We were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world. But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son… to redeem those under the law. Galatians 4:3-5
We don’t have to read very far into the Bible to find out that we have 2 big problems:
1. We all sin—we all do destructive and unloving things. Today’s verse calls that “slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world”.
2. None of us measures up to the glory that God planned for us walk in.
This situation would be bad enough all by itself, but we discover in our own experience and the experience of people written about in the Bible, that sin separates us from God who is our only hope, it produces misery in our own lives in in the lives of others. And we have no successful solution to this problem.
God, however, has a solution. As we read through the Old Testament, we find promise after promise that God made concerning how He was going to save people from the mess that sin makes in our lives. His goal is to restore us to the glory that He had planned for us.
His plan: He would send a Savior.
So, as each promise of rescue was made in the Old Testament, His plan became more and more detailed about who this Savior was going to be and how He would rescue us from sin and restore us to glory. God’s real solution became more and more recognizable as He gave more and more details of His rescue plan.
The reason God shared His plan with the people of the Old Testament was to give them hope in the rotten situations they lived in as a result of sin.
And God made good on His solution. As we read through the New Testament, we find all those promises that God has made fulfilled in Jesus.
1. Jesus dealt with sin—giving us His victory over its power in us and its consequences upon us.
2. Through Jesus, God reveals in us the glory that He planned all along for us to walk in.
That is what the shepherds were all excited about the night Jesus was born. That’s why the angels were singing, “Glory to God in the Highest”. That’s the reason for the Magi’s gifts. They were celebrating. Jesus was God’s Christmas gift to us.
The hope God poured out didn’t leave us disappointed…Just at the right time, while we were still powerless in the grips of sin, God sent His Son to rescue us.