Under the new covenant life is not so simple. Christians are like grown-up children, weaned from the carrot-and-stick approach. We are promised suffering and deprivation as part of God’s blessing (Phil. 1:29) and his way of fellowship with us (Phil. 3:10). Yet many of the sayings are universal in their application. Even those which are ‘dispensational’ in the above sense have a principle on which we may build some profitable New Testament teaching. 3. Allegorizing, typologizing and spiritualizing