v. 2 Paul is not, as so many have thought, referring to OT believers when he speaks of those who are slaves "until the time set by the father." He is speaking of all who are to be saved, before they are saved. The slavery is not to some supposedly inferior religious arrangement, such as the Mosaic religion of the OT, but to sin and death. I haven't time to establish that from the larger context, but I will simply mention the interesting fact that what Paul says here, he says explicitly of both Jews and Gentiles. In v. 3 he uses "we" which certainly seems to include his largely Gentile readership; but in v. 6 he uses "you" in the plural which undoubtedly is a reference to his readers, mostly Gentiles, and in v. 7 "you" again but now in the singular, bringing the point home to each individual reader. What he is saying about salvation, about deliverance from bondage, and about becoming sons of God, applies to everyone who is saved -- always has, always will.

I'm going to be using, from time to time in this sermon, the term "incarnation" and want to be sure everyone knows what it means. It is an English word made from the Latin words "in" meaning "in"; "caro" meaning "flesh"; with the addition of a suffix that makes the whole thought into a noun. It means "infleshment", with "flesh" being used as a synonym for "human nature" -- not only the body but also the soul, the entirety of a human being. The incarnation occurred when God the Son, the second person of the eternal triune God, added to himself a true and entire human nature when he was conceived in the womb of the virgin Mary and born of her. It produced this great mystery, that in the person of Jesus Christ there exists two separate, distinct, and complete natures: one divine and one human.

There is a great deal of Christian theology that is obviously and immediately relevant to every believer in Christ. If you pick up a Systematic Theology, perhaps the three volumes by Charles Hodge, or the three 17th century volumes of Francis Turretin recently published in English for the first time, or the two volumes of Calvin's Institutes, or the 20th century's premier single volume manual by Louis Berkhof, or the brand new single volume -- all 1200 pages worth -- by my professor and friend, Robert Reymond, whom some of you will remember preaching here years ago, -- I say, pick up any of these books and you will find subjects discussed that any Christian knows are of immense importance to him or to her. God's holy wrath against sin, the person and work of Jesus Christ, how sinners are made right with God, the nature of heaven and hell, and on and on. The discussion of these doctrines may be more complex and sophisticated than you are used to, but the importance of the discussion is beyond dispute.

But, there is no doubt that those books also contain lengthy and complicated discussions of more obscure issues, not without importance to be sure, especially to theologians, but the practical importance of which is not so immediately obvious to the non-specialist. There are lots of doctrines of this type -- from the double procession of the Holy Spirit, to the communication of the attributes of Christ's two natures, to the longstanding debate regarding the order of the divine decrees, to the doctrine of the necessity of the atonement. But that last is not without interest, especially at Christmas time. And, there is no reason why we should not stretch our minds a bit if what we are seeking is a deeper appreciation of our Savior and our salvation. So I want to consider with you this morning the "necessity" of the atonement, the necessity of Christ's coming into the world and suffering and dying for our salvation.

In discussions of this doctrine, this passage in Galatians 4 plays a role. Here Paul is in the middle of his discussion of justification, how guilty sinners are made right in the sight of a holy God, and not made right only, but are actually made the sons and daughters of God. They were his enemies, they become by faith in Christ not only his friends, but his children! In the midst of his long argument that began back in chapter 2, Paul now turns, in these verses, to relating Christ's work as our Redeemer -- his incarnation, his becoming a man, living as a man, suffering and dying on the cross in our place -- to our justification and adoption -- things that take place in the believer's own experience, his own lifetime. The one is the basis of the other. The latter flows from the other. The work of the Holy Spirit in them, making them sons of God, comes from and is the result of the work of Christ for them long before, redeeming them, or buying them out of sin, guilt, and the death they deserved. What happened long before, when Christ was in the world, produces what happens in us and in all believers today. It is in this context that Paul says, that to effect our deliverance God sent his son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law -- that is, to pay the price, to satisfy the demands of God's holy law against us, or as he put it earlier in 3:13, "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us" --, that we might be no longer the bondslaves of sin and death but the children of God.

Now the question that is debated in Christian theology is whether God could have or might have saved his people in some other way than by the incarnation and the redemption of Jesus Christ? Did he send his Son to be born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, because there was no other way to save us, or did Christ come because, for one reason or another, this was the way God chose to save us? There is actually another question, still more basic: did God have to save us at all? Might he not have saved anyone?

