and repent. It will take nothing less than the returning glory of their Saviour to at last

bring them to their knees.

So we find then that the break with the Jewish nation is not at the Cross; it is at the

end of the Acts. There is a consistent line of Divine purpose going right through from

Gen. 12:, where God lays hold of Abraham, right on to the end of the Acts, and we can

say that the people of Israel are in the forefront all the way through till that point. There

is coming a time, the Second Advent of Christ, when God is going to deal with His

earthly people again. Between these two points there is a gap so far as the earthly

kingdom is concerned, and what fills it up is the revelation that the Lord Jesus Christ

made known through Paul, His prisoner. And this concerns the revelation of a secret

purpose of God concerning His heavenly people, the body of Christ, the fullness of Him

that filleth all in all.

In this company there is no Jew and no Gentile either. It is a new creation where both

lose their status and something infinitely better is revealed. That is one reason why this

could not be revealed during the Acts where Israel, the chosen nation, is being dealt with

by God until the last chapter.

We have looked at the word `church' as used in the Bible, and we saw that it would be

quite Scriptural to talk about the children of Israel as a church, because this word only

means a called-out company of people, which just describes the nation of Israel. And in

any case, the word `congregation' that we have as many times in the O.T. is translated

`church' in the Greek translation of the O.T., the Bible in common use in N.T. times.

Stephen does not hesitate to use the word `church' in connection with the people of

Israel; he calls them `the church in the wilderness'. It is not correct to say that there is

only one church in the Bible: there is only one Body, but that is quite another thing.

There was a called-out company of Hebrew Christians, as we would term them today, at

Pentecost--a church who were indeed the Israel of God.  But was it the Church

connected with the secret that was revealed after the Acts through Paul's later prison

ministry? We have seen that this cannot be. For one thing every step in the Acts was

linked with the O.T. which is quoted at various points and therefore was not, and could

not be secret in any way. Let us obey the command in Phil. 1: 10 margin and "Try the

things that differ" and not confuse them. If we do this, how can we expect to get light

and blessing? We want to make it plain that it is not foundation or basic truths that

change after the Acts, such as sin, salvation and sanctification, these are true for all time.

But God can reveal various aspects of His great plan for His creation, all of them resting

solidly upon the death and resurrection of Christ, and this is what we find after Israel's

failure at the end of the Acts. God now reveals something entirely new, related to the

heavens and not the earth, and it is this heavenly side of the purpose of the ages

connected with the Body of Christ that now comes to the forefront and dominates the

scene during this age of grace, while the nation of Israel are in darkness and unusable by