Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

KINGDOM OF ISRAEL.
6. When Jacob was converted amid the wonderful vision of the ladder, he called the place Bethel,
which means “the family of God,” commemorating the fact of his spiritual birth, as then and there
he was born into the family of God. After twenty years of terrible conflict with inbred sin, especially
assuming the form of that fatal iniquity of covetousness, which has slain its millions, not even
sparing the apostles, but consigning poor Judas to the doom of the lost, Jacob, like all others, could
only conquer in a second work of grace. Peniel means “the face of God.” He must meet God face to
face and receive the wonderful fiery baptism on the bank of the Jabbok. There victory came never
to depart, and his name was changed from Jacob, which means “rascal,” to Israel, which means one
that “prevails with God.” In the grand restitution, when Satan is to be taken out of the world and
Paradisian glory restored, the government of the world is to be given to the “princes of God,” who
shall rule all nations as the subordinates of their glorious King.
TIMES AND SEASONS.
7. Probably a better translation of these Greek words would be “periods and epochs.” You plant
out a peach orchard. Then follows a period running over a number of years during which the trees
flourish and yield their fruits. Eventually they get old and diseased, and the fruit is not only imperfect
in quality but much reduced in quantity, so that it no longer pays to perpetuate the enterprise. The
fruit bearing period is past and a revolutionary epoch supervenes. You dig the trees up by the roots,
make fuel of trunks, roots and branches, plough and harrow the ground as virgin soil and proceed
to pitch another crop on an entirely different agricultural line. So, in the Divine administration, we
see these periods occupying rolling centuries and wound up by miraculous Divine interventions,
developing memorable epochs and superinducing a new order of things. The Eden period terminated
in the sad calamity of the Fall; the antediluvian, with the Flood; the patriarchal, with Egyptian
slavery, plagues, and destruction in the Red Sea. The Mosaic dispensation, launched amid the
thunders and earthquakes of Sinai, adorned with many prophets, saints and martyrs, finally
degenerated, like its predecessors, into dead formality and hollow hypocrisy, rushing madly into the
bloody scene of Calvary, fast ripening for destruction by the invasion of the Roman armies. The
Gospel dispensation, the last of all in the grand preparatory for the coming kingdom, though
inaugurated amid the unprecedented glories of Pentecost, pursuant to prophecies has already
degenerated into worldly ecclesiasticisms, fast ripening for destruction. “It is not your prerogative
to know the periods and epochs, which the Father placed in his own authority.” The appointment
of the day of His coming is fanatical, as this is known to the Father only. However, it is our privilege
to know the time of the end, the precise time being known only to the Father, from the simple fact
that it is probably impossible for any human being to know the exact chronology. Professors Totton
and Dimbleby, evidently the greatest chronologists of the present age, define the expiration of the
“Gentile times” in the last vernal equinox (1898). The lunar chronology finishes the “Gentile times”
seven years ago; the calendar chronology, thirty-five years hence, and the solar chronology, in
seventy years. If we take Daniel’s tribulation period, forty five years, to intervene between the
rapture of the Bride and the coming of the King, we may certainly be on the constant lookout,
because by the majority of chronologists the coming of the Lord to steal away His Bride is over-due.
That we are living in the time of the end of the Gentile dispensation and in the Millennial dawn, is
certainly indubitable.