Galatians 4:4-5 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.
Some things take time to finish. Have you ever noticed this? If you bake a pie, you have to bake it long enough so that you don’t get a ‘soggy bottom,’ as Paul Hollywood says on the British Baking Show. You have to let bread rise, or it is a brick!
I have taken up landscape painting. This year my goal is fifty paintings. But as I spend time at the easel, I realize how much time I need to stand at the easel. Paintings don’t just happen. They take time.
And I am trying to learn and experiment with each painting, working to find a style that I like and with which I am happy with the results. I am learning to put myself in my paintings. But this takes time to develop. I hope by the end of the year to have settled on a favorite style, my style.
The LORD’s plan took time to accomplish. There were steps involved and milestones to pass along the way. We didn’t go immediately from Creation to Fall to Resurrection to New Heaven and New Earth. The story had to unfold. “These things were written for our encouragement.” (Romans 15:4) They were written so that we would receive encouragement. And this takes time.
The illustration from the text is about inheritance timing. In normal circumstances, the child doesn’t get the inheritance of the parent until the parent dies. That makes sense. For most of human history, many children died before adulthood.
For the readers of Paul’s text in the first century, they had been born under the Jewish Law, brought up to follow the traditions and practices of their Jewish faith. Life was to be lives a certain way. Certain things were forbidden, and certain things were allowed.
But now with the freedom of the Gospel, those lines had shifted. Jesus brought freedom from the constraints of the Law. He opened the door to a new kind of living, one where we served one another in love.
But even today we sometimes get stuck in a certain way of living out our faith. We have settled into our comfort zone of faith and we like it that way. We know what to expect. We know how things will go.
But sometimes, when we don’t expect it, but when the LORD’s timing is in sync with this world’s clocks, things shift. Will we be willing to move with the LORD? Or will we get stuck in the past way of faith? The Galatian believers had to move forward, away from the externals of their Jewishness and forward into the freedom found in Jesus.
The Arnold Journey 