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In the Scriptures there is a clear distinction between different dispensations, and the line of these dispensations ties together the entire Bible. According to the Bible, there are four dispensations; according to some Bible scholars, there are seven dispensations. The former emphasizes the content of the dispensations, and the latter emphasizes God’s seven arrangements with regard to man. Now let us consider the line of dispensations according to these two ways of division.
Romans 5:14 says, “Death reigned from Adam until Moses.” From Adam to Moses men fell under the authority of sin. In this dispensation men were under sin and ruled by death, so death reigned through sin. The record in Genesis 5 says that after Adam was created, he lived for a number of years and died; he begot a son named Seth, who also lived for a number of years and died. The entire record of chapter 5 is filled with these words—lived, begot, and died. Why do people die? People die because of sin. So from Adam to Moses, even though there was no law, men lived in sin and were under death.
John 1:17 says, “The law was given through Moses; grace and reality came through Jesus Christ.” In the period of time from Moses to the first coming of Christ, the law was present in addition to sin and death. When the law was given, it confirmed the situation of man being under sin and death; this period is called the dispensation of the law.
Hebrews 9:26 and 28 tell us that in the first coming of Christ man’s sin was put away, and in His second coming, man’s salvation will be fully consummated. Between these two comings there is the dispensation of grace, which is the dispensation of the church.
In His death related to His first coming, the Lord Jesus satisfied the righteous requirements of the law and also abolished the requirement to live by the law of the commandments in ordinances (Rom. 8:3; Eph. 2:15). He bore our sins, that is, dealt with our sins, and nullified death. Thus He opened the door of grace, bringing in grace that grace could reign. Now anyone who receives Him is immediately released from the law, from sin, and from death to enter into grace.
The period of one thousand years—from the Lord’s second coming, the beginning of the millennial kingdom, until the end of the millennial kingdom—is the dispensation of righteousness. In this dispensation righteousness will reign as king; Christ will judge all the people of the earth with righteousness.
As soon as this dispensation is over, the new heaven and new earth, eternity without ending, will begin. This is recorded in Revelation 21 and 22. Before the first dispensation there was eternity, and after the fourth dispensation there will be eternity. First, there was eternity without beginning, and last, there will be eternity without ending. Between these two eternities there is a gap called time, and time is subdivided into four dispensations. This is how the dispensations are divided according to the Bible.
Dispensations occupy a significant position in the Bible. According to the Bible, there are four dispensations. However, many Bible scholars point to seven dispensations, according to the unfolding of God’s dispensational arrangements with man in the Bible. This division into seven dispensations does not emphasize the content of the dispensations but rather God’s seven arrangements with regard to man.
These seven dispensations are seven arrangements. In English dispensation can also be translated as “arrangement” or “economy.” The seven dispensations are God’s seven economies, operations, arrangements, managements, or administrations. Therefore, the seven dispensations emphasize God’s seven different operations, arrangements, managements, and administrations in His dealings with man.
The dispensation of innocence covers the time from Adam’s creation until the time he was driven out of the garden, a period of no more than one hundred and thirty years. Adam begot Seth when he was one hundred and thirty years old, and Seth was born outside of the garden of Eden. Therefore, the dispensation of innocence lasted only a very short time. In this dispensation, or in this arrangement of God, man lived directly before God and was directly ruled by God. Therefore, this dispensation can also be called the dispensation of divine government.
In this dispensation man did not need to wear clothes because he did not have sin or even a consciousness of sin. Without the shame of sin there was no need to wear clothes. In this dispensation there was no need for man to be justified because he was without sin. After man was created by God, he met all of God’s requirements and was “very good” in the eyes of God (Gen. 1:31). God gave man herbs and fruit, the plant food, as nourishment to sustain his life. At this point God did not need to tell man to eat meat by slaughtering animals and shedding their blood, because man had not yet sinned. Therefore, there was no need for the shedding of blood. Man lived directly before God. This is an arrangement by God, so this is a dispensation.
The dispensation of conscience was from the time of Adam’s fall to the destruction of the earth by the flood. According to the record in the Bible, the dispensation of conscience and the dispensation of innocence lasted 1,656 years. It is called the dispensation of conscience because once man ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the function of the conscience in knowing good and evil and right and wrong became especially prominent. Since man could know good and evil, he had to be responsible to his own conscience and live before his own conscience.
At this point, due to the fall, man lived before God indirectly instead of being ruled by God directly. In the dispensation of conscience, God governed man through the conscience. In this dispensation man was under his own ruling, so this period of time can also be called the dispensation of self-government.
