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| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) |
GALATIANS 4:4c
(Readings: Phil.2:1-18; Luke 1:26-38; Gal.3:23-4:7)
Perfect Entry
Beloved Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ…
These words, “born of woman,” can seem quite insignificant.
After all, isn’t each one of us born of a woman?
It would be impossible for us to be here today if this didn’t happen!
It’s a basic fact of human life.
Just like Joseph’s reaction was quite natural when he found out Mary was pregnant.
I mean, he was engaged to the girl.
And now this?
He knew the relationship couldn’t continue.
Mind you, he was going to do that quietly.
He was thinking about Mary’s future.
There would be enough difficulties she faced because of this.
But it was obvious to him what had happened.
Someone had made her pregnant, and it wasn’t him.
It’s a basic fact of human life.
Joseph was soon made to realise, however, that what was being conceived wasn’t just a fact of human life.
It was actually a part of the divine life being joined with human life!
Brothers and sisters, young people, we know there is something more about these words.
For the apostle to say God’s Son is “born of woman” is something else.
What he has written before this phrase and what he will write after this shouts this out to us!
You see, this passage, from chapter 3, verse 26, essentially describes the equality and privilege we have as children of God, through faith in Jesus Christ.
But here, in the verses 4 and 5, Paul puts it in the widest possible perspective.
It is almost as though up until verses 4 and 5 the apostle has been carefully seeing where to put his own footsteps just in front of him.
Then in these verses he looks up to see where he’s going by the stars.
Or it’s like driving along, looking at street signs, but then matching it up with the map that covers the whole city.
For the verses 4 and 5 is that big picture.
It puts it all in perspective.
What we have here is equivalent to an early creed, or confession.
The words, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons,” speak in a simple way of the Triune Godhead and his great plan at work.
Indeed, the following verse confirms the place of the Third Person, the Holy Spirit.
As verse 6 says, “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts…”
At this point Paul wants us to look up, for we are down here.
In the words of verse 3, we “were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.”
Congregation, let’s not forget, GOD’S SON CAME INTO THIS LIFE.
This is our first aspect to the text this morning.
GOD’S SON CAME INTO THIS LIFE.
Think for a moment of the situation if Jesus had not been born.
Where would you be then?
Isn’t it ironic that even the most vitriolic atheist writing a letter full of propaganda to a friend must acknowledge Christ when he dates that letter?
The communist Soviet Union was forced in its own Constitution to acknowledge that it came into existence in 1917, A.D.
That’s ‘Anno Domini’ – the year of our Lord!
The baby born into a humble family, in a stable, and laid upon a manger – an animal’s feeding trough – he would change history right around.
In fact, we could even rename history as ‘His Story’.
That’s how much everything hinges upon him!
This also includes the time before he came.
For don’t we call that B.C. – before Christ?
Whether we believe in him or not; whether we acknowledge that anything at all in the New Testament is at all true; we all have to admit that no man dominates human history quite like this man.
You know, I don’t think we could even begin to imagine how things would have been like if Jesus hadn’t come!
Mind you, the question itself is a good one to challenge your unbelieving neighbours and friends with.
Ask them: ‘What if Jesus had never been born?’
‘How would our community be without Christianity?’
Actually today aren’t we finding that out in a society so much against the gospel?
Look at the fear and brokenness and violence all around us!
Congregation, GOD’S SON CAME INTO THIS LIFE.
It is a fact, a human fact, because it was as a man that he came.
But his coming itself upset whatever we may have thought about the facts of life.
He was born by the Holy Spirit conceiving within Mary.
To those original readers whom Paul was recounting the fact of Jesus being born of a woman, it would have brought back the story of the virgin birth quite clearly.
They may have heard it from Paul himself, or his companion Luke, who wrote the Gospel.
Our reading from Luke 1 gave us part of what they would have known about it.
There we read about the words from the angel Gabriel, the question from Mary, and then the angel’s answer.
For Gabriel declared in verse 35, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy - the Son of God.”
There could even have been someone who knew Jesus personally who told them.
However they first heard it, it would be difficult for them not to think of the way of Christ’s birth with these words.
John Calvin comments here, that, the apostle “expressly intended to distinguish Christ from the rest of men as having been created by the seed of his mother and not by the intercourse of man and woman.”
This is not always a thought shared by more recent commentators.
And it certainly isn’t the only thought of these words.
But it is likely to have come to mind with the original readers and hearers.
What all faithful commentators are agreed on, though, is the second aspect we consider in connection with the text.
For now we see … GOD’S SON TOOK ON OUR LIFE.
In this aspect many see the link between this verse and Philippians 2, the verses 6 till 8.
We saw last Sunday that the words “God sent forth his Son” means the same as “in the form of God” in that Philippian passage.
