But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law,

to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. (Galatians 4:4–5)

Someone pointed out that the great difference between Christianity and every other religion is that in religion man is on a quest for God, but in Christianity God is on a quest for man. In every religion, man goes looking for God or gods or enlightenment or paradise, and hopes by his merit and good works to attain them. In Christianity, God knows man is imprisoned in himself, stuck in his own delusions, hiding from the light, refusing truth, wallowing in self-righteousness, so God comes looking for man. God goes questing for man.

We don’t use the word quest much anymore. It is a word we connect with the time of the knights, when a man in search of honour would go questing, go on a knight’s errand, a mission to rescue a damsel or defeat a foe. But the Bible tells us that the great story of the world is the story of a quest, a mission.

Here in Galatians 4:4-5 we have some of the most important verses in the Bible, one of the most concise summaries of the whole message of the Bible. At the very centre of this verse are five words: God sent forth His Son. That’s the main point. The subject is God, the main verb is sent – word which means to send out – to send someone off for the fulfillment of a mission in another place; and the object is His Son. God the Father sent His Son.

Christmas, if we define it biblically, is actually a mission, a quest, an errand. It involves a Sender, and the one Sent. Christmas celebrates the arrival of the Sent One, the Questing One.

Christmas is not really an end point of this quest, a celebration of the mission completed. Christmas is more the celebration of the arrival of the questing one, a celebration that the Father sent, and the Son indeed came.

But you cannot really understand this day, unless you understand the whole quest. You would not greet the arrival of someone at the airport with singing and gladness if you didn’t know who they were, why they had flown in, and what they had come to do. So, we do not rightly understand this day with its singing and gift-giving and feasting, unless we understand the whole quest of Christmas.

Galatians 4:4-5 succinctly describes the whole quest of God sending forth His Son by giving us the when, the how, and the why of this quest. It gives us three descriptions of God’s quest for man: the perfect moment of the sending, the peculiar manner of the sending, and the particular motive for the sending. When, how, and why. If we understand these three explanations of the sending, we will understand how we are related to this questing God, whether this day of Christmas is a day we are on the inside of, or whether we must still embrace it.

I. The Perfect Moment of the Sending

But when the fullness of the time had come

This is the moment of the sending.

When the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son. Here the Bible gives us an image of time like the old hour glasses which had sand running down from one receptacle to another. When God’s Messianic hour glass was full of sand, so to speak, it was now the appointed time, waiting time was up: it was the exact moment to send His Son into the world.

Now this fulness of time of course refers to human history. It would be meaningless to speak of the fulness of time with respect to God, to eternity, where timelessness means that past, present and future are all one eternal now for God. But, from our perspective, the timeless God acts and intervenes in the flow of history.

This verse tells us that the time of the sending of the Son was not random, or arbitrary, or even fatalistically inevitable. No, human history was guided by God’s overruling hand so that politically, economically, linguistically, philosophically, it was the perfect moment.

First of all, Jesus was born not during the Egyptian, or Assyrian, or Babylonian empires. These empires followed one after the other, followed by the empire of the Medes and Persians, the Greek Empire, followed by the Roman Empire. For the most part, each empire extended the borders of the previous one and brought more people under its influence. Now, at this chosen time, the fullness of time, the Roman empire had reached a size unmatched by any empire before: its population reached a maximum of up to 70 million people, which was around 33% of the world’s population. Not only so, but because of the policies of the Roman emperor alive at the time of Christ’s birth, Augustus, the world entered what has been called the pax romana: the Roman peace, an unprecedented time of peace, stability, and order. In the ancient world, you either lived behind the high walls of a fortified city, or you lived under the military protection of a nearby chieftain. Attacks by bandits, pirates, thieves, hostile tribes would have basically quarantined any movement of a message, or a religion or a people, unless you had an army to impose law and order on everyone. To now live in a world where you could travel on Roman roads unmolested, travel on the sea without fear of pirates, this meant that what happened in Israel could spread beyond the borders of Israel in a large and relatively peaceful society.

