In 4:4-7 there is of the most elegant expressions of incarnational faith in the New Testament. I begin with a theological consideration of the text.
Paul utilizes the metaphor of slavery and freeing a slave to express his notion that our relationship to God has radically changed. The distinction between slave and child is a relational one. Both are under the authority of the head of the household, but they have a different status. Through Jesus Christ, the legal relationship of slave to the master is no longer binding. Paul uses imagery for the messianic/eschatological era, the fullness of time (χρόνου), suggesting that one period has ended so that another can begin, such as the transition from childhood to adulthood, or the transition of the slave to freedom. They have a new status, and a new era begins. The Moment arrived for God to transition to a new era in the plan of reconciling and redeeming the world, and humanity, which had been a minor and had various tutors, transitions into a mature age. The mission of the Son is to bring this fullness of time and has become the Lord of time. The sending of the Son is the event that gives time its fullness by being the agent of redemption and adoption. All time becomes fulfilled time. As understood by science, space/time is moving toward a void, toward emptiness and nothingness, but as understood through the Son, space/time is moving toward fullness.[1] This event gives the Old Testament promises of the people of God expanding to embrace all nations, that God established a covenant with all peoples, that transformations of Torah need to occur for those promises to find their fulfillment. The promises and hopes of the Old Testament are without content apart from the coming rule of God in Jesus. Apart from their relation to this event, the law and the prophets are defective because of unresolved tensions that the event of Jesus of Nazareth resolves. In an analogous way, time is defective as it hastens toward the time of Jesus and moves away from this time, but this event of Jesus gives time its fullness, for time has its purpose because of this event.[2] Regarding human experience, most of us assume that our time has meaning, but our moments of boredom, the despair of lost love, of lost passion for life and vocation, can lead to an experience of lost time. The present becomes futile without its connection to a positive future. Our time is meant for us to enjoy and live fully, embracing the brief time we have. Theologically, the sending of the Son is the origin of the doctrine of the Trinity, having its counterpart in the sending of the Spirit, for such sending implies pre-existence.[3] This sending involves the cooperating will of Father, Son, and Spirit, expressing the love of God toward the cosmos and toward humanity. This sending involves God in a form of self-abasement and self-emptying. The Son came under the Law, stepping into the heart of the conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of humanity. He took the conflict within divinity. Obviously, human sin offends by God, but God also threatens divinity with death. In this way, God enters solidarity with humanity.[4] Paul stresses that the Son was born of a woman, bringing the sending of the Son into an intimate connection with his birth, which in the context of the canon, is striking, as Paul expresses no interest in how Mary conceived and gave birth to Jesus. In fact, his point is that the birth of Jesus was natural. We to think of Jeremiah 1:4, where the Lord set the prophet apart in the womb of his mother. In an analogous way, God set apart Jesus from his birth to fulfill his mission as the Son. The point is that the Son has entered the sphere of earthly existence with its conditions and relations. This applies to his entire earthly course that we find mention not only of his birth but also of the subjection of his earthly course to the Mosaic Law.[5] Law had worked out its educational purpose and God now superseded it with the sending of the Son. Negatively, it was the purpose of the Law to deepen the conviction of sin and thus to show the inability of all existing systems to bring people near to God. Positively, it assumes a moral and spiritual expansion. This was the path God chose to rescue those under the law, giving the gift of adoption as children. They are free from slavery, but even more, have brought into the family of God, giving the children the Spirit of the Son that allows the intimacy of relating God as Abba (daddy), Father, even as Jesus taught in the Lord’s Prayer. The freedom and the adoption into the family of God is expressed in prayer. They receive in their own subjectivity before God a filial relation that expresses itself as spontaneity in relation to the Father and hence also to all creaturely reality. Putting Aramaic and Greek forms together symbolized Jewish and Gentile unity. These verses remind the believer of the basics of faith in which they stand and offer the good news that anyone who calls God "Abba" is part of the family. The abolition of the Law and rescue from bondage was a prior condition of the universal fellowship of God family. The presence of the Spirit is thus a witness to being children of God. the gift of the Spirit is the result of adoption as children. The mission of the Son is to give the rights of being in the family of God and the mission of the Spirit is to give the power of using them.