Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 108:429 (Jan 1951)
Article: Part 3: The Course and End of the Age
Author: C. I. Scofield

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BSac 108:429 (Jan 51) p. 105

Part 3: The Course and End of the Age

C. I. Scofield

[Editor’s note: By special request Bibliotheca Sacra is putting back into print the lectures delivered by Dr. Scofield at the second annual Philadelphia Bible Conference. These prophetic messages were given first in 1914 after World War I had begun, and appeared originally in a Bible study magazine then being published, Serving and Waiting. The series was entitled “The World War in the Light of Prophecy,” while lecture three—here reproduced—was named “The Course and End of the Times of the Gentiles.”]

We continue today our study of “the times of the Gentiles” (Luke 21:24). Nineteen hundred years ago a great divine interposition came to the help of the Gentiles. The Son of God came into the world. It was His right then to take His kingly authority and establish His kingdom, but He would not do it then merely by divine power, apart from the willing hearts of the people. That willing heart was not in Israel, and the king was rejected. But He left His great gospel of peace and power and love and joy in this world, and He commissioned those who should come to believe in that gospel to preach it in all the world.

Gentile world-authority has been illuminated more or less, of course, by the presence of such a fact and such a message in the world. The appeal to conscience has been possible. A new ethic—or an old ethic affirmed in a new and wonderful way—came with this message of free grace, and now for nineteen hundred years the Gentile world-authorities have had the advantage of that ideal and have had the opportunity of turning it to personal salvation.

They have never governed for one fraction of a second under the Christian ideal—never once. There has been no such thing as a Christian nation. I used to have to argue that. I do not have to argue it now. I have but to point to the fact that in the scene where the gospel has been longest preached and where the civilization of which we have been so proud has won its greatest triumphs—right there the passions of men are let loose and they are murdering each other in hecatombs. Now we are approaching (as I believe

BSac 108:429 (Jan 51) p. 106

and many students of the Word believe) the end of this long period during which the world has been under testing to see whether the natural man growing constantly in knowledge of the material world, harnessing the forces of nature to his chariot, could govern the world. And the experiment certainly has broken down. The civilization of which we have been so proud has ended in bloodshed—in all but universal war, a war that may be entirely universal before it ends.

Dur...

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