On this latter point, most of our authorities have held that God was under no absolute necessity to save anyone. It was an act of his will not a demand of his nature that he choose to save a people from their sins. It was not inherently necessary for God to save us. It is theoretically possible that he would not have saved anyone, but judged and condemned all mankind. Now, I think theologians often create unnecessary difficulties for themselves by discussing questions that they cannot possibly answer with any certainty. God never had any other intention but to save his people, his intention to save them stretches back into endless time, it is mistake, therefore, to think that at some point God had not yet decided to save his people and then came a time when he decided to do so. So what are we discussing and what does this question even mean? On the other hand, it is also clear that the Bible represents God's saving love and grace as amazing, surprising, a surpassingly wonderful thing. "See what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called the children of God!" (1 John 3:1-2) We are never allowed to think that God had to save us, that he had no choice in the matter, that it was not the free decision of his love to rescue us from judgment and to bring us into his family. I leave that question there.

But, still, we are left with this other question: could God have saved us in some other way? Or was the way chosen, the incarnation and the redeeming life, suffering, and death of Christ, the only way in which we could have been delivered from sin and death? You may be surprised to learn that some very honored names in the history of Christian thought and biblical interpretation answered that question: "No." Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, even, apparently, John Calvin held to what in theology is called the "hypothetical necessity" of the work of Christ. We might have been saved in some other way, but God chose this way, because, apparently, this way had the greatest number of advantages; that is, this way was the best way, but not the only way. These theologians were attempting to preserve God's perfect freedom and sovereignty. They were suspicious of any idea that seemed to limit God, that made him subject to laws and principles outside of himself.

But most of our authorities have held through the centuries to what is called "the absolute necessity" of Christ's incarnation and atonement, viz. that it was absolutely necessary for the Son of God to become a man and suffer and die in our place, because there was no other way possible to reconcile sinners to God. And their arguments are these.

First, there are a number of texts that seem to suggest such a necessity. The author of Hebrews writes, for example, that Christ had to be made like his brothers in every way (2:10). He uses the phrase "it is necessary" again in 9:23-24 in connection with Christ's sacrifice purifying the heavenly things themselves, the true heavenly sanctuary. It is not easy to know what that means, but it certainly suggests that what Christ came to do had to be done.

Second, the Scripture teaches that the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin, and as well we read earlier in Galatians that "if the law could impart life, righteousness would have come by the law" -- by "the law imparting life" he means by our keeping the law and meriting our own salvation. These things cannot save us -- the sacrifice of some animal, nor our own obedience and good works. But, we must have righteousness, perfect righteousness if we are to stand accepted and received and welcomed by a holy, just God. Christ's redeeming sacrifice is everywhere regarded as meeting our need which could not be met in other ways. We must have perfect, human righteousness to present to God. How else could this be obtained but by Christ's earning it for us and giving it to us? Paul seems to say in Romans 3 that, if God were to justify sinners, he had to do it in a way that satisfied his justice, so that he could be just himself while justifying the sinner who has faith in Christ Jesus. How else could God preserve his justice and at the same time justify sinners except by Christ satisfying divine justice on their behalf?

Third, to put the same point negatively, every sin we commit has an infinite disvalue. James teaches that only one sin would damn us -- not that anyone has committed but one sin, of course. We are sinful through and through and the more we know of the truth about God and man the more sin we see in ourselves. But, the point is clear. Each sin has infinite disvalue. To cover it we need an infinite compensation, an infinite satisfaction paid to the divine justice that has been offended by our sin. But who else but the Son of God could offer such an infinite atonement?

Fourth, it has seemed to many simply unthinkable that God would have subjected his only Son to the humiliation, the pain and suffering, and the terrible abandonment of the cross, if these things were not absolutely necessary to accomplish the salvation of his people. We expect that sometimes love will lead someone to die for another, but is it love if one could have just as well saved the other by some other, some lesser means? In the Bible the cross of Christ is regarded as the supreme demonstration of God's love for us, but could it be, would it be, if our Heavenly Father might just as well have saved us in some other way than by the agony through which he asked his beloved Son to pass?

For these reasons and others it seems necessary to conclude that God sent his son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, precisely because by no other means, in no other way, could they be delivered from sin and death into the eternal happiness of the family of God. Frankly, it is hard to read Galatians 4:1-7 in any other way. God undertook to save his people and used the only means that would suffice, the redeeming blood of his own beloved Son.

