Acts 1:7

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.