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dispensationalism

Guest Blog: The Crux (2 of 5)

Recently, blogger Marv (a.k.a asphaleia) posted an excellent series of discussion regarding his view of the redemptive plan of God. It winds up being a progressive dispensational model but was interesting enough to house here on the Bible Archive for consumption by friends and family. This is post 2 of 5.

Phase One.
Phase One sets the stage for the rest of the plan and defines the background, the world that God loved and sent His Son to redeem (John 3:16). It includes the events of Genesis 1-11, chapters in which God deals with mankind as a whole. Three crises occur, each a major turning point, after which nothing can be the same as before. Each is a failure, a judgment, but also a step in the redemptive plan of God.

1. The Fall (Adam, black dot). Lavished by God with with good gifts and entrusted with rule over the earth, our first parents do what creation itself dared not do, disobey the voice of God. The consequence of their disobedience was death, disconnection of the human race from God, and condemnation of the race. This death, spiritual death immediately, physical death inevitably is a curse and an enemy. However the redemptive aspects are:

a. Barring access to the Tree of Life prevents a true living hell of ongoing physical longevity in a state of spiritual death.
b. Death itself will become an instrument of our redemption, through the cross of Christ.

2. The Flood (Noah, blue dot). That it is at the same time a rescue and a judgment is clear from 2 Peter 2:5,9. Redemptive aspects include:

a. A demonstration of God’s absolute hatred of sin.
b. Evidently, from Gen. 6:1-4, purging humanity of an admixture of the non-human.
c. The eight preserved form the basis for the nations to come.

3. Babel (Prism). Human depravity was showing itself in pride, arrogance, disdain for God, and foolish dependance on technology and political power. God’s plan here introduces frustration into man’s self-sufficiency. At this point as well God separates, as he did in Genesis 1 between light and darkness, between land and sea. By confusing languages He divides man into nations, the nations that are described in chapter 10.

The chart pictures this division as a prism dividing an initial ray of mixed (white) light into constituent colors. The red ray running down the center will trace the line that through Shem, Eber, and Abraham will become the nation of Israel, the Nation, and lead to Christ. (This will be developed in the next post.) The other rays symbolize the various nations of the earth, the Gentiles. They run along the background during the whole of the Old Testament but their importance is never really forgotten, as the New Testament makes clear.

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