The Gap Principle

a. Definition. That principle of divine revelation whereby God in the Jewish Scriptures ignores certain periods of time, leaping over centuries without comment. This is a principle that is not recognized by all Bible teachers and students.
b. illustrations.

1. Isa. 61:1,2, with Luke 4:16-21. Why, in Luke’s record, did the Lord Jesus stop at the comma in Isa. 61:1,2? In the first coming of the Lord, He came to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. When He comes the second time He will preach of the day of vengeance. This has not yet come. There is already a gap of 1900 years between the clauses of that sentence—Isa. 61 :2.
2. I Pet. 1:10,11.
   The prophets themselves could not understand what they prophesied concerning the suffering and glory of Christ (His humiliation and exaltation). They did not understand the gap principle. They tried to put these two mountain peaks together, but there was a valley of 1900 years which they did not see.
3. Dan. 9.
   The seventy weeks were not weeks of days, but weeks of years, or four hundred and ninety years. Sixty-nine of these weeks have passed.
   69 weeks—(Gap)—One week which has to do with Israel, the restoration, the day of the “little horn.”
4. Hosea 1:4.
   Jezreel—(Gap) forty years. Close of the kingdom of the house of Israel.
5. Rev. 12:5,6— Birth and ascension (vs. 5) (gap). Three-and-a-half years of tribulation period—Vs. 5,6.
6. Isa. 9:6,7-—Incarnation Vs. 6a—(Gap)—Throne of David (not taken yet).