The dispensation of human government was from the time Noah left the ark to the time that the city of Babel and the tower of Babel were built, comprising a total of four hundred and twenty-seven years. At this time man fell a step further into the dispensation of human government. God gave man the authority to rule over others. Genesis 9:6 says, “Whoever sheds man’s blood, / By man shall his blood be shed.” This means that man should not kill others or else others would rule over him and punish him with death. From the time Noah left the ark, God gave man the authority to rule over others. Ever since then, man has fallen from self-government to human government.
Formerly, man lived directly before God and under God’s government; but due to man’s first fall, he fell from living before God to living before his conscience, falling under the ruling of the conscience. After the flood destroyed the world, man went through a second fall, falling from the conscience to human government; that is, man could be governed by others. At this point man fell to the uttermost, so God gave up on the descendants of Adam and called Abraham to be the beginning of a new race.
Everyone knows that the only reason that the world today still has some degree of order and is not overly chaotic is because of human government. If we take away police stations, policemen, and courts of law, cities would become totally lawless. The world relies on human government because the world is fallen. But Christians are different. After we have been saved, we should at least come back from the rule of man to the rule of the conscience. We do not need the police to tell us that we should not steal; our conscience should tell us that we should not do such things. Once we are saved and our conscience is activated, we should go from human government to self-government. If we follow the feeling of our conscience to deal with every matter that is inappropriate or that it feels uneasy about, we would increasingly go from our conscience to God and be governed directly by God in our spirit. Newly saved Christians go from human government to self-government; and when they have had some growth in the spirit, they go from self-government to divine government, living directly before God.
The path of the fall of Adam’s descendants is from divine government to self-government and then to human government. At this point God had to have a new start; He turned from the Adamic race to the Abrahamic race. God called Abraham out of Babel, where mankind had fallen to the uttermost. This was the beginning of the fourth dispensation.
This dispensation covers the time from the calling of Abraham to the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, a period of four hundred and thirty years. After God called Abraham out of Babel, He promised him that all the families on the earth would be blessed through his seed, Christ. God promised to deal with man by grace in Christ. However, the Israelites were unwilling to draw near to this promise and to receive this grace because they did not know themselves, including their own failures and weaknesses. Instead, they presumptuously thought that they could justify themselves before God. Thus, the dispensation of promise was temporarily put aside.
Because the children of Israel, Abraham’s descendants, did not know themselves adequately and wanted to justify themselves before God rather than drawing near to His promised grace, God was forced to put aside the promise temporarily. The law came to expose and prove man’s weakness and corruption so that he would be convinced of his condition and draw near to grace. This period of about one thousand five hundred years, from the giving of the law at Mount Sinai to the coming of John the Baptist to preach the gospel, is called the dispensation of the law. Concerning this, please refer to Luke 16:16.
The dispensation of grace is from the coming of John to preach the gospel to the second coming of Christ. As soon as John came to preach the word, the dispensation of the law ended, and the dispensation of the gospel, or the dispensation of grace, began. This is clearly referred to in Mark 1:1-5. Out of necessity and against His original intention, God dealt with man through law; God’s original intention was to deal with man through grace. Galatians 3:17 tells us that the promise of grace was not annulled by the law, which came later. Romans 3:19-20 also says that God used the law temporarily so that man would fall under His judgment until His Son would come in the flesh to fulfill His promise of grace. His Son came as the real seed of Abraham to fulfill the promise of grace given to Abraham. In this way God was able to deal with man through grace, not just according to the law, so that man could live under grace. With the termination of the law, grace can reign; the dispensation of grace is a continuation of the promise God gave Abraham.
The dispensation of the kingdom extends from the time of Christ’s second coming to the time of Satan’s being cast into the lake of fire, covering a period of a thousand years (Rev. 20:10). For one thousand years Christ and all the overcoming believers will reign together over the future world. At the end of one thousand years, as 1 Corinthians 15 says, Satan will be cast into the lake of fire, the Lord will deliver up the kingdom to His God and Father, and the new heaven and the new earth in eternity will begin (v. 24).
These seven dispensations are seven arrangements. In the first dispensation man did not need to wear clothes, nor did he need to eat meat. In the second dispensation man needed clothes. In the third dispensation man needed to slaughter animals, shed blood, and eat meat. In the fourth dispensation God dealt with man through the promise of grace. In the fifth dispensation God dealt with man through the strict and righteous law because man did not know himself. In the sixth dispensation God put aside the law and dealt with man through grace in Christ because His Son came to fulfill His promised grace. When the seventh dispensation, the kingdom, comes, He will reign with righteousness, exercising His authority on the earth. These are His arrangements, His management. The seven dispensations are God’s seven arrangements, His seven managements.
