First Coming of Christ - Part 1

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Scripture references are from the King James Version Bible.
(This message is also included in the hardback book, J. Vernon McGee On Prophecy,
Copyright 1993 by Thru the Bible Radio.)

How God Prepared the World for the
First Coming of Christ

But when the fullness of time was come, 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. (Galatians 4:4, 5)

In amazing ways God prepared the world for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. The world consciously and unconsciously entered into God’s plan. The four corners of the civilized world were made ready for His coming. Oh, I know they forgot to put the welcome mat out, and they went so far in one quarter as to even put up a sign that read in effect: "Keep off this world." The world then and now is saying, "Go home, God, we don’t need You."

However, four great ethnic divisions of the human family were made ready for the first coming of Christ. First, the nation of Israel; second, the Oriental races; third, Greece; fourth, Rome. Each one of these performed its particular part in the coming of Christ into the world. Each one had a separate mission. When they all are fitted together, you can see that there was a pattern and a design on the part of God when He sent His Son into the world. It was when the fullness of the time was come that God sent forth His Son. He prepared the world for the coming of His Son. And when we look back over the centuries and see that there is one design and one pattern, it should make the most skeptical, cynical person become a believer in Him. Let’s consider these four different divisions of the human family and see how each was prepared.

Israel

Look at Israel first because it is easiest to see. There is so much of Scripture that deals with the nation Israel in God’s plan. Israel has special significance in the coming of the Savior into the world. Kurtz, the great German historian, said, "Judaism prepared salvation for man, and heathenism prepared man for salvation."
The Lord Jesus Christ said to the Samaritan woman at the well, "Salvation is of the Jews." He was accurate, of course. Paul, writing to the Romans, speaking of his people the Israelites, gave eight identifying fingerprints, and one of them was: "… of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came …" (Romans 9:5). Jesus Christ came out of Israel. He came into our world from this nation, and Israel had been prepared for His coming.

If you go back over the history of Israel, you will find that there are two major divisions in God’s preparation of this nation. One is the period of isolation; the other is the period of dispersion. Or, to put it another way, one is the period of segregation, and the other is the period of integration. You ask, "Is God today for integration or is He for segregation?" God votes both ways.
For Israel there was the period of segregation (see Genesis 12-45). God reached down, first of all, into Ur of the Chaldees. You must remember that Jewish people came out of the East; they belong to the Orient. God drew Abraham out of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and told him to leave not only the high civilization of Ur of the Chaldees, his business, and his friends, but also God wanted to get him away from all his relatives. He said, "Leave them all, and I’ll bring you into a land that I will show you." He brought Abraham into the land of Canaan for a period of isolation during which God was preparing this man and his progeny, his race, if you please, for from Abraham came Isaac, Jacob, and the twelve sons of Jacob.

Then down into the land of Egypt they went, where there was that brief period of dispersion (Genesis 46 – Exodus 12). They spent four hundred years in the land of Egypt, mixing with those heathen down there and adopting many of their customs. They became just as bad as the Egyptians as far as idolatry was concerned. Then God called Moses and said in effect, "I want you to take My people out of this land. I want you to bring them into the land of Canaan; I want to put them in a very special place." God took them out and brought them yonder to Mount Sinai and said, "There’s one thing I have in mind, Moses, for these people, that they be a peculiar people." And everything that God gave them was different from the nations round about. If the surrounding nations went this way, God said to His people, "You go that way. I want to keep you separate." Finally, He put them in Canaan at the crossroads of the world where three continents mingled. The most amazing thing is that when the tramp, tramp, tramp of the nations of the world went by during the period in which the Israelites were faithful to God, He kept them a separate people. All that time He was preparing them for the coming of the Savior and preparing a lineage or line for His coming into the world.

Then the period of dispersion came, when God sent them back into the East from whence they had come, back to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley to mix with what were then the great nations of the world. They rubbed shoulders with the East, and they rubbed shoulders with the West. In their period of dispersion they carried to the world the greatest theological statement in the Old Testament: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Millions of nomads, Arabs wandering over the desert today, will listen to the summons to prayer from a minaret and say the same thing, "Allah is one God." Out to a polytheistic world Israel gave the message. One of the greatest historians said that once Greece rubbed shoulders with Judaism, polytheism was dead in Greece because Greeks were an intellectual people and would not follow idolatry, having come in contact with Judaism. Down yonder as Israel went into captivity, they disseminated the knowledge of the living and the true God. From then on, they walked the highways of the world, carrying a pack, doing business, building synagogues in every place, telling out: "Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God is one LORD – Jehovah our Elohim is one Elohim." That was their mission. All was preparation for the coming of the Messiah.

