part0150

Key Verse : "'I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the LORD have spoken, and I have done it,' declares the LORD."

A dispensation is a time when God regulates the conduct of believers and tests their responses to His conditions. The judgment at the end of the Dispensation of Grace, or the New Covenant, will be the Tribulation. Leading up to that, there will be intense evil and ungodliness in the earth, Satan will blind people, and there will be an age of apostasy. During that time, the church will have great difficulty trying to stay pure. At the end of the Kingdom Dispensation, based on Revelation 21:1, there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

In Matthew 24:1-51, Jesus talked about the end of the Age, and He gave some signs for how people will know that it is here. One of the problems with signs, though, is that people sometimes try to predict dates. Another is that no one knows that any particular sign is the actual sign for which the people should be looking. Signs can be a diversion from doing the work that God wants those in the church to be doing, so maybe He does not even give them because His people cannot handle them. Of course, He may give them just to see how they will handle them. In the church at Thessalonica, the people were so certain that Christ would soon return that many of them quit work to wait for Him.

One sign that will occur before the return of Christ is found in Ezekiel 37:1-14, where the Prophet Ezekiel wrote about the valley of dry bones. In his vision, he saw Israel being restored to their land, and that prophecy seems to be happening now. Other prophecies that foretell the Lord's return are the growth of the ecumenical harlot church, the possibility of a one-world government, the growth of knowledge, the population explosion, the declines in ecology, and the fact that the church has already started becoming the church of Laodicea in Revelation 3:14-22. When those things happen, the time may be drawing near.