As Winston Churchill said, men occasionally stumble on the truth but then pick themselves up and carry on as though nothing had happened. And that’s also the case with the sweeping changes God makes from age to age in his dealings with mankind. A.D. 62 is an example.

History records this year as the one when the Roman army commanded by Consul Lucius Caesennius Paetus was heavily defeated by the Parthian King Tiridates 1 in Armenia, when Emperor Nero divorced then killed his wife Claudia Octavia, marrying Poppaea Sabina instead; when an earthquake devastated Pompeii and Herculaneum as a prelude to the later Vesuvius eruption, and when James the Just, brother of Jesus, was martyred in Jerusalem.

But there is not a word outside of the Bible about the cosmic shattering change God Almighty, the Lord Jesus Christ, made in this year. This epoch upending event was studiously ignored not only by the world and its leaders but also by almost all those who confessed themselves Christians and fearers of God. And it is still met with indifference, if not loathing today. Arguably the most cutting change God has made in 2,000 years or more it is still routinely dismissed as unimportant by theologians and church leaders.

So, let me say for the record that in A.D. 62 the Lord Jesus Christ, speaking through the Apostle Paul, brought to an end the miraculous Acts period and postponed the Church of God’s hope, as declared in Acts 3:21, of a restoration of all things spoken by all the prophets since the world began. He also halted some 2,000 years of Israelite history. Acts 28: 25-28 reports how this ending took place:

And when they (the Jews in Rome) agreed not among themselves, they departed after that Paul had spoken one word, Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias as the Prophet unto our father, saying, Go unto this people and say, Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand: and seeing ye shall see and not perceive.

For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing; and their eyes have they closed: lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. Be it known therefore unto you that the salvation of God is sent to the Gentiles and they will hear it.

This was a judicial judgement that deemed the nation Israel, blind, deaf and impervious to God’s pleading that they repent and turn back to Him. The comparatively few Jews that had believed on Jesus in the Acts period and had themselves likely done many of the many miracles that affirmed his resurrection were now stunned and confused. The signs, wonders, miracles, healing and functioning gifts of the Holy Spirit which had been commonplace suddenly ceased and for perhaps two years nothing much took their place.

And, if words mean anything, then Israel as a vehicle of God’s salvation had now been set aside. No longer would Gentiles converted to belief in Jesus be “grafted” into Israel’s “olive tree”, no longer would salvation be only by covenants, either Old or New.

Paul had warned of this happening  in his letter to the Romans written during the Acts period, saying that blindness had now happened in part to Israel  ‘until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in’ (Romans 11:25)  And in verses 20, 15 and 19 he speaks of all but a few chosen Israelites being cast off, broken off and fallen. Only a minute number would be saved by grace. Paul even wrote a letter direct to the Jewish nation, warning them as “Hebrews” that their judgement was at hand. Likening Israel to the “earth which drinketh in the rain”, he wrote:

But that (the earth) which beareth thorns and briars is rejected and is nigh unto cursing: whose end is to be burned (Hebrews 6:8),

Another warning came in Hebrews 10:26-31:

For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins. But a certain fearful looking for of judgement, and fiery indignation which shall devour the adversaries.

He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses. Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden underfoot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith He was sanctified, an unholy thing and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?

For we know Him that hath said, vengeance belongeth to Me, and I will recompense, saith the Lord. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

By A.D. 62 it seems God’s long-suffering patience with the recalcitrant nation Israel had run out. By then it was nearly 40 years since Jesus had first walked among Jewry as their Messiah. They had rejected Him as their God, crucified Him, then spurned the forgiveness he offered after his resurrection.

Therefore, He sent the Apostle Paul, a Hebrew himself, to solemnly tell the Jewish leaders in Rome that the message and means of proclaiming salvation had now been taken from them and sent to the Gentiles “who will hear it”

And when they agreed not among themselves, they departed, after that Paul had spoken one word, Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet unto out fathers, saying: Go unto this people and say, Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand, and seeing ye shall see and not perceive.

For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears , and understand with their heart, and should be converted and I should heal them. Be it known therefore unto you that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles and they will hear it (Acts 28:23-28).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Not only was Israel’s mission to tell the world of God’s salvation withdrawn; Israel’s future hope was also postponed. Paul had come to the Jews in Rome, saying it “was for the hope of Israel I am bound with this chain” (Acts 28:20). That hope, proclaimed by the Old Testament prophets, was that on the day of resurrection a righteous Israel would be raised to rule the world under their Messiah now revealed as Jesus. (Later, i.e. after A.D. 62, Paul would declare himself “the prisoner of Jesus Christ”, and thus evidently no longer bound by Israel’s chain (Ephesian 3:1)).

Thus, we learn that in A.D. 62 Israel’s hope was put in abeyance and remains so to this today. What’s more, within a few years (A.D. 70) the Lord Jesus’s prophecy (Matthew 24:2ff) that Jerusalem would be conquered and devastated, many Jews slain and the temple destroyed came to pass.

But God had not abandoned the Jewish people who truly trusted Him as Messiah. As Romans 11:2 declares, “God has not cast away his people which He foreknew”. So, a remnant was saved by grace.

And a new hope for all people, not just Jews or Hebrews, was proclaimed through the sudden intervention of the “dispensation of the grace of God and the mystery” (Ephesians 3:1-6) which was specifically addressed to Gentiles. Thus, some two to three years after A.D. 62 the Apostle Paul declares that his mission was (and still is for those who read their Bible) to:

“…make all men see what is the fellowship (dispensation) which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Christ Jesus.

 Thankfully, in this new dispensation, a new hope for all men was proclaimed as part of this mystery. Colossians 1:25-27 reveals that:

… I (Paul) am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God, which is given to me for you (Gentiles), to fulfil the word of God: even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations but now is made manifest to his saints. To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

So great was this watershed change in God’s dealings with mankind that the Lord commanded the Apostle Paul to write his last seven epistles to the Acts period faithful believers in Ephesus and Colossae to bring them into the new, latest truth declared by God.

As Ephesians 4:11 says the ascended, glorified Lord Jesus (temporarily) “gave some apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists and some pastors and teachers” for the “perfecting of the saint … for the work of the ministry” to build up the Body of Christ over which He is Head.

Thus now, every faithful believer (not just a hierarchy of specially endowed leaders) is to minister the present truth of grace and the mystery to every other believer. Consequently, today there is no longer the hierarchy of apostle, prophet, pastor, teacher, etc, since these ascension gift ministries of Ephesians 4:11 lasted only for the lifetimes of the men so appointed. Today every believer of present truth is given the authority to minister the full grace of Christ Himself to whoever needs it (Ephesians 4:7). So, for us today Jesus Himself is our teacher (Ephesians 4:20-21) of the truth revealed to Paul and recorded in his last seven epistles.

The purpose of all this was (and is) to bring all believers in Christ to “the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. Put more simply that is until both individually and collectively as “his Body”, those called into this truth become one with Him in his personal Body because He is also fully revealed in each one of them.

Sadly, back in A.D. 62 few Acts period saints were willing to embrace this new way of sanctification as is shown by Paul lamenting to Timothy, “This thou knowest, that all those that be in Asia (where Paul had planted most churches) be turned away from me, of whom are Phygellus and Hermogones” (2 Timothy 1:15).

And even today only a small minority of Christians acknowledge the dispensational truth that in Acts 28 God took the salvation message from Israel and gave it to we Gentiles as the assurance of full salvation completed by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8-9).

John Dudley Aldworth

Email: johndaldworth42@gmail.com

Website: dayofchristmnistries.com