[6]H. Schlier (1971) said that God bestows on us not only the status of children through the sending of the Son, but also the character and knowledge of children through the sending of the Spirit. God bestows on us the character and knowledge of children because we are already in the status of children. This passage shows that reconciliation occurs as God takes up humanity into fellowship with the Father of the Son, a taking up that occurs through the Spirit, who assures that this reconciliation is no longer coming solely from the outside. We ourselves enter it. We find the goal of the sending of the Son is in others. As Paul sees it, a special link exists occurs with the death of Jesus by which God liberates believers from the dominion of sin, Law, and death. Therefore, the sending of the Son aims at the reconciliation to God of the world. The claim of Christian proclamation that this took place in the history of Jesus needs fuller exposition and demonstration, however, if it is to hold good. Note the connection between the sending of the Son and the function of the Messiah relative to the fellowship and renewal of the people of God. This passage shows that fellowship with God brings distance from self, enabling the people of God to fulfill their individual callings in service to God and to the world, to which God addresses divine love. Paul is describing the freedom of a new immediacy to God that believers have as children, mediated by the sending of the Son. The Spirit brings the mission of the Son to its completion. Where this freedom of the Spirit is, our reconciliation to God has reached its goal. The Old Testament could call all the people children of God. The new thing for Paul is the inclusion of non-Jews in this filial relation and the linking of the relation to the gift of the Spirit and to fellowship with Jesus Christ, the Son, through whom believers receive the Spirit of adoption as children. For Paul, then, only in Jesus Christ has the basic filial relationship for which we are destined come to full and definitive manifestation. This passage was among the keys for the Reformation to emphasize the immediacy of relationship to God.[7] Freedom and immediacy to God have an intimate connection.[8]
In verses 4-7, Paul shifts the metaphor to deepen his crucial point that the human relationship to God has radically changed. Now he uses the metaphor of slavery and freeing a slave. Through Jesus Christ, the legal relationship of slave to the master is no longer binding.
Paul begins by pointing in the direction of a Christology from above.[9] Jesus is pre-existent as the Son of God.[10] God sends the Son in order to break the curse and power of the Law and to allow the community to live through the substitutionary death of the Son. The community now exists as sons and daughters of God, in which they cry, “Abba,” the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, They are no longer slaves. They are free. The basis for being sons and daughters of God is the sonship of Jesus, the Spirit of the Son effecting this change in relationship, believers already living in this new creation.[11] He at least presents a version of the Adam-Christ theology of Paul. Jesus shared human frailty as a child of Eve and bondage to the Jewish law. As Adam was a son of God destroyed by the fall, Israel was son of God who became a slave to the law, while God sent Jesus to liberate humanity.[12]
However, the point may not be speculation about pre-existence, but that the historical mission of Jesus rests upon divine initiative.[13] One can understand the verse against the background of the tradition about Jesus, who thought of himself as the Son sent by God (Mk 9:37, 12:6, Mt 15:24, Lk 4:18, 10:16). Paul and his readers may well have thought of the man Jesus whose ministry was commissioned by God and whose unique relationship with the Father was assured by his resurrection and despite his rejection of those who were stewards of the law. The point of the passage is redemption and thus does concern itself with the Incarnation.[14]
I want to pause with each phrase. We need to take our time here.
In verse 4, when the fullness of time (χρόνου) had come, This fulfillment points to the end of the temporal course of human history,[15] referring to the messianic or eschatological era that completes the long wait of centuries. One might translate it more precisely, as “when the time had reached its full term.” "Fullness" has much more meaning than an end of a period. "Fullness" suggests that one period has ended so that another can begin. It can denote the legal transition from childhood to adulthood. Furthermore, as slaves fulfill the time of their service, they become free. They take on a new status as a new era begins. First, it was the fullness of time in relation to the giver. The moment had arrived in God's plan. Second, it was the fullness of time about the recipient. Humanity had to reach a mature age. A time existed when humanity was in the position of a minor. Humanity had tutors and governors, the stoicheia. Humanity was a slave among other slaves. This fulfilled time is before or after all other time. It makes all time chronologically understood also fulfilled time. Time may appear to move toward a void, but it is moving toward this fullness. All time is fulfilled time.[16] The entire notion of the fullness of time pictures time as an empty vessel, not yet filled, but waiting for a particular time to fill it. “Fullness” suggests something filling a vessel, plan, concept, or form full. The Old Testament promises are without content apart from the coming of the reign of God in the man, Jesus, and therefore defective in themselves, yet, being related to this event, they are not for nothing. Time has a similar character. It has the defect and advantage of being a time hastening toward the time of Jesus and is then destined to move away from His time. There is no fulfillment of time without the time of fulfillment. The specific word kairos does not occur here. However, the decisive significance of the concept expressed by kairos receives its definition by the opening of the verse. The new age brought in by Jesus is not a refutation of the old age. The old age had fulfilled its time, its purpose. All time from the moment of creation was moving toward this new time of redemption and release. A new age has begun. The Law holds sway no longer. The season of grace has come! Christ has inaugurated a new regime.[17]
Continuing in verse 4, God sent his Son, time achieving its full measure in content as well as extent in the sending of the Son, the saving work of God entering history in the earthly Jesus as an eschatological act.[18] The fullness of time suggests that God sent the Son to humanity. With the Son came the fullness of time arrived, that is, the mission of the Son is to bring the fullness of time. The Son has become Lord of time, a free person. This event gives time its fullness. Of course, behind all of these meanings lies the rich and evocative theological truth that with the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the old age is over, and a new age has begun. God has brought all things together in Christ and through Christ.
