Thousands of years ago, God established a covenant with Abraham and his descendents:

I will bless thee, and I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sand that is by the sea shore; thy seed shall possess the gates of their enemies.  And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because thou hast obeyed my voice.”[2]

    The covenant was renewed by God, occasionally broken by the descendents of Abraham, and renewed again by God on a number of occasions.  God was troubled by their failure to keep the Commandments, but above all by their rejection of Him.  On occasion they made idols and worshipped false gods.[3]  At other times they rejected His providence, preferring the fleshpots and bread of slavery in Egypt to the quail and manna given them on the journey to the Promised Land.[4]  God allowed the slaughter of many to clear a place for them on the land, but when God brought them in to the land He promised, they demanded a king to rule over them in His stead.  God graciously anointed Saul, and then David, and Solomon.  A descendent of David was to rule the house of Israel forever—but the promise, contingent on fidelity, was broken by Solomon who worshipped the false gods of his many wives—and the kingdom was broken in two, and Israel descended deeper into idolatry.[5]

    God sent prophets to warn the people, and then sent them into captivity for decades, allowing even the Temple of Solomon to be destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC.  The Persian Emperor Cyrus and his successors liberally allowed the Temple’s rebuilding, even returning the gold and silver plate.[6]  But even with the re-dedication of the Temple in 515 BC, Israel was never again a sovereign nation.  The Persians, the Macedonians, and the successor Kingdoms of Alexander the Great gave way to the Romans in 63 BC.

    Around 20 BC the infamous Herod the Great, Idumean puppet-king of the Romans in Judea, rebuilt and expanded the second Temple to make the one found at the time of Christ—the place where He was to “be about His Father’s business.”

    But again, God’s people rejected Him, causing the Romans to nail the Son of God to a cross.

    Jesus answered and said to them: “Destroy this temple; and in three days I will raise it up.”  The Jews then said: “Six and forty years was this temple in building; and wilt thou raise it up in three days?”   But He spoke of the temple of his body.   When therefore he was risen again from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this: and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had said.[7]

    This capital infidelity ushered in the new covenant of Faith, in place of the old covenant of circumcision.

    One of the very difficult things for Protestant teachers to explain when they came on the scene in the sixteenth century was how Christianity had gone immediately wrong and survived all those years before Martin Luther came along to “fix” It, and why the authoritative Institution that existed from the time of the Apostles in the Catholic Church ought now give way to the private interpretation of Scripture by everyone calling himself a Christian.  One method of explanation was to go very light on history and not explain it at all.  A more ingenious method, developed by a former Anglican minister named John Nelson Darby (1800-80), called “Dispensationalism,” holds, in essence, that the church—lower case “church” because Darby used the word to include anyone who thought himself a Christian—the church was the result of poor planning on God’s part.  When God sent His Son to redeem Israel, He was faced with the unexpected outcome of rejection and crucifixion.  The establishment of this church was a sort of afterthought, an accommodation for those who did believe in Jesus, but a temporary one, for, according to Darby, a number of the prophesies in the Old Testament still remained to be fulfilled in Israel.  The period of the church was said to be a sort of “parentheses” inserted into the flow of salvation history.  In the end, when the parentheses were closed, Israel would accept Jesus and things would return more or less to God’s plan.  [No! I am not making this up!]

    For Darby, the end times would be marked by great strife in the Holy Land.  The Christians would be “raptured”—that is, snatched away out of harms way by God to heaven.  The world would undergo seven years of tribulation and the rule of Antichrist, all of which would come to an end in a great war at Armageddon, on the Plain of Esdraelon, about fifteen miles southeast of Mount Carmel.  At the war’s end the victorious Jews would convert to Jesus, Who would return to earth and rule for a thousand years over an Israel that stretched from the Nile to the Euphrates (i.e. from Alexandria in Egypt to Baghdad in modern Iraq).

    Darby’s disciple, Cyrus Scofield (1843-1921) rounded out the story a bit, requiring the return of the Jews to Jerusalem, the destruction of the Moslem holy sites, and the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple, as preconditions for the end of the church and the rise of Antichrist.  The “Dispensationalism” of Darby and Scofield is continued today among such Protestant notables as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.  Contemporary publicists include Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth) and Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (the Left behind series).

    Initially, Darby’s ideas seemed to be a reaction to the authority of the Anglican church—Church of Ireland, really, where in his early days he had been successful in drawing Catholics to the government church.  He lasted only two years as an Anglican clergyman (1825-27), abruptly resigning when he was told that he and his converts would have to recognize George IV as King of Ireland and lawful head of the Church of Ireland.  In 1827, after taking a serious fall from a horse, he studied the Old Testament and was left with the idea that the Kingdom of Israel was entirely separate and distinct from the Christian church.  By 1832 he had been instrumental in founding the sect known as the Plymouth Brethren, a group which rejected any idea of the clergy, with the claim that the Holy Ghost could and would speak through any member of the local congregation.  Darby’s writings (and later those Scofield) formed the basis of what has come to be known as “Christian Zionism,” a movement seeking to fulfill the supposed prophesies about Israel and facilitate the end times. [8]

    As a minister in a Protestant church, and later as the organizer of non-denominational, leaderless, sect, Darby found in his “Dispensationalism” what he thought to be a solid refutation of the Church.  In his mind, the Jewish “dispensation” continued along side the loosely ordered Christian “dispensation.”  He failed to see that the revelations of the Old Testament had already been fulfilled in post-exile Israel, in Christ, and in His Church—that with the Crucifixion of Christ, the veil of the Temple had been rent from heaven toward earth, and the right to be called “children of Abraham” now belonged to those of the Christian faith, and that the Christians had become the “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation ... the people of God.”[9]