Then you come to the period of the prophets. Each prophet, as he spoke to the local situation, did not stop there but looked down through the ages and prophesied of events far in the future. When the prospect for national survival was darkest, the prophets saw it the brightest because God revealed to them the coming of the Messiah. They all pointed to His coming, so that when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law. The nation of Israel was prepared for the coming of the Messiah. From their Scriptures they knew where He was to be born (Matthew 2:6) and they should have known when. They believed the Old Testament Scriptures that He was coming, but they did not believe that He had arrived. God had prepared them for the coming of the Messiah.

Oriental Races

The second group, the Oriental races, were prepared for Christ’s coming. That’s where the majority of the population was in His day; it is where the majority of the population is today. Sometimes when I get on the freeway, I think that the majority of the population is here, but it is not. My friend, you find it in the Orient. That’s where most people are.
The prophet Daniel saw the interpretation of the vision which God gave to Nebuchadnezzar. He saw an image composed of four different metals: the head of gold, the breast and arms of silver, the belly and thighs of brass, the legs of iron, the feet part of iron and part of clay (see Daniel 2). Those four different metals represented the four great world powers. Two of these nations were Oriental powers: Babylon, the head of gold, and Media-Persia, the arms and breast of silver. Both were descendants of Ham. They represent the Orient. You and I are living in a day when world control has been in the hands of the ethnological division of the human family descended from Japheth. I think that Japheth is coming to an end in his rulership of the world shortly. But the first great world powers were Hamitic.

The head of gold under Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon represented absolute autocracy. It represented a despotic power reposed in one man so that his whims became law. If he wanted men in a fiery furnace, they were thrown into a fiery furnace. Nobody questioned him. The kingdom that followed was Media-Persia. Media-Persia represents material riches. Probably no nation ever brought together so much of the wealth of the world as Media-Persia did. The world still stands in amazement at the wealth and the display of the Oriental courts of that day. These two nations, Babylon and Media-Persia, represent the Orient, the mysterious East, the land of the occult where there are contrasts and contradictions.

Side-by-side, for centuries, wealth and wretchedness have been co-existing, squalor and splendor walk hand in hand, plenty and poverty go together, the purple and the perishing live in the same town and on the same side of the railroad tracks. Vast multitudes yonder in the Orient have been dying in rags right beside great riches. Solomon exemplified this also, for Solomon was the one who gathered together the wealth and the wisdom of the world. And Solomon made this statement, speaking for them: "He that trusteth in his riches shall fall …" (Proverbs 11:28). May I say to you, the East went down rich. Will Rogers said, when we in America entered the Depression, "America is the only nation on record that’s going to the poorhouse in a Cadillac!" He was wrong, because he did not know history. That had been true of the Orient – they went to the poorhouse in purple and gold and silver in their day. But the gold and silver could not save them.

Abraham had come out of Ur of the Chaldees, out of that mysterious land. In captivity Israel went back into that land, and some never came out. When the nations of the East lost their power, the East was like a dead battery that was run down. The ragged religions of that land didn’t help any; they offered no hope. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, offered no help or hope for them. At the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Orient was perishing, and there was a great longing in the hearts of the miserable mobs of the East. Also, an air of expectancy had spread throughout the world. Suetonius, the Latin historian, relates that "an ancient and definite expectation had spread throughout the East, that a ruler of the world would, at about that time, arise in Judea." Tacitus, the Roman historian, made a similar statement. And Schlegel, the German historian, states that Buddhist missionaries traveling to China met Chinese sages going to seek the Messiah about A.D. 33. Paul was saying no idle words when he witnessed of Christ’s resurrection to a Roman king, "This thing was not done in a corner!" We find yonder on the day of Pentecost that there were Parthians and Medes in Jerusalem (see Acts 2:9). The East was represented.

It was an Ethiopian eunuch out of the dark continent of Africa who heard the Scriptures explained as he was returning from Jerusalem (see Acts 8). He was the first Gentile converted to Christ, and "he went on his way rejoicing." He took the gospel into Africa.
Thomas, the doubting apostle, did not go to the Roman Empire. Rather, there is an abundance of historical evidence that he went into India and even into China with the good news of Christ.

Out of that wretched and miserable East there came to Jerusalem wise men. Where men were suffering and dying they came with the urgent question, In the fullness of the time, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law. The Orient had been made ready.

Next Part 2.