Christ Obedient to the Law.
I. Christ's obedience to the law was not a matter of course, following upon His incarnation. Scripture everywhere separates the two, making His obedience an additional thing, undertaken by Him over and above His becoming man. It was a positive thing, not to be for a moment in our thoughts merged in the mere negative fact of His being pure and free from sin.
II. Secondly, it was not only an integral, but also a necessary, part of His work of redemption. The Jew was lifted above all the other nations, and stood nearer to God. His privilege was greater, and his guilt was different. The guilt of all mankind before God was indeed that of original disobedience, but might now be said to consist in blindly following sinful courses, while Israel's guilt was that of constant and deliberate disregard of a written and ever-present law. And that righteousness which put man into the position of God's approval being to come in by one Man, Jesus Christ, all cases of guilt must be covered, all situations of disobedience taken up and borne and carried triumphantly out into perfection and accordance with the Father's will by the Son of God in our flesh; and this could only be done by His taking upon Himself the situation of the higher responsibility and the deeper guilt. And there was another reason why our Lord should have been made under the law: His fulfilling of the will of God for man was to be, not only complete, but was to be our pattern, that as He was holy, so we might be holy also; and this it could not have been had it not been of the highest kind. He not only fulfilled all righteousness in His own person, but He showed to us, His disciples, a new and better way: He led us up through the law, and out of and above the law, into our obedience and spiritual freedom, so that He has satisfied and abolished the handwriting of ordinances that was against us and has taken it out of the way, nailing it to His cross.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. vi., p. 88.
The Fulness of Time.
I. God sent forth His Son, and sent Him in the fulness of time. In four ways God had prepared the civilised world for the reception of Christianity. (1) By means of the Roman empire He had reduced all the world under one government, so that there was free intercourse between all parts of the known world, and there was no political obstacle to the spread of the faith from one nation to another. (2) By means of the Greek language, the most perfect instrument of thought ever known, He had made the earth to be of one tongue, and thus He had prepared the way for the advent of Christ. (3) By means of the chosen people of the Jews, having still their religious centre at Jerusalem, yet scattered throughout the world, He had provided a nursery for the tender plant of the Gospel. (4) By reason of the general confluence and mutual competition of all kinds of heathen idolatries, He had caused heathenism to lose its old repute and power over souls.
II. Why did God not send His Son sooner into the world to comfort and to save? Is it not hard to think of the Son of God looking calmly down through all the ages on His miserable creatures, tormenting and slaying one another, crying with piteous, unavailing cries to that heaven which, in its unmoved majesty, only seemed to mock their agony? We may ask these questions, but we cannot answer them. Revelation is as dumb as Nature herself to these inquiries. We only know that to God the moment of our Saviour's advent was the fulness of the time, was the earliest moment in which He could come to our help. But He that stooped from His Divine estate to die upon the cross has surely earned our confidence. We do not know how the history of the world is to be reconciled with the goodness of God, but we can believe. Jesus Christ has surely a right to demand that we should trust Him, not only with the present, but with the past, too.
R. Winterbotham, Sermons and Expositions,p. 323.
The Fulness of Time.
I. There was a threefold work of preparation for the Son of God, carried forward in what was then called the civilised world, and each portion of this preparation demanded the lapse of a certain period. (1) The world had to be prepared in a certain sense politically for His work. In order to spread an idea or a dreed, two instruments are very desirable. The first is a common language, and the second is a common social system, common laws, a common government. The first of these conditions was partly provided by the conquests of Alexander. He spread the Greek language through Western Asia, throughout Egypt; and when Greece itself was conquered, the educated Romans learned the language of the vanquished provincials. And during the half-century which preceded the birth of Christ the Roman empire was finally consolidated into a great political whole, so that Palestine and Spain, so that North Africa and Southern Germany, were administered by a single government. Christianity, indeed, did not need this. It passed beyond the frontiers of the empire in the lifetime of the Apostles. But this preparation was an important element in the process by which preceding ages led up to the fulness of time. (2) There was a preparation in the convictions of mankind. The most gifted of races had done its best with heathenism, and the result was that all the highest and purest minds loathed the present and looked forward to the future. It was the fulness of the time. (3) There was also a preparation in the moral experience of mankind. The widespread corruption of the age, the longing for better things, marked the close of the epoch of moral experiments; it announced that the fulness of the time had come.