Not only was the birth of Christ timed perfectly from a political standpoint, but it was also perfect from a commercial and communication standpoint. The Roman empire, with its military ambitions had devised an amazing communication and transportation system for their troops. Any message could be effectively carried to the farthest reaches of the known Roman world. The Gospel would spread by means of roads constructed by unbelieving Romans. In fact, Rome’s efficient postal system meant that the New Testament letters – the revelation of the New Testament spread throughout the empire of the time.

But wait, the world couldn’t speak Hebrew or Aramaic! So what difference would all this empire and peace make if no one could understand it? Well, that was also timed perfectly. Three centuries before Christ, Alexander the Great conquered the world and established Greek as the common tongue spoken throughout the world. When Rome replaced Greece as the world empire, they did not replace Greek with Latin, except where they were conquering barbarian tribes in the far west. Greek was still like the English of the ancient world. Everyone spoke it. In about 250 B.C., the Greeks wanted a copy of the Old Testament in Greek. This translation was done over a period of about 100 years, and became known as the Septuagint. Well, what this did was introduce the revelation of God, the truths of Jehovah God to the world at large. No longer did you need to know Hebrew to understood the truth about the Creator God, you could read about it in your own tongue.

The one language meant that the life of Christ as recorded in the Gospels, the letters of Paul, Peter, James, John and Jude could be read and understood by Gentiles in every part of the Roman empire. God had also prepared the world philosophically. That is, He had allowed the musings and ideas of unsaved men to come close enough to the truth so that when His Son came, they would immediately understand. For example, John begins his Gospel by saying “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1). The Greek term for Word is logos. But a number of Greeks had talked about this concept of logos for many years. Heraclitus in 500 BC used logos to talk about a universal sense of reason or order. In 400 BC, Anaxagoras described this logos as a type of intermediary between God and man. Philo, in around 20BC viewed the logos as an intermediary between God and man, and even described it as God’s firstborn son, an ambassador, an advocate, a high priest. So when John wrote – In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the logos was God, God had set the scene philosophically.

But he also prepared the world religiously. At the time of Christ’s birth, messianic expectation in Israel was at an all-time high. Zealots and messianic figures were popping up repeatedly, claiming to be the deliverer from Rome. The world still looked to the Jewish religion as the ultimate morality, the purest religion, the highest system of ethics. And the religion of Israel was no longer restricted to the Temple. Since the exile, there was a new thing, called the synagogue, which existed in every town in Israel, and everywhere in the Roman empire where there were more than 10 men.

Politically, commercially, linguistically, philosophically, the world was ready for the Messiah. It was the perfect moment.

II. The Peculiar Manner of the Sending

God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law,

How did the Son arrive? Was it in a chariot of fire, attended by angels? Was it riding on a white horse? Did He break through the clouds with the sound of a trumpet? We read now that the way God sent His Son. Born of a woman, born under the law.

Now the first thing that Paul wants us to know is that God’s Son was born as a human. He did not arrive as an angelic visitation. He did not just appear and disappear. Instead, He went through the full human process of beginning life in the womb, being born, growing up. He did not just visit our race; He joined our race. To be born of a woman is to enter the human race, with ancestors and a genealogy leading up to that moment. You are now related to everyone else, to all the humans descended from Noah and his sons.

The sending of the Son meant the Incarnation. That is a word which means enfleshment, to be clothed and to indwell human nature. This is the glory of John 1 telling us that the Word was with God and was God, and then in verse 14, the Word became flesh. The Son added to himself a true human nature. His eternal, pre-existent life would now have added to it a true human nature, Jesus the son of Mary. Two natures, now forever united in the one Person.

But you’d think this birth would have been in a palace, amidst royal pomp and splendour. But if you remember the circumstances of His birth, they were humble, even humiliating. An animal stable or cave, dirty, smelly, and visited only by some shepherds. Was this an accident? Or was it a design feature? Was it an oversight, or did God intend to communicate something by having His Son be born of a woman in very humble circumstances.

But even though it isn’t explicit, Paul is very likely also referencing the virgin birth. It is not common language to speak of someone born of a woman. Paul is probably casting our minds back to Genesis 3:15: the seed of the woman who will conquer the Serpent. To be born of man would simply be to have been one of the children of Adam with no distinction. But to be born of a woman seems to refer to the miraculous nature of Jesus’ birth: a virgin birth.