Now, we are familiar with these words and others like them in the Bible. "God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under law..." His Son, who had lived forever in the glory of the life of the Triune God, now suddenly is a man, and not just a man, but a tiny, helpless infant of a day, threatened with death immediately upon his birth by the hatred and jealousy of a vicious and now genuinely insane king. And with thirty years or more ahead of him of the hardest, saddest, most painful life ever lived by a human being. I say, we are familiar with these words and what they mean, or so we think we are.

But the fact is, we have hardly the barest idea of what they mean. "God sending forth his Son to be born of a woman under the law..." We know what the words mean, we can grasp the concept in its barest sense, but we stand before a great deep when we read those words and especially when we genuinely try to enter into their meaning.

Alexander Moody Stuart, one of the brightest stars in that galaxy of deeply spiritual and searching preachers in the Scottish Free Church in the middle of the 19th century, remembers a conversation he had with a godly elder when Stuart was himself still a seminary student.

"He said to me, 'You ministers should have more of the infinite in your sermons'. Showing me two family portraits by eminent painters, he said, 'That is by an artist; this by a genius. In the one you have the whole before you but nothing beyond; in the other the lines run off into infinity. You will never reach the people by teaching us as if you knew it all, and giving us our lesson as if we were children. If you wish to move us, you must make us feel that you see more than you are able to express, and that you think and know that there is an infinite height and depth beyond what you can see. But you go to the brim of the great ocean, you dip your tumbler into it, you set it down before us, and you tell us 'that's the Ocean.'" [Memoir, 273]

Well, I want to try to give you some sense of the depth and breadth of that ocean this Advent Sunday morning. For it is a great deep we stand before when we contemplate first the incarnation of God the Son and then his suffering and death on the cross. As Luther says in his Commentary on Galatians of verses 4 and 5: "These words...are worth all the attention we can bestow on them." Christmas and what it led to are unfathomable mysteries and wonders, but we can easily forget that.

We may know that God the Son had to become a man if we were to be saved, because no one could live in man's place and die in man's place, no one could be a true substitute, live the life we should have lived and die the death we deserved to die, except one who was in truth a human being. But likewise, no one could make that life and death of infinite value and no one could conquer death except the Son of God himself. God cannot die and man is not infinite: only the God/Man, only God the Son now come in human nature, could die an infinitely valuable death and so save his people from their sins.

But, saying all of that, knowing its necessity, we don't have the ghost of an idea what it meant for the Son of God to become a man. We cannot measure the vastness of the distance that separated his glory in heaven from his ignominy on earth. And we have no idea, none at all, of this highest and deepest mystery in all of existence -- namely the relationship between deity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, so that he remained truly God and genuinely man, so that he lived his life as a man truly under the law and not over it as is the right of the living God whose law it is -- a man obliged to keep the law and to keep it with no other powers or capacities than you and I have as human beings who trust in God --, even though he remained also the living God all the while he was a man in this world! And, if that were not enough, we certainly have only the vaguest notion of the agonies he endured -- throughout the entire course of his life in this world -- in order to pay for our sins. We can grasp to some degree the physical pain, but that is the least part of our Savior's suffering and of our redemption.

"The cross is sharp, but in thy woe, this is the lightest part;
Our sin it is that pierces thee, and breaks thy sacred heart."

And what did it mean for him finally, on the cross, to be separated from God, this man who lived in unprecedented intimacy with his heavenly Father, this man who depended upon the presence of God in his soul as no man ever has or will. We have no real knowledge of any of this. Even the Scripture throws a veil over these mysteries, as if we could not understand even if the effort were made to educate us. Perhaps when we are in heaven and see that divine glory, or at least the periphery, the edge of that glory, and look back upon human history and the world as it was, we will have some more idea of what it was for him to come down from heaven to earth, but, even then, we will not understand. Necessary as it was, necessary as we can explain the incarnation and the cross to have been, essential to our salvation as it was for God to send forth his son to be born of a woman under the law, we hardly know what we are talking about when we use the words.

I was reminded of this in two very different ways this past week. In a funeral a few days ago, we sang the well known and much loved hymn "How Great Thou Art." It is a hymn with many fine points, as you know, though it partakes of one of the great defects of so much of the hymnody of the last 150 years. I mean, it overreaches in its expressions, and so becomes sentimental and irreal. We have the problem at the very beginning: "O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder..." Well, every Christian wishes that he or she more often found himself or herself "in awesome wonder" before the works of God. But, alas, we are rarely in that state and shouldn't speak and sing as though we were. And in the third verse we have: "And when I think that God his Son not sparing, sent him to die, I scarce can take it in..." Only in recent years have I come to think that this is a real problem. Now, hear me. I'm not accusing the hymn writer of anything. He was expressing Christian sentiment in the way that was common in his day. But, for you and me, I want more. I want us to be very careful and thoughtful and especially reverent about our faith and, especially, the most sacred and precious and crucial parts of our faith.

