Why Did Jesus Delay So Long Before Entering Human History?
00:00:00.000 | Welcome to a new week on the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime author and pastor John Piper.
00:00:05.360 | And thank you for listening to the podcast. We appreciate it.
00:00:08.320 | We begin the week with a short question, but a very good one from a listener named Bryce. He asks, "Pastor John,
00:00:13.320 | hello. Can you tell me why did God wait so long in human history,
00:00:17.520 | centuries, even millennia, before he finally sent Jesus to earth? Why the long wait for the incarnation?"
00:00:24.320 | I don't think that in this life we will have a complete answer to that question.
00:00:30.840 | I am going to suggest some pointers, but in the end, I know that even the pointers I'm going to
00:00:37.520 | suggest do not completely or
00:00:40.240 | satisfyingly answer the question, but they might be helpful.
00:00:44.760 | They've been helpful to me over the years to think about. In general,
00:00:49.480 | the answer is going to be something like,
00:00:53.040 | given the way God chose to prepare for Christ in the world and to make the gospel
00:01:00.680 | clear in the world and
00:01:03.200 | prepare for the mission of the church to the nations in the light of his design for how to do that,
00:01:10.320 | this kind of history for thousands of years leading up to Christ was
00:01:14.960 | necessary, was fitting. This length and this kind of history
00:01:21.400 | leading up to Christ so that Christ becomes clear and so the gospel can be clear.
00:01:27.040 | This was the most suitable, the most appropriate, the most effective
00:01:30.840 | way to get the world ready for Messiah, for gospel, for mission.
00:01:36.120 | That's why I think the general answer is God has designed the world and
00:01:42.800 | cultures and
00:01:45.120 | the nature of humanity so that certain conditions,
00:01:48.320 | certain states of affairs,
00:01:51.640 | come about in the world gradually. We can always second-guess
00:01:56.080 | why God would ordain it to be that way,
00:02:00.120 | but he has told us that some things take
00:02:04.440 | time,
00:02:06.200 | meaning taking all of reality into account, God thought it wise that things would develop the way they do.
00:02:13.080 | Here's some examples. God tells Abraham in Genesis 15 that there will be four
00:02:20.400 | long generations that will elapse
00:02:22.920 | before Israelites come back to the Promised Land and take it over.
00:02:29.040 | God intends for there to be roughly 400 years, and here's the reason he gives.
00:02:35.120 | "They shall come back here in the fourth generation,
00:02:38.000 | for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete." Very strange. In other words,
00:02:45.600 | God regards it as
00:02:48.080 | fitting that there be a certain
00:02:50.400 | completeness of
00:02:53.040 | corruption and iniquity and depravity in the inhabitants of Canaan,
00:02:58.080 | so that when the judgment comes
00:03:01.080 | through Israel from God, it will be fitting and
00:03:05.480 | proper when Joshua wreaks havoc among the Canaanite generations later.
00:03:12.680 | So we have roughly 400 year block of time that
00:03:17.960 | God deems
00:03:19.960 | appropriate, fitting
00:03:21.840 | for the completion of the fullness of a state of affairs that needs to be in place for another
00:03:28.880 | suitable thing to happen.
00:03:31.000 | This is an artist, you might say, painting a canvas and saying the reason this color is here is because later
00:03:37.280 | I'm gonna add this color and those two colors together make this
00:03:40.920 | beautiful whole. So that's the kind of thing that I think is at work in
00:03:46.640 | creating the durations that we have in the Old Testament. Here's another
00:03:50.720 | example.
00:03:52.600 | When God says to Isaiah in Isaiah 6 10 that he's going to preach in such a way that the people are hardened,
00:04:00.600 | Isaiah cries out, "How long, O Lord, how long?"
00:04:05.400 | To which God answers,
00:04:08.080 | "Until cities lie waste without inhabitants and
00:04:11.760 | houses without people and the land is desolate waste and the Lord removes the people far away
00:04:17.760 | and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land." Now that's a lot of events and a lot of time
00:04:26.120 | that God says must elapse before his purposes of this kind of preaching are
00:04:31.280 | finished. And we can think of numbers like 70 years of captivity for the Jews in in Babylon. Why 70?
00:04:39.640 | Why not 7 or 700?
00:04:42.440 | And God has his reasons based on on the nature of what he's trying to show
00:04:48.720 | about his grace, his mercy,
00:04:51.600 | the law,
00:04:53.840 | disobedience, wrath, judgment, holiness.