Had Jesus been born of Joseph and Mary, nothing would have alerted us to His unusual origin. We would not have known of the work of the Spirit in joining the human and divine natures, and we would have suspected that Jesus was born with a sinful nature. But the virgin birth, recorded in Matthew and Luke allows Jesus to be fully God and fully man.

The next phrase there tells us more of how he came. “Born under the law”. That’s a reference to the Law of Moses. The only people who were born under the Law were Israelites. Jesus was born in Israel, an Israelite of the tribe of Judah of the house of David. He was brought under all the laws and precepts of Israel because on the eighth day after his birth, He was taken to the Temple to be circumcised and dedicated. He came to be an obedient son of Israel, keeping the laws of worship, and cleanliness, and service, and morality. In fact, He came as the only one who had ever kept the Law perfectly, obeying every single commandment, avoiding every single prohibition, fulfilling not only the letter, but the Spirit of the Law.

And of course, this means that God’s Son would come, and according to His humanity, be an Israelite, a Jew. Of all the nations at the Tower of the Babel, God chose one nation to be the primary stream of His revelation to man: the covenants, the prophecies, the written Word. The greatest revelation was of was a Person:

God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; (Hebrews 1:1–2)

And this Son came, out of all the nations, through the Jewish people. As God had promised Abram “In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” (Genesis 22:18)

We remember some scribes, some wise men from the East who beheld something in the skies. They came to Jerusalem asking, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.” (Matthew 2:2)

Even Eastern magi had found out that whoever this is that is born under the Law of Moses in Israel is a king of kings, worthy of leaving your land to present gifts. God sent His Son born under the law.

The manner? He came as a human. Born of a woman in humble circumstances. He was born of a virgin. He was born in that nation so despised of the world, and yet the light to the nations: Israel.

The perfect moment of the sending and the peculiar manner of the sending all brings us to

III. The Particular Motive of the Sending

to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.

Here is the grand reason for the whole mission, for the entire errand. To redeem. To redeem those under the law.

Redeem is not a word we use too often today. You’ll hear advertisers talking about redeeming an offer, but it falls short of the biblical meaning. Redeeming in Scripture means this: an expensive rescue. To redeem was to set your sights on someone who needed rescuing: either from slavery, or from crippling financial debt, or some other misfortune. Someone needing to be redeemed was usually facing lifelong servitude to someone else, or slavery in a foreign land. The person needing rescuing could not rescue themselves. They were either chained to a slave-block, or watching their goods about to be taken and possessed by another.

A redeemer was always a kind, wealthy benefactor. A redeemer was someone who didn’t have to pay your debt. A redeemer had the means to do it, and was willing to do it purely out of love and mercy, and kindness.

This is what the mission of Christmas was about. It was to redeem those who were under the law.

Who is that? Well, specifically, it was the nation Israel. But Paul tells us in Romans that even non-Jews were under the law: “for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts,” (Romans 2:14–15)

Jews and Gentiles were both chained to the demand to be righteous, to pay the debt we owe to our Creator. All humans have this sense that we should be good people, and that God will accept good people. But instead of succeeding at being good people, we went deeper into debt. We sinned more. Just when we thought we were getting better, our sin natures would binge and gorge ourselves on the sin we’d been saying no to. And the more of God’s rules we learnt, the more we wanted to break them. So we found ourselves going deeper and deeper into debt to God, unable to pay, and making our situation worse everyday.

So how did the Son, coming at the perfect moment, in this peculiar manner of being made human, born in humble circumstances to a virgin, as an Israelite, how did this redeem people born under the obligation to be good people?

Well, He didn’t redeem people alone by His birth. He didn’t even redeem them by His perfect life. He redeemed people because His perfect life was something He gave up, a price He put down to buy guilty people out of our sin-debt. The birth of Jesus Christ, which we celebrate this day, all pointed towards His death on the Cross. He was born to die. His mission was to redeem: Christ’s mission is stated in Luke 19:10: “For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.”

