What a beautiful, poetic passage of edification and affirmation! The phrase that I would like us to focus our minds and hearts on is “When the fullness of time had come . . . .”
One of the images that I have of God Almighty is that of a “Master Chessman.” In the natural a Master Chessman has reached status of and earned the title of “Master” based on the ability to project forward in time to all of the possible moves his opponent might make. For each move his opponent may choose, the Master has multiple options in choosing his next move. Each of these options provides his opponent with multiple choices of his own. Continuing this process for four or five possible future moves by each player, all of the multiple options each move presents to each player and the extrapolation forward in time involves a complex array of possible future events that boggles the mind of the average chess player. The ability to foresee so many possible alternative future events and their consequences is one of the many factors that sets apart a true Master chessman from all others in his field.
One part of the many aspects of God’s omniscience is His “foreknowledge,” i.e. His ability to see into, what is for us, the future. Omniscience is a word from the Greek: omni – all science – “a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws.” Quite a mouthful, yes? Simply put, one of the aspects of God’s nature is that He is “all-knowing.”
At this point we must be careful to note that God, the Creator of the universe, is Himself outside of and greater than that which He has created. Therefore, as his created ones we live within the four dimensions of the physical universe of which we are a part – time, energy, matter and space. God, however, who is pure Spirit and who brought all that is into existence is not limited to these physical dimensions and the limitations they impose upon us.
God is able, beyond our finite ability to perceive or understand, in His Infinite Nature as the Great “I AM,” is able to see all of time, past, present and future, as we perceive the present moment. Even more, He is able to perceive every aspect of every moment in time as if it were this very moment, and invest Himself in it with perfect understanding of all of the infinite dimensions of what that means to you and to me, physically, emotionally, intellectually, volitionally and spiritually. There is not separation of division within His Nature for He is, at one and the same time, Father, Son and Holy Ghost who is ONE!
Therefore, according to His providence, literally His “foresight” which includes both His “prudent anticipation” as well as His “precautions,” God made provision for His only begotten Son to be incarnated, to come into this world in human flesh, at just the precise moment in time and history when the Good News of God’s redemption of all mankind could go forth into the world.
From the time of God’s first calling of Abram (whose name God later changed to Abraham, “the Father of nations”) in Genesis 12, God promised that from the seed of Abraham all of the peoples of the world would be blessed (v. 3). The Father had it in His heart that His chosen people would be a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 49:6). And so, through the Messiah Jesus, they were indeed! The original disciples of Jesus who went forth as Apostles, plus those first deacons like Phillip and that great Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul who was Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee trained under Gamaliel, were all Jews.
Through the seed of Abraham we have received the Hebrew Scriptures (our Old Testament), and the writings of the Apostles (our New Testament). The authors of the New Testament were themselves Jews: Matthew, Mark, John, Paul, James, Jude, as well as the author of Hebrews were all Jews.
We know nothing of Luke’s background other than that he was a physician and the friend of a man named Theophilus. We do not know of a certainty whether he was a Gentile or whether, like Saul of Tarsus and Cephas, he was a Jew as they were and who was known by his Greek name, Luke, when working in the environs of Gentile society as Paul and Peter were known by their Greek names. If Luke was a Gentile, he was certainly well-schooled in the Hebrew Scriptures by Paul with whom he traveled and ministered for many years. For one cannot fully appreciate the significance of the birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus unless one has the firm grounding in and the clear understanding of God’s relationship with, His Covenant with and His Promises for mankind as revealed in His Word. That Word, the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament was the Bible for Jesus, Peter, James, John, Paul and all of those who brought Gospel to all of Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the uttermost reaches of the Roman Empire within the time span of one generation!
So it was indeed the “Fullness of Times,” because the Promised Messiah had come. Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled all of the more than 60 major prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures plus what the scholars refer to as the 270 “ramifications” or secondary implications of His coming. Remember, the prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah were written over thousands of years by a multitude of authors in various cultures and circumstances, the last of which was recorded approximately 400 years before Jesus was born!
The experts in statistics cite that the probability of one person fulfilling even 8 of these major prophecies, in order to help us visualize the magnitude of such, is the equivalent of covering every square inch of the state of Texas with silver dollars stacked two feet high which equals 10 quadrillion (a 10 followed by 18 zeros) coins and marking just one of those coins at random and then sending someone to walk across the state, stop where they choose, bend down and pick up one of those coins. The odds of such a one picking the only marked coin among them all is the same probability of the Messiah, born at the right moment in history, in the right place, and completing only 8 of these Messianc prophecies. Jesus fulfilled them ALL!! These same experts tell us that the probability of all the Messianic prophesies being fulfilled by one man in one lifetime is so low that it reaches the level of a statistic Impossibility! Praise God! Yet, this is only one dimension or aspect of the “Fullness of Time.”
The second aspect we want to acknowledge is the provision for the Gospel to be preached to people of all the ethnos, or people groups, of the Roman Empire in a single generation. One way in which this was made possible was the fact that at the time of Christ and the Apostles Greek had become the “lingua franca” or the universal language of commerce and government throughout the Roman Empire, which itself had Latin as its primary language.
So these Hebrew speaking Apostles came forth from Jerusalem penetrating the Latin speaking Roman domains communicating the Gospel to the Gentile in koine Greek (the dialect, not of the classical scholars and philosophers, but of the common people – just like you and me!). How had the Father made provision for this?
