04 - Chapter 04
IV. THE FULNESS OF TIME. When the fulness of time was come, God sent forth his son (Galatians 4:4).
WHY was the advent of our Saviour so long delayed? Why did He not come at a much earlier period in the world’s history? When we are perplexed by this question it will be well for us to remember the words, ’ When the fulness of time was come, God sent forth his son.’ The Gospel was withheld until the world was ready for its reception. The Saviour came when the course of preparation for His coming conducted through the previous ages was completed. Had our Saviour come into the world when Judaea was comparatively independent and severely intolerant, He might have been crushed at once by those in authority, or innumerable and well-nigh insurmountable obstacles might have been put in the way of His work among the Jews. Had He come into the world long before the fulness of time, He might have come into a world divided up into countless separate kingdoms, jealous of each other, or at war with each other, and filled with people narrow-minded and prejudiced a set of circumstances which must have seriously impeded the work of the Apostles and missionaries in the early days of the Christian Church. But in the fulness of time Judaea was a province of the mighty Roman Empire an Empire that comprised almost the whole civilised world an Empire over the whole of which one language was well understood an Empire throughout which peace then prevailed, and wherein every kind of religion was tolerated an Empire so thoroughly organised that there was frequent and easy communication between the capital and the most remote provinces.
It was now comparatively easy, therefore, for the disciples and followers of Christ to preach what they did preach and where they did preach it. And we must carefully remember that the Jews in Palestine were only a fraction of the Jews in the world at the coming of Christ. In the course of the ages the Jews had been scattered everywhere throughout the world, and everywhere they had made their influence felt. They were everywhere, and everywhere in force throughout the Roman world: and outside the Roman world there were great colonies in Babylon, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and in every place or city of any importance. And wherever they went the Jews carried their faith with them that faith which marked them off from all others that clear strong faith which filled them with hope and confidence, and which was so well able to hold its own against the superstitions of the world, and to arrest the attention of those who had no real faith in anything. But here we must pause to notice that moral discipline and those mental and spiritual movements by which the Jews had been prepared for the reception of the Universal religion. To the Israelites there was to be but one God, and His right to their sole allegiance was not to be doubted. But in the course of the ages the misfortunes and sorrows of God’s people had often been so trying, so overwhelming, that had it not been for the Leaders and Prophets who from time to time arose in Israel, the faith of the great majority would have been seriously endangered.
Now it does not surprise us to find, even in the earliest period of Israel’s history, divine grace work-ing and good men striving for the removal of spiritual blindness and for the undoing of the evil which sin had wrought upon the earth. For while sin is the sign of man’s fall, it may also be made the means of his moral uprising. Our moral sense brings home to us, and rebukes us for, our im-perfections and our sins. But in the very act of doing this, it becomes a witness to the divinity of our nature, and an earnest of the glory that may yet be ours. And so it is for us a divine voice calling upon us to forsake our sins exhorting us to be faithful to those Revelations which God is ever breathing into the consciences of those who seek to do His will and urging us on to heights of holiness to which we have not as yet attained.
There is thus a divine side to the higher thoughts of men: and God is in every noble effort for the regeneration of the world. We are not perplexed, therefore, when we find it said in Scripture that God called Abraham, and that Abraham responded to the call. And we have no great difficulty in discovering the purpose which God meant to work out through the instrumentality of those faithful servants whom from time to time He raised up for the instruction and guidance of His own peculiar people.
