Fifth Dispensation: The Age of Law
This Age has also been called the Mosaic Covenant. This legal dispensation began at Sinai (Ex. 20) and ended at Calvary. Moses was the steward, but Joshua, Samuel and David were also prominent characters during this time. “And Moses verily was faithful in all his house, as a servant, for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken after” – Heb. 3:5.
God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt was on the ground of His covenant of Promise He made with Abraham in pure grace. “And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob” – Ex. 2:24. But at Sinai Jehovah’s relationship to Israel was placed upon a different bases.
God bid Moses to say unto His people, “Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” – Ex. 19:5. The Lord was not referring to His covenant with Abraham, because there were no conditions attached to it. God proposed to make another covenant, to which there should be two parties – Himself and Israel: a covenant of works that Israel must keep if they were to enjoy the conditional blessings attached to it.
In response the people of Israel unanimously and boastfully said, “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do” – Ex. 19:8. So God made a Covenant with Israel. Moses was on the mount with the Lord forty days and forty nights. He wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments – Ex. 34:27-28. It was man’s responsibility to keep all of the holy law of God. Man miserably failed. In fact they had broken the commandments before Moses could even come down off Mount Sinai with them.
As Moses “came nigh unto the camp…he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses, anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount” – Ex. 32:19. The tables of stone lay broken on the ground, symbolic of the people breaking God’s Law.
Why couldn’t man keep the Law of God? “The law is holy and the commandment holy, and just, and good…For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin” – Rom. 7:12,14. God was instructing man that he is a sinner and unable to keep His holy law.
Then why did God give man the law he could not keep? “What things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God…for by the law is the knowledge of sin” – Rom. 3:19,20. “Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound” – Rom. 5:20. “What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law; for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet” – Rom. 7:7. “Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made…the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith” (not by the works of the law) – Gal. 3:19,24.
The law was never given to men or to Israel as a means of salvation, in fact it put the sentence of death upon us. “For the wages of sin is death” – Rom. 6:23. “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh” – Rom. 8:3. “God who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ…For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God. Not of works, lest any man should boast” – Eph. 2:4,5,8,9.
This dispensation ended with judgment upon the Lord Jesus Christ. God poured out His wrath upon His Son hanging upon the Cross bearing our sin. Israel did suffer the judgment of being put out of the land of promise and the land was judged also.
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