both the Gospel we preach, the Church to which we belong, and the hope that

is before us.  Dispensational Truth is not confined to one aspect or phase of

the Divine purpose, for every dealing of God with man, whether under law

or grace, whether with saint or sinner, has its own dispensational colouring

which is inherent to its teaching and is in no wise accidental.  Much has yet

to be written and presented along these suggestive and attractive lines of

study, but the particular application of this principle, now before us,

focuses the reader's attention upon one thing, namely, that while in the mind

of God the whole purpose of the ages is seen as one and its end assured, in

the outworking of that purpose, the fact that moral creatures are involved,

creatures that can and alas do exercise their liberty to disobey as well as

to obey the revealed will of God, has had an effect upon the manifest

unfolding of the purpose of the ages.

This is seen as a series of `gaps' and `postponements' which are filled

by new phases and aspects of the purpose until at length He Who was once

`All' in a universe that mechanically and unconsciously obeyed, will at

be `All in all' in a universe of willing and intelligent creatures, whose

standing will not be that of Creation and Nature, but in Redemption and

In this section we can do little else than indicate the presence of

these `gaps' and consider the terms that are employed in the Hebrew of the

Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament and of the LXX.  The well -

known example of the Saviour's recognition of a `gap' in the prophecy of

Isaiah 61 must be repeated for the sake of completeness and for the value of

its endorsement.

We learn from the fourth chapter of Luke's Gospel,

that the Lord attended the service at the Synagogue at Nazareth, and

apparently, after the reading of the law by the official reader of the

Synagogue, He (Christ) stood up `for to read' the Haphthorah, or the

recognized portion from `the Prophets' that was appointed for the day.  He

found the place, and commenced to read from Isaiah 61.  Now it is laid down

by Maimonides that:

`He that reads in the prophets, was to read at least one -- and --

twenty verses',

but he allowed that if `the sense' be finished in less, the reader was under

no necessity to read so many.  Even so, it must have caused a deal of

surprise to the congregation then gathered, for Christ to read but one verse

and one sentence of the second verse, shut the book, and sit down.  He did so

because `the sense' was indeed finished in less than twenty -one verses.  He

was about to focus attention upon one aspect of His work, and said:

`This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears' (Luke 4:21).

The sentence with which the Saviour closed His reading of Isaiah 61 was

`to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord'.  The next sentence, separated

in the A.V. by but a comma reads `and the day of vengeance of our God' yet

that comma represents a `gap' of at least nineteen hundred years, for the

days of vengeance are not referred to until in Luke 21:22 when the Second

Coming and the end of the age is at hand.  This passage we have examined in

the article Right Division4.