Christmas 24
Part 2
“God’s Perfect Timing”
Galatians 4:4 “But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son,”
This passage highlights the fact that our God, the God of the Bible, is a God of perfect timing.
Our timing is not always God’s timing.
And sometimes God’s timing may not look like the best, but His timing is always perfect!
We have the familiar saying, “when it rains it pours”— which expresses the way not just one thing, but several difficult things go down like a row of dominoes at the worst of times.
And the angel’s announcement to Mary was like that!
She was not married,
Was engaged,
and lived in a much more conservative culture than ours.
For Mary to become pregnant out of wedlock would have created a scandal.
To make matters worse, when she was nine months pregnant she and Joseph had to travel 97 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem because Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the Roman world.
So if we focus the camera just on her, the timing of Mary’s pregnancy seems really bad.
She looked poised to lose her reputation, her man, and her future!
But from God’s perspective, the timing was perfect.
—in fact, we’re going to see that sometimes seemingly imperfect timing is PERFECT for accomplishing God’s purposes!
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Now, when we read the expression, “When the fullness of time was come,” what does it mean?
The expression “fullness of time” means when the time was ripe—when the time was perfect, God sent forth his Son to be the Savior of the world.
The Bible says that our God operates in exquisite and perfect timing.
Ecc 3:1 “To everything there is an appointed season, a time for every purpose under heaven:”
The word SEASON refers to the characteristics of particular time period—like it will be a season marked by tribulation. Or it will be a season of peace and blessing.
And the word TIME is a clock kind of word; it refers to how long something lasts or when exactly something starts or ends—We think of chronology, or chronometer.
In Galatians 4:4 the word CHRONOS is used for time, meaning the exact and perfect moment in God’s timing had come for Jesus to be sent into our world!
We see in Scripture that throughout Bible history God had been whispering, promising, and predicting that he would send a Savior.
God made the promise, and the promise had a timer attached to it.
Way back in Eden, God promised that he would send a Savior for both Adam and Eve and for all humanity:
Gen 3:15 “From now on you and the woman will be enemies, as will your offspring and hers. You will strike his heel, but he will crush your head.”
This was the first prophecy of the Bible and the first Messianic one at that!
God predicted a coming Redeemer, but it wasn’t yet His TIMING for it.
Scripture reveals that the plan of salvation unfolded in layers or increments.
When around 1,700 years had passed after the promise of Gen 3:15, God appeared to a Middle Eastern nomad named Abraham and his wife Sarah.
They were an elderly couple who had struggled for decades with infertility, and God said to Abraham in Gen 12:
“Through your seed I will bless the nations of the world,”
Though he and Sarah had been plagued with infertility, God promised it would come to pass through HIS seed!
—Gen 15:4 “One who will come from your own your own body will be your heir.”
And of course, the promise of Abraham’s seed blessing the entire world would ultimately be fulfilled in Jesus Christ!
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Then a few centuries later, God approached one of Abraham’s great, great grandsons, King David.
God promised David that one of his descendant’s offspring would sit on the throne forever and ever.
And again, God was referring to Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.
After that, the Bible prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Zechariah, made very specific predictions about the coming Messiah Jesus.
He would be:
Born of a virgin,
Born in Bethlehem
Would die on a Cross,
—And WHY he would die on the Cross,
They foretold that men would reject Him,
the kinds of miracles He would perform,
And even the very day of His death was predicted by Daniel!
In fact, Jesus’s birth alone fulfilled 7 stunningly accurate Bible prophecies, and his life as a whole fulfilled over 300!
But all of these amazing predictions—all the shout-outs of a coming Redeemer awaited ‘THE FULNESS OF TIME.’
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And then it happened, 4,000 years after the first Genesis 3:15 promise the PERFECT TIMING to send forth His Son via the miraculous conception had arrived!
“In the fullness of time, in the perfect time, God sent forth his Son.”
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Now, people often ask why He didn’t come sooner.
Why did mankind not have the offer of His shed blood and the new birth immediately after the fall?
Why were four thousand dark and gloomy years allowed to roll on?
Ultimately, I don’t know the answer to the inner workings and deep counsels of God.
But I can offer a few thoughts:
Had Jesus come directly after the fall, the enormity and deadly fruits of sin would not have been realized fully by man, so as to feel his desperate state and need of a Savior.
When Jesus finally arrived, the horror of sin was fully developed.
Then also, man’s frustrating inability to save himself by obedience to the law, whether that of Moses, or that of conscience, was completely manifested.
And we also see that God’s Providence had been preparing the world of Jesus’s time.
The famous roads of Rome (all roads lead to Rome) created a perfect setting for gospel preachers to cover the known world with the message of salvation.
The Greek language God chose for the NT to be written in had now become the common language of the world of that day.
—So a world totally frustrated with its inability to win the battle against sin,
—And a world perfectly positioned for the spread of the gospel is the world that witnessed “the fulness of time” for God to send His Son!
Listen to this closing verse:
Romans 5:6 LB “When we were utterly helpless, with no way of escape, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners who had no use for him.”
The next verses are so good I can’t pass them up:
7 Even if we were good, we really wouldn’t expect anyone to die for us, though, of course, that might be barely possible. 8 But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. 9 And since by his blood he did all this for us as sinners, how much more will he do for us now that he has declared us not guilty? Now he will save us from all of God’s wrath to come. 10 And since, when we were his enemies, we were brought back to God by the death of his Son, what blessings he must have for us now that we are his friends and he is living within us! 11 Now we rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God—all because of what our Lord Jesus Christ has done in dying for our sins—making us friends of God.”