When the angels announced His birth, they said, in Luke 2:11, they said: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. A Saviour.” J. C. Ryle once noted this: “The Son of God came down from heaven to be not only the Savior, but the King, the Lawgiver, the Prophet, the Priest, the Judge of fallen man. Had He chosen any one of these titles, He would only have chosen that which was His own. But He passed by them all. He selects a name which speaks of mercy, grace, help, and deliverance for a lost world. It is as a deliverer and Redeemer that He desires principally to be known.”

All sorts of hints are present at the birth of Christ that the reason He has been born is to redeem. His birth is connected to His death by similarities, contrasts and opposites.

• One of the gifts was myrrh. Myrrh was often used as a painkiller. When Jesus was on the cross, Mark 15:23 tells us: “And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he received it not.” At birth, he was given myrrh as a gift by a foreign wise man. At death, he was offered myrrh by a foreign soldier. Myrrh was also used to embalm the body of Jesus before His resurrection.
• At his birth, foreign kings worshipped him, but at his death, a foreign ruler, Pilate, disowned him.
• At birth, Mary his mother cared for him. On the Cross, Jesus told his disciple John to now care for Mary.
• At birth, light from angels shines. At his death, the angels are silent and darkness descends.
• At his birth, Herod the Great tried to kill him, at his death, Herod Antipas tried to mock him.
• At his birth, he is in tiny Bethlehem, at death, great Jerusalem.
• His birth is attended by the small in Israel – shepherds – His death by the great in Israel – the rulers and chief priests.
• At Birth, He was wrapped in swaddling clothes. At Death – He was stripped naked and His garments gambled for.

He was born to die. He was born to pay the price which guilty people cannot pay without losing it all: physical and spiritual death. Jesus paid that price on our behalf, and then rose again, vindicated, because he had committed no sin.

So what happens to you if Jesus pays the price for you, and you accept and receive His free gift of paying for you?

that we might receive the adoption as sons

Redemption brings about adoption. He buys you out of slavery to sin and guilt and Satan and the world to claim you as His own. He buys you to become part of the family of God. In the ancient world, adoption meant that either a natural born or a non-natural born child would be declared a legal part of the family, with all the rights, and privileges, and status of that family.

This was the grand plan, the mission: to buy back slaves of Satan and make them sons and daughters. God was seeking a family, a family from the fallen race of Adam. What do you have in a family? You have love, and friendship. You have familiarity, and recognition. You have protection and provision. You have belonging and joy. So God’s desire was always to have a household, a family of redeemed people, who did not want to live under Satan, or the world, or even their own rule. He came to redeem guilty people under the law, to became free children of God.

Charles Spurgeon: “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”

Verses six and seven describe the joys of that adoption:

And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!”

Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ. (Galatians 4:6–8)

The Father first sent the Son, but now He sends the Spirit (same word). When you are adopted, the Spirit within you recognises God with the intimate term, Abba. He is not a faraway Creator, but Abba, Father. And no longer in slavery, in bondage to the world, you are now an heir, a legal family member who receives all that God wants to give you in His Son.

But it would misunderstand this whole mission if we made out like this was automatic and done for all people everywhere. No, there are many people who do not want to become part of God’s family. They want their autonomy, their independence. They don’t want to live as children who listen to their Father God, who uphold the family likeness, who uphold the family name, whose loyalty is with God’s family. No, they wish to remain as they are, without God, without authority, without a Master.

That’s why the message of Christmas and the message of the Gospel is the same: you must receive the gift God gives. God sent His Son to redeem, but you have to choose to receive Him: who He is and what He did on the cross. Trust in it, turn towards it, re-orient your heart and life to it, change your loyalties. That’s what it means to receive Jesus Christ. John 1:12 promises: “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name.” (John 1:12)

Today, you may or may not say you have been on a quest to find God. But the truth is, God has been on a quest to find you. It’s a quest that selected the perfect moment, a peculiar manner, for a very particular motive of buying you back. It would be a strange princess that refused her rescuer, a strange prisoner that rejected the one breaking him out, a strange slave that preferred his chains. And yet, that is many today.