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Hi, my name is Wayne Johnston. I want to talk about the passage, ‘in the fullness of time.’
A few years ago, my wife and I decided to spend Christmas with my family. We should have stayed home.
We lived in the middle of the Canadian prairies, and my family lived in Northern Ontario.
That Christmas was a bone-chilling -35 C (-31 F) for weeks on end. Our car was old and of course, the night before we left, our dog got out and didn’t come home.
I spent several hours, late at night in -35, looking for our dog, which I never found.
We notified the humane society and had friends look for him while we were gone.
The morning we were to leave, I went to fill up the car with gas, and the gas cap was frozen shut. I couldn’t put gas in the car. I decided not to use a lighter to thaw it out. I was smart enough not to do that.
But it was just one thing after another.
As we traveled, we got to Brandon, Manitoba (not even close to half-way) and spent the night in an inexpensive hotel, because I had gotten sick, possibly from food poisoning, and spent one day in bed.
Finally, we got to our destination. We laugh about it now,
If you have ever had one of those holidays from Hades, where it seems that everything that can go wrong and line up against you, does happen and is put in that box called your holiday.
And that is sort of what I want to talk about.
Galatians 4:4 is an interesting verse about the coming of Christ.
It says:
But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law.
The phrase, ‘fullness of time’, is what I want to focus on.
Wayne, do you mean the ‘fullness of time’ is in the perfect, most wonderful time to send Christ to redeem us?
No, it is more like my holiday.
The Greek word for fullness, ‘piērōma’, means what is filled, as in a container. It is like if I took a coffee cup in my hand and filled it right to the brim to where it would start spilling over.
That is what the Greek word ‘piērōma’ means.
It means literally to fill to the brim, and God sent Christ at God’s most perfect time. But in reality, it was a little like my holiday, where everything was lined up against Christ.
Now if it was up to me when Jesus would come, maybe I would have picked Moses to pass the baton to the Messiah. Possibly, I would have sent Christ to be born during the time of David or even Isaiah or when somebody special was around, who would have handed things over to the Messiah, and everything would have been great.
But that wasn’t God’s perfect time.
So what time did God pick for His only Son to come to Earth and be born?
Think again, not of a nice summer day, but rather it was -35, and the gas cap was frozen, and your dog had escaped, and everything had gone wrong
I believe our Heavenly Father sent His Son in the fullness of time, the worst of times, to prove that He was all in to redeem us.
First, there had been about 450 years of silence. The Old Testament had ended and there were about 450 years of basically silence.
No more major prophets had risen up. No more books of the Bible were written.
It was a time of silence. That was the cup starting to be filled.
The next thing that filled the cup was, the Jews had gone through Babylon, the Persians, and the Greeks and now the Romans were ruling over them.
Jesus was born during the middle of the Pax Romana, the peak of the Roman Empire, and Rome ruled over Judea with an iron fist.
So the cup is starting to get a little fuller now.
While Mary was pregnant, she and Joseph had to move halfway across the country to be registered for the Roman carbon tax, I mean for Roman tax purposes.
They then had to have their baby in a barn in a strange town.
That was making the cup a little fuller.
Another thing that made that holiday or that trip difficult was King Herod.
King Herod was half-Jew. He ruled for Rome over part of Judea, and secular historians have tried to discount the story of Herod having the babies or the innocents slaughtered in Bethlehem.
Yet, secular accounts make it pretty clear that Herod was a monster. He was a paranoid, sadistic monster.
He had members of his own family butchered and drowned because they disagreed with him, and he was paranoid that they might usurp his authority.
Cesar Augustus, who was emperor of Rome at the time, said of Herod that he would rather be Herod’s hog, than one of his sons because he would probably live longer.
It’s interesting because here is a secular account, by a Cesar nonetheless, that supports what the Bible says about Herod.
And in some ways, the Jews were a broken, divided people.
There were religious and secular Jewish rulers who were pro-Roman and said let’s do what we have to do to get along with them. Then other religious leaders just wanted to fight Rome and go against everything that Rome was trying to do.
In some ways, they were a very divided people.
Jesus also had the stigma of people not being really sure of who His actual father was.
Jesus was also born into a lower, working-class situation where there was little chance of getting ahead.
To top it off, he grew up in Nazareth, which had a terrible reputation of nobody good coming out of Nazareth.
And the last thing of filling this cup to where it was starting to dribble over, think in the context of today’s news over the past several weeks. When Jesus was young, they were warned by the angels that He and his family had to flee to Egypt as refugees to survive.
So we have the Jewish Messiah having to flee Judea because it was too sketchy and too dangerous to be in Judea.
You think of that in modern times, that is quite a thing for the Jewish Messiah to have to escape and take refuge in Egypt.
But that was the cup, that God sent the Messiah in.
That cup was filled with everything that I look at and go “No, don’t send the Messiah now, it’s too sketchy.
It’s too dark.
It’s too dangerous.
It’s too scary.
But that is exactly when our Heavenly Father decided to send the Messiah, and I thought my winter holiday was bad.
But I look at that situation, and it starts to become clear to me.
I believe God, the Father, let Jesus, His son redeemer, be born at the worst possible time, when that cup was full of the dregs of everything wrong and dark, so that Christ could be the light in the darkness.
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