Failing to understand that this age of grace was kept secret until revealed to Paul has caused no end of confusion. We are currently in that period that the prophets of old could not understand (1 Peter 1:11).
1 Peter 1:10-12...
"As to this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful searches and inquiries, 11 seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as He predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow. 12 It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you, in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—things into which angels long to look." (NASB)
Yes, Paul said of God's ancient men and women of faith.....
"All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth." (Hebrews 11:13)
They knew what was coming but not how or when it would manifest. They knew that this world was NOT the one they were designed to live in....and that a better one was coming in the future when the seed of promise would liberate them, bringing in God's rulership back to the earth. None of the trauma of the old world would come back to haunt us. (Isaiah 65:17)
When you say the word "grace", what do you understand it to mean?
We have chosen not to use that word simply because of the way many of Christendom's churches have interpreted it. Some use it as an excuse to sin, taking on a "once saved, always saved" position. That is not what "grace" means...nor is that the purpose of it. We prefer the expression "undeserved kindness"; the Greek word "
charis" has the central idea of 'that which is agreeable and winsome'. The word is often used to refer to a kind gift or a kind manner of giving. When referring to the undeserved kindness of God, the word describes a free gift given generously by God, with no expectation of repayment. Thus, it is an expression of God’s bounteous giving and generous love and kindness toward humans. The Greek term is also rendered by such expressions as “favor” and “kind gift.” It is given unearned and unmerited, motivated solely by the generosity of the giver. (
2 Corinthians 6:1; Ephesians 1:7)
Nothing that has happened from the day of Pentecost until the present was spoken of in the OT, including the Gospels.
Actually, Daniel's prophesies are entirely about "the time of the end". (Daniel 12:4; 9-10) Have you ever done a specific study on Daniel and his visions? It tells about the march of world powers from Babylon to the present day and the coming of God's Kingdom as it crushes all worldly kingdoms out of existence and replaces them with Messiah's rulership. (Daniel 2:25-45) True, they did not know the specifics, but the bare bones were there.
Jesus came for Israel to fulfill promises God made to them. They rejected him. God did not give up on them. There is plenty of scripture that says God will gather them together again and put a new heart in them, etc. Jesus will appear again to do that for them. That is in Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelations, et.al. They have nothing to do with our age of grace. If the do, then God lied in the NT when He said that nobody knew the mystery until He gave it to Paul. The mystery is completely illuminated in the 7 church epistles, which very few denominations understand or teach. Most Christians are told to act like Jesus and little else. It's been going on for 2,000 years now, ever since Paul warned of the lies that even then were beginning to corrupt the truth. That's plenty of time to convince people of anything the churches desire them to believe. It makes it hard to break out of tradition and see the truth.
Yes, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and others were told by God what was coming, but the details were not revealed until the time of the Apostles...even then, there was more to come as time went on (Proverbs 4:18) . Their prophesies have everything to do with our day....but perhaps you could describe what you believe "the age of grace" to mean?
These "last days" are a judgment period just as it was before the flood of Noah's day. Jesus said it will have the same basic scenario....(Matthew 24:37-39)...no one taking much notice until it all goes pear-shaped and people realize that what Jesus and his disciples have been warning about all this time was true. They put their faith in the wrong people...and it will result in great disappointment, leading to a sense of utter betrayal and resulting in great anger. There are rough times ahead as God lifts the lid on who is running this show and how corrupt this system really is because the majority have been lulled into a false sense of dependency on the very agencies that have been exploiting their gullibility all this time. Greed has been driving everything.
The mystery occurs between Jesus' first (Gospels) and second appearance (Revelations). To read into this present era things that belong to the past and future only causes confusion. If WW1 occurred in this age, which it of course did, then there is nothing in the OT, Gospels included, that say anything at all about it.
Daniel does .In fact the beasts of his prophesies tie in with the ones John saw in the Revelation.
Publications — Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY
Everything in this age was kept secret. Very simple. Just needs to be believed. If it's not understood and believed, the rest of the story remains largely unclear. Speculation replaces truth.
That would undoubtedly be true if God was not the one preparing his people for what is coming.
Daniel explains that at "the time of the end" God would "cleanse, whiten and refine" his people with an 'abundance of knowledge'. He said that those who acted wickedly (despite claiming to be God's worshippers) would continue to do so, largely ignoring those who accepted the cleansing and refining of their worship. God was going to do this in "the time of the end" which ties in with Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds. Only at the harvest time would the wheat be identified as completely different in appearance to the weeds. "Growing together" all through the history of "the church" is what Jesus said they would do, but when it was harvest time, the weeds were to be identified, collected up first by the reapers, and disposed of. There is no speculation...we are living it.
I would strongly suggest you do further research on your own and be prepared to shed some the beliefs of your denomination. To tell you the truth, I know of no denomination that understands the different eras in the Bible nor the people who are involved with each era.
I appreciate your concern, but it occurs to me that I have found the people that Jesus is directing in these last days. He commissioned them as a collective to 'preach the good news of the Kingdom in all the inhabited earth as a witness to all the nations' before 'the end would come'.(Matthew 24:14) It is not a work to be done by a few scattered individuals, this is to be an organized work, carried out by a large group of organized people as God has always had.
As it was foretold in Isaiah 60:22...
“The little one himself will become a thousand, and the small one a mighty nation."
Jesus said that no one can come to the Father unless he is drawn by him. That makes this an invitation only arrangement. If God isn't drawing us, then we will never see the sense in what is being preached about his son and the role of the Kingdom for the future of mankind.
If you have no brotherhood and are rubbing shoulders with an apostate church system, then how are you ever going to carry out the commission that Jesus has given to all of us? Just as Jesus followers abandoned apostate Judaism, so we must abandon apostate Christendom. (Revelation 18:4-5)
That is how we see these things.
