First Coming of Christ - Part 2

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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

Greece

Now we turn to the third ethnological division, the Greeks. The Greeks were the third world power that Daniel mentions. The Greco-Macedonian civilization was one of the greatest civilizations this world has seen. The basic philosophy of Greece was a striving to produce the perfect man. They tried to bring man to the place of physical and mental perfection. They didn’t do much for him spiritually, but they certainly worked on him physically and mentally. The Greeks gave genius to the world as no other nation has. At the time that David was singing the sweet psalms in Israel, just a few miles away yonder in Asia Minor, the poet Homer was walking in rags and singing his story. As someone has commented, Homer went into twenty-five towns that would not give him bread but that afterward claimed to be the place of his birth.

Then several hundred years went by, and about the third century before Christ, in the Paraclean age, Greece erected upon the horizon of history a glory of Greece that covered the Acropolis and ran down to the ends of the earth – so much so that today it has affected every walk of life, even architecture. You can’t build today a humble church or a courthouse that does not in some way reflect upon the genius of the Greeks. It was during that period that Socrates, Demosthenes, Plato, Xenophon, Sophocles, and Euripides appeared – each of them a genius in his line. Philosophy and poetry and drama and athletics and government were carried to the highest degree in this particular period.

Then came Alexander the Great out of Macedon, uniting the Greek states for the first time and marching an army over the world to do something that, unbeknown to him, God wanted done. I want to give you Houson’s statement regarding Alexander:

He took up the meshes of the net of civilization, which were lying in disorder on the edges of the Asiatic shore, and spread them over all the countries which he traversed in his wonderful campaigns. The East and the West were suddenly brought together. Separated tribes were united under a common government. New cities were built, as the centers of political life. New lines of communication were opened, as the channels of commercial activity. The new culture penetrated the mountain ranges of Pisidia and Lycaonia. The Tigris and Euphrates became Greek rivers. The language of Athens was heard among the Jewish colonies of Babylonia; and a Grecian Babylon was built by the conqueror in Egypt and called by his name.

Alexander took Greek civilization to the ends of the earth, and may I say that he accomplished a purpose: God was disseminating a language that was to become the vehicle of the gospel, the Greek language. Every book of the New Testament was originally written in Greek. And that most amazing of all apostles, Paul, could stand and speak one language yonder in the "agora" (marketplace) in Corinth or on Mars Hill in Athens or in the amphitheater in Ephesus or in the Mamertine prison in Rome, and be understood by all. He was a master of the Greek language – his marvelous epistle to the Romans is proof of that. He knew the Greek language, and he could use it to preach Christ all over the Roman Empire. God had prepared the Greeks for the coming of Christ into the world at just the right moment. The Old Testament had previously been translated from Hebrew into Greek and was called the Septuagint.

The Old Testament in Greek is one of the best of the translations that we have today. Luke wrote his Gospel record to the Greek world and, in effect, said to them, "You have been seeking all these years for the perfect man. I present Him to you: the Lord Jesus Christ. I am a doctor, and I looked at Him physically. He grew physically in favor with God and man. He grew as a normal person down here upon this earth. But I examined Him," said Dr. Luke. "He was a perfect Man. He died upon a cross for the sins of the world, and He was raised from the dead." When Paul took that gospel throughout the Roman world, Luke traveled with him. One of the last things Paul wrote was "only Luke is with me." Luke, the man who in a sense put his stethoscope down on Jesus Christ, said to the Greek world, "You never found the perfect man, but here He is." In the fullness of the time, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law.

Rome

God prepared the Romans for the coming of Christ. If you had told Caesar Augustus in the first century A.D. that he was nothing but a pawn on a chessboard carrying out God’s wishes when he put his name to a tax bill, he would have laughed at you. But from our vantage point of about two thousand years we can look back to see that it is true. Of course, Augustus couldn’t see it, but he was a puppet being moved by God’s hand.

Rome was the empire of iron. Their philosophy in one word was power. Power. I’m afraid that Rome is misunderstood today, and we ought to know something about it in this hour – because, you see, Rome did not die. It lives on. The Roman Empire tried to solve the world’s problems in another way. Again I would like to give you a quotation from Gregory concerning Rome. Notice that their philosophy sounds familiar:

He [Rome] was to try whether human power, taking the form of law, regulated by political principles of which the regard for law and justice was most conspicuous, could perfect humanity by subordinating the individual to the state and making the state universal.

Neither Hitler, Mussolini, nor the Communists were the first to try making the state a sovereign and even a god. Rome did that. What a tremendous reminder! Look further at Rome. With physical force, the Roman conquered the world. With his executive power, he organized it, for he was an organizer. He gave good government – that is, if you can call his government good – to every people, tribe, and nation of the world. He built roads; he gave them good roads. God made sure of that because over those roads the gospel was to go to the hinterlands. Under Rome’s domination law and order prevailed. Read the four Gospels again, and see how law and order prevailed in Jerusalem. Roman soldiers were there to enforce the law.

