Sermon
The Fullness Of Time
December 29, 2002
Pastor Donald Sheley

There's a theme that's been going through my mind, a phrase that is so filled with meaning, in the fullness of the time. It comes from that verse found in Galatians chapter 4, "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." In the fullness of time.

Matthew says, "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." In the fullness of the time.

Let's follow our notes a little while. In the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem one spot is pointed out to travelers as being the center of the world. Now that's 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 Sea. 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.

So 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 to which He did come. Shakespeare wrote, "There is a tide in the affairs of men." We can go beyond that and say that there is a tide in the affairs of God, 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 with 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 in which all the conditions were ripe for His first advent.

Now as we go through these I'm going to pull from history some interesting facts, but I want you to draw some parallels and see how closely the conditions of His first coming parallel with the history of our day.

Let's go to the first one. When Jesus came, it was the fullness of 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 flag could be seen. The world was one big neighborhood for the first time in human history.

Now three factors contributed to this situation into which the gospel of Christ was born. Number one: the Roman peace. You see, 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.

The 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 to the other. It was the triumph of Roman engineering. When you look on a map and you see the vast piece of real estate that Rome owned, you can go as far north, even into Scotland, I had a gentleman today who was raised in Scotland and he said; Pastor, even in northern Scotland today we travel on many of the roads that were built by the Romans 2000 years ago.

All the way from Britain all the way down to what we today know as Baghdad, and then going north to Armenia, all the way across southern Europe down along the north coast of Africa; all of that belonged to Rome. Now they knew that if they were going to control that vast amount of real estate they had to tie it together so they could move their armies as quickly as possible. Because if there was an uprising over here in Armenia, they had to get their troops there. So they built these marvelous roads. They were a masterpiece. They made sure that they had the drainage on the slide and they had the compaction just perfect, and then on top of that they laid their stone. Those Roman roads in many parts of Europe today still remain. But what happened is they crisscrossed, in fact, historians tell us there were over 50,000 miles of handmade roads crisscrossing that empire. And what it did, it provided the roads for the Christian missionaries preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to move from one end of the empire to the other.

Thirdly, the making of the 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.

So we have 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 of Christ and the spreading of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I'm at the top of the page 3. When Jesus came it was the fullness of time, not only politically, but economically. For 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, and so it was in Palestine.

The disastrous aftermath of war, the wild, colossal extravagance of Herod the Great and his building projects, 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 the time had come.

When Jesus first came, it was the fullness of time morally. Swineburne, an atheist, 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 its good spirits away. And then he penned that ugly sentence, "Thou hast conquered, 0 pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from Thy breath" -- so wrote the atheist.

But ladies and gentlemen, all of that is false to the facts. Historically it's nonsense. The idea of an ancient world happy and innocent and light-hearted and morally at peace is simply a myth. If you want to know the real truth about that world to which Jesus came, you don't go to Swineburne, you go to Paul, and he described that world in the first chapter of Romans. And I put much of that chapter in there, but let's go to the top of the page 4.

Paul is describing the moral calamity in which Jesus came: 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."

That's not a picture of a happy world. 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 time religiously. The old gods of Rome were either dead or dying, and to fill the gap, two expedients were tried. On one hand, they brought in a whole new batch of gods that they imported from the East, the oriental deities. And on the other hand the strange phenomenon of Caesar worship appeared, and the emperor himself became god. But all expedients in religion failed. One historian writes, the Christian faith came to a world hungry and insecure and unsatisfied, to a disintegrating society, and to utter religious confusion.

There was this whole Pantheon of gods that Rome developed. It was worth nothing when there was a soul that was stabbed with guilt and sin and remorse. Nothing. I ask you to think with me for a minute. I'm not an alarmist, but I do study history and it's interesting to watch historical events take place and to see how they tie together over the long period. I painted for you the picture of a world into which Jesus came and suggested that, first of all, politically it was tied together as one big neighborhood. I ask you -- think of our world today, satellites, Internet, rapid transportation, most nations now require English in schools -- the children study so English has become almost an international language -- and if ever our world was one big neighborhood -- it is today.

Something happens in Afghanistan -- a little girl gets shot by a soldier -- we know about it in about 10 minutes. Our world is very small. And as history moved towards that point 2000 years ago when all the world was tied together, once again, we come to a time in history when our world is intensely tied together.

