Who we are is defined by Jesus Christ. He is the Son of God, and he makes us sons of God (Gal 4:6). He is the High Priest and He makes us a royal priesthood (1 Pet 2:9). He is the Living Stone, he makes us living stones (1 Pet 2:4-5). He is the King of kings, and he makes us rulers over the nations (Rev 2:26).
In Galatians 4 we are learning that we are heirs. We are heirs because of Jesus Christ, who is the heir. We become heirs with Him and because of Him, verse 7 says, “So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are His child, God has made you also an heir.” But to fully appreciate what Paul explains in verses 1-7 today we need to focus on verse 4, where Paul gives us some parenthetical christology. You see, Paul is explaining to us about us in this passage – what God has done for us and made us to be. But in verse 4 he gives a little parenthetical comment about who Jesus Christ is. So verse 4 is “christological,” meaning it explains who Christ is. It does us good to understand who Christ is – that is a rule of the Christian life: to always be understanding Christ better, more accurately, more fully. So today, to understand who we are as heirs, we have to understand the One who makes us heirs, and the One that we are united to who Himself is THE HEIR over all other heirs.
FROM GOD
Jesus is from God. God sent Him. “But when the set time had fully come, God sent His Son….” God sent Him. When the time had fully come.
We see here several important things to understand.
First, Jesus is from God. This was the objective of Jesus’ earthly ministry: to convince people He was from God. Turn to John 16:27-30…READ… Jesus tells them he came from God and is returning to God, and they confirm that they believe. Then in the next chapter, 17:8 and 25, Jesus confirms their belief that He came from God…READ
Much later, the Apostle John wrote 1 John 4:14 where he said, “We have SEEN and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world.” The Father sent….Jesus was from God.
APPLICATION: Jesus is not a great man. Jesus is not a great man, merely. Anyone who reveres Jesus as a great man is in danger of Hell. That is, if they see Him only as a man. You do Him no honor if you see Him as the greatest, but still no more than just a man. And God will not honor such an opinion of His Son. Thomas Jefferson said Jesus’ teachings were the most sublime and wise of anyone in history. But, Jefferson denied Jesus was from God. The Quran, Surah 112:3 declares that God “begets not, nor was He begotten.” Then Surah 4:171 says, “The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was no more than a messenger of Allah… Allah is only One God. Glory be to Him! He is far above having a son!”
APPLICATION: See Jesus as your Apostle. The fact that Jesus came from God is why Jesus is called “our Apostle” in Hebrews 3:1. Apostle means “one who is sent.” Jesus was sent by God into the world, “I came from the Father and entered the world,” He said in John 16. He is “our” apostle because God sent Him for us! He sent Him to us!
APPLICATION to the APPLICATION: Jesus was sent and came FOR you – so respond by coming TO Him!
Second, Jesus is from God, but also Jesus came in God’s time. When the time had fully come. The first and most primary idea here is that God determined the time. It was decided by God long before the world even came to be. Here we have the doctrine of Providence, God’s activity in human affairs to accomplish His purposes. God is always in control, God’s purposes that He determined long before the creation of the world are going to be accomplished in the world and nothing in the world is going to stop Him! God determined in eternity past the time in history when He would send Jesus into the world.
The eternal God, untouched by time, determines the time of all things:
- Abraham’s descendents would be strangers and slaves in a country not their own (Gen 15:13)
- He determined 40 years for the Israelites to wander in the wilderness
- He determined the time that Israel would be removed from the land and for how long (Jeremiah 29:10; Dan 9:2)
- He determined the number of our days (Psalm 139:16)
- He determined man’s days will be no more than 120 years (Gen 6:3)
- He determined the coming day when Jesus will return, a date that only the Father and not even the Son knows (Mt 24:36)
- He determined when Saul and Barnabas would set out as missionaries (Acts 13:2)
- He determined that in 6 days He would create the universe.
- He determined the time the sun would shine each day and the moon and stars at night.
- He determined the very end of all things will be brought under Christ, as Ephesians 1:9-10 says, “He made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which he purpose in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment – to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”
- And as we read here in Galatians 4, God sent His Son when the set time had fully come.
