Page 13 - The Divine Unfolding of God's Plan of Redemption

tried and proved, mark this age when wickedness and iniquity, disorder and confusion
come to the full, and the cup of Divine wrath is about to overflow. Yet in the midst of
this Babel comes ringing in clarion tones to every believer, the assurance of the

fulfillment of the Divine purpose, which He hath purposed in Himself, that “In the
dispensation of the fullness of times, he shall gather together in one, all things in
Christ.” We praise Him for assuring us that out of this awful heterogeneity and
confusion, this welter of bloodshed and iniquity, there will emerge, when God‟s clock

strikes, a universal unity, an all-embracing homogeneity, with God‟s Son as its focal
point, with Him Who is the very personification of all the will, attributes, and glory of
the Deity in the place of centrality.
We find the same assurance expressed in the first of the Messianic Psalms. In

reply to the vauntings of the “kings of the earth who set themselves and the rulers
[who] take counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed, saying „Let us
break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us,‟” He thunders, “Yet have
I set my king upon my holy hill of zion” (Ps. 2:6). Practically all the Old Testament

prophets add their testimony to that coming age of peace and unity under the rule of
David‟s greater Son. Peter tells us that “They sought out and searched diligently what
the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify when He testified beforehand the
sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow,” and their prophecies of the

“glory” outnumber their prophecies of the “sufferings” by a ratio of about eight to
one.

In the record of these monumental prophecies we are struck with an apparently

careless use of tense. To us, creatures of time, and to our little grammatical systems,
the distinction of mood and tense are very important. But with the eternal God there is
no place for a subjunctive mood (expressing doubt or condition) in the declaration of
His immutable purposes. With Him it is all indicative or declarative. “For all the

promises of God in Him are yea and in Him amen, unto the glory of God by us.”
Likewise, He can afford to play fast and loose with our puny little tense forms and can
readily express a distant future event in the past tense, because what He has designed,
it is as though it had already come to pass.

God has no purposes that begin and end with the believer. No created thing or
being is an end in itself. The primary utility in the Divine scale of values is that the

thing created shall reflect the glory of the Creator. Each part of the inanimate and
animate creation was brought into being as a reflector of at least some aspect of the
glory of the divine nature. The diversion of any part to any other use constitutes an
infraction of the divine will and an offense to the divine sovereignty. It hath pleased
the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell. Of this fullness have all we (believers)

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