It is true that the children of Israel were often far from being what God wished them to be. Time after time they fell back into idolatry and super-stition: often, very often, they gave themselves up to grievous sin. Stern was, therefore, the discipline to which they had often to be subjected. Severe was often the chastisement wherewith the Lord chastised them. But not even in their greatest trials and tribu-lations did the most faithful wholly lose their faith in God. And, strange to say, at every turning-point in their history there stood forth before them at least one man who spoke with authority, and who in the most earnest and impressive way pointed out to the people the real meaning and significance of the crisis that had overtaken or was about to overtake them. Even the enemies of Israel were, the Prophets asserted, in the hands of God, who determines the limits of their power, and can say to them, Thus far shalt thou come, but no further. Moreover, Jehovah’s attitude towards Israel and all other nations was, the prophets declared, conditioned by His righteousness and justice; and what they asked could even the Jews expect from great and long-continued unfaithfulness to God and to His law but sorrow, mischief, and disaster, which were at once a manifestation of God’s displeasure at sin, and an indication of the possibility that God’s purposes for mankind might have to be realised through an Israel purified by much discipline “ a shoot from the stock of a felled tree, the remnant of an afflicted and poor people.” In Israel and in the world God may have some seemed to suggest a ministry through that better part of the Jewish nation which, after being purified by trial, would truly represent the whole, make atonement for the sins of the whole, and secure a blessing for the whole.
Without doubt, God had for Israel plans and purposes of the wisest and most beneficial kind. And yet, the Prophets said, these might not be exactly what Israel desired and expected. The salvation which God had in store for them might be of a deeper and more spiritual kind than that of which they fondly dreamed. Even the great Prophet who was to prepare the way for the Lord’s day of judgment and redemption, the great and righteous King who was to arise from the house of David, might be ’ a Servant of Jehovah,’ a vicarious Sufferer, one who would bear the griefs and carry the sorrows of His people, one who would be wounded for the transgressions and bruised for the iniquity of His people; and so not in accordance with their ideas regarding the Deliverer whom God would yet raise up.
It is true that many of those who heard the words of the Prophets did not lay them to heart; did not even understand them. And many of those who in after ages read the words of the Prophets did not perceive their meaning and significance. And so materialistic in their con-ception of things were they, and so wedded did they continue to be to the expectation of a great and glorified Israel that was one day to bear sway over all the nations, that when Christ appeared upon the earth the people were, for the most part, blind to the real greatness of Him who came “ in weakness and in woe,” in meekness and humility; and there was little to attract them in that kingdom of peace and truth and love and righteousness into which Jesus called men, and of which the words could be truly spoken, ’ the kingdom of God cometh not with observation, neither shall they say, lo here, or lo there, for behold the kingdom of God is within you.’
Nevertheless, there were a few who were able to recognise the grace and glory of Jesus Christ, and the value and importance of that salvation which God vouchsafed to men in Him.
Some, like Simeon, had been disciplined and trained to wait for the consolation of Israel for Him who was to be a light to lighten the Gentiles as well as the glory of God’s people, Israel. And some, like John the Baptist, were able to see in Christ and in His kingdom a grander ful-filment of their hopes and expectations than that of which the Israelites for so long had dreamed. The Psalms to be found in the first two chapters of St. Luke the Magnificat, the Benedictus, and the Nunc Dimittis to which utterance was given by Mary, Zacharias, and Simeon, are beautiful examples of the hope of Israel which was nurtured in saintly souls “ through the teaching of the Scriptures and of the Spirit of God, under the Old Dispensation.” In the next place, we must carefully remember that at the coming of Christ, belief in a Resur-rection, in a Judgment, and in a future existence, would seem to have become somewhat common among the Jews.
It is true that the belief then held was not so spiritual, so purified, or so exalted as the faith of the Apostles. Neither was it placed on the firm foundation laid by Him who brought life and immortality to life through the Gospel. More-over, it was only gradually that the Jews had attained unto the belief that then was theirs. At a very early period in Israel’s history the thought of a continued existence after death was not altogether wanting. Doubtless, it was an existence rather than a life of which men then spoke an existence indefinite, vague, shadowy.
Nevertheless, when men died they were spoken of as ’ gathered unto their fathers,’ and at a later day they were represented as going down into Sheol. And these expressions at all events the latter meant that death was not regarded as ending all. By and by, however, the faith of the Israelites became more definite and confident. But even yet it was merely a hope, not a dogma; and for a time it was a hope for the renewal and resur-rection of the nation rather than for the resurrection of individuals. And when an advance is made and men begin to think of the resurrection of indi-viduals, the hope is, even to the close of the Old Testament, limited, or well-nigh limited, to Israel.