00:04:56.400 | Here's one last text and the most important at least as far as I can see in answering this question.
00:05:03.800 | The thread of Old Testament history runs from creation through fall
00:05:09.480 | into sin, through election of Israel, through Exodus, through giving of the law, and then a thousand years give or take of
00:05:17.320 | the inability of Israel to keep the law. A
00:05:21.640 | thousand years of covenant breaking over and over again. It is a bleak, bleak history as you read it.
00:05:29.400 | Disobedience followed by punishment, followed by repentance, followed by mercy, followed by disobedience, followed by
00:05:36.480 | repentance, followed by mercy, followed by more judgment, and on and on it goes. It's just awful to watch the history go.
00:05:43.640 | Now in Romans
00:05:46.200 | chapter 3
00:05:47.920 | verses 9 to 18, Paul quotes half a dozen passages from the Old Testament,
00:05:51.840 | mainly from the Psalms, but he calls them the law. And the point of those passages is to show that everybody's
00:05:58.600 | under judgment, everybody, Jew and Gentile, are sinners.
00:06:02.080 | And then Paul says one of the most important sentences in the Bible
00:06:07.120 | regarding what God has been up to for these 2,000 years of Jewish history. Verse 19,
00:06:13.260 | "Now we know that whatever the law says," and he's referring back to those
00:06:18.420 | statements about the failure of Israel and all people, "what the law says,
00:06:24.720 | it speaks to those who are under the law," that's Israel,
00:06:29.040 | "so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may become accountable to God. For
00:06:35.520 | by works of the law no human being
00:06:39.600 | will be justified in his sight," etc.
00:06:43.360 | So Paul uses the word law here in its wide reference to the Old Testament,
00:06:49.200 | and he says that the point of the Old Testament record is that it is addressed first to Jews,
00:06:57.200 | those who are under the law, so that every mouth, every Jewish mouth, would be stopped. In other words,
00:07:03.920 | the record of God and what he's required of men and the failure to do it is
00:07:10.720 | intended to shut the mouth of every Israelite so they can never
00:07:15.480 | protest that they've succeeded in obeying in such a way as to be right with God, that they are in desperate need of
00:07:23.080 | grace,
00:07:25.160 | so they can't have it any other way than by
00:07:29.040 | someone else, some
00:07:31.640 | Savior, some Redeemer, because verse 20 says they'll never have it on the basis of their own good works.
00:07:39.120 | And then he adds this crucial statement,
00:07:42.760 | "The reason every Jewish mouth is stopped by the Old Testament record of law and failure to keep law
00:07:51.480 | is
00:07:53.920 | so that the whole world might be held accountable to God."
00:07:58.880 | That's really worth thinking about. In other words, the history of the Jewish people and the record of its
00:08:07.320 | failure to keep the covenant that God made, that
00:08:12.640 | record not only shows that that Jews will never be able to save themselves, but the whole world is
00:08:21.320 | held accountable because it too has failed in all of its ways of trying,
00:08:26.360 | because if the Jews can't do it with as much special revelation and
00:08:30.640 | privileges as they've had, how much less will the world be able to work its way into God's favor?
00:08:36.960 | And then he gives this verse 24, "No human being will be justified in the sight of God."
00:08:45.040 | Now that, it seems to me, is as close as we get in
00:08:51.040 | the Bible to an explanation of why such a long and
00:08:57.640 | contorted,
00:08:59.880 | disappointing, frustrating
00:09:01.880 | history. God ordained that the history of Israel would develop in such a way that,
00:09:08.360 | and as long as it did,
00:09:11.360 | that Israel would be a lesson book for the nations about the gospel. A lesson book for the nations
00:09:20.600 | no one can be justified by
00:09:23.880 | law-keeping, and evidently God believes that the
00:09:29.120 | lengthy story of failures under every condition of advantage
00:09:34.320 | makes the point in the best possible way.
00:09:39.400 | Amen. "When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son."
00:09:44.880 | Thank you, Pastor John, for picking up on those biblical timelines.
00:09:48.360 | That's very helpful in perspective. Well, for more details about this podcast, or to catch up on past episodes
00:09:53.720 | we have released, or subscribe to the audio feed, even send us a question of your own, go to our online home
00:09:58.400 | DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:10:02.040 | I am your host, Tony Reinke, but I'm not a very good one because I don't know what's on the docket for Wednesday.
00:10:08.600 | I forgot, but Lord willing, we'll be back. Thanks for listening.
00:10:11.720 | [BLANK_AUDIO]