The soul that has been established in dispensational truth and that has ascertained the ways of God during the various dispensations (and even when the testimony entrusted to men in each dispensation has been corrupted and destroyed) learns how to respond to God’s way, how to walk before Him in accordance with His mind and will, even when the dispensation has fallen into ruins.
Surely one judges that the path marked out in one dispensation would be unsuited for another and judges, too, with spiritual discernment, that a path right in the beginning of a dispensation necessarily changes its character when the dispensation has fallen into ruins through the unfaithfulness of those to whom the testimony is entrusted, yet all the while recognizing that divine principles never have changed, even while the vessel proved that it could not hold the treasure committed to it.
F. G. Patterson
The use of dispensations is to nurture our minds into the knowledge of what God is, from whence all dispensations flow, and to lead them to look on to that time when “God will be all in all.”
J. N. Darby