How can Christianity advance? Is it by getting more people saved? Or merging fast dwindling church congregations? Does watering down of scriptural truth to accommodate worldly values help?  

No. But would the sharp edge of a knife rightly applied to dividing the word of God open up truth that would really make a difference? Perhaps we should re-read 2 Timothy 2:15 (in the King James Version) to make sure it really does say to cut a furrow through the Bible.

Actually, there is a proven path that’s on the cutting edge. It leads to life through the pursuit of truth and it’s definitely a progressive one. Jesus said so (Matt. 7:13-14). But it is narrow and “few there be that find it”. Jesus also said that He Himself is “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6).

And there you have it. The way forward is through truth, but not truth bought second-hand. It must come first hand from the pages of the Bible as revealed by the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him” (Eph. 1:16).

So, as grace-saved believers, we are challenged to climb the mountain of biblical truth. Our journey begins with the “gospel of Christ” that is “the power of God unto salvation for everyone that believeth” (Rom. 1:16-17) and in which is the “righteousness of God, revealed from faith to faith”.

But it doesn’t stop there, although many Christians do. The higher slopes of the mountain beckon us to climb upward to experience the amazing blessings of grace in this, the current “dispensation of the grace of God” (Eph. 3:1-4). But we have to stop trying to reactivate the now suspended supernatural powers of the Acts period, which was a “foretaste” of the kingdom of God, in order to do so.

Higher still we begin to grasp the importance of the “mystery”, a secret God long hid but has now revealed in the Apostle Paul’s prison epistles. And, if we press on, we discover new truth about the “kingdom of his dear Son” (Col. 1:13) and learn that taking over government of the world is the very next event on God’s agenda for drawing mankind back to Himself.

But before we start to climb we must learn what it is to be both a “Bible believer” and a “right divider”.  To be the first we must hold that “all scripture is given by the inspiration of God” (2 Tim. 3:16) and is able to cause the man of God to be “perfect”.

To be a “right divider” we must understand what the Lord and his apostles have taught about the different dispensations and the need not to muddle important truth from one with different doctrine from another. Of course, some truths continue throughout time; others don’t.

You see, dedicated followers of the Lord don’t stop with just being saved. They go on to “live by faith”, learning and believing greater and higher truths from the word of God. Because “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God” (Rom. 10:17).

What’s more there are specific truths God quickens individually to each believer to increase their faith and overcome their difficulties, just as there are truths the Lord quickens to believers in each specific age and generation. Of course, all such higher truth is found in scripture but, sadly, the quest to find it has been all but abandoned by the organised churches of today.

Proof of that is found by contrasting the huge impact Christian truth had on the world in the first two to three centuries after Christ’s ascension with the disinterest and hostility toward it seen around the globe today.

Can it be that most Christians have missed what the Lord Jesus has been saying for the last 2,000 years? That they have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the advanced truth He has been seeking to teach them for so long? You see when it comes to heeding the “latest word from God” it is Jesus Himself who is our teacher. That much is said in Eph. 4:20-24:

But ye have not so learned Christ. If so be that ye have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus. That ye put off, concerning the former conversation, the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts. And be renewed in the spirit of your mind. And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.

The above commandment to put on the “new man” is not obeyed by most in the professing churches. Many prefer to think of themselves as the “bride of Christ”, a truth that belongs to an earlier time and dispensation, but the scripture is clear. Right now, in this the unique and current “dispensation of the grace of God” (Eph. 3:1-4), we are to shed the “old man” and put on the “new man” [not become a woman or wife]. This man is a new and holy creation by the Lord Himself, the creator of all things.

Hence the importance of the Apostle Paul’s injunction in 2 Timothy 2:15 to “rightly divide the word of truth”, meaning we should realise that what God says to people in one age is not necessarily what He says to those in another. It needs to be “present truth”, i.e. the revelation of truths God specifically tailors to each dispensation that saves, sanctifies and prepares believers for the Lord’s kingdom age when He will take over government of the world.

Examples of such change are:

• Since Jesus’s death on the cross for our sin, God no longer requires animal sacrifice but rather faith in Jesus’s once-for-all sacrifice on the cross.
• Today the Lord does not require anybody to copy Noah and build an ark, although I know of one cult that is building three.
• Nor is it required that we should “repent and be baptised” to be saved. Rather, we should count ourselves “complete in Him”, “putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ”, by being “buried with Him in baptism, wherein ye are also risen with Him through the faith of the operation of God [not man]” (Col. 2: 10-12).

This much has been said to assert that the way forward for Christianity is to believe the latest truth revealed by Him. And that means acknowledging what has become a term of ill repute for many Christians, the word “dispensationalism”.

But, whether they know it or not, every saved believer is a dispensationalist of some sort. For example, many hold (wrongly in my view) that “the church” began on the day of Pentecost, thus making it different from the “little flock” Jesus spoke of earlier. Others see the church of today beginning in Acts 9, 13 or 18. 

Nobody today would build an ark or offer an animal sacrifice because they recognise God has moved on from what He required back then. Yet multiple millions of Christians today try in vain to reproduce the miracles and power of the Pentecostal dispensation of the Book of Acts, not realising God has left such explicit supernatural acts behind in bringing in the “dispensation of the grace of God” (Eph. 3:1-4).

As the Apostle Paul clearly advised during the Acts period before the great change of Acts 28:28…

…whether there be prophecies they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be [supernaturally revealed] knowledge, it shall vanish away (1 Cor. 13:8).

Why then is dispensationalism deemed a dirty and “divisive” word in much of Christendom today? Answer: Because almost without exception denominational teachers and preachers refuse to obey the Apostle Paul’s command to Timothy to:

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15).

“Rightly dividing the word of truth” is recognising that God has moved on from one dispensation to the next changing his specific message to those who hear his voice in each specific eon or era. This is the “cutting edge” Christianity desperately needs if it is once again to become a power that shook and changed the world as it did in the two to three hundred years after Christ’s ascension.

For example, it is a backward step to persuade new converts to be dunked in water by a minister wearing waders when we are told in Col. 1:10-12 that:

…ye are complete in Him [Christ], which is the Head of all principality and power: In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ: Buried with Him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with Him, through the faith of [i.e. faith in] the operation of God who hath raised Him from the dead.

In other words, God Himself has made us “complete” in Christ. If we will believe it, He has buried us in the baptism [of death] in Christ, cut off the body of our sins by a supernatural circumcision by including us in Christ’s death on the cross where He was “cut off for our sins” and also made us part of our Lord’s resurrection from the dead.

By including believers in what Christ went through He has “reconciled” us (Col.1: 20) “in the body of his [i.e. Christ’s] flesh”, as Paul says, to present us “holy and unblameable and unreprovable in his sight” (Col. 1:22).

And that’s only part of the great and wonderful message the Lord Jesus Christ has for those who will hear his voice and tune their hearing to what He is saying now in contrast to what He said and what went before.

Truly, “rightly dividing the word of truth” is the “cutting edge” that shows the way forward for Christianity in our time.

John Dudley Aldworth

Email: john.aldworth@hotmail.com

Visit the website: Day of Christ Ministries for more Bible studies about such matters.