This statement shows signs of being pre-Pauline. God is the subject who sends the already developed out of Wisdom speculation pre-existent Son. In Wisdom 9:10, the writer asks God to send wisdom from the holy heaven and the glorious throne to teach him what is pleasing to God, identifying in verse 17 wisdom with the sending of the Holy Spirit in order to learn the divine counsel. This closeness of the Son to God is decisive and constitutes of the significance of the sending, distinguishing it from the sending of prophets.[19] Even when Paul uses wisdom terms like this that has its origin a primal mythical event, as applied to Jesus he turns it into a unique and definitive act.[20] The pre-existent Son bound himself to Jesus of Nazareth,[21] this sending connected closely to the commissioning of Jesus,[22] “Son” expressing his relation to the Father, a relation of obedience, trust, and mission.[23] God sent Jesus when the time was right to serve as the agent of redemption and adoption. Theologically, this notion of the sending of the Son is the New Testament origin of the notion of the Trinity, and it has its counterpart in the sending of the Spirit that we find in the Gospel of John. "Sent" includes concept of pre-existence.
The significance of this passage is that Christology begins with the primitive Christian interpretation of the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. Messiah implies the thought of divine sonship. It early had the sense that in the man Jesus the preexistent Son of God came to earth. Only God could be behind this event, namely, the sending of the Son into the world. Yet, we can know that it happened only as it took place on the plane of our human, creaturely reality. This sending involves the totality of his life, including his birth.[24] This sending has its ground in the free will of the Father and the Son in fulfillment of the divine love toward the cosmos and the world of humanity. God exposed divinity to an imposition. Speaking in an all too human way, God has been hard on Himself. God is stern toward Himself in this self-abasement and self-emptying. The Son came under the Law, stepping into the heart of the conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of humanity. He took the conflict within divinity. Obviously, human sin offends by God, but God also threatens divinity with death. In this way, God enters solidarity with humanity.[25]
Continuing in verse 4, the Son was born of a woman, denoting the incarnation as a whole,[26] designating the situation common to all humanity,[27] the phrase evoking the fullness of body as well as the completion of the time of a woman's pregnancy. These verses show that for Paul the issue of how Mary conceived and gave birth to Jesus was not as important as the fact that Jesus was born to save. Furthermore, the stress is not on the supernatural birth of Jesus but the very natural process of being born of a woman. The sending of the Son coincides with his birth from a woman. We are to think of Jeremiah, the servant of the Lord, and Paul as he describes himself in this letter. Only here do we find in Paul an express relating of the sending to the birth of Jesus, and even here the reference is not simply to the beginning of his course. The point is that the Son has entered the sphere of earthly existence with its conditions and relations. This applies to his entire earthly course that we find mention not only of his birth but also of the subjection of his earthly course to the Mosaic Law.[28]
The Son was born under the law, designating the situate common to all humanity,[29] the primary reference is to the Mosaic Law, though Gentiles also have undergone elementary discipline. Law had worked out its educational purpose and God now superseded it with the sending of the Son. Negatively, it was the purpose of the Law to deepen the conviction of sin and thus to show the inability of all existing systems to bring people near to God. Positively, it assumes a moral and spiritual expansion.
Jesus is not some celestial god (familiar to the Greeks) who is above the Law; he is fully human who is born under the Law, a Jew. Jesus came not to provide a new moral law or philosophy; he came with a specific function of freeing slaves and spreading the boundary of family to include Gentiles.