And the fact is that the line "I scarce can take it in" is a piece of sentimental superficiality. There were tons of this in the songs of American evangelicalism during that period. And it helped produce a superficial and sentimental Christian faith in our churches. For the fact is that far from "scarcely taking it in", which is to say, "barely taking it in, or only just taking it in, or even not quite taking it in" you don't take it in at all; you hardly know what you are saying, you have but the barest idea of the bare ideas of the incarnation and death of the Son of God. And when we speak of and treat these high mysteries, these deepest things that any human being ever thinks about or can, as something we can, finally, get our minds around, something we can, at the last, pretty well understand, these things become pedestrian, predictable, and ordinary for us -- they become subject to us instead of, as is right, we remaining subject to them. "The incarnation, the cross, of course, we've heard about those things all our lives; tell us something new, something really fascinating, perhaps having to do with marriage or financial management, something really practical." Which is, as we all know, exactly what the church has been saying to itself over these last years, though never putting it in exactly these terms. No! A thousand times, No! Next to the incarnation and the Lord's undergoing the curse of the law for us, nothing else compares at all, nothing is so breathlessly mysterious and profound, nothing so powerful, nothing remotely so important. But these mighty things will lie far beyond our powers of comprehension and appreciation when we have been in heaven ten thousand thousand years. And we will smile and laugh in still stupefied amazement over it all.

And, then, there was a second thing. The other night, late, I was watching on television a special musical concert featuring Luciano Pavarotti, the great Italian tenor. But, as it happened, Pavarotti was not featured by himself, but was joined by a series of guest stars, most from the world of popular music. I gather that this is his way of introducing serious vocal music to the younger generation. Anyway, he sang with Celine Dion and Jon Bon Jovi and other groups or soloists would take the stage to sing by themselves and among them were the Spice Girls. I confess this was my first encounter with the Spice Girls, though I have heard about them, of course. Four attractive young women, in clothes intended to accent their sensuality, delivering their number with, what shall we say, ebullient choreography. What struck me, however, every time we got a camera closeup was that one of the girls was wearing a large silver cross around her neck, hanging over her black outfit. A jarring juxtaposition -- a song, costumes, and a way of singing that bore no resemblance to loyalty to Jesus Christ, but a large cross as part of the wardrobe, the total effect.

A powerful reminder of how we have domesticated the central mysteries and profundities, the mighty works of the Living God. The very next day, I happened to be reading a little book, The Seven Great Hymns of the Medieval Church, one of which was the "Vexilla Regis", the "Royal Banners" or the "Standards of the King."

The opening verse, in the translation of John Mason Neale, reads:

The Royal Banners forward go;
The Cross shines forth in mystic glow;
Where He in flesh, our flesh who made,
Our sentence bore, our ransom paid.

And then in a later verse, these two lines:

On whose dear arms, so widely flung,
The weight of this world's ransom hung:

No other arms could bear that infinite weight. How he bore it himself we shall never know (the hymn makes no effort to explain). How the maker of human beings could become one himself and then live as one, while all the while never ceasing to be Almighty God, and then so terribly suffer and die to endure as our substitute, in our place, the curse of God's holy law which was against us for our sins -- I cannot explain this. But, I want all my life to stand against every tendency rising in my own heart or in yours to think this commonplace or conventional. The wrath of God was descending toward you and nothing could save you from it, nothing at all, except the mightiest and most mysterious and truly wonder-ful events in the history of the world or any history -- the incarnation of God the Son and his suffering and death to redeem us from the killing slavery to sin and death into which we had pitched ourselves.

Your life, your salvation, your happiness, your heaven absolutely depended upon this stupendous thing that was done, nothing else would suffice -- a thing so stupendous that we hardly know what we are talking about when we talk about it: the incarnation and death of the Son of God. And some day, when we fully understand what a marvel it is to be a child of God, at home in God's house, we will look back in stupefied amazement that we ever thought such simple and superficial and trivial thoughts about what was done for us to save us from our sins!

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