The Preparation For Christ's Coming - Part 1

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Thursday, December 16th. It's easy to become so familiar with the story of Christmas and forget how elaborately the coming of Christ was planned and orchestrated by God. Stay with us and learn about the preparation for Christ's coming. Today I want to begin a series on the coming of Christ in preparation for this Christmas season. And I want you to turn, if you will, to Galatians chapter four and verse four, and I want us to read verses four through seven. There's a little phrase that the apostle Paul uses concerning the preparation for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ that is so packed, that is so exciting when you and I begin to understand all the preparation that our heavenly Father made for the sending to us of our Messiah. So Paul, in this fourth chapter of Galatians, chapter four, verse four begins by saying, But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order that he might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father, or Father, Father.

Therefore, you're no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. So as you and I look at this preparation, I want you to see several things, one of which is God's great providential hand in guiding, in controlling the affairs of men in order to bring about this very special time which ultimately changed the course of human history and which has changed the destiny of all of us who are believers. Well, that preparation first began, if you will, with the prophets. And if you'll think about all the prophecies in the Old Testament concerning the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, most of the study Bibles have a list of all those prophecies and the fulfillment. But I want us to think about those prophecies for just a moment. God gave those prophecies as words of hope. He also gave them because they're given so accurately, so precisely, beginning even with the first family.

He gave them in order that when the Messiah came, there would be a way of identifying him as the Messiah rather than for the people to be fooled into believing that many of those who came by as teachers and so-called messiahs, they would follow him. So he gave those prophecies as a means of identifying the true prophet. And that's why all of these prophecies are so meticulously fulfilled, every single one of them. But as you look at these prophecies and you see how God protected them all through the Old Testament, it is a witness of God's sovereign control of the affairs of men and in the universe and how meticulously God works to fulfill every dot and every cross, every T of every single prophecy he has given to us.

It is found here in Galatians in this fourth chapter when he says, But in the fullness of the time, when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth his Son. Now, the Bible says that Isaiah prophesied, Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. This will be a sign. This will be an indication.

This is a way you can identify him. Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son and she will call his name Immanuel, which means what? God with us.

There could be no question about that. So when Matthew turned to Matthew chapter one, when Matthew wrote the gospel that he wrote, he wrote this gospel primarily to Jews. Luke wrote his primarily to the Gentiles. Look at this passage, if you will, as Matthew begins in verse 18. Now, the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows. When his mother, Mary, had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with the child by the Holy Spirit.

Listen to what God said to Satan. He says the seed of the woman. Women don't bear seed.

Why? Conceived. Conceived by the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband, being a righteous man, not wanting to disgrace her, desired to put her away secretly. But when he had considered this, behold, an angel appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For that which has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit, and she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for it is he who will save his people from their sins. Now all this took place that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, which prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled, saying, what is it? Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, which translated means God with us.

There could be no mistakes about what that prophecy meant. The Bible says she was a virgin. The New Testament fulfillment of the prophecy is that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin.

It is absolutely essential in God's atoning work that he be born of a virgin, so that God fulfilled that prophecy of a virgin, bringing forth a child, conceived of the Holy Spirit, bringing forth that child, as Paul said, in the fullness of God's great, sovereign, providential timing, in the fullness of the time. Well, turn to Micah chapter 5, verse 2, for a moment. Listen to this now, and this prophecy was given somewhere around 700 B.C., thereabouts. Listen to what this verse says about the coming Messiah. Chapter 5, verse 2.

But as for you, Bethlehem, Ephratah, too little to be among the clans of Judah, for you, one will go forth for me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago. That is, his life has been what? From the days of eternity, which is to say there has never been a time that he was not.

He always has been. And when Paul says in the fullness of time, here is a prophecy of the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, you and I know that passage in Matthew chapter 1 and also in Luke.

Now, as you and I look at the prophecies of scripture, it is very clear that God kept sending those prophets down through the ages to keep heralding to men the hope that a Messiah was coming. Now, you certainly took God a long time. God's schedule is not our schedule. God is in the process of doing something infinitely bigger than you and I could possibly conceive of.

Now, what I want you to see is this. If God is willing to do all the things we've just said and we're about to say in order to prepare us for the first coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and meticulously fulfill every single prophecy, what does that leave us to believe that in his coming again, he's going to meticulously and precisely fulfill every single prophecy you and I have so clearly given in the New Testament about his second coming that you and I are expecting as God's people, as his believers, the body of Christ? So let me begin with a very interesting unraveling of how God worked to prepare us for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ from a little different perspective. Now, listen to me carefully.

