Ver. 4. The Fulness of the Time.—Christ comes when a course of preparation, conducted through previous ages, was at last complete. He was not the creation of His own or any preceding age. What is true of all other great men, who are no more than great men, is not true of Him. They receive from their age as much as they give it; they embody and reflect its spirit. Christ really owed nothing to the time or the country which welcomed His advent.
I. The world was prepared politically for Christ’s work.—There was a common language—the Greek; a common government—the Roman.
II. There was a preparation in the convictions of mankind.—The epoch of religious experiments had been closed in an epoch of despair.
III. There was a preparation in the moral experience of mankind.—The dreadful picture of the pagan world which St. Paul draws at the close of the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans is not a darker picture than that of pagan writers—of moralists like Seneca, of satirists like Juvenal, of historians like Tacitus; and yet enough survived of moral truth in the human conscience to condemn average pagan practice. It led them to yearn for a deliverer, although their aspirations were indefinite enough. This widespread corruption, this longing for better things, marked the close of the epoch of moral experiments.
Lessons.—1. The earthly life of Christ stood in a totally different relation towards moral truth from that of every other man. 2. It was a life at harmony with itself and a revelation of higher truth. 3. His incarnation delivers us from false views of the world and of life, from base and desponding views of our human nature, and from bondage.—H. P. Liddon.
Christ Obedient to the Law.
I. This obedience was not a matter of course, following upon His incarnation. He might have lived and died, had it been consistent with His high purpose, in sinless purity, without expressly undertaking as He did openly to fulfil the law. It was a voluntary act, becoming and fit for the great work He had in hand.
II. This obedience was not only an integral but a necessary part of His work of redemption.—Had this not been so, redemption would have been incomplete. Not only God’s unwritten law in the conscience, but God’s written law in the tables of stone, must be completely satisfied. It being shown, by both Gentile and Jew, that neither by nature nor by revealed light was man capable of pleasing God, all men were left simply and solely dependent on His free and unmerited grace. 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.
III. This obedience for man was to be not only complete, so that Christ should stand in the root of our nature as the accepted man, but was to be our pattern, that as He was holy so we might be holy also.
IV. This obedience arose from the requirements of His office connected with the law.—He was the end of the law. It all pointed to Him. Its types and ceremonies all found fulfilment in His person and work. All has been fulfilled. All looked forward to One that was to come—to one who has come, and in His own person has superseded that law by exhausting its requirements, has glorified that law by filling out and animating with spiritual life its waste and barren places. So that God has not changed, nor has His purpose wavered, nor are His people resting on other than their old foundation.—Dean Alford.