Jesus Provided the Tipping Point of Time When He Came in Time to Redeem Time (Along with the lives of those who, in and through Him, would receive ado

What Did Jesus Do?

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son…to redeem.
Galatians 4:4-5

It being again time to make a New Year’s Resolution, I believe the time is long overdue for me to resolve to follow the exhortation of Paul to the church in Ephesus to, “make the best use of the time.” (Ephesians 5:16) In a couple of months I’ll celebrate the 30th anniversary of my 29th birthday, and, anyway you measure it, 59 years offer considerable opportunities for one to make the best use of one’s time, or not. I fear I must confess I fall far short of having made the best use of the time God has thus far so graciously granted to me. In this I am not unlike the world itself, which had misspent year after year, century after century, until, "when the fullness of time had come," the Father resolved that the ultimate of Kairos moments had arrived, and sent forth his Son…to redeem, not just those who were to receive adoption, but the whole of creation that had been waiting to be set free from its bondage to corruption. (Romans 8:21) The groaning of the whole of creation had reached the ears of the Father, and he acted in grace and mercy to relieve the groaning by sending Jesus, Jesus who provided the tipping point of time, from bondage to corruption to the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

For centuries, the pivotal place of Jesus Christ in the history of the entire world has been acknowledged in the way that the world has measured all time. All time up to the birth of Jesus, the time of the whole creation’s groaning, if you will, of the universal condition of bondage to corruption, was identified by the suffix “BC” (“Before Christ”). With the coming of the Lord, who had been sent by the Father to redeem from corruption, all time was henceforward prefixed with “AD” (“In the year of our Lord”; from the Latin, “Anno Domini”). For some 1500 years the BC-AD reckoning of time served quite well, until, in the closing decades of the 20th Century, secularizing publishers and revisionist academics began to popularize BCE-CE (“Before the Common Era”-“Common Era”), as the acceptable means of reckoning time, and effectively removed any acknowledgement that the life of Jesus was of any significance in the history of the world. What the growing use and popularity of BCE-CE reveals is this—much of the world remains in bondage to corruption, and continues to reject the One whom the Father sent two thousand years ago to redeem and to set free.

Here’s the question I ask myself, and share with you should you care to wrestle with it: “What does it mean, Jesus having been sent by the Father in the fullness of time to redeem my life and even time itself, for me to live in the freedom which Christ has obtained for me, if not but that I should make the best use of, “redeem,” the time I have in this world?” To do otherwise would be both careless and foolish, not to mention ungrateful, of me. (Ephesians 5:15) The task, as I believe and understand it, is to live redemptively, as befitting one who has been redeemed. And the only possible way to live redemptively is to live in, for, and with the Redeemer day in and day out, week by week, month after month, all the years of my life, in this world and in the world to come. You see, Jesus isn’t merely “The Reason for the (Christmas) Season,” he is The Man for ALL Seasons, the New Man, the Last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), apart from whom the world, life, time itself, remain in bondage to corruption (read “sin and death”).

Years ago an orange juice company tried to convince us that “a day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.” I believe it is infinitely more important for us to know and to believe the certain truth that a day without Jesus is a day lived in absolute bondage to corruption. Not caring what the BCE-CE crowd has to say, not daring put if off another day, much less another year, I have to agree with the Chambers Brothers, “Time Has Come!”



What do you say to our resolving to live today, and throughout the coming year, as those for whom time, even life itself, has been tipped from bondage to freedom by Jesus?

S.D.G.

Jim
www.jimwilkenministries.org
Marion, NC
PS 37.4