Galatians 4:4
4 But [de] when [hote] the fulness [pleroma] of
the time [chronos] was come [erchomai], God [theos] sent forth [exapostello] his [autos] Son [huios], made [ginomai] of [ek] a woman [gune], made [ginomai] under [hupo] the law [nomos], KJV-Interlinear
4 But when the fulness of the
time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, NASB
Back in verse two we saw that it was the father of
the family who determined when the appropriate time would be for the child to
be released and set free from the guardian, and therefore no longer under the
authority and control of the guardian.
And so it is in history that God the Father
determined when the time would be right for Jesus to enter into the world and
for the cross to occur.
And so we have in this verse the phrase, fullness
of time, wherein fullness describes repletion or completion, that which is
filled, to fill up as in full, to assemble all pieces.
So by the time of the birth of Christ, nations had
been formed, languages had been established, the scriptures have been
documented, the prophecies and promises and genealogy of the line of the Savior
had been determined, and the law of Moses which pointed to man’s weaknesses and
the need of a Savior, all were in place.
God the Father authored the divine plan, and Jesus
Christ executed the divine plan.
God controls history in its entirety, right down to
the very year and month and day and hour when Christ went to the cross.
Despite Satan’s evil attempts to derail God’s plan
for well over four thousand years, and man’s evil attempts to establish his own
destiny, God’s plan has advanced through the ages without so much as skipping a
single beat.
Up until the time of the cross, the human race had
only the Mosaic Law with which to measure man’s position in the ages and man’s
relationship with God.
And then according to God’s calendar, the time was
right for the birth of Christ.
As we studied in the first two Psalms, the phrase,
Son of God, is a title designation that was adopted by the second person of the
Trinity.
Jesus Christ is God, and he also came into this
world as a human being, as stated here, born or made of a woman.
Way back in Genesis, God promised that the Savior
would come from the seed of a woman. This excluded Joseph as the human father,
therefore Mary’s pregnancy was a virgin pregnancy. And therefore, Jesus as God,
was born a human child.
The phrase, under the law, indicates that Jesus as
a man had to grow up under the same rules of this world that everyone else was
faced with. He had to live the perfect life demanded by the mosaic law, which
he did, otherwise if he had failed in any way he would not have been qualified
to go to the cross in our behalf.
Jesus was bound to the observance of all of the
original rituals and requirements of the mosaic law, but he was not bound to
the observance of all of the additional rituals and demands that the Levitical
priesthood had artificially incorporated into the mosaic law.
And as we will see in the next verse, his living a
perfect life was among the qualifications required so that he could purchase
our lives out from under condemnation of the mosaic law.