Now it is not difficult for us to explain how it was that the thoughts of the Jews on this subject became clearer and more distinct as the years passed by.
1. The inequalities of life must always have pro-duced in the faithful a tendency towards belief in a future life, and in personal immortality. Goodness and virtue do not always receive in this life what, under the government of a holy and omnipotent God, we should expect them to receive. Evil doing is not always followed by that condemnation and punish-ment which ought to be meted out to it. Might often prevails over right, and unscrupulousness and dishonesty often win that success which ought always, as we think, to follow in the train of virtue. And what conclusion is forced upon us by these things, in view of God’s justice and might? Is it not that there must come a time, in another life, if not in this, when the world will be judged in righteous-ness, and when every man will receive according as he hath done, whether it be good or bad?
2. The great national catastrophe the Captivity gave rise to practices, thoughts, feelings, which tended towards a belief in personal immortality.
Far away from Jerusalem, and without the aid of the Temple Services, it was necessary for the Jews to have, much more than heretofore, personal and direct dealings with God in prayer. And this awoke within them the consciousness of their personal responsibility to God, and led them more and more to look for the divine benediction in “ that spiritual satisfaction which is the boon of all who, in any age, or in any land, repose their simple faith in God.” And close spiritual fellowship with God helped to create the conviction that they who walked with God and lived in God must be personally superior to death. The eternity of God became the ground of their confidence with regard to the future. ’ Art not thou from everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One? we shall not die.’ ’ Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth; My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption.’
3. Belief in the resurrection of at least the pious Israelites would seem to have followed naturally in the train of belief in the Messiah and the Messianic kingdom. The Jews of a later date knew well that many of their ancestors had served the Lord with all their heart. Some of them had even died for their faith. Were they then to have no share in the glory of the Messianic kingdom?
Moreover, the Jews then living were not sufficiently numerous to be the predominant power in the king-dom of the Messiah. And so, to fill up this want, all those faithful servants of the Lord who had departed in the true faith must live again. ’ Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead.’ ’ Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.’ And when we reach the Apocrypha those semi-sacred books which are not in the Canon of Scripture, but which have always been highly valued in the Church on account of the light they throw on the history of the Jews during the time which elapsed between the close of the Old Testament and the birth of our Lord we find that the doctrine of a resurrection and of a future life for the good has taken firm possession of the hearts and minds of many of the Jewish people. Thus, for example, in the Book called “The Wisdom of Solomon” we have such passages as these: “ The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died; and their departure was accounted to be their hurt, and their journeying away from us to be their ruin: But they are in peace. For even if in the sight of men they be punished, their hope is full of immortality.” “ The righteous live for ever, and in the Lord is their reward, and the case for them with the Most High.” And in 2Ma 7:14, we have this passage: “ And being come near to death he (the fourth of the seven brethren who were martyred) said thus: It is good to die at the hands of men and look for the hopes which are given by God, that we shall be raised up again by him; for as for thee (the King) thou shalt have no resurrection unto life.” When we read such words as these we can easily understand how thoroughly prepared the way v/as for the coming of Him who was able to say, ’ I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’ But beyond the range of Judaism the world was prepared for the coming of Christ. The religions which flourished within the Roman Empire, and which were thus brought, more or less, into contact with Christianity in its earliest days, were infinite in number and of the utmost diversity: ranging from the lowest forms of idolatry to specu-lations of the noblest and most rational kind. The popular religions of Greece and Rome with their innumerable deities and their strangely varied forms of worship were “ too poor and fanciful to contribute anything directly to the treasury of Christian truth.” And from the lower forms of idolatry which were to be met with in the Empire what theological or philosophical light could thought-ful men expect to get? It is true that in the vague gropings of these heathen worshippers after that mysterious Power which they felt to be in nature, there is an indication that even to them there were more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in ordinary philosophies. And, doubtless, in the breasts of many there was a vague awe, a sense of fear, engendered by the consciousness of the existence of Powers unseen, on whose due propitiation the safety of the state and of the individual depended. But no more positive contribution than this was made by the religions of the Roman Empire to that preparation which in the heathen world was made for the coming of Christ. For more than this we must go to some of the Greek poets, such as Aeschylus and Euripides, and more especially to the great Greek philosophers and to those in the Roman world who had learned from them: for, as is well known, philosophy became at last in the Republic the religion of the intelligent and the rule of life for the virtuous. The sanctions of a future life form no part of the religious thought of Aeschylus. The world to come is not denied by him, but, though sometimes it would seem to be implied, it is invariably left out of sight. At the same time Aeschylus testifies to the reality of sin, and to the consequences that follow in its train: and it is difficult to read his works without feeling the need which man has of a divine deliverer “ to check and control the consequences of violated law.”