That was the thing that Rome gave to the world, and their emphasis was on justice. Listen to Gregory again:

It was justice practically omnipotent and omnipresent, and so neither to be resisted nor escaped, justice which never dreamed of mercy until the work of conquest and consolidation was done. It made men long for mercy because it demonstrated to them that there was no hope for them in righteous law.

What a picture! They upheld justice, and all over the Roman Empire which covered three continents in that day – all the way from the pillars of Hercules to the Euphrates River, all the way from the cold mountains of Scotland down to the burning sands of the Sahara Desert – there was law. There was that Roman judge like Pilate, and on his desk there was the image of Janus.

We get our word January from him. He was represented with two opposite faces, that is, he looked in both directions, seeing both sides of a case. Rome said to every people they conquered, "We will not destroy your customs. You go right on living your lives. Only one thing: we will govern you. We will run things, and we will give you justice. Every one of you can come to us and get justice." Every Roman court stood for justice. Isn’t it an anomaly, isn’t it ironical, that Jesus Christ was crucified on a Roman cross? Crucified by the nation that boasted of justice!
By the time Paul the apostle, that little Jew, crippled and almost blind, started down those Roman roads, speaking the gospel of Christ, the world was ready to listen to him. One of the things that arrested their attention – oh, it is so important – he said, The world was tired of justice.

You know that most people say today that they want justice from God. A man said to me in Altadena many years ago on his death bed, "You let me alone, preacher. All I ask of God is justice." I said, "Wait a minute, is it really justice you want or mercy?" He finally had to admit that what he actually wanted was mercy. You see, we have mercy and justice confused. Justice condemns you. The law condemns you, and the law was given that "every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God" (Romans 3:19).

And "by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight" (Romans 3:20). Does God mean the Mosaic Law? No, He means any law. By deeds of Roman law, or any law, no one can be justified. Paul went out into the Roman world. He wrote the epistle to the Romans, in which he said, "By the deeds of law there shall no flesh he justified." That Roman world, down under the heel of Rome, hearing of nothing but justice, was crying out, not for justice, but for mercy! Paul came and said to them, "What the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh" (Romans 8:3). But now "by grace are ye saved through faith ... not by works" – not by works!

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. (Ephesians 2:8, 9)

Oh, not by works but by grace! Out over that Roman Empire were sixty million slaves and sixty million free men, but none of them were free; they were all under Roman law. They all sighed for a salvation that could deliver them. In the fullness of time God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law.

Our contemporary world is equally as needy as it was under Roman rule. Honestly, we haven’t come very far in that long span of time, except technologically. In our day there is both plenty and poverty. America has a headache with an abundance of surplus, and in India and in China, where most of the population of the world live, they go to bed with empty stomachs. And, my friend, they won’t be filled on Thanksgiving or Christmas while the Western world sits down to gorge itself on food it doesn’t need. The world is equally as needy, equally as wretched, as it was all those centuries ago.

Why Four Gospels?

The Jew was the man of prophecy. When Matthew wrote his Gospel record he directed it to him, gathering up the Old Testament prophecies and presenting the Man who fulfilled them: "Here He is – the Messiah!"

The Oriental was the man of plutocracy and the man of poverty. The man who had pearls and gold and diamonds in such abundance that on the scales they would balance his body weight, had the same spiritual need as the man begging for bread. He was still hungry and still thirsty. The Gospel of John was written to him, and John quotes our Lord when He says, "I am the bread of life; he that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst" (John 6:35).

The Gospel of Luke was directed to the Greek, the man of perfection, the man of philosophy. Dr. Luke wrote, "Look, here He is, the perfect Man."
The Roman was the man of power, the man of politics. With him in mind Mark wrote a brief Gospel in staccato fashion, one miracle after another. He presented Jesus Christ as the Man of action.

But the world is needy still. Idealism is all but dead. Mankind is bankrupt intellectually. There is not a leader in the world who is outstanding, not one. We are not producing giants in any field of endeavor. Modern literature reflects this. One of our modern writers gives her estimation: "Modern literature is a mirror on the ceiling of a brothel." What a picture!

In these four Gospels is the Man Christ Jesus, God, who took upon Himself human flesh. My friend, He can meet your need. Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Are you tired of life? A young lady on the telephone said to me not long ago, "If you don’t give me a reason for living, I intend to take my own life." Are you tired of life today? Maybe you have been looking in the wrong areas, maybe you have been going to the wrong places, maybe you are listening to the wrong voices. I point you to Jesus Christ, who still is the Savior of the world.

It’s black outside right now. You know it. I don’t have to tell you that. Men in high places are pessimistic and frightened about the future.

My friend, I have some good news for you. There is a little glimmer of light breaking on the horizon right now, and it shows up brighter because it is so dark down here. This One who came about two thousand years ago is coming again! I’m willing to risk being called a fanatic in saying that I think God is preparing the world right now for the return of Jesus Christ.

He is coming again! This is the hope of the world. I point you to Him, the mighty Son of God, the Savior of the world and the only One who can meet your need.