Now, the next words, “born of a woman,” match up with the words that Jesus, “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”
Actually, whether by shock or otherwise, that Paul uses the word “woman” is very frank about this.
For the word for woman, ‘gu/ni/kos,’ expresses in the most distinct way that this is a female.
Just like a gynaecologist today is a doctor specialising in treating women.
Now, the word in the text was stated in an age of extreme inequality.
Women were regarded as second-class citizens – they were grouped together on the same level as slaves.
In their prayers the Pharisees would thank God they weren’t born as women!
So this is quite something!
We would have noticed this also in the verses before the text.
There is repeated emphasis on the equality of all before the face of God.
Indeed, there couldn’t be a more liberating statement than Galatians 3:28.
For it says, “There is neither Jew or Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
I mean, who was it that forced the abolition of slavery?
Whether in New Testament times or in more modern times?
It has been Christians.
You see, it is the Gospel, which, despite the cries of feminism, has truly freed our women.
Jesus lifts from woman the curse of her sex and sets her at the side of man as equally a child of God.
Jesus recognises her special role.
Congregation, we can even see paradise restored in this way.
For in creation the woman was made from man’s ribs for a special reason.
As Matthew Henry writes in his commentary, the woman “was not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be loved.”
I put it to you that this text fulfils this very purpose!
For what had been so devastatingly distorted, almost destroyed, by the fall into sin, is now restored through the second Adam, Jesus Christ.
GOD’S SON TOOK ON OUR LIFE because we were going to die – eternally!
And Paul describes it in such a way as to leave no doubt about the humiliation Jesus suffered in doing this.
One commentator says that the expression, “born of woman,” suggests the weak, the human, the condescending.
The woman was not only the way Jesus came into the flesh, but from her he took all that belongs to the human.
She was in the full sense his mother, while he was true God.
The sweet innocent Nativity scenes you can see on many Christmas cards couldn’t be a more deceptive depiction!
And this is not referring here to the condition of the stable, or that he was laid in a manger – the animal’s feeding trough.
This is about God himself come down!
The all-glorious Son is found amongst the most inglorious ones!
Mind you, not that this was all so unknown, or should have come unexpectedly.
The Jewish chief priests and teachers of the law could tell Herod the humble place it was prophesied Jesus would be born.
Micah 5 verse 2 had declared, “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from old, from ancient times.”
But then it happened!
In this way we come to a third aspect to our text.
Here we realise … GOD’S SON MUST BE IN YOUR LIFE!
Friends, we don’t know the first thing about real love until we see the sacrifice in that stable scene.
And which important dignitaries are there to come and greet him?
Just those lower-class shepherds, the untouchables of society.
The Magi didn’t come until later, when Joseph and Mary were living in a house.
So much of what passes for Christmas today is totally opposite to the true meaning of what happened when God’s Son was “born of a woman.”
This is no triumph of human character.
Here’s no great story, like we hear so many today, of someone beating the odds.
Indeed, the odds are stacked against him!
They’re going to end up killing him!
Dear believer, do you see yourself in that crowd condemning him?
Because we blew the blessing we had!
We were only adding to our cursing.
As Romans 8 verse 3 states, “For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.”
The true Christmas story has to point us to the fact of faith.
Unless we believe that Jesus did it we won’t be going anywhere!
You know, if there wasn’t a Christmas holiday as we know it, I’m sure the world would have another festival as an excuse for a holiday.
Perhaps that festival would still have the holly, the trees, the coloured lights all over houses and streets, but there wouldn’t be a birthday anymore.
How could there be then for someone who died nearly two thousand years ago?
That question pops up again.
“What if Jesus had never been born?”
The apostle addressed a similar question in 1st Corinthians chapter 15.
There it was about those denying the resurrection, which really is tied in with the same work of Christ.
Paul writes there, in the verses 17 till 19, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still lost in your sins.
“Then those who have fallen asleep - those who have died – are lost.
“If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”
And then Paul goes to proclaim the glorious hope of the Gospel.
In verse 20 he cries out, “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
“For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also comes through a man.”
Just think, congregation, the birth of Jesus Christ on earth began the final countdown!
The countdown that also later included his suffering and death and rising
This is the countdown that right now is close to its end.
Soon Christ will return.
Are you ready for that?
Amen.
PRAYER:
Let’s pray…
O Lord Jesus, you who alone is our Saviour, how we bow before you now!
You did it all for we who were so hopelessly stuck in the quicksand of our sin - we who had no hope.
Indeed, the only thing waiting for us was eternal damnation for all our sins.
So, Lord, how can we begin to thank you for all you’ve done, and all you still do?
But praise you we will do – for the glory of your Name.
Help us by your Word and Spirit so to do.
In your saving name alone, Amen.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Rev. Sjirk Bajema, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
(c) Copyright 2024, Rev. Sjirk Bajema
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