It is very simple what I want to do. But I want to show you, my friend, how God has worked in every area of life in order to prepare to save you. And to prepare to seal you as a child of God and to give you his great divine inheritance.

Watch this. God spoke to a man called Abraham living in a pagan society. He absolutely revealed himself to this man. Abraham listening to God. God made a covenant relationship with him which could never be broken. In that covenant relationship, God said to him, I'm going to give you a land. It'll be yours and your people's forever. He says, listen, through you, Abraham, all the nations of the earth are going to be blessed.

All the nations of the earth are going to be blessed through you. Abraham had Isaac, Isaac, Jacob. Jacob had 12 sons, which made up the great family of the beginning of the nation of Israel. Of those 12 sons, the one who is most, the most prominent one is Joseph, because he takes up about the last 14 chapters of the book of Genesis. But in the mind of God, the most important one of those sons, the man through whom the genealogical line came, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, the lion of the tribe of Judah. And so came the family, the little family of Jacob and the sons.

Isn't it interesting that God arranged this? Oh, they thought they were doing it, and God took advantage of their reaction. Joseph's brothers hated him and despised him.

So what did they do? They tried to kill him and finally sold him into Egyptian bondage. By selling him to a caravan on their way into Egypt, he was bought, purchased by Potiphar, came a part of Potiphar's household, ended up in prison, interpreted the dreams of the butler and the baker, ended up as the prime minister of Egypt, saving them from a famine. Now, his rest of his family was up in what we know today and what we would know then as the promised land. God allowed a famine up there. Jacob, who saved the Egyptian civilization from starvation and death, brought his family down into Egypt. And there they were given a plot, an area of land.

They began to multiply as the years went by. And after 400 years, there were a couple of million or so of them. God brought them out of that land, brought them down there and corralled them, so to speak, in a land called Egypt.

Then, of course, came the time of slavery and bloodshed and heartache in 400 years. Finally, God, when God was ready and the nation was ready, God brought them out of Egyptian bondage across the Red Sea in a miraculous feat, not up to the promised land but down to Sinai in order to de-Egyptianize his people. He gave them the law and the Ten Commandments, the mosaic law, in order to teach them how to live once they got in the promised land. They came to the promised land.

They absolutely denied God. They spent the next 38 years or so wandering around the wilderness until all of those adults died off and God could start again. Then he brought them into the promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey. They didn't do all that God told them to do.

And so God allowed them to be continually harassed by Philistines and Jebusites and all the rest of them until finally the dark ages of the nation of Israel set in, a period of the judges, when every man was doing what was right in his own eyes. And where was the Messiah? Where is the coming of the Messiah? Has God forgotten the coming of the Messiah?

Where is he? Then the Bible tells us that a man by the name of Samuel, a prophet, came upon the scene and God allowed him to appoint a king. The first king was Saul, the second one David, the third one was Solomon. Following Solomon, the kingdom of God, that is the kingdom of Israel, was divided into a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom, oftentimes warring with each other. And then finally in 722, the Scripture tells us, history tells us that the Assyrians came from the north and devoured that northern kingdom of about 10 tribes and took them away, scattering them all over the known world.

That was in 722. A little over 600, about 605, somewhere thereabouts, out of the east came the Babylonian empire, the Nebuchadnezzar. They destroyed the city of Jerusalem, tore down the walls, burnt the gates, destroyed the temple, and took away some 50,000 Jews over into Babylon, leaving only a remnant there in the city of Jerusalem in that area.

Now what has happened? Jews are scattered all over the world. The Assyrians took them from the northern kingdom.