Euripides brings before us with startling vividness the sorrows and failures of the good. But even in his most tragic and pathetic scenes he appears to be feeling after God and His righteousness; and although his view of man’s destiny is a very sombre one, yet he does seem to reach the con-viction that they who have greatly reverenced the gods will prosper yet, and that retribution will ultimately overtake the wicked.
Socrates traced his deepest thoughts and noblest aspirations to divine suggestions, and with him the hope of immortality and the belief in a world which is spiritual and eternal are clear and strong. And he would seem to have reached these anticipations of Christian truth by practising the famous maxim know thyself which he commended to all others, and especially to those who on a superficial examina-tion of the world without are prone to make arbitrary and shallow assertions with regard to the nature of things. For it is only when we look within us and study what ought to be best known by us, viz., our-selves, the powers and processes of the mind, the nature and character of our feelings, desires, volitions, aspirations, that we can ever truly know what lies without us and about us.
Plato believed that in Mind or Reason there was to be found that which gives to human nature its fellowship with the divine, and enables us in the conduct of life to be conformable to the order and harmony which everywhere prevail in nature. He also endeavoured to lead man beyond what is seen and temporal to “the eternal prototypes of the beautiful, the true, and the good from which man has fallen; thus awakening in him a deep longing for the blessings he had lost.”
Plato grasped firmly the idea that there was a unity in nature: he was convinced that there was reason at the root of things. And as he constantly thought of the end which things were meant to serve, and judged of means in their relation to ends, we may be sure that if Plato had attempted to con-struct a system of nature, “ he would “ as Dr. Edward Caird has said “ have adopted the teleological view of things in which God would have been conceived as a designer working with a conscious purpose to realise an end, and that end the happiness of his creatures, especially man.” But Plato and his followers, with all their spiritual and noble concep-tions, could never altogether rid themselves of the notion of an aristocracy of souls. ’ God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth ’ these words which doubtless secured for St. Paul the sympathy of his Athenian audience would have sounded strange in the ears of Plato, and they would have been called in question by many of his disciples. For they found it difficult to keep from thinking that one race was pre-eminent over every other, and that there was a natural and necessary distinction between Greek and Barbarian, bond and free. Not to the Philosophers so much as to the con-quests and the policy of Alexander the Great are we indebted for the uprooting of those exclusive ideas which did something to mar the philosophy of Plato. “ Alexander,” says Plutarch, “ did not hearken to his preceptor Aristotle, who advised him to bear himself as a prince among the Greeks, his own people, but as a master among the Barbarians; to treat the one as friends and kinsmen, the other as animals or chattels... But conceiving that he was sent by God to be an umpire between all, and to unite all together, he reduced by arms those whom he could not conquer by persuasion, and formed of a hundred diverse nations one single universal body, mingling as it were in one cup of friendship, the customs, the marriages, and the laws of all. He desired that all should regard the whole world as their common country, the good as fellow-citizens and brethren, the bad as aliens and enemies; that the Greeks should no longer be distinguished from the foreigner by arms or costume, but that every good man should be esteemed an Hellene, every evil man a Barbarian.” And these thoughts and sentiments did not pass away with the Empire of Alexander, but survived and became more common in the great Roman Empire which took its place. And so when we draw near to the time of Christ we find in some of the best philosophers the doctrine of the equality of all God’s children, of Greek and Barbarian, bond and free as well as distinct fore-shadowings of other pre-eminently Christian doctrines.
