One of the most serious errors of Dispensationalism is that it believes in a dual divine purpose with respect to Israel and the Church, and that the former is more important than the latter. In fact, Dispensationalism sees the Church as a mere parenthesis something that comes between God's past and future dealings with Israel. What happened, according to Dispensationalism, is this. Christ offered Himself to the nation of Israel as the Messianic King to establish the glorious, earthly kingdom that was promised to David. Israel, however, rejected this offer, and this resulted in a change in the divine program. The kingdom rejected by Israel was now postponed by God, and in its place the Church was introduced. When did this take place? At Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:1-11). Though the Jews on that occasion did welcome Him and shouted their Hosannah's, they soon changed their minds about Him and cried: crucify Him! Thus they lost their golden opportunity of seeing David's kingdom restored. The result was that now, instead of the kingdom, the Church made her entry into the world as a totally new concept, a "mystery" of which the prophets had said nothing, but which God now revealed as a temporary "interlude" until He would resume His dealings with the Jews at the end of this "Church Age".

When Israel turned down the offer of the kingdom, the clock of prophecy stopped ticking and will only start ticking again when the Church is raptured out of the world. Only then can God fulfil His "unconditional" Old Testament promises to Israel by establishing His millennial kingdom in Jerusalem with Christ on the throne of David. The temple shall be rebuilt; animal sacrifices will be reinstituted in "commemoration" of the death of Christ, and all the nations will acknowledge national Israel as God's favoured people. As C.C. Ryrie puts it: "This millennial culmination is the climax of history and the great goal of God's program for the ages." (Dispensationalism Today, p. 65)

How can Dispensationalists come to such absurd notions as mentioned above? This must be ascribed to their extreme literal interpretation of Biblical prophecy. Dispensationalists accuse the Reformed and others who do not agree with them that they spiritualize and allegorize the Scriptures too much. The Bible, they say, must be interpreted literally wherever possible. We agree, but the problem is, who decides when a passage should be taken literally and when figuratively? Dispensationalists, generally, limit their literalism to prophetic statements, but when it comes to other parts of Scripture, the historical narratives, for instance, they often spiritualize and allegorize as much or more than those whom they accuse of doing this. "God means what He says and says what He means" is a frequent assertion made by Dispensationalists as they seek to defend their method of interpreting prophecy.

Again, we can only agree with this statement as it stands. Who will deny that God does indeed mean what He says? But as John Wilmot points out in his excellent book, Inspired Principles of Prophetic Interpretation (p.14):

Does God in making His will known by selecting earthly things (John 3:12), and expressing His will in 'words of earth' (Ps. 12), 'words which the Holy Spirit teacheth' (1 Cor. 2:13), and admittedly meaning what He says – does God thereby restrict His meaning to the earthly and literal? He means what He says, but does He fix a rigid literal limita­tion to His meaning? Or, in what God says, are His chosen literal objects intended to represent, to reveal and to direct to the spiritual? Therefore, is it not in this latter objective that we may discover what He means?

This whole question of literal versus figurative interpretation is a very thorny one and we must avoid oversimplifications. If someone asks me, "Do you really take the Bible literally?" my immediate reaction is to answer, "Yes, of course I do!" Behind this question, you see, there probably is a certain amount of scepticism as to the truth of God's Word. My assertion that the Bible is to be taken literally in this context means that Scripture is reliable in all that it says. There are no lies or errors or inaccuracies of any sort in the Word of God.

But this is not to say that everything in the Bible must be interpreted literally. No one does that. Not even the most thorough-going literalist holds that everything in Scripture admits only of a literal interpretation. When in Exodus 15 Moses sings his Song of Triumph after the miraculous crossing through the Red Sea, he declares, "With the blast of thy (God's) nostrils the waters were gathered together," we all know that the reference is to the strong east wind whereby the Lord caused the sea to go back (Ex. 14:21). And when the Lord later reminds Israel at Sinai, "I bare you on eagles' wings and brought you unto myself," everyone realizes that this is a figurative way of saying: I took care of you as an eagle cares for her young. Scripture is full of such examples. Not only do we read of hills dancing and trees clapping their hands, but Jesus speaks of eating His flesh and drinking His blood and destroying the temple of His body, building it up again in three days – all figurative expressions which no one will take in a literal sense.

