Galatians 4:4-6
"But when the fullness of the time was come. God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.
And because ye are sons. God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba Father."

Matthew 1:18-23
"Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as His mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.
But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.
And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call His name Jesus: for He shall save His people from their sins.
Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying. Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us." (Matthew 1:18-23)

In the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem one spot is pointed out to travelers as being the center of the world. It is a strange and rather fantastic claim. Yet there is a sense in which the corner of the earth's surface called Palestine is the geographical center. Take the three great continents of Europe, Asia and Africa; in between them, linking them up, lies this little land bridge on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Clearly, if you were to start a movement whose aim was to extend out into three great continents simultaneously, that neck of land would be a natural starting point.
The old legend about the center of the world is, therefore, truer than the man who invented it realized.
It was no haphazard that made Bethlehem and Nazareth and Calvary the cradle of the Christian faith. It was the best possible place for the launching of a world religion.
But if the place God chose was ideal for the coming of Christ, the time in history was ideal too! It was when, in the fullness of the time was come, says Paul, that God sent forth His Son. That is to say, it was when world conditions were exactly ripe for it that God's supreme revelation in history came. It was when all the factors — social, economic, moral, religious — had converged upon him that the Man of God's right hand came forth. The hour and the Man had met!
Search the pages of history up and down, and in all the tale of the centuries you will not find any generation to which Christ could better have come than just the generation in which He did come.
"There is the tide", said Shakespeare, "in the affairs of men." We can go beyond that and say that there is a tide in the affairs of God,

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and it is when that tide reaches the flood, when all the preparatory work is done and world conditions are clamoring for it and human souls are open, it is then, at the flood-tide hour of history, that God launches His new adventure.
So it was when Scotland heard the rugged voice of John Knox. So it was when Wesley kindled a great fire in England. So it was supremely when upon the whole Greco - Roman world that there burst suddenly out of Galilee, with the shouts of saints and the trumpeting of angels, the sound of a new name, the name of Jesus.
It was the fullness of the time, said Paul — it was the hour fore -- ordained in the divine wisdom — when God sent forth His Son. Jesus came at the very point in history at which all the conditions were ripe for His first advent.
When Jesus came, it was the fullness of the time politically. The dominating feature of the political situation of the generation to which Christ came was the unification of the world. That was Caesar’s achievement. The day of closed frontiers was over. The day of separate, self-sufficient, antagonistic nations, gazing suspiciously at one another across bristling defenses, was done. Everywhere the barriers were down. All the way from the Atlantic to the Caspian, from Britain to the Nile, from Hadrian's Wall to the Euphrates, the Roman standards could be seen. The world was one big neighborhood.
Three factors contributed to this situation into which the gospel of Christ was born. One was the Roman peace. If Christ had come a century earlier, His gospel would have been blocked at every turn, blocked on the land by closed national frontiers, blocked on the ocean by the pirates who made the high seas impassible. But Christ came to a generation when the Roman peace held the world, held it no doubt with an iron hand, but held it sure and far-flung and unbroken; and men could hear the Bethlehem angels sing.
A second factor making for the unity of the world when Jesus came was the great roads. From end to end of the empire the great highways ran, triumph of Roman engineering. And the ten thousand laborers who had toiled on the making of the road in the sweat of their brows little thought they were preparing a way for the Son of God!
Along these imperial lines of communication, built to carry Caesar's legions to every corner of his dominion, the missionaries of the gospel came marching; and everywhere their message spread like wild-fire.
It was on these roads that the Apostle Paul traveled from city to city preaching the gospel of the kingdom. Christ's men could never have evangelized the world as they did if it had not been for the Roman roads.
The third factor making for world unity when Jesus came was language. While each province still had its own tongue or dialect, everywhere the people were bilingual and all knew the Greek language. In the heights of Galatia as much as on the streets of Athens, in Spain as in Rome, the Christian preachers could speak Greek knowing they would be understood.
The Roman peace, the great roads, the common language — these were the things that had linked the world into one big neighborhood and so had prepared the way for Christ.

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When Jesus first came, it was the fullness of time not only politically, but also economically. Deep down beneath the shining culture of that old world, down beneath its luxury and magnificence, unrest was seething and poverty walked in rags. Two men of every three on the streets of Rome were slaves, mere goods and chattels; and sometimes the slave's heart rebelled. In many quarters of Caesar's dominions the economic situation had reached the point of crisis when Jesus came. So it was in Palestine. The disastrous aftermath of war, the wild, colossal extravagance of Herod the Great, the burden of taxation, both civil and religious, the growing over-population which made it impossible for the land to provide food enough for its own population — these things had precipitated a period of unexampled depression among the great bulk of the people. Life had grown care-ridden and full of weary. Anxiety for the morrow was written deep upon men's faces and on their hearts, and all the world seemed tangled and gone wrong. It was then at the blackest hour that a voice of hope rang out of Galilee, and men's hearts leapt up and listened, for the fullness of time had come.
When Jesus first came, it was the fullness of time morally. Swineburne in one of his poems cries out protestingly that after Christ the world has never known the same light-heartedness again; that Jesus has taken all its natural gaiety and good spirits away; that until then the Greco-Roman world had been perfectly happy and innocent and contented in its nature worship, its worship of Zeus and Dionysus and Aphrodite; that Jesus really spoiled everything. "Thou hast conquered, 0 pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from Thy breath".
But all that is false to the facts. Historically it is nonsense. The idea of an ancient world happy and innocent and light-hearted and morally at peace is simply a myth! If you want the real truth about that world, you will get it, not in Swineburne, but in Paul, in the terrible picture that stands forever for all future ages to read Paul's first chapter to the Romans — a world that was sunk in moral helplessness.
"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the un-corruptible God into an image made like corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.
Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever, Amen."