Think of it with me economically. You don't have to be much of a student of finance, all you have to do is listen. We are living in a world of tremendous financial instability. You can go to Europe -- one of the major currencies, one of the major sources of finance is Germany, but Germany rides now on the crest of a great, great depression. You study Japan and they're going through a tremendous economic depression. You study the world and if ever there was an economic instability, we're in a today folks.

Now it's interesting, and history can teach us some wonderful lessons, but most nations and most empires fell apart because of the over burden of paying for wars. And one of the marks that Jesus says in Matthew 24, you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. And wars have the fastest way of draining a national treasury.

Again, I'm not an alarmist. I'm just simply saying when you understand the economics of our world, its tottering. Think with me for a moment about morally, and I don't even have to talk about that. You can take those same scripture versus that we read from Romans and line them up for the world in which we live, and it describes it identically. And when you think of religion -- we live in a world where there's so much confusion of religion. And I tell you folks it's invading even our America, which was founded as a Christian nation. Yet because the church has lost its strength, and the church has lost its vibrancy, and the church has lost its authority and has brought so much shame to the cause of Christ, those searching for truth are having a time finding. And we live in nation that's gone in 1000 different directions religiously.

Again, you can be an alarmist, but I'm fully aware you can go back through the pages of the last 300 years of Christian literature and you can find almost in every situation they found something of their generation to say this could be the last generation. They preached the imminent return of Christ, even during the 1700s, and 1800s, because they took the conditions of history and somehow wove them into their theological interpretation and said Jesus could come immediately.

Back in 1967 when we had ships sitting in the Mediterranean Sea ready to bomb Lebanon, and in the San Francisco Examiner the headlines read "Is this the battle of Armageddon?" It's very easy to quickly take the happenings of history and become an alarmist. I don't want to do that, but I do believe that it's wise for us to watch the happenings of our time. Because if He came once, He will come again.

The angels who bid, as He went into heaven in Acts 1:9, they said to those standing by, This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go. One of the great strengths of our Christian faith is the fact that we believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ. He came once, and He's coming again. And I keep thinking of that phrase as it relates to His coming again, in the fullness of the time. Remember, God keeps the time piece for eternity and God wrote the calendar for human history, and He knows the last day -- in the fullness of that time He will come again. That's what we believe as Christians.

I turn to my hymn book and I found this hymn, it says: The sky shall unfold, preparing His entrance; The stars shall applaud Him with thunders of praise. The sweet light of His eyes shall enhance those awaiting; And we shall behold Him then face to face. The angels shall sound the shout of His coming; The sleeping shall rise from their slumbering place. And those who remain shall be changed in a moment; And we shall behold Him then face to face.

When He came the first time He was the answer to a world in desperate need, and when He comes again, it will be in the fullness of His time. As you watch history move along, you watch events take place, you do have that tendency as you grow older to maybe feel a little closer to the events of time. But here's what I'm asking you to do this year. I'm asking you to keep your ear open to the facts of history and watch it transpire. And I want you to so live that if Jesus should come in this year we will applaud His coming, we will be ready, and our hearts will be made happy as we go to meet Him face to face. He may come today, He may come 100 years from now, that's not the point. The point is He is coming in the fullness of time. And may we be ready for that coming. Amen?

Let's bow our heads. Lord Jesus, we've stepped back today and we've taken a lesson from history, and we now know why Paul wrote that descriptive phrase that in the fullness of the time You came. We also realize that as Christians the promise we hold very dear is the promise that You will come again. We know not when, but we know You're coming, and the historical events are making preparation for that great event. May we be sensitive to the happenings of our time.

But more importantly, Lord Jesus, may we live our faith very seriously, very sincerely, so that whenever You choose to come and time is finished, we will hear that trumpet sound and we'll rise to meet You, and we'll all go to greet You in that glorious event of Your second coming. Help all of us to be sensitive to the moment in which we live. And may, Lord Jesus, in this year to come, we so live our faith that those who we relate to will see the sincerity and the honesty and the concern that we have as we live out our faith. And may our lives bring others to know You and prepare for Your coming too, dear Christ.

Thank you for coming. Thank you for this very wonderful season of the year. And one of these Christmases we'll spend our last Christmas here on earth, and we'll be with You forever. Thank you for that hope Lord Jesus. It's in Your name we pray, amen.