Just before Christmas, I was in a Starbucks near Woodfield Mall and noticed a young man reading from the bible—a highly unusual sight for me as a Starbucks aficionado.

After initiating a conversation with him, I learned he was a seminary student attending Trinity International University in Deerfield. When I told him I was a dispensationalist, he said he knew a little about what I believed and had been given the impression dispensationalists focused primarily on Paul’s epistles and pretty much dismissed the rest of the Bible as not having any practical application for today.

He said something like, “It doesn’t make sense to me to have that attitude when Paul himself refers so frequently to things from the Old Testament.”

He was then surprised to hear me rattle off specific incidents of just what he was talking about. I responded, “Yeah, in the book of Romans alone Paul discusses Abraham, Isaac, Esau and Jacob . . . He writes about Pharaoh and Sodom and Gomorrah. In Romans 3, he quotes a bunch of psalms including 14 and 140 . . .”

I spent the next hour-and-a half in a very invigorating debate on why Christians are to study the whole Bible in relationship to what Paul reveals about today’s “dispensation of grace.”

As a reader of the satanically corrupted English Revised Standard bible, this seminary student was actually unaware of how Paul even testifies in Colossians in the King James Bible, “Whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God;
[26] Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints.”

I showed him Ephesians 3 where Paul again stresses, “If ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to youward:
[3] How that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery; (as I wrote afore in few words,
[4] Whereby, when ye read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ)
[5] Which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.”

What seems most hard for non-dispensationalists to grasp is how the Four Gospels represent Jesus Christ’s teachings to the nation Israel and have to do with the Jews’ prophetic program and are not meant to be taken as instructions for today’s Believer—whether Jew or Gentile.

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A big, big passage people simply won’t accept for its incredible simplicity is in Matthew 15 where a Gentile woman begs for Jesus Christ’s help and He answers her, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Similarly, in Matthew 10, Christ commands His twelve disciples: “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not:
[6] But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
[7] And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
[8] Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.
[9] Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses,
[10] Nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his meat.”

I guarantee there’s no Christian today healing lepers, raising people from the dead, casting out devils, etc. So what gives if we Believers, as they say, are to follow Christ’s teachings? You know, “What Would Jesus Do?”

Jordan says, “When you study the Bible literally and come to conclusion there’s a difference between God’s program for the nation Israel and His program for the Body of Christ, that leads you to understand what most people, when they don’t get this, miss and that’s that the life of the Body of Christ—the life of the church, where the living and activity of the Body is—is in the life that is ours in Christ. The true church is the life of Christ in us.”

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Newspaper columnist Ann Coulter was dead wrong the other month when she made headlines for saying on a cable news talk show that Christians were “perfected Jews.”

“Members of the Body of Christ aren’t who they used to be—they’re ‘the one new man,’ as Paul says,” explains Jordan. “Paul says, ‘In Christ there’s neither Jew or Gentile.’ So you can’t say, ‘Here we are!’ (by looking at the Four Gospels and Old Testament). Why? Because there’s no status that way. You’re the one new man!

“Now, what would make so many preachers and theologians, when they read ‘Jew’ say, ‘Oh we won’t take that literally. We’re going to spiritualize it. We’re going to study it allegorically. That’s really an allegory’?

“These saved Gentile members of the Body of Christ don’t know the fullness of what that (status) means simply because they’re caught in a system that won’t let them study the Bible literally. A lot of folks in the conservative fundamentalist camp do the same thing.

“Jerry Falwell would get on the TV and say, ‘Jesus said ye shall receive power and be witnesses in Jerusalem and Jerusalem, well, that means your hometown.’

“All the (popular) preachers say that. The problem is if you read two verses beyond that in the book of Acts the angel looks at those guys and says to them, ‘Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye here gazing?’

“Do you know where Galilee was? It was up north! They’re a bunch of Yankees. They weren’t a bunch of southern rednecks from down in Judea where Jerusalem’s located!

“There wasn’t but one of the 12 apostles from the southern kingdom and he was dead at that time. Jerry says Jerusalem really means ‘your hometown’ but it wasn’t the hometown of anybody Christ’s talking to!

“Think about what that is! There’s a guy who claims to be a dispensationalist, claims to be a fundamentalist, claims to take the Bible literally, but when his system is advantaged by reading Jerusalem and saying, ‘It’s your hometown,’ he abandons the literal approach to Scripture and takes the allegorical approach and spiritualizes the Bible!

“Every map you’ve got in the back of your Bible has Jerusalem in Palestine in the Middle East right off the sea of Galilee, doesn’t it? Do any of them have it in Illinois, Tennessee, Iowa or California?

“We got a Jerusalem, Illinois but it’s not the one they were talking about. You see, it’s easy to fall into the trap if your system needs you to do it and the greatest motivator to not take the Bible literally and, instead, allegorize it, is that it helps your system out.”