"sincere" we can afford to ignore all this "hair-splitting". However, on one occasion I

was able to demonstrate the futility of such "sincerity". I was standing in a bus queue,

and a man in front of me made it known that he wanted a bus to 10: I said to him in

effect, "however sincerely you may believe, however convinced you may be that all the

rest of the queue are wrong and you alone right, you will never arrive at X if you wait

here, there is your bus, and that is your queue, some fifty yards further along the street".

Happily this particular person did not airily wave my information aside as "mere

dispensational hair-splitting". The fact that he had his return ticket or his fare, the fact

that he was a believer in buses, the fact that he sincerely hoped to get to X, all was of

nothing worth while he stood in the wrong queue. In like manner neither doctrinal nor

practical truth come into the picture until dispensational truth adjusts the focus.

What is true of doctrine and practice is equally true of prophecy and its interpretation.

The prophecy of Isaiah is concerning Judah and Jerusalem (Isa. 1: 1) and the primary

interpretation of this prophecy must relate to that people of that city. The application of

its teaching when tempered by true dispensational understanding opens its treasures for

all believers, but the rule remains unchanged, namely, that while all Scripture is FOR our

learning, not all Scripture is TO us or ABOUT us. Callings must be discriminated. It is

impossible within the limits of this article to attempt a survey of prophecy, as a whole, we

will therefore limit ourselves to the consideration of one important phase of prophetic

truth, namely the Second Coming of Christ. Matt. 24: is the sequel to early chapters

of that same gospel. There Christ is seen as "born King of the Jews", in Bethlehem, the

city of David. Before Him, in fulfillment of Isa. 40:, went John the Baptist. The

temptation in the wilderness reaches its climax in the vision of the kingdom and glory of

the world. When the disciples used the expression "the end of the world" (Matt. 24: 3)

the sunteleia, they used a well-known term, found in Exod. 23: 16 "the feast of the

ingathering". While all attempts to compute the date of the second coming of the Lord

are forbidden, two periods of time are nevertheless given in Matt. 24:  The second

coming of that prophetic chapter will take place "AFTER the tribulation" (Matt. 24: 29,

see verse 21) and DURING the last week of Dan. 9: (Matt. 24: 15; Dan. 9: 27).

These items provide a dispensational test that must not be ignored, and effectually

prevent us from reading into Matt. 24: the hope of the church of the Mystery. Again,

it is not the teaching of this chapter that all nations will have been evangelized before the

end comes, but that "this gospel of the kingdom" shall be preached in all the oikoumene

(the prophetic earth) for a witness unto all nations (Matt. 24: 14). Those who accept the

Divine rule of dispensational truth, have no need to alter mentally "this gospel of the

kingdom" with its miraculous signs, to "the gospel of the grace of God" without

miraculous gifts, they do not stretch the limited word oikoumene to include the ends of

the earth, they do not alter the words "for a witness" to read "unto salvation" or "unto

everlasting life". Dispensational truth rejoices to accept without alteration or demur,

every word given by inspiration of God. Can one ask for more? Can those who deny

dispensational truth say as much? Rom. 15: says of the hope that was before the church

during the Acts period, and while Israel were still a people, and while the Jew was still