Many, for example, then declared that virtue, not pleasure, is the chief good in life, and, emphasising the spiritual nature of man, asserted that birth, rank, country, wealth are mere accidents in human life.
Shortly before the time of Christ some of the Stoics were inclined to believe that “ the deity is an all-pervading spirit animating the Universe, and revealed with special clearness in the soul of man, and that all men are fellow-members of a single body united by participation in the same spirit.” And as the Roman Empire gradually became co-extensive with the civilised world, we find anticipa-tions of the doctrine of the universal brotherhood of man. Thus, for example, Cicero, who died 43 B.C., says: “ The whole world is to be regarded as a common city of Gods and men.” “ Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man who-ever he may be, for the very reason that he is a man.” “ To reduce man to the duties of his own city and to disengage him from duties to members of other cities is to break the universal society of the human race.” But Philosophy was for the few: it left the great mass of men untouched. And even those who were familiar with Philosophy were made by it to feel and see that even the best of ancient Philosophies lacked one thing the one thing needful that fuller knowledge that was to permeate and transform all sinful man’s natural knowledge of divine things that elixir of life that alone is able to vitalise the life of man. The best Philosophies could to some extent show how worthy of being saved man is, but how to completely effect that operation they did not know. They were able to bring man near to the kingdom of God, but to secure his complete ad-mission was beyond their power. The ladder which they set up on earth was high, but the top of it did not reach to heaven; and because it leaned against the unsubstantial clouds men felt and saw that it was unstable and likely to fall. There was a link wanting in the golden chain by which the Philo-sophers sought to bind earth to heaven, man to God: and men were persuaded that the chain was not so perfect as the Philosophers imagined. The world by wisdom knew not the Almighty unto perfection. The Philosophies of men could not re-veal to us the inner nature and character of God and His relation to the children of men. However ably a few might speculate, the people as a whole knew nothing of man’s being made in the image of God nothing of the underlying kinship of God and man nothing of the self-realisation and self-revelation of God in humanity nothing of the Fatherhood of God and of the Sonship of Man nothing of God’s love and mercy and compassion nothing of God’s ceaseless efforts for the salvation of sinners. And so Philosophy failed to bestow upon man that of which sinful man stood above all things in need: and the most intelligent men grew weary of it. Even the Religions of the day ceased to have influence with the great mass of those who formerly believed in them, for the freedom of thought in which men then delighted had sapped and under-mined the superstitions and irrational beliefs which almost everywhere prevailed. And losing such re-straining influences as were in the old religions, the lives of men deteriorated and became more worldly and sinful. And failing to cultivate their spiritual nature men lost the thought and the sense of the world unseen and eternal.
“ As it is by nature that we believe in the being of the gods, and by reason that we apprehend their nature, so it is by the unanimous opinion of all nations that we hold the doctrine of the permanent existence of the soul.” The weakness of the belief which, according to Cicero, was so widely entertained will become apparent when we remember that it was before Cicero and Cato that Julius Caesar in the presence of the Roman Senate gave utterance B.C. 63 to those words which have ever since been regarded as “ the Manifesto of Roman Unbelief on the subject of future existence.” The question before the Senate was, What should be done to those agents in Catiline’s conspiracy who were in custody? When Caesar’s turn for speaking came, he said: “ In pain and misery, death is the release from all suffering, not increased suffering: death dissolves all the ills of mortality: beyond it is no place either for pain or pleasure. Where-fore keep these criminals alive, to suffer a fitting penalty; after death there is no more punishment for sin, neither is there any reward for virtue.”
