Galatians 4:4

Galatians 4:4. When the fulness of the time came, i.e., when the period appointed by the Father (Galatians 4:2) till the coming of Christ and the age of manhood was filled up or completed. This period was fixed in the eternal counsel of God with reference to the development of the race. The words ‘fulness of the time' express, as in a nutshell, the whole philosophy of history before Christ, and the central position of the incarnation. The ancient history of Jews and Gentiles was a preparation either direct or indirect, positive or negative, divine or human, for the coming of Christ, and Christ is the turning point of history, the end of the old, and the beginning of a new world. Hence we begin our era with His birth. He himself commenced his preaching with the declaration, Mark 1:15: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.' The Saviour could not appear in any other country, nor at any other time, either sooner or later, nor in any other nation, according to the order of divine government and the preordained harmony of history.

Sent forth his Son, who, therefore, must have existed before the incarnation in heavenly glory with the Father. Comp. Colossians 1:15-19; John 1:1.

Born of a woman, is no allusion to the mystery of the supernatural conception (=‘of a virgin'), but expresses simply the realness of the incarnation or Christ's true humanity. Comp.

Job 14:1, ‘man that is born of a woman;' and Matthew 11:11, ‘among them that are born of women.' Every reader knew, of course, who the woman was. The absence of any further allusion to Mary in the Epistles of Paul, who never even mentions her name, goes to show that the excessive veneration of the holy Virgin, as it obtains in the Greek and Roman churches, arose after the Apostolic age. We meet it first in the apocryphal Gospels and then among the fathers of the fourth or fifth centuries, when the term ‘mother of God' came into general use.

Born under the law (the accus. in Gr. implies the motion or transition from the preexistent state into the state of human subjection to the law) is more specific, and defines the humanity of Christ as to its national and religious aspect. He was not only born of a woman, i.e.. a true man, like all others, but a full member of a particular nation and the Jewish theocracy, and hence subject to all its religious ordinances and obligations, in order to redeem those who were under the legal covenant. A Gentile could not have saved the world from the curse of the law; in Israel alone all the historical conditions were at hand; and hence, ‘salvation is of the Jews' (John 4:22), that from them it might pass over in proper order to the whole race.