Such figures of speech are usually easy to recognize and present no problems in interpretation. It becomes more difficult when we come to prophecy. There it is possible to take words and phrases literally without necessarily sacrificing good sense, and this is what Dispensationalists have done. Their motto is "literal wherever possible" and "literal unless absurd." Thus, whenever the Bible mentions the word "Israel" it always means the nation or people so named. And whenever the word "Church" occurs, the reference is to the New Testament body of believers which came into being on the day of Pentecost. Israel never means or even typifies the Church. They represent two entirely different entities which should never be confused, let alone identified, with each other. Consequently, the prophecies regarding Israel may not be applied to the Church in any sense, Dispensationalists say. Israel is an earthly people, therefore all the promises and prophecies which concern her are earthly and must be taken literally. The Church, on the other hand, is a heavenly body to which are promised, only heavenly blessings. Those who take the promises which God made to the Jews and apply them to the Church are, as far as Dispensationalists are concerned, guilty of spiritualizing and allegorizing in a way that is completely unscriptural.

What shall we say to this serious charge? Are we, who do see the Church as the New Testament Israel in whom all Old Testament prophecies are fulfilled through Christ, guilty of distorting the plain meaning of Scripture? Certainly not! It is the Dispensationalists who have distorted God's Word by giving it a meaning which it never had. The basic mistake Dispensationalists makes is that it treats the Old Testament as a separate document which may be interpreted without the aid of the New Testament. The Christian Church has always believed – until the time of Darby, that is – that the Old Testament must be interpreted in the light of its New Testament fulfilment. There is much wisdom in the ancient couplet:

The New is in the Old concealed;
The Old is by the New revealed.

Sound biblical interpretation takes its starting point in the fact that the Old and the New Testament belong together as one organic revelation of God in Jesus Christ. This implies that we may not view the Old Testament as the complete and final revelation of God to the Jewish people, as Dispensationalists tend to do. They are forgetting that it is Christ and His inspired apostles who have been appointed by God to interpret the Hebrew Scriptures for the Christian community.

This is what Augustine and later Luther, Calvin and the other Reformers have understood so clearly. Calvin especially, has contributed greatly to our understanding of the relationship between the Old and the New Testaments. In his Institutes, II, X, he first states that both testaments are essentially one because "all men adopted by God into the company of His people, since the beginning of the world were covenanted to Him by the same law and by the bond of the same doctrine as obtains among us." They were saved by the same grace through the same faith and looked for the same heaven. The patriarchs "participated in the same inheritance and hoped for a common salvation with us by the grace of the same Mediator." Earthly prosperity and the possession of their own land was not the highest goal set before them to which they were to aspire. "The Lord not only communicated to the Jews the same promises of eternal and heavenly life as He now deigns to give us, but also sealed them with truly spiritual sacraments." The key promise which sus­tained Old Testament believers was not that of material blessings, but concerned fellowship with and enjoyment of God. "I will be your God, and you shall be my people." They understood that God here does not promise to be a God to their bodies alone, but especially to their souls. In other words, it was a promise that brought everlasting salvation with it.

But Calvin also points out certain important differences between the Old and the New Testaments. The first difference is this:

The Lord of old willed that His people direct and elevate their minds to the heavenly heritage; yet to nourish them better in this hope, He displayed it for them to see and, so to speak, taste, under earthly benefits. But now that the gospel has more plainly and clearly revealed the grace of the future life, the Lord leads our minds to meditate upon it directly, laying aside the lower mode of training that he used with the Israelites.

Another difference, according to Calvin, is that "in the absence of the reality the Old Testament showed but an image and shadow in the place of the substance (whereas) the New Testament reveals the very substance of truth as present."

Calvin would therefore disagree completely with Dispensationalists who, as we saw, tend to elevate the Old Testament above the New, as if "the weak and the beggarly elements" (Gal. 4:9) of the old dispensation were the real thing, and the "grace and truth" (John 1:17) which came by Jesus Christ were mere appendages to an essentially complete revelation.

Dispensationalists, by their insisting on a literal fulfilment of Old Testament promises to Israel as a nation, to the point of an actual millennial reign of Christ on earth complete with a rebuilt temple and a re-introduced sacrificial system, are violating one very basic principle of Scripture, namely the one stated by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:46: "That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual." In the Dispensational scheme of things there is first the natural (Israel, the land, material blessings, types and shadows), then follows the spiritual (the New Testament Church, fulfilment of types and shadows, illumination of the Holy Spirit), and finally the natural again (millennium, earthly glory, etc.).

This whole scheme ignores what the apostle writes to the Hebrews, namely that the Lord "taketh away" the first (old covenant with all its earthly temporal elements) that he may establish the second (new covenant with its permanent spiritual realities) Heb. 10:9. As Dr T.T. Shields once said: "God does not walk backwards." (Quoted by Wilmot, Ibid., p. 27)