Caesar was, for the year, Pontifex Maximus, the highest functionary of the state religion: and yet he was neither rebuked nor contradicted by the Senate not even by the grave and virtuous and religious Cato or by the eloquent orator Cicero, who was consul for the time being: two men who made speeches after Caesar and who, as Sallust says, referred to Caesar’s speech.
Now, what are we to infer from this incident this blank negation of all faith and hope, unrebuked and uncondemned “ in the gravest of assemblies, on the gravest of all public occasions”? The indiffer-ence of such an audience to the expression of such views by such a man on such an occasion shows that while the thought of a future life may have existed as a sentiment or aspiration with a few, yet, speaking broadly, the great mass of the people of Rome were destitute of a real and living belief in a future state of divine retri-bution. And how Rome thought and felt and acted to-day, in that way the most distant provinces of the Empire would think and feel and act sooner or later. For there was a constant intermingling of the nations within the Roman Empire. All roads led to Rome, and people were constantly going to and coming from the great centre of the Empire and of the world. Many of the adherents of the various religions of the Empire must, therefore, have come in time to see that the gods they worshipped were, at the best, but local deities, and that the peculiar form of their religion was determined mainly by the char-acter of their own locality and by the circumstances of their own people; while the philosophical sceptics would find themselves ever more and more con-vinced that all the religions were equally false even when they were not equally degrading in their tendencies and hurtful in their results. The people when they met in city or in country must have compared their religions, and they must have been forced to see that all their religions could not be wholly true, whilst all might abound in absurdities even though not wholly false. And looking into each other’s faces, and realising their oneness and their brotherhood, the more intelligent must have felt within them a yearning for a true knowledge of Him for whom all were seeking and after whom all were groping a desire for one true religion that would be equally adapted to and equally helpful to all. Then rose from earth to Heaven, as it were, the cry of some of the best in all the nations: “ Are we all orphans? and have we no Father? no one God and Father of all? “ And then it was that Christ came, revealing the Father: the Father who loved all His children with a love past understanding; the Father in whose eyes the children are of such value that He is prepared to make even the greatest sacrifice for their welfare; the Father who gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life. And ’the Saviour of the world did not come a day too soon, for the decay and death of men’s religious beliefs had been accompanied by the destruction of morality, and at the birth of Christ the state of the world was deplorable in the extreme. In this enlightened age the moral sense of man had become completely blunted, and the national conscience was a thing of naught. “Immorality, sensuousness, gross-ness, gluttony, cruelty, bestiality, sordidness, syco-phancy, untruthfulness, were,” says Professor Wenley, “ never so rife at one time; and as if to render the situation even more gloomy, acts such as we should regard with utter revulsion, amounting even to physical sickness, were perpetrated not in secret, but in the light of common day, and this without arousing anything in the nature of serious or unanimous protest”
“ When Jesus came The world was all at peace in utter wickedness.”
Doubtless, the testimony borne by Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius, Persius, and Martial, to the abounding and shameless iniquity of their time, may be held as referring in the first place and for the most part to life in Rome and in those pleasure cities of the Empire which imitated or taught the capital. Doubtless, among Rome’s hundred million subjects there would be, at all events in country dis-tricts, many whose lives were fair and worthy. And even in Rome itself there would be some of whom it could not be said that they loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. But the facts would seem to show that such were the exception which goes to prove the rule. Speak-ing broadly and generally, men and women had fallen away from the eternal laws of righteousness and were walking in the vanity of their minds, according to the whims of evil hearts, the promptings of sinful passions, or the suggestions of depraved and degrading inclinations.
“ On that hard Pagan world disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell.”
Terrible is the picture which even heathen writers draw of the state of society at the time of Christ. When we read their description of the moral corrup-tion which seemed to prevail everywhere we can understand the words of St. Paul to the saints at Rome and Ephesus:
’As they did not like to retain God in their know-ledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not convenient, being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness.’ ’ This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart; who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all unclean ness with greedi-ness.’ When we know the state of the world at the advent of Christ we are compelled to admit that it was in the fulness of time that Jesus came.