God gave His Law to Moses while His people, Israel, were making their way from Egypt to the land that He had promised them. Yet, during Israel’s entire history, not one of them could follow the Law as they had promised to God (Exodus 19:8).
Now, the Law did have good within it. It restrained violence. It taught morality. It trained people to live in a holy way. But not once did the Law of Moses ever give life; it only dealt out death.
Years came and went as Israel matured as a nation. Mothers gave birth to their children; they grew up and had children of their own. They grew old, and they died. They all died.
Why was that? It goes back to the dawn of time. In the garden, God said to Adam: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden. But you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:16-17).
Adam ate from that tree, and the rest was history. With his fall into sin, all of us fell into that inescapable descent into sin. That’s why we die. We die because the sin from Adam’s fall still infects us. We no longer are the holy beings whom God created to bask and delight in His full and glorious presence. Adam’s disobedience, and ours that follows, condemns us to live out that first death.
Listen to Moses in Psalm 90, to whom God gave the Law:
O Lord … you return mankind to the dust, saying, “Return, descendants of Adam….” You sweep mortals away like a dream–they are like the new grass of the morning. In the morning, they sprout and grow, but come evening they wither and dry up…. For all our days ebb away under your wrath, and we finish our years with a sigh. Our days may come to 70 years; if we are strong, 80. Yet, even one’s best years are marred by trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. [Psalm 90:1-10]
A year comes and goes. Time flies past us. And what does it take in its wake? Death! Your mother, your father, even you and me: We die. And so God’s Law spoken to Adam long ago still has its final word. Time proves that God’s Law isn’t empty and idle. For time has us in its thrall and it deals out death–and death is the exclamation point of God’s Law! Indeed: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, soon bears us all away; we fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day” (LSB 733, stanza 5).
We are the descendants of Adam’s original disobedience. That’s why they can’t, and don’t, love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind. That’s why we don’t love our neighbors as ourselves. We bow down to the false gods of our own making. We use God’s name in unholy ways. We trivialize His instruction. We dishonor those whom God has placed in authority over us. And so on and so forth.
And we die. Every one of us dies. We die because our sinful condition has destroyed the eternal life that God originally gave to us in the first creation. We die within this linear stream of time.
Time bears us all away. Here, our graves will be forgotten. Our memories will disappear. Even among the most well-known of us, over time, no one human alive will know who or what we were, except for one undeniable fact–we are dead! We were born into an inherited, sinful state, and God’s Law, first spoken to Adam, still has us bound to death. The Law only brings death; it cannot give life.
Yet, as we watch time flow by, and when we stop to see what happened in the fullness of time, we find that God stepped into our reality. He sent His Son from eternity into our existence within time.
Yet, Jesus’ appearance wasn’t just at the right time–it was in the fullness of time. Oh, the time was right. Jesus was born at the proper time to advance the one, true faith throughout the world. And so the Christian Gospel took root in an Empire that would soon breathe its last, and with its death, the Church of Jesus Christ would extend even farther throughout the world. So, Jesus was born at the right time.
But the Apostle Paul calls it the “fullness of time” because only Jesus is the One who fulfills time. Jesus was born of a woman, as all of us were. But His birth did not place Him under the Law of God. Why should it? He’s the Son of God! He is over the Law. Yet, He still chose to place Himself under the Law. He did that to redeem those who were under the Law, that’s you and me, to make us sons of God.
Jesus is the Son of God because He is the one-and-only Son of the Father from all eternity. Christians then become sons of God by adoption. That happens in baptism, when God brings us into His covenant, His family. Because of Jesus, and what He did and does to save us, God adopts us as His sons because Jesus has redeemed us.
How did that happen? It’s Christmas! Jesus became God in human flesh, and by doing so, the Giver of the Law placed Himself under the Law that He had given. Now, the Law that only dealt out death would judge the Prince of Life. And so it did.
God’s holy Law examined Jesus’ heart, soul, strength, and mind. Yet, it couldn’t find anything in His heart that was impure. The Law could find nothing in His soul that wasn’t fully devoted to serving God. It even couldn’t find Jesus weakening in resolve to do everything it demanded. Even when He sweated drops of blood as He faced the daunting task of taking into Himself all the sins of the world, Jesus prayed that His Father’s will be done. He did that, even if it meant that He, the innocent One, suffer as if He were guilty.
And so Jesus did. He suffered. The One who was born without any taint of our inherited sin never gave in to sin, so the Law could not condemn Him to die. Yet, the Law did condemn Him to die. For it is as Scripture says: “God made the One who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
It was Jesus’ obedience for our disobedience. It was His life of love for our lives of sin. It was His innocent death for our guilty deaths. He redeemed us, rescuing us from the grave of eternal death. In the fullness of time, Jesus, the eternal Son of God, stepped into the confines of time and stopped the unstoppable pull of eternal death.
In the shining light of Jesus’ glorious incarnation, now take a look at your death. Even as it comes closer and looms larger, look and see where Jesus has sent eternal death. Jesus has sent it to the grave. And so your death is no more. Oh, the sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the Law. But look at the One who was born of a virgin, who placed Himself under the Law, and obeyed it. Look at His holy life.
When the Law points you to the grave, tell the Law that he has met his match in Jesus. When the Law tells you that God is angry with you, tell the Law to accuse Jesus. That’s something the Law cannot do. When your mind makes you afraid, fearing what may lie beyond physical death, silence your mind with the words of the Holy Spirit. He tells you that you are a son of God, adopted into God’s family. He tells you that Jesus lived for you and died for you.
That’s the voice of the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of truth who cannot lie. That’s the Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son. He teaches you to cry out, “Abba, Father!” Only the Spirit, whom Jesus sends, can give you this confidence. For it’s only because of God’s one-and-only Son that God the Father adopts you as His son as the Holy Spirit brings and keeps you in the one, true Faith.
And so, even if you are a female, you become a son of God because of Jesus, THE Son of God. His righteousness covers you. Now, you may not only call God “Father,” but you may also claim all the treasures of His household. Whether male, female, young, old, rich, poor, life-long Christian or recent convert, all Christians are sons of God and share the same treasure. That treasure is life, the Life that is Jesus and the life that we have in Him.
So, let time roll on and take us to the grave. For when time comes to take you, he can only claim you for a moment. Jesus has already claimed you for eternity, for a life of glory and joy outside, and beyond, time. So, let time march on and bring to destruction all the sons of men, for you are now a son of God. Your Lord Jesus has fulfilled the demands of God’s law. He has borne for you the pains of eternal death. His innocence met our sin on Golgotha’s stony slope and erased it from God’s memory.
Jesus has sanctified the passage of time for you. Now, you can remember a Christian loved one, knowing that God has set a time for a reunion in eternity. For in eternity, there is no death.
What we have today by faith, there it will be ours by sight. Who can imagine the joy we will feel? We will have a greater joy than any child ever felt on Christmas. For the treasures of God’s love in Christ will fill us forever, into the ages of ages, as time gives way to eternity. Amen.