Israel was located at one of the most strategic spots in the entire world! It was the connecting link of a land-bridge between Africa, Asia Minor (southern Europe) and Asia proper. Therefore, it was located at a bottleneck locale where merchants, travelers, philosophers, sages and explorers found themselves traversing with regularity thereby enriching the culture of and providing a more global exposure to and for the inhabitants of this tiny strip of land.
Unfortunately, however, that also made it a “plum” to be picked by every major empire that desired to expand its territory and influence, for this expansion was universally done via military conquest. Since the “Golden Era” of Kings David and Solomon, Israel had known very little of peace and prosperity. Divided into two kingdoms during the reign of Solomon’s heir, Reheboam, the nation became two – the Northern Kingdom, Israel, ruled by Jereboam, and the Southern Kingdom, Judah, ruled by Reheboam.
Israel in the north was devastated by the Assyrians, and their policy of total assimilation ultimately left behind a remnant, mongrelized people, both in terms of their ethnicity and their religious practices known as the Samaritans, so-named after the capital city of Jereboam, Samaria, and despised by their pure-bred relatives, the Jews in the south. The southern kingdom was then conquered by the Babylonians, and the capital of Jerusalem razed. Its pride and joy, the Temple of Solomon was razed and burned, and all of the wealth of the kingdom, both its physical wealth and its wealth in terms of human capital were taken to Babylon. Those Jews left in the Land were poor and without leadership and without their structures and priests to enable them to continue in their accustomed forms of worship.
After 70 years of captivity, a contingent of leaders returned to Jerusalem, and under Nehemiah the walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt. The Temple was rebuilt under Zerubbabel, and the Laws and worship were reintroduced by Ezra. Things would never be the same, however. Without their Temple to go to in order to perform their sacrifices and hold their great feasts, the Jews in Babylon had developed the synagogue or local congregational system of worship and were thereby able to perpetuate their study of and faithfulness to Torah.
From this point forward, Israel is used with reference to the Land, and the Jews is used with reference to those who held to the worship of YAHWEH, the I AM, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Their Scriptures came to be known as the Torah, but this can be a little misleading, for they use this as a generic term for all of the Hebrew Scriptures known as the TaNaK, a Hebrew acronym for the Torah (the Law of Moses found in the first five books of Genesis-Deuteronomy) the Nefilim (the Prophets) and the Ketubim (the Writings, or the Wisdom Literature). These are what we find in our Old Testament and it is the totality of these Scriptures to which Jesus referred on several occasions as “the Law and the Prophets.” The Samaritan, however, believed that only the five books of Moses were sacred.
You will recall from your readings of Daniel 7 that he prophesied the sequence of four world powers that would come forth based on a vision wherein four beast came forth from the seas, one after another, before the glorious coming of the like a Son of Man (v.13) who would establish His eternal Kingdom (Blessed by His Name!). The first, the lion, we identify with Babylon. The second, resembling a bear, we identify with the Medes and the Persians. During the reign of the Persian king, Cyrus, the Jews returned from Babylon to Jerusalem. The third beast was like a leopard that had four wings and four heads.
The leopard symbolized the Greek Empire, and there are two key components that are of interest to us. The first deals with the spread of the Greek language, as mentioned above. Alexander the Great, a prince of Macedonia (a small kingdom of northern Greece) was tutored in war by his father, King Phillip, but in all else, Alexander was the disciple of the renowned Greek philosopher, Aristotle. Aristotle imparted to his pupil a true missionary zeal and a belief that the Greek culture was the very epitome of civilization.
When Alexander went forth to conquer, he did so with unparalleled success and speed. Before he died at the premature age of 33 Alexander had conquered all of kingdoms of the Mediterranean basin, including southern Europe, northern Africa, Asia Minor (what is today Turkey), all of the Middle East, Persia, Arabia and had even penetrated into regions of the subcontinent of modern-day Pakistan and India.
More than mere military rule and the collecting of tribute, however, Alexander strove to fulfill the vision that his mentor, Aristotle, had successfully woven into his very psyche, for in all of the lands that he conquered, Alexander introduced every aspect of Greek culture including its language, dress, science, philosophies, mode of governing, the arts, the Olympic games and physical contests in the nude, and the pantheon of it gods, known best to us from the stories handed down through our western civilization know as Greek mythology. In every major city, Alexander had temples erected to their various gods and goddesses, and he introduced the rites of temple prostitution, both males and females. Both heterosexual and homosexual as well as the drunken orgies and other modes of debauchery they entailed.
This all encompassing expression of Greek culture became known as Hellenism. On e of the greatest trials for Judaism came with the Hellenization of so many of the Jewish people during this period. All of the ramifications of this process and the crisis it presented for the Judaism of its day is the subject for another study. However, the employment of a universal language by which the Apostles of Christ could transmit the Gospel was a gift from God, and was in place at just the right moment in history for its effective use in communicating with all of the people groups throughout the Roman Empire.
We might note here, also, that Saul of Tarsus, was knowledgeable of all things Greek, as well as all things Jewish, and this knowledge held him in good stead that in the proclamation of God’s truth he could truly be “all things to all men, so that I may be all means save some” (1 Cor. 9:22).
* * * * * * * * * *
(to be continued . . . . In our next edition of Fresh Bread, we will delve into the significance of the “leopards four heads” and also deal with the contributions to the preparation for the spread of the Gospel made by the fourth beast in Daniel’s vision – Rome.
