THE HOPE OF ISRAEL - The Preterist Archive

82 The Hope of Israel: What Is It?
in our sins, those who have fallen asleep in Christ are
perished, and we who hope in Him are of all men the
most miserable (id. vv. 13-19).
Before the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God recognized
as His people a nation of men in the flesh, the
natural descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ;
and
with them He made covenants concerning earthly
things, and gave them the promise of earthly blessings.
Also He recognized an earthly Zion and an earthly
Jerusalem; and He appointed an earthly temple, an
earthly priesthood and earthly sacrifices. But that
system in its entirety was but "a figure for the time
then present, in which were offered both gifts and sacrifices
that could not make him that did the service
perfect, as pertaining to the conscience" (Heb. 9:9).
Moreover, its ordinances were imposed only "until the
time of reformation" (v. 10).
Here is a fact to which we wish to direct special
attention; namely, that the whole Jewish system, nation
and all, had a status in God's plan only until the
fixed "time of reformation"; and the next succeeding
verses (w. 11-15) make it plain that "the time of reformation"
began when Christ not in virtue of the
but in virtue of "His own
blood of goats and calves,
blood," entered in, once for all, into the true holy
of holies, as the High Priest of the good things that
were to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle
than that ordained by Moses and administered by
Aaron, a tabernacle not made with men's hands, and
not of this creation.
Here indeed is "dispensational truth" ; for "the time
then present" was the dispensation of the law, and it
was to be (and now has been) followed by the dispen-