Now they're taken over into the east. They learned the Babylonian ways. In order to survive, what did they do? They began to establish little places of worship which we know today as the synagogues. And they began to meet there and to worship there and to pray there. In the midst of all that time of 70 years, God had sent a little teenager over there by the name of Daniel. God raised him up as a mighty prophet among the people there in Babylon. And he was watching the prophecies and listening to what God was saying. And he became a very important person in the affairs of the Babylonian empire. When God's prophesied time which he gave to Jeremiah the prophet was over, the Bible says out of the north came the Persians, a man by the name of Cyrus, a great military leader who took the city of Babylon as it were in one night. And it is said that the people themselves opened the gates to Cyrus that let them in. Babylon was a very advanced civilization. The Jews of that day learned a great deal from the Babylonians. But in that time as the Persians came, it was interesting that Nebuchadnezzar who was a vicious type of dictator, Cyrus, this Persian, came who was very lenient toward the Jews. And one of the things he did which is indicated here in Daniel, that is he decreed that the people of Israel, that God's people, the Jews, could go back to their homeland. So you read the book of Nehemiah and you understand Nehemiah and Ezra what is happening. So he sends them back and probably some 60,000 of them went back over a period of time. They rebuilt the walls, rebuilt the temple, rebuilt the city. So now God has done what? Rebuilding the holy city of Jerusalem. The Jews, a lot of them didn't go back. It was too good.

Things were too good. They had learned the prosperous ways of the Babylonians and so now we have Jews scattered all over the world. The city of Jerusalem now being rebuilt again. After the time of the Persians, right at the end of that period of time, comes a man upon the scene by Alexander's name. We call him Alexander the Great of Macedon, a Greek state. A man who was an absolute military genius in the ways of warfare.

But in the short years of his life, and he died in his thirties, the short years of his life he conquered a major part of the world. One of the things that Alexander the Great wanted to do is he wanted to Hellenize the world. That is, he loved the Greek culture, which was a supreme culture.

Nothing had ever matched it. These were the times of Socrates and Demosthenes and Aristotle and all the rest. The Greek language of that day was the most accurate language in the world.

Now, Alexander, of course, was massing his men, not only from the state of Macedon, but in all the Greek Isles there, but others who began to join him. So he taught them all the one language that everybody understood. And it is probably a lot of contribution to Alexander the Great for preparing the world in the area of language for the coming of the Messiah. Because, listen, many of the Jews, for example, were speaking Greek in this time and the children were growing up. And so to speak, as you and I think in terms of schooling and so forth, they were learning Greek. And so Greek was becoming the language and more and more Hebrews were speaking less Hebrew and more Greek.

So what did they do? They said, well, something's got to happen or what will happen to our scriptures? So the Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament scriptures so that their children could grow up having the Old Testament scriptures in the prophecies of the coming of the Messiah. Because they did not want that great truth to which all of them had looked forward to to die because of the language and because of the Hebrew language primarily.

So Alexander the Great spreading his Hellenistic philosophy and his Hellenistic culture over the world. Then there came a time when the Jewish people were free. They were out from under the domination of anyone.

They began to be stronger and stronger. And you recall an Amos that the Bible says that the prophet Amos said to his people in that day. There will come a time of great famine, not a famine of food, but a famine of the hearing of the word of God. And for 400 long years, God sent no prophet on the scene to remind the people of the coming of the Messiah. Four hundred silent years.

Can you imagine what that would be like? Four hundred years, no man of God rising upon the scene to say, Thus saith the Lord, the Messiah is coming. Repent of your sins. Four hundred silent years. Rome began to be the dominating power and the dominating force of the world. Till finally, the saying was that all roads led to Rome. So the Romans come upon the scene.

What do they do? They send their great legionnaires to all parts of the known earth at that time, conquering and subduing every faction. So what did they bring in the world? They brought peace. That is peace that what the Romans call Pax Romanos, the peace of Rome. So you could travel most anywhere and be protected by the law and the legionnaires of Rome.

Good roads. The seas were open to sailing. The Greek language was everywhere. There was a great expectancy among the Jews for the coming of the Messiah. Religion, so to speak, was tolerated. That is, all kinds of religion were tolerated so that the Jews religion was tolerated. So that when the Lord Jesus Christ came upon the scene, travel was open and free.

You could be protected. You could spouse your philosophy of your religion under the protection of Rome. Everything seemed to be set. While all this was going on, the affairs of men, rulers were making their decisions. Empires were coming and going. Nations were strong.

Then they were they were weak. Great men that God raised on the scene, sometimes pagan, sometimes righteous, godly men. But upon every single civilization and upon every nation and upon every man was the hand of Almighty God. Every single decision being made in humanity, God was protecting that great event, which He purposed and decreed before eternity ever began in human history. Almighty God was doing His great thing. Thank you for listening to The Preparation for Christ's Coming. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.