Perfect Love as a Definate Blessing

It took four thousand years for the sacred Scriptures to fully unfold — "to import God into knowledge," in the phrase of Dr. Bushnell. The patriarchal and Jewish dispensations were devoted to revealing and firmly impressing the Divine unity on one nation surrounded by polytheism. If the triune personality of God had been taught before God's oneness of substance was securely established, it might have asked too much of humanity in its early stage of theological learning. For more than three thousand years, the first words taught to every child in the Jewish nursery were these: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord." Under the dispensations before Christianity, faith in this truth, when it produced obedience, was saving. It is saving now for all who have received no higher revelation. So why do we need a clearer and more definite manifestation of the nature of God? Why should he reveal the unthinkable fact of his threefold personality, and call us to a faith that rises so far above reason? This is a question even angels might approach with bashful tread. It is certain that he has not taken me into his counsels. Here I walk by faith. And faith says that the fuller revelation of God, and the new requirement of faith in the Trinity, come from his gracious purpose to give richer blessings to the believer in a dispensation "rather glorious."

Fletcher's Doctrine of Three Dispensations (rewritten)

John Fletcher

John Fletcher, in his well‑known portrait of St. Paul as the model evangelical preacher, insists — strongly — that a minister cannot do his work well without a clear understanding of what he calls the three great eras of spiritual life. He names them the dispensation of the Father, the dispensation of the Son, and the dispensation of the Holy Ghost.

Anyone unfamiliar with the distinct experiences of these three dispensations, Fletcher argues, will struggle to apply Gospel truth correctly or fully fulfill their ministry. Although these dispensations appeared successively in history, they now exist at the same time. Among people accepted by God and living on the earth today, some are living primarily in the dispensation of the Father, some in that of the Son, and others in the dispensation of the Holy Spirit.

A New Dispensation

"Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you." — John 16:7 KJV.

The declaration that it was expedient, or "good," as Luther translates it, for Christ to go away in order that the Comforter might come, proves the fact that the work of the Holy Spirit is so indispensable a complement to His own work that His bodily withdrawal, which is the condition of the Spirit's advent, should awaken great joy in the hearts of His disciples. A few disciples, comparatively, had seen Him in His humiliation, rejected of men; now One was to come who should be a mirror in which all disciples in all lands and in all generations should see Him glorified, and, seeing, "should be transformed into the same image from glory to glory." Without Jesus radiant with divinity, the Comforter would have nothing to reproduce in the heart of the believer. It would be like removing from the photographer's studio the person whose features the sun is about to fix on the plate prepared to receive them.