Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I am in the middle of making a three-point argument. That sounds very important for why I think the Bible says that the time that Jesus showed up was the fullness of time. Why the Bible is so confident that God nailed it here, and indeed Jesus showed up exactly when he was supposed to show up with everything lined up. Yesterday, I talked about the history of things, the decline of the great super ancient empires, the Egyptians, Hittites, we talked about the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians. They all passed into history. And then along comes Alexander the Great and Greek culture that gradually mingled with the new Roman Empire just a few years before the arrival of Christ to create the Greco-Roman world into which Jesus and the early church were born. And I think that that moment right then was better than any previous moment in terms of having everything in place for this to work and make sense to everybody. Which is what the Bible says from all the way back at the beginning was always the point that this was supposed to go to everybody. So with that, I pivot to point number two. Yes, I just made a note in my notebook. Galatians 4.4, the verse that we're working on right now says, But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law. Why theologically then is this the fullness of time? That's my son out there using a leaf blower, by the way. Am I gonna stop him so that you won't hear a leaf blower in the background? No, I'm not. Because he is learning how to be the heir to this household, and he just went out and initiated doing responsible things, and that is part of the fullness of time for us as a family, of him going from being a child in my household to having ownership of this household, and I don't want to discourage it. So let that leaf blower back there just reinforce things we've talked about in this passage over the last few days. Theologically, there's a narrative in the Bible that we've talked about a lot in this season on Galatians. We've talked about it a lot when we were in Ezra and Nehemiah and Esther. What we get in the Old Testament is basically a bunch of test cases for every possible solution that could be imagined to fix the human problem, to fix the problem of sin and death that was introduced all the way back at the very beginning in the Garden of Eden. And sister, let me tell you, we have tried it all over the course of the Old Testament. We've tried, what if people were just smarter? Maybe human problems are just because of ignorance. But if we could all just hear each other better and communicate more clearly and understand each other, then we could put our heads together and solve the human problem together through our unified joined minds. Well, at the Tower of Babel, we learn that isn't actually going to work. And well, in the age of the internet, we've learned again that isn't actually going to work. It's crazy how things repeat. At another point in the early going of the Old Testament, we run the equation, well, like what if we just got rid of all the bad people? Like surely this is one of those 80-20 things where 20% of the people are the ones causing all the problems for the other 80% of us. Let's just purge the world of all the baddies, and then we'll just move forward with all the goodies. But that doesn't work either. God floods the earth and we're right back to the stupid stuff that was happening before within just a few minutes of getting off of the ark. There's no discernible difference in the behavior of humanity before the flood, nor after the flood. No, I don't think the human problem is one that you kill your way out of. Well, okay. In that case, let's just try having God show up and run things himself. That'd be better. He could live among the people, and anytime somebody doesn't know what to do, he could just tell them, this is exactly what you need to do. Yet, immediately upon getting that arrangement, the Israelites build a golden calf and start worshiping it while God is visible right there on the mountain in the book of Exodus. What if we had God just write it all down, like in an email, so we have it as a point of reference to look back on, so we can reflect on it more. There's a lot of pressure when God's talking to you in the moment. Let's just have him write everything down. So he does that for the whole book of Leviticus, but then the rest of the Old Testament has the people who received the law never deeply obeying the law, or only in very small stints. So that doesn't seem to solve it. Just have God write down every single expectation ever for how to do things. That doesn't seem to get it done. Well, maybe we need God to put in a place where we can like do something to show him that we're really, really sorry. Maybe that would solve the human problem. Cool, here's a sacrificial system. Do all these sacrifices to cover all of these different things that you mean and that you don't mean. But it doesn't seem to heal the heart of humanity, and further the sacrifices aren't perfect because it's a flawed thing that's being sacrificed by a flawed thing to resolve a flawed thing that they did. It points to something, but it doesn't seem to solve that something. No, I don't think that's gonna get it done. Okay, well I got another idea. What if the problem is that the people are just unsettled? Like what if they had a place where they could put down roots and build buildings and not have to be stressing and nomadic all the time? Like what if they just had their own land? Wouldn't that do it? I mean, isn't it difficult to do this when you're homeless? Cool, so God miraculously gives them a home, and then they immediately act like they had always acted. All right, so that's not gonna solve the human problem. Well wait, I got another idea. Maybe there was just too much authoritarianism when we were doing all of that conquering. And maybe people just get a little bit sick of always being bossed around by leaders. What if we did a time where we just did whatever was right in our own eyes and we just I don't know, like people are of a pretty good moral compass. We'll just have everybody have it be just them and God. Solo. It should work out. Yeah, it doesn't. The 400 years that are the age of the judges some of the worst that we see in the entire Bible. I don't think the libertarian solution here might be a good way to govern, but dang, it's not a good way to solve the human problem, apparently. So we tried lots of authority. We tried no authority, neither of those things worked. Well, let's just try doing it like our neighbors. They all seem like they're doing it well. We'll just govern just like our neighbors, have a society just like our neighbors, but we'll have it informed by, you know, like the law of God and stuff. We'll totally do that, and not immediately become unswervingly loyal to the throne instead. And the prophet Samuel's like, I don't think you guys I don't think it's gonna work, but no, do it. It'll work. Okay, Samuel says, let's do