He spoke about this time through the prophets. He said through Daniel that it would be 69 prophetic weeks before the coming of the Anointed One. The prophets said to wait for the time when the virgin is with child, when Bethlehem brings forth her Ruler, when His star rises, whenFirst Peter 1 describes the prophets of old looking over their own prophecies, “trying to find out the time and circumstances of which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow.”
Another fascinating aspect to this idea of the timing is where the world was at. Many commentators point out several fascinating reasons that that time when Jesus came was so well timed because of how it all complimented the Great Commission:
- Language. Greek was established as a near universally spoken language all over the empire. If the coming of Jesus to the earth was to result in Him being preached all over the earth, how much easier if most of the world could speak the same language!
- Roads. The Romans built magnificent road systems connecting all parts of the empire. Again, think of how this made travel so much easier and how that would have made it so much easier for the Gospel to travel all over Rome!
- Peace. The Roman peace, or “pax romana,” extended a peace over practically all the civilized world at that time. This meant there was safety and freedom in traveling all throughout the empire.
If the goal would be to bring the Gospel into all the world, and preach the name of Christ to all nations, you can see how this time in history opened up that mission by removing language, road and political barriers unlike any other time in history.
Thirdly, the fullness of time is related to the ending of the dispensation of the Mosaic Law. In verse 2 Paul described a father setting a time when the guardianship of his son would come to an end, and Paul is making that analogous to the set time that God determined when the Law’s purpose in history would come to an end. Just like a father appointed for a while a guardian, God appointed the Law over Israel for a while. It served a purpose in history with a distinct beginning and a distinct ending. With the sending of His Son that time came to an end, as verse 5 says, that Jesus, born under the law, came to redeem those under the law. Redeem means to set free from and release someone from slavery by paying a price. Those under the law are slaves, but they’ve been set free (redeemed) by Jesus Christ, and no longer being slaves they are made sons of God.
The divinely set time for Jesus to come finally came. It was always God’s timing. Everything is always God’s timing.
GOD’S SON
Next we see that Jesus Christ is God’s Son. “But when the set time had fully come, God sent His Son….” His Son. We are seeing the whole Trinity in Galatians. God the Father sent Paul (1:1), God the Spirit is given to those who believe (3:2), and again we are seeing God the Son. There is no Christianity without God’s Son. There is no Christian where there is no Son. No one is a Christian who does not believe God has a Son and also believes in that Son.
Long before He came, the Scriptures were telling about the coming of this Son.
- Psalm 2 spoke of this coming Son of God. In verse 7 is the Son speaking, “He said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have become your Father.” Then in verse 12 it instructs the kings of the earth, “Kiss His Son, or he will be angry with you, and you will be destroyed…”
- In the very beginning, in Genesis 3, God told the devil, “I will put enmity between your offspring and the woman’s offspring, and He will crush your head.” There was the first indication of a human son who would come in history and defeat Satan.
While on earth God spoke from heaven numerous times in the hearing of crowds of people saying, “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to Him!” Peter answered Jesus saying, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” (Mt 16:16). The Roman guards at the cross of Jesus, looked at him as he hung there dead and said, “Surely he was the Son of God.” (Mt 27:54). John wrote his Gospel, he says, so that “you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.” Romans 1:4 says that Jesus was vindicated as the Son of God through His resurrection from the dead.
But I love the challenge Proverbs 30 gives to everyone. A thousand years before Jesus was born in a manger it asks about God: “What is His name? And what is the name of His Son? Surely you know?
APPLICATION: Do you know that name? We know! We know that name! The name that the angel told Joseph to give him. The name that is above every name (Php 4:9). The name that every knee will bow down to (Php 4:10). The name that is the only name under heaven given to men so they can be saved (Acts 4:12). The name that if you confess it with your mouth and believe in it with your heart you will be saved (Rom 10:9-10). What is that name Church?! Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Lord of heaven and earth!
CONCLUSION
In sending His Son, God was giving His Son. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son…” In order to give His Son, God had to send His Son. Sending emphasizes the truth that Jesus came down from heaven to the earth, that He existed before He became a man here on earth. Giving emphasizes the nature of why He came – to die in place of us sinners so that we could be rescued and brought into eternal life. When the set time fully came, God sent His Son to be a sacrifice for the world. John 3:17, the next verse right after the most famous verse in the whole bible, forever living in its shadow(!), captures this whole thought perfectly, “For God did NOT send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.”