The Perfect Plan and Timing of Christmas: An Exposition of Galatians 4:4-6
“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”” (Galatians 4:4–6 ESV)
Your opinion of time and punctuality says a lot about your personality or temperament. There are those who’d rather not show up at all for an event if they know they’ll be late. By contrast, there are others who just “get there when they get there.”
Maybe you’re the type of person who arrives at work or to other appointments ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes early, or maybe even earlier. Or maybe you’re the sort of person who drives feverishly everywhere you go because you’re always running late—you know, the sort of person who honks for others to go at a stoplight before the red light even changes to green.
A friend recently told me that he had to confront an employee who was five to ten minutes late for work nearly every day. The employee had a hard time seeing why this was such a big deal, and my friend couldn’t quite figure out how this employee couldn’t see being late every day as a problem. People have different views of time and timeliness.
But we know perfect timing when we see it. A receiver is running down the field and the quarterback places the ball in just the right place at just the right time. Someone knocks something over and you’re able to stick your hand out at just the right time to catch it before it hits the ground. Someone is in the road about to be hit by a car when a bystander pulls them back at just the right time.
In Galatians 4:4-6, Paul is writing about a divine intervention that occurred at just the right time. As we consider this text, let’s consider the perfect timing and plan of God which is demonstrated to us in Paul’s account of the Christmas story. To do so, we’ll focus on two primary principles.
Christmas teaches us that the perfect timing of God doesn’t always look like perfect timing to us.
If you were to read the Christmas story in Matthew or or Luke’s Gospel, very little about the scenario suggests ideal timing. Mary and Joseph are essentially engaged to be married when Gabriel comes to Mary and tells her that she, a virgin, will have a child. This leads Joseph to be concerned about what people will think of Mary and him. As the narrative continues, Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem, Joseph’s hometown, for the purpose of being counted in something like a census. But Mary is apparently far along in her pregnancy, and it turns out that Jesus is born while they’re in Bethlehem. But there isn’t even a proper room in Bethlehem for Jesus to be born so a feeding trough serves as His crib after His birth.
This hardly seems like the ideal time or the ideal way for the Son of God to enter into the world. If we were to choose the right time and the right place, I don’t think we would have chosen the same time or the same setting in which Jesus was born. But God did. And Paul goes so far as the say in Galatians 4:4 that His birth occurred in the “fullness of time.” This was the very moment that God had waited for. This is the scenario God had planned. This was just the right time in human history.
People have speculated about why, out of all of the moments in human history that Jesus could’ve come, He came at this time. Some have pointed out that the historical setting was just right. The Roman Empire dominated the world at the time of Jesus’ birth, and there was relative peace throughout the Empire (pax Romana). The majority of the people within the Empire spoke a common language, making communication much easier than it would have been at other points in history. It was easier to travel within the Roman Empire due to more roads, open waterways, and the vast expanse of the Roman Empire itself. All of these things might help explain why this time was just the right time for Jesus to come.
But the reality is that there is no perfect explanation of why He came at this moment in history. God’s plans and God’s timing are often too lofty for us to comprehend. Thus, we look at the Christmas story, and we wonder what God was up to and why He chose this place, this time, and this plan. To be frank, we sometimes look at our own lives and wonder what God is up to, or if He’s even present at all. We’re often unable to fully grasp God’s plans and God’s timing. However, the Bible teaches us that He does everything at just the right time. The Christmas story teaches us that the perfect timing of God doesn’t always look like perfect timing to us.
Yet here’s Jesus, born to a young woman named Mary in the town of Bethlehem. Paul tells us that Jesus was “born of a woman” in order to highlight the fact that although Jesus was the divine Son of God He was also fully human. Jesus had a completely human body. He got hungry. He became thirsty. He was tired and slept like we do. Whatever the song “Away in a Manger” may say, He even cried. Jesus was “born of a woman” named Mary.
But Paul says something else about Jesus here. He was not only born of a woman, but He was also “born under the law.” That’s a sort of confusing phrase. What does being “born under the law” mean? God had given the law to the people of Israel, and the law told them how they were supposed to live, how they should interact with one another, and even how they should worship. But no one could perfectly keep the law, and to break the law was to sin against God. Because no one could keep the law perfectly, everyone was guilty of breaking the law. They were living under the burden of their inability to obey God.
Jesus was the exception to this. He perfectly kept God’s law. He always, at every moment, obeyed every one of God’s commands. Jesus lived a human life like every human who has ever lived except in His relationship with God. Unlike us, Jesus always did what was right. He always obeyed the Father.
Paul’s phrase contending that Jesus was “born under the law” brings us to the heart of why Jesus even came in the first place as well as to our second point.
Christmas teaches us that the Son of God came so that we might become sons and daughters of God.
The Bible doesn’t allow us to just stop at the Christmas story. In fact, in order to make sense of the Christmas story, we have to make sense of Easter, too. Therefore, we see Jesus not just as a baby in a manger but as a man placed on a cross, dying a death He did not deserve. What Jesus is doing on the cross is “redeeming those who were under the law.” He’s paying the penalty for our law-breaking. He’s stepping in our place for us. If we were to sum up this connection between Christmas and Easter, we would say that Jesus made a way for every one of us to have a real, personal relationship with God. Paul describes this as “adoption.”
Some dear friends of ours, after serving as foster parents of a little girl for a couple of years, were just recently able to adopt her. Whereas before they were loving foster parents, they are now this little girl’s parents. They can call her their daughter, and she can call them her mother and father. God sent Jesus into the world so that through faith in Jesus God might adopt us into His family—so that He might call us His children and we may call Him our Father. In the words of author, “God’s family comprises solely adopted sons and daughters—there are no natural-born sons or daughters in his divine household.”[1]
I don’t know what your father was or is like. Maybe you had a great father, but maybe you grew up feeling unloved and uncared for. Maybe you didn’t even know your father. Oftentimes, human families are dysfunctional and unloving. Such is not the case with our heavenly Father. He is a perfect, loving, caring, faithful God. In fact, if you’re a follower of Jesus, you’re even encouraged to call Him “Father.” When Jesus was teaching His disciples to pray, He instructed them to pray something like, “Our Father, who art in Heaven.” For the believer, Paul teaches us, the Spirit of God residing within us cries out, “Abba, Father!” constantly reminding us that we are the children of God.
This season, may the Christmas story remind us afresh of the perfect timing and plan of the triune God. May it also help us to recall the way in which God has called each of us into His family. In turn, let us speak of and extend the love of God in Christ to those not yet in that family, that one day, they may be.
____________________
[1] Trevor J. Burke, Adoption into God’s Family: Exploring a Pauline Metaphor (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2006), 89.
Recent Comments