At Just the Right Time: A Sermon for the New Year
Galatians 4:4–7 NKJV
"But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.
And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!” Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ."
About fifty years ago, Andrew Lloyd Weber created a new musical called “Jesus Christ, Superstar.” It was perhaps an attempt to make Jesus relevant to an increasingly secular and skeptical age. However, it was a highly irreverent work. In the song of the same name as the work, the voice of Judas makes many outrageous charges. Jesus is mocked as a misguided martyr. One of the lines questioned the timing of Jesus’ arrival in 4 BC, seeing it had no mass communication. This brings up a good question. Why did God choose that time to bring His Son into the world? Weber’s charges are, of course, blasphemous. Who are we to question God, especially in this way? It could be simply answered “Because God said so.” But is there a right way to contemplate the timing of God? Let us see.
Let us first remember is that God is God, and we are not. God is all-knowing, not just of current happenings, but all future happenings as well. God is also all-powerful and can bring whatsoever He wills to pass. Whereas we might have partial power and might appear to be able to influence future events as well as to make predictions about these events, our ability falls far short of the power of God. We need to go no further than tomorrow, which is New Year’s Day. All kinds of resolutions will be made, usually to amend some fault on our part such as losing weight. We will start this on the second of January as there is no use missing the New Year’s Party. People will make predictions of what will happen in 2024. Will the war in Gaza spread to the Middle East? Will we have a recession? What will the weather be like? We would like to know these things. However, it is humbling that weathermen are far from perfectly accurate about the upcoming weather, especially as one looks past the next few days.
New Year’s is a time to try to feel optimistic. It is far too depressing otherwise. People hope that the New Year will be better than the old one. Maybe it will be, maybe not. It may be good for some but bad for others. Who knows, but God? We think of the great chapter about time in the 3rd chapter of Ecclesiastes, which was put to music by Pete Seeger and sung by a group named the Byrd’s. To everything, there is a time and a season under the hands of God. Seeger hoped that it would be a time of peace rather than war. the song adds to the text: “I hope its not too late.” Will it be a good year to have a child? Or will someone we love, die? The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us that the timing and acts of God are inscrutable. Trying to figure out the meaning of life is meaningless without God.
So let us humbly realize that God is in control of these things and works them out according to His purpose. So we must realize that when God sent His Son to earth somewhere around 4 BC, He knew what HE was doing and why He did it. I said about 4 BC, because we do not know the exact time of Jesus’ arrival. Nor do we know the time of His return. what we affirm is not that He was born on the 25th of December in 4 BC. We affirm that the Divine Word became flesh of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit. He did indeed come into our history which is bound by time and space. 4-6 BC is a good approximation. We don’t know in our time, but it was the perfect time for God, whatever date that was. We might also look at the times we live in and speculate whether this will be the year that Christ returns. Only the Father knows the time. But this time is fixed in His mind. when we look at the signs of the times and what we read from the Scripture that it may indeed be the year. But it may not. However, we live every day in expectation of His return. our salvation is not based on getting the right date but being in the right relationship. We need to be found on that day being faithful servants.
Let us now examine this morning’s text which comes from Galatians 4:4-7. We have already discussed that the birth of Christ occured in the fullness of time. On this day, God sent His Son to earth. This journey started with the conception of Jesus by the Virgin Mary through the agency of the Holy Spirit. No man was involved. Then on Christmas at some time at night, Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. For the vast majority of the world, their time went on, totally oblivious of what God had done. Augustus went on decreeing. Soldiers kept soldiering. Tex-collectors collected taxes. shepherds kept their flocks. The priests in the Temple kept up their daily tasks. The Pharisees kept pondering the time that the Messiah might come. Even though His birth was heralded by the heavenly hosts, only a few shepherds came to the manger, and only because they were told. Joseph and Mary were there. There may not even have been any witnesses among the animals, seeing they were out with the shepherds in the field. The Wise Men came much later, perhaps two years later. The whole world missed this time. Yet, in the mind of God, this was the fullness of time.
