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The fulness of the time

How God Prepared the Way

The apostle Paul wrote that when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son. The silent years were that preparation. Across four centuries God had given the world a common language in Greek, a network of Roman roads and the peace of Rome to travel them, a scattered Jewish people with synagogues and Scriptures in every city, and a longing for the Messiah stretched to its height. When Christ was born, the stage of history was set as it had never been before, and the gospel could run to the ends of the earth.

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,Galatians 4:4 (KJV)

The fulness of the time

Writing to the churches of Galatia, Paul looked back on the coming of Christ and chose his words with care. When the fulness of the time was come, he wrote, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. The phrase the fulness of the time means the appointed moment, the hour that history had been filling up toward. Christ did not come at a random point. He came when the world was ready, and the silent years were the years of that readying.

This is the deepest way to read the four silent centuries. They were not empty. They were full, quietly filling, like a vessel brought slowly to the brim, until the moment arrived that God had set from before the foundation of the world. What follows are some of the ways the silence was preparation, each one a gift laid ready for the coming of the King.

A common language for the gospel

The first gift was a shared tongue. Because of Alexander and the Hellenization that outlasted him, the common Greek called Koine was understood across the whole eastern half of the Roman world. A single language now bound together peoples who had once been divided by a hundred dialects. When the apostles went out to preach Christ, they did not have to translate the message anew in every land. They could preach and write in Greek and be understood from Jerusalem to Rome.

The New Testament itself was written in that Greek, and the Old Testament had already been translated into it in the Septuagint. So the whole story of redemption, promise and fulfillment together, could be read in one language by the nations. God had given the gospel a voice the world could hear, and he had given it in the silent years.

Roman roads and Roman peace

The second gift was a way to travel and a time of relative safety in which to do it. By the birth of Christ, Rome ruled the Mediterranean world, and it had bound that world together with a vast network of paved roads and safe sea lanes, built for legions and trade but usable by anyone. The long period of stability under the empire, often called the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, meant that a traveler could cross from province to province in more safety than in any age before.

The book of Acts is, among other things, the record of the gospel running along those roads. Paul and his companions walked the Roman highways and sailed the Roman shipping lanes from city to city, from Antioch to Ephesus to Corinth to Rome itself. Paul's Roman citizenship even gave him the right to appeal to Caesar, and so the empire's own law carried him to the capital to preach. The roads Rome laid for its armies became the roads the good news traveled.

A people scattered and longing

The third gift was the Jewish people themselves, scattered yet faithful. In the centuries of the silent years, Jews had settled in nearly every city of the empire, a dispersion called the diaspora. Wherever they went they carried their synagogues, their Scriptures, and their worship of the one true God, and around them gathered God-fearing Gentiles drawn to that faith. Every one of those synagogues became a place where the God of Israel was already known and the Scriptures were already read.

When the apostles arrived in a new city, they had a ready starting point. They went first to the synagogue, to people who knew the promises and were waiting for their fulfillment, and there they proclaimed that the promised Christ had come. And within Judea itself, the long ache of foreign rule had sharpened the hope of the Messiah to a fine point, so that when John the Baptist cried in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the LORD, the crowds streamed out to hear. A people had been made ready to receive their King.

It was John the Baptist who broke the long prophetic silence. After four centuries with no prophet in Israel, a voice cried again in the wilderness, and the crowds knew at once that the drought was over and God was speaking. John came, the Gospels say, in the spirit and power of Elijah, the very messenger Malachi had promised at the close of the Old Testament, to prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight. The last words of the Hebrew Scriptures and the first movement of the Gospel joined hands across the silent years, and John pointed away from himself to the one coming after him, saying, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.

The stage set for Christ

Put the gifts together and the picture is unmistakable. A common language so the message could be spoken. Open roads and a wide peace so it could travel. A scattered, believing people with Scriptures and synagogues in every city so it had a foothold everywhere. And a longing for the Messiah stretched to its height so that hearts were ready to answer. No age before had ever held all of these together. In the fulness of the time they stood ready at once, and into that moment God sent forth his Son.

None of this means the people of the silent years understood what was happening to them. They lived through conquest and persecution, taxation and unrest, and mostly they simply endured, prayed, and waited. The preparation was hidden from them, as God's deepest work so often is. Only looking back, from the far side of Bethlehem and the empty tomb, can the church see how each hard century was a beam laid in the frame of a single house, built to shelter the coming of the King. The God who worked unseen through Persia and Greece and Rome is the same God who works unseen in the long, quiet, unexplained seasons of every believer's life.

This is why the silence was never absence. Through Persia and Greece and Rome, through the Septuagint and the synagogue, through the faithfulness of the Maccabees and the waiting of Simeon and Anna, God had been preparing the world for one event: the coming of Jesus Christ. The Old Testament ends with the promise of the Sun of righteousness rising with healing in his wings. Four hundred years later, in a stable in Bethlehem, the Sun rose. The time was fulfilled, the kingdom of God was at hand, and the long silence gave way, at last, to the Word made flesh.

A note on the sources: the history above rests on well-attested ancient records, above all the books of First and Second Maccabees and the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. First and Second Maccabees are received as Scripture by Catholic and Orthodox Christians and read as valuable history by Protestants. Where a detail is a later tradition rather than early history, such as the account of the oil at Hanukkah, it is flagged as such. Dates in this period are approximate and are given as historians commonly reckon them.

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