the way the covenants interact with each other as we move through the plan of God, both within how it’s revealed in Scripture and then in its outworking through time. So, dispensationalism is a way of making sense and organizing what’s going on in the Bible alongside the covenant program of God. And the term itself actually comes from the Latin. It’s the Latin word dispensatio that comes from the Greek word oikonomia, which translates the idea of a stewardship, an administration, or an arrangement.” (source)
“We now come to the new covenant of Jer 31:31–35. The new covenant is one of three covenants of promise that are in the Bible. The first covenant of promise is the Abrahamic covenant, the second covenant of promise is the Davidic covenant, and this covenant, the third one, represents a setting up of a dispensational shift.” (source)
“So the Mosaic covenant becomes an exception among the covenants that we see in the Old Testament. The Abrahamic covenant, the Davidic covenant, and the new covenant are parts of covenants of promise—what God commits Himself to do. The Mosaic covenant is primarily a covenant of maintenance, of stipulations, that talk about how the people are going to live in the nation, and it becomes how they’re going to live in the nation for a time because the new covenant is going to come to replace it.” (source)