48. Pictorial Helps to Impression

Pictorial Helps to Impression

Chapter 47

Every sense has its own channel and stream of sensation and sense perception, and when one sense is obscured or blunted, the others are usually quickened. It is as though the stream, blocked in one direction pours greater volume in another. Hence appeals to the eye help impressions through the ear, and both stimulate the imagination. Pictorial and visible helps are especially useful to the young or to minds as yet untrained for more severe processes of thought.

Visible form or representation addressed to the eye is found greatly helpful both in the impression and retention of ideas. Hence the value of charts, maps and drawings in connection with scripture study and exhibition of truth. A few examples will suffice, as this matter also has ampler illustration in another volume from the same pen.[1] [1]The Bible and Spiritual Life, Gospel Publishing House, N.Y An outline of the Tabernacle and its Courts is of primary importance not only in the understanding of the structure itself but in the interpretation of numerous scripture references to it and its various articles of furniture, as in Hebrews 9, etc.

We add a General Summary of Teaching from Romans to Thessalonians.
From In Christ Jesus, published by Funk & Wagnalls The drawing that follows is meant to show how the earthly life of a disciple is, at all vital points, represented by and identified with some corresponding experience in the career of the Lord Jesus Christ. The semicircle hints the whole scope of Christ’s experience from His incarnation to His final enthronization. The central vertical line indicates the method and principle of the union and identification of the believer with his Lord, namely, His ascent to Heaven and the descent of the Spirit, these two great facts linking Heaven and earth. The base horizontal line stands for the daily earthly walk of the believer as essentially one with the Christ-life, which spans it from beginning to end like a rainbow. The various radii are intended to mark the parallel experiences of the believer with those of his Lord, at every point. It is hoped that such diagram, however imperfect, may impress on the mind the truth addressed to the eye.
A chart of Dispensations is also very helpful. Dispensational truth is doubly important; it serves both for the interpretation and illumination of Scripture. All history is a plan of God, in which two factors are prominent:

God, in judgment and mercy; law and grace;

Man in disobedience and condemnation; faith and obedience.

There is no hope save in divine management and mastery; for man has always been a failure. Dispensations express and exhibit God’s ways of successive dealing with man in successive periods and experimental methods.

Certain distinguishing marks characterize every dispensation, and in something like the following order: A new advance in clearer, fuller revelation of God and truth. A new decline in man’s faith and faithfulness toward Him. A new assimilation to the world and amalgamation with it. A new advance in a worldly and godless type of civilization. A new parallel development of good and evil—wheat and tares. A new apostasy or practical denial of God and His truth. A new crisis of judgment, a catastrophe of destruction.

These particulars may all find illustration in the antediluvian era. It began with a Messianic promise and the institution of worship and sacrifice. There followed rapid declension and departure from God; then the practical wedlock between the sons of God and the daughters of men, with a gigantic race of men of renown but godless. Worshippers of God and idolaters grew side by side, until the apostasy was so prevalent that but one righteous family remained, and the flood swept away mankind. This general historic outline has been strangely repeated in every successive dispensational period. It is still accurate as the type of the present Christian dispensation. This opened with Pentecostal Light; there was even in the apostolic age rapid spiritual declension; the church became worldly and lost separateness; a great imperial civilization developed, but introduced the Dark Ages spiritually; the parallel development of wheat and tares still goes on; the final apostasy from the faith is even now alarmingly progressing; and it only remains for Christ’s Coming to bring the catastrophe of judgment.

Many attempts have been made, familiar to most Biblical students, to represent God’s dispensational dealings with man under law and under grace, and all follow essentially one scheme. Between the Eternity Past and the Eternity Future, the whole duration or period of time is usually divided into at least five subordinate periods:

There is general accord in the following scheme of dispensations as in harmony with the Word of God:

We add a drawing of the Triclinium, or threefold reclining table, used at meals and probably such as our Lord sat at in the Passover Supper:

If this be correct, it shows by the numbers which were the chief seats and why James and John had asked to sit “at the right hand and left hand;” what is meant by “sitting down in the lowest room” and being bidden higher; and how our Lord could give a sop to Judas at the table, as next to Him on the left. If this chart be accurate, as we believe, it explains many another reference in the Word.

Prophets in Israel and Judah
A Table of Prophets Showing when they Prophesied

Timeline of Comparative Chronology
Showing the probable time when the various portions of the New Testament were written, and the corresponding events in history. Interrogatin points mark the more doubtful times of events