By Dr. C. I. Scofield Author of the Scofield Bible and many Religious Works
Note —C. I. Scofield, the universally-known Bible scholar and author, delivered the following address a t the N iagara Prophetic Conference some years ago, but it is as good reading now as it was then, and if anything more im portant today than a t any previous time in the world’s history.— Editor.
as indicating at least my own sense of the importance of my theme, say at once that the Gospel according to Matthew is, taking into account the pre-conceptions and the miscon ceptions which are in the minds of people, precisely thé most difficult book in the Bible for a beginner. / It ought to be delightfully simple. If we came to the study of Matthew with our minds saturated with the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, the book would present no difficulty. When we found it called “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham when we found wise men asking, “Where is He that is born King of the Jews?” when we found John the Baptist, and after him, Christ, and after Him the twelve, preaching, “the kingdom -of heaven is at hand,” we should find precisely what we had been taught to expect. The difficulty is that we have been taught that Christ is king of the church, not of the Jews, and that the king dom of heaven is the church ; and law and grace have been so jumbled together in our minds that we are mere Galatians, and so when we read Matthew and the other synop- tists we do not read them really, but with these miserable glosses upon them. Now my hope is to help earnest Bible students to discriminate things that differ in these precious books. Let me say then :
T IS a very great comfort in ™ speaking from this platform, and I am sure it is felt by other brethren as well as myself, that one is not under
the necessity of defining every term used. Elsewhere it might be required at the outset to explain that the word “dispensational” re fers to the fact that the Scriptures divide time into distinct periods, called ages, or dispensations, each of which has its own peculiar character in respect of God’s deal ing and man’s responsibility; and that the synoptic Gospels are Matthew, Mark and Luke. In this place such explanations are unnecessary, and it will be at once under stood that my theme deals with the way in which distinct and diverse dispensations have their places in, and give color to, the three synoptic Gospels. Possibly the importance of the subject may not be so evident. There is, I know, a wide-spread impression that, while the Epistles and the Apocalypse are difficult, and while the Old Testament presents diffi culties, we have between these in our Bibles in the books of Matthew, Mark and Luke, a section of the Word exceedingly easy of comprehension. Perhaps the average pastor would suggest Matthew to a young convert as the best first book in Bible study. Let me,
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