it. So he gives him a king and King Saul, and immediately abuses start to flow from the throne, even in the good years under Saul, David, and Solomon. And after just three generations of kings, there's a civil war and the whole thing splits in two. Okay, dang it. Well well, let's try this. You know, maybe just regionally we've all drifted apart and we'll just have two kingdoms, and maybe that'll work. But it it doesn't work at all. It's just terrible. In the north there isn't a single good king for the entire run until finally they get conquered in the seven hundreds by Assyria and they're just gone. Oh. Well wait, let's just try having just the good ones, just the righteous ones. We'll just have them still be around, you know, like the tribes of Judah and Benjamin down south with Jerusalem as their ancestral capital. Yeah, but even though things go better at times down there, it doesn't work there either, and ultimately a mega empire comes along a wrecks it all in the Babylonians. Okay. Well let's try a new thing. Let's go through 70 years of just not having a country or anything, no temple, nothing, and then the land will lay fallow, our hearts will lay fallow, and then we'll all realize, you know, don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got till it's gone, and we'll be so happy to have our kingdom back, and then we'll get everything right. Now, no more idolatry. Now we'll actually worship God and get it right. But as soon as the exiles return under the leadership of Cyrus the Great in the late 500s, they're all worried about getting their fancy paneled houses built and aren't really worried about getting the stuff of God done. They're willing to fight for their own property, but without the intervention of a bunch of prophets, they struggle to muster the will to get it done on their own. But in fairness, they do eventually get it done. And that's pretty cool. Now it seems like maybe we're gonna finally find the fix to the human problem. Our hearts will finally be right, we'll set up the perfect environment that is going to cultivate right hearts in the people, and we're gonna get this thing whipped. And over the course of the next 60 or 70 years, a couple of really powerful, dedicated, focused leaders in Ezra and Nehemiah are like, these are the rules. Read the rules to everybody again in public. Now everybody go have the rules explained to you to make sure you understand what the rules are. Now we're gonna re-up the rules. Also, seems like intermarrying with other people is a big part of how we got things wrong in the first place with idolatry. You all have to divorce everybody, cut off these lines and these households, no more foreign marriage. We're gonna be a completely set apart people. We're gonna add rules on top of the rules God has already made, and maybe this'll work. And the Old Testament ends with Nehemiah on the screen going well. I tried. Remember me, God. And then the Old Testament wraps up, and then Persia falls to Alexander the Great, and then Alexander the Great's generals get custody over the Jewish people in Jerusalem. It's okay at first, then it turns awful. Then the Jews rebel. This is the celebration of Hanukkah is about, and they build their own kingdom for a hundred years from the mid-100s to the mid-single digits, but it's a mess, it's corrupt, it's a disaster. They don't follow the law of God. There isn't technically idolatry. They get that right now, so I guess that's pretty cool. Ultimately, they have to invite Rome in to try to get things patched up, and Pompey the Great comes in and is like, yeah, here's how we'll fix them. We'll just make you Roman. We took over your thing now. And that's the last time until 1948 that there is an independent political Israel. After Pompey, it's just a few more years and the Roman Republic fails and gives way to the Roman Empire, and we're right back to where we left off last time around, ready for the birth of Jesus. Why does that theological story of the Old Testament bring us to the fullness of time? Well, because we've exhausted everything. Every proposal and counterproposal that you or I could dream up for how to make things right with God by human effort, for how to fix the human problem. Like everything that we could be like, wait, wait, wait, don't you can't be mad at us. We haven't tried this yet. You have to let us try that. We exhausted all of it. We did it. And the Jews aren't different from you or me if you're not Jewish. We would be just like them if we were there. This isn't like some kind of unique problem the Jewish people of ancient times had. This is a human heart problem, and you own it, and I own it the same way as the people back then. We're no better, we're the same. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All are in need of the grace of Christ. And that was abundantly clear when Jesus showed up on the scene during the reign of Caesar Augustus. The theological arc had been clearly established that we needed something different. We needed the Messiah. We needed the long promised, long-awaited king descended from David, who would reign on David's throne forever. We needed God with us. We needed the ultimate perfect sacrifice for the sins of all of humanity. We needed to see that new family of faith and action that fulfilled the promise to Abraham to go out to everyone. We needed to see the mechanics of God doing the heavy lift because clearly we weren't capable of doing it for ourselves. If Jesus had shown up any earlier, I don't think it's the fullness of time because there might have still been things to exhaust. Well, we haven't tried this political solution, we haven't tried that legislative solution, we haven't tried this cultural solution, we haven't tried this military solution. But instead, by the time Jesus shows up, no man, it's all been done. We've tried every last bit of it. Humanity was in a place where it was crystal clear. We need Jesus at this point, we need the intervention of God. We've tried everything. We're at a loss. God save us. And in that moment, we meet God with us. So in Galatians 4 4, Paul says that the Jesus thing happened in the fullness of time. Why? I made my weakest argument yesterday that I think history, if you look at it big picture, it all points to that being the best time that had existed up till any point in history. Right there. That's a great fit right then. I made my second point today that it seems like the whole Bible theological arc points to this being exactly the right time for Jesus to show up. I guess I didn't even really touch on all the prophecy that needed to be teed up so that Jesus could knock it out of the park with his arrival, but that's obviously there too. Tomorrow we're going to move forward in Galatians chapter four, but I'm also going to make a third little micro point that I think is the most reliable for why this is the fullness of time, and that's because Jesus thought it was the fullness of time. All right, I'm having fun. I hope you are too. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.