In verses 5-7, in his being Son, all others receive a share in that intimacy of relation to the Father. Becoming children of God through Jesus, the Father sent the Spirit into our hearts, who inspires us to cry, Abba, Father. the new human being lives based upon a new relation to the Father.[30] He begins by expressing the saving mission of the Son: in order to redeem (ἐξαγοράσῃ, rescue from loss) those who were under slavery to the law, so that, adding another concept to help his readers understand who Jesus is, we might receive adoption (υἱοθεσίαν) as children, thereby becoming part of the family of God. In verses 6-7, through the Spirit the Christian has been lifted into the freedom of being a child of God:[31] And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts. Filling with the Spirit making being children of God possible.[32] The goal of the work of Christ is forming sons and daughters of God by the Spirit into the new life of a community. This new life finds expression in the community crying, "Abba! Father!" Freedom and immediacy to God have an intimate connection.[33] This passage was among the keys for the Reformation to emphasize the immediacy of relationship to God.[34] God now sends the Spirit of his Son, showing the intimate connection of what church teaching would call the Trinity. The sending of the Son and the Spirit have the goal of the intimacy of this relationship.
We need to pause again and reflect upon the significance of addressing God in this way. Their reconciliation with God was complete without the Law. The intimacy finds expression in the new Father-child relationship of the community. the Spirit who effects this new Father-child relationship impels the community to cry out in this way. The Spirit is a living reality who becomes the basis for a new kind of prayer. It expresses the certainty and joy expressed by one whom the Spirit moves to turn to God.[35] Jesus regularly addressed God as Father in prayer, and this passage, with Rom 8:15-16, is evidence that the early Christian communities continued the practice.[36] As God redeems and adopts the believer, he or she can call God, the Almighty, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, "Abba, Father." "Abba" is an Aramaic word best translated "Daddy." "Abba" originated among Jews in Palestine. It relates Jesus referring to God in this way, and possibly to the Lord’s Prayer. The point is the freedom such adopted children can have in prayer. It suggests the power of response to divine love in prayer issuing forth in freedom related to adopted children. They receive in their own subjectivity before God a filial relation that expresses itself as spontaneity in relation to the Father and hence also to all creaturely reality. Putting Aramaic and Greek forms together symbolized Jewish and Gentile unity. Jesus used this word about God. The word became significant to later generations of those followed Jesus. Through the grace of Jesus Christ, believers are heirs of the riches of the Kingdom of God. These verses remind the believer of the basics of faith in which they stand and offer the good news that anyone who calls God "Abba" is part of the family. The abolition of the Law and rescue from bondage was a prior condition of the universal fellowship of God family. Though Mosaic Law is uppermost in his mind, Paul extends it to all systems. The negative aspect of redemption is freedom from slavery. The positive is adoption as children. However, it is not just an inheritance, but new life, in which Paul associates the Trinity. The presence of the Spirit is thus a witness to being children of God. We should note that here, the gift of the Spirit is the result of adoption as children. The mission of the Son is to give the rights of being in the family of God and the mission of the Spirit is to give the power of using them.[37] H. Schlier (1971) said that God bestows on us not only the status of children through the sending of the Son, but also the character and knowledge of children through the sending of the Spirit. God bestows on us the character and knowledge of children because we are already in the status of children.
Continuing with verse 7, So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God. The coming of the Son changes everything. The distinction between slave and child is a relational one. Both are under the authority of the head of the household, but they have a different status. Our work does not lead to faith. Moral character is not the goal of faith. Rather, righteous living, the life that pleases God, is a means to an end. Our changed lives are the means. The worship of God and advancing the earthly divine mission are the end.[38] Rules have much to say about our actions, but rarely do they shape our attitudes, thoughts, and emotions. A relationship is a far more influential force on the whole of how we live. When work of Christ replaces our work, slaves become children, and relationship guides us instead of rules. A clear result happens as we internalize the heart of God into our own.
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[6] H. B. Swete (The Holy Spirit in the New Testament, 1909, p. 204).
[7]
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[11] Schweizer, TDNT VIII, 391-2.
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15]
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[18] Delling, TDNT VI, 305.
[19] Schweizer, TDNT VIII 374-6.
[20] Schneemelcher, TDNT VIII, 383.
[21]
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[26] Schneemelcher, TDNT VIII, 383.
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[35] Grundmann, TDNT III, 902-3.
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[37] H. B. Swete (The Holy Spirit in the New Testament, 1909, p. 204).
[38] N. T. Wright, After You Believe.
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