PREPARATION FOR THE GOSPEL
‘But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights as sons (Gal 4:4).’
What time? The time of preparation. The preparing of what or whom? Of Israel, primarily, ‘those under the law’ – so God’s chosen people, or at least a representative minority of them (‘a remnant’), might be ready for the appearing of his Son amongst them.
But there were more people to be prepared than just Israel. Simeon, when Jesus was presented as a baby in the Temple, prophesied of him that he would be ‘a light for revelation to the Gentiles’ as well as ‘for glory to [the Lord’s] people Israel’ (Luke 2:32). What time, then, had arrived, had ‘fully come’ for the Gentiles? The time when a Hellenistic world, Greek in culture and language, had been taken over by Rome, and Rome had just become an Empire. This Greek-and-Roman world was making its presence felt in the Jewish lands in which Jesus was born, grew up, and ministered – not least in Galilee.
The preparing of Israel
In Israel’s account of mankind’s earliest history, the judgement on the serpent, the spiritual force of evil, involves “enmity between you and the woman [Eve], and between your offspring [lit. ‘seed’, singular] and hers; he will crush your head, and you will crush his heel” (Gen 3:15). If it wasn’t obvious what this meant before the event, then, looking back, Satan’s ‘wounding’ of Christ at the Crucifixion is clearly what had been referred to. ‘The greatest own-goal in history’, someone has called it: Satan’s ‘head crushed’, his power broken – as a result of actions he himself had initiated.