|
This Is Appendix 72 From The Companion Bible. From what has been said in Appendix 63. ix
and Appendix
71, it will be seen that there are different Dispensations, or
different characters of Divine administration, suited to the different
times in which such administrations are exercised.
The object of this appendix is to show that, in the
Old Testament, while this present Dispensation was kept secret (compare
Matthew 13: There are certain scriptures which we cannot
understand unless we use this key. Like the angels and prophets
( Whether it be a "theory", let Scripture
decide, and the Savior Himself teach.
In the synagogue at Nazareth "He found the
place where it was written:
And HE CLOSED THE BOOK, and He gave it again to the minister, and sat down" (Luke 4:18-20). Why this mysterious action? Why not continue the reading? Because He could not; for the words which immediately follow refer to the end of the present Dispensation of Grace, and speak of the coming Dispensation of Judgment. Had he continued to read Isaiah 61:1, 2, the next line would have been
But this part of the prophecy was not then to be
fulfilled.
As far as He had read, He could truly say,
"This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears." But He
could not have said "This day is this Scripture fulfilled",
had He not "closed the book", but gone on to read the next
line.
And yet, in the Authorized Version and all other
versions, there is only a comma between the two lines, while there is a
period of nearly 2,000 years between the two statements. (In the
Manuscripts there is no mark of punctuation at all.)
This will show the importance of
"searching" and "looking into" the
"manner of time" of which the prophets wrote.
Other examples may be found in
|