II. The fulness of the time came, and God sent forth His Son. If we had seen Jesus Christ in His earthly life and had freely opened our souls without prejudice to the impression He could have produced upon them, what would that impression have been? (1) First of all, we should have observed that He stands in a totally different relation towards moral truth from that of every other man whom we have ever met. His life breathes sinlessness, freedom, peace. To Him the law can bring no curse. The law does but express His character in human words; He is strictly in harmony with it. (2) And not merely is His life thus sinless: it is also at harmony with itself. Precisely because He is not like any individual man, with some great special endowment, with some striking idiosyncrasy, but, on the contrary, of a humanity so universal, so comprehensive, that all feel that they have their share in Him, and even Pilate, unconscious of the mighty truth he was uttering, could cry, "Behold the man," therefore He draws all men to Himself; therefore He can sanctify all human capacities; therefore He can subdue all human wills; therefore the century in which, and the people among which, He appears cannot monopolise Him. He and His revelation have on them the clear mark of eternity. He can bring all whose hearts are not closed against His advances by wilful sin into their right relation towards God and towards each other.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,No. 703.
References: Galatians 4:4. H. Batchelor, The Incarnation of God,p. 1; H. P. Liddon, Christmastide Sermons,p. 74; Ibid., Advent Sermons,vol. i., p. 157; G. Bainton, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvii., p. 150. Galatians 4:4; Galatians 4:5. W. Cunningham, Sermons,p. 393; J. Monro Gibson, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxv., p. 56; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. v., p. 331; Preacher's Monthly,vol. iv., p. 321.
Let us consider wherein consisted the preparation of the fulness of the time preceding the birth of Christ for a new turn in the history of the world and wherein consisted the special peculiarity of the coming of Christ which made it the germ of what there was to be in the ages following, and further see how this is really true of ourselves and of our own age.
I. There was a general sickness, so to speak, in the condition of the civilised world at that time. Look at the Roman empire. The most tremendous civil wars that ever were fought had just ended, leaving all their scars and sores behind. "If ever we were to judge of God's moral judgment," says a great Roman historian, "exclusively from the varying fortunes of good and bad men, there are few instances of successful wickedness which would more disturb our faith than that of the long and peaceful reign of Augustus Caesar, whose word rules the earth." Look, again, at the dying and worn-out condition of the old pagan religion. Or look at the Jewish nation, with its sects of Pharisees and Sadducees, the religion of Moses and Isaiah falling away into a discussion of the most minute ceremonial of dress and food and posture, a fierce fanaticism taking possession of the whole people. It was in some respects the darkest period of the Gentile-Jewish world, the dullness before the dawn. "God sent forth His Son." He was a Teacher unlike the generation from which He sprang, yet specially suited to the needs of the generation. "I dreamt a dream," says one of the most gifted writers of the last century, the famous Rousseau. "I saw the temples and altars of the ancient world in all their splendour. I looked, and they had vanished, and in their place I saw standing a young Teacher, full of grace and truth. He had not attacked them; He had not destroyed them; but by His own intrinsic excellence and majesty He had superseded them, and there was no one to dispute His right." This is the true description of the aspect of Jesus Christ towards the darker side of the old world. And what was His aspect towards the brighter side? Almost everything there was of good in it took courage, was revived and assimilated and strengthened by Him. The long-unexampled peace under Augustus Caesar, the organic unity of the civilised world under his sceptre, gave a framework into which the Gospel could fit and spread without hindrance or violence.
II. Such a fulness of time, such a craving of the empty human heart, such a providential preparation, as occurred on the first birthday of Christianity cannot be re-enacted, but in each successive age and in each individual there is in a certain sense a return of the fulness and a reproduction of the coming. In each successive age, even in this age of our own, there is something like it. In every age the glad tidings of great joy is but the moral element of human nature as the true representative and vehicle of Divinity. Where this is to be found in any degree, there in some degree is the manifestation of the Godhead and a child of God. Where it is not found, whatever else there may be, there the supreme Divinity is not. Where it is found in the highest degree, there is God incarnate; there is the true Son of the universal Father.
A. P. Stanley, Penny Pulpit,New Series, No. 851.
Reference: Galatians 4:4-6. G. Hester, Christian World Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 11.