It was necessary to the Father that the Son would be born of a woman, the Virgin Mary. This was prophesied by the prophet Isaiah hundreds of years earlier in Isaiah 7:14. But this would not happen in Isaiah’s time. Whatever fulfillment there was in the days of King Ahaz serves only at a pointer to the fullness of time. God did extend the day of Simon the Priest who presented Jesus to the Lord, and probably Anna as well. But numerous other prophets died long before this appointed time. It was also necessary that Jesus be born a Jew or the lineage of King Davis who loved a thousand years before the fullness of time. The Prophet Nathan told David in 2 Samuel 7 that one of His descendants would build the Temple which David could not build because he had shed too much blood. His son, Solomon, did indeed build a Temple for the LORD, but this was not the fullness of time either. History bears this out. Solomon, despite a good start, failed miserably. So did his descendants, some more than others. It would be nearly one thousand years before the time was right.
As long as this time was between the time of Isaiah and Jesus, the promise of the Christ actually goes back thousands of years before that to the Garden of Eden. There in Genesis 3:15, a promise was given that the seed of the woman, having suffered bruised feet would give a death wound to Satan. and if that wasn’t enough, the Bible tells us that Jesus was slain from the foundation of the world. So the plan of redemption is older than time itself. God sees time from the view of eternity, something we cannot fathom. In fact, our understanding of time is based upon our mortality. But there was a time in which the time of God intersected with the time of man. The Word became flesh and entered into our time and out mortality.
It was also necessary to God’s plan that Christ be born under the Law as a Jewish man. Paul says it was to redeem those who were under the Law. This is an interesting statement. One might note that Jesus died for all, not just those under the Law of Moses. This is especially cryptic seeing that Paul in Galatians was aggressively opposing Judaizers who said that unless the Gentiles were circumcised and bound themselves to keep the Law of Moses that they were either not Christians at all, or at the very least very inferior ones. Perhaps Paul is reminding the Jews that they also were dependent upon God’s grace in Jesus Christ to be saved. Those who were under the Law also needed redemption. one was not saved by law-keeping. Another possibility is that “Law” has a more generic application. The Law stipulates the will of God perfectly. Ignorance of the Law is no excuse. Nevertheless, the purpose of the statement is to show our need of this Savior, born of a woman under the Law in the fullness of time.
The result of the coming of Christ into our time and world and dwelling among us, dying for our sin, and rising for our justification on the third day was that we might be adopted into the family of God. The children of Israel are called the “sons of God.” But even Israel was adopted by God. No Jew is a native-born son. The fact that God has extended this great privilege to Gentiles as well shows that God’s family be equally exclusive to ethnic Jews and ethnic Gentiles. It is not that the believing Jew has lost privilege. It is that the Gentiles have gained the privileges once offered more or less exclusively to Israel. The Israel of God Paul refers to at the end of Galatians is the Church. We have been called out from the world.
We are, therefore, no longer slaves. We are sons and equal heirs to the promise. The “Judaizers” might have accepted Gentile believers without circumcision as slaves, much as the Gibeonites of the Old Testament. They would be the drawers of water and the choppers of wood. They would be spared hell but only offered an existence of servitude. After all, does not a kingdom rely upon slave labor, at least in the thinking of those times?
The Gospel is offered equally to all people of all times. This includes our present day. People need to know that they are slaves to sin, but in Christ can be transformed into sons through faith in the one who came in the fullness of time. This is the cause of great joy in both heaven and earth, even if like the older son in the story of the Prodigal refuse to celebrate. Would it not be the proper time for the sinner to receive Christ. To the sinner, today is their “fullness of time.” We read in Isaiah 55:6-7: “Seek the Lord while He may be found, Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, And the unrighteous man his thoughts; Let him return to the Lord, And He will have mercy on him; And to our God, For He will abundantly pardon.” Do not let your fullness of time pass you by. We must act while it is still called “today.” Tomorrow might be one day too late. We must resolve better than our New Year’s resolution which we will start tomorrow because we want to party one more day. Those who resolve to receive Christ today will be greatly rewarded. We are not called to receive a superficial moral uplift, but rather a total transformation. Think about this.