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For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections; for even their women did changed the natural use unto that which is against nature; and likewise also the man, leaving the natural use of the women, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men, working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affections, implacable, unmerciful: who knowing the judgment of God that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them." (Romans 1:18-32)
It was a world sunk deep in hopelessness, sin and despair that Christ left the glory of heaven to come to. Everywhere to the noblest souls it seemed that the whole world was pursuing its riotous way down to disaster and oblivion and ultimate night.
When Jesus first came, it was in the fullness of the time religiously. The old gods of Rome were either dead or dying. To fill the gap, two expedients were tried. On the one hand, a whole new batch of gods was imported from the East, outlandish, oriental deities brought in to stir Rome's jaded senses, till among the philosophers, the overcrowding of Olympus, where the gods were supposed to dwell, became a standing joke. On the other hand the strange phenomenon of Caesar worship appeared; the emperor himself was accorded divine honors. But all expedients failed.
What was a whole Pantheon of gods worth if they have nothing to say to a soul stabbed with the guilt and remorse of sin? Nothing!
Amidst all this religious confusion there was a strange sense of something impending from the side of God. In many parts of the world men of deeper nature and more spiritual vision were peering into the darkness for some faint flush of dawn.
Among the Jews themselves the hope of the Messiah was blazing more clearly than it had done for centuries. The air was tense with expectation.
So the Redeemer came — in the fullness of the time. Somewhere in the mind and heart of God from the very foundation of the earth the Christ had been waiting, hidden in the counsels of eternity until the great bell of the ages should strike; and when at last everything in the world and in the souls of men was ready and prepared, He came, the Word of God made flesh — in the fullness of the time.
His coming was the fulfillment of many Old Testament prophecies. A consideration of Old Testament prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah reveals that there were two streams of thought. One stream spoke of the deity of Christ, while the other spoke of the humanity of Christ. The Jewish interpreters of the Old Testament could not reconcile these two streams. They could not understand how the Messiah could be divine, and yet also human. They erred in understanding and missed the very Messiah that their Scriptures prophesied would come.

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Speaking of His Deity, Isaiah wrote: "A virgin shall conceive and bear a Son — and His name shall be called — Immanuel" (Isa. 7:14). "For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given — and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace." (Isa. 9:6-9).
From Bethlehem there was to come forth the — "Rulers, whose goings forth have been from of old (from the days of eternity)" (Micah 5:2).
There are many Old Testament scriptures that spoke of the humanity of the Messiah. The Redeemer was to be the "seed of the women" who would bruise the serpent's head (Genesis 3:15). Also the Redeemer would be the "seed of Abraham" (Genesis 22:18). The Messiah was to come from the nation of Israel (Numbers 24:17-19).
But how could the Messiah be both human and divine? The miracle of the incarnation is God's answer to the question. The word "incarnation" simply means "God taking on Himself human flesh." God took human form and clothed Himself with flesh in the virgin birth. Paul wrote; "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
And being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is about every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." (Philippians 2:5-11)
All the New Testament writers attest to the truth of the incarnation. The origin of the Christ-child, as to His humanity, is traced to the work of the Holy Spirit. God became man in Jesus, Deity took upon Himself humanity. Jesus Christ was not deified humanity, but the decent of God into humanity. It is not man taking God into him, but God taking on manhood.
Jesus Himself gave abundant evidence of His own origin including the truth of His miraculous birth. Jesus said 'I came from God, I came forth from the Father — (John 16:27; 8:42). Jesus knew that He was David's Lord (as to His Deity), and David's Son (as to His humanity). On numerous occasions He claimed God as His Father while never saying that Joseph was His Father. The Father God also attested to the Son's miraculous birth. Three times He spoke from heaven, two of these three times attesting to the fact — 'This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.' This was the Father's taking responsibility for the way His Son was born. It was the Father's way of acknowledging the virgin birth. To deny the virgin birth is to reject Christ's on testimony, as well as the Father's witness.

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There are two major things which necessitated the incarnation. The fall and sinfulness of man, and the covenant-making and keeping God.
Man sinned and therefore came under the death penalty. "And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." (Genesis 2:16-17). Man thus needed someone to redeemed him from death. However, all those who would be born of Adam's race would be born in sin and need redemption from sin and death for themselves. If man is to be redeemed and a man must die for man, and if no man of Adam's race could do this, then only God could redeem man. But by His own law God could not redeem man as God. He had to become man. The fall of man necessitated the covenant-keeping God becoming man in order to redeem man back to relationship with Himself. It was sin that necessitated the incarnation.
However, if God was to become man He must be without or apart from sin. Otherwise, He Himself would be a sinner unable to save others. God's answer was demonstrated in the miracle of the virgin birth, in which God clothed Himself with human flesh, and was born of Mary into the human race.
"In the fullness of the time," — Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil and his kingdom. "Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy Him that had the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage" (Hebrews 2:14-15).
Jesus came to live a perfect and sinless life as God intended man to live on this earth. Adam fell from that life, but Jesus Christ lived this life without sin.
Jesus came to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. Christ, as a priest on earth offered at Calvary's altar His own body and blood as the supreme sacrifice for sin. This was the supreme purpose of the incarnation, to put away sin for ever, for only could a perfect sinless man atone for the sins of mankind.
The first coming of Christ by the incarnation was but preparatory "In the fullness of the time" — "When the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power; when He shall come to be glorified in His saints, and to be admired in all them that believe (because our testimony among you was believed) in that day" (2 Thess. 1:7-10) "In the fullness of time!" Because He came once, He will come again! "For as the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" (Matthew 24:27).