What is the dispensation of Grace (the church age)?
The sixth and present dispensation, from Pentecost to the rapture (Acts 2-Rev 3). God governs by grace through faith in the finished work of Christ; the church is the steward, and the age ends at the rapture, followed by the tribulation.
What the text states
This is the age we live in: "the dispensation of the grace of God" (Eph 3:2). Salvation is by grace through faith, apart from law and works (Eph 2:8-9), and the church, Jew and Gentile in one body, is a mystery not revealed in the Old Testament (Eph 3:3-6). The stewardship is the gospel, "the free offer of the gospel to every person." It ends not in a judgment on the church but in the church's removal, the rapture, after which God resumes His dealings with Israel in the tribulation. This is the dispensation almost every other answer on this site is written from.
Covenant theology denies a distinct church-age dispensation, reading the church as Israel continued. We hold the church age is a distinct parenthesis, the "mystery" of Ephesians 3, between Israel's sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks (Dan 9).
Go deeper
Checked 2026-09-29 by Darren. 63 Scripture citations verified against the KJV rows. 63 quoted fragments table-passed against the verses table. One correction: who-is-the-antichrist read “the man of sin”; KJV 2 Thess 2:3 reads “that man of sin”. 13 exhibit links checked, all resolve; the brief's the-grammar-of-romans corrected to grammar-of-romans.