The Perfect Time
Happy New Year!
New year, new blog series. If you missed the last post, you’ll know I jumped the gun on 2025 with a post called “Perfect Timing.” In 2024, we looked at the Names of God using Ann Spangler’s book. This year will be a bit like taking the training wheels off–of going off-road to use another transportation metaphor. We’re going to look at different attributes of God, meandering and lingering along the way.
Today’s blog post will read like a book review, because J. Warner Wallace’s Person of Interest highlights the Lord’s genius in orchestrating Jesus’s birth.
Wallace investigates Jesus’s first coming like a homicide case with no body and no crime scene. Skeptics claim the events of Jesus’s life and the claims of His deity are more myth than reality. If we ignore the evidence of the New Testament, is there enough circumstantial evidence to prove that Jesus is God, the Son of God, the Messiah?
Yes.
To make his case, Wallace looks at the Fuse, the circumstances leading up to Jesus’s birth, and the Fallout, the way the world changed after the resurrection.
Why did Jesus come when He did?
- Papyrus. Long before the first century, written language had progressed from pictographs and cuneiform to alphabets with complex grammar. The ability to disseminate the words of the Gospels by writing them on papyrus and sending them throughout the Roman Empire got the word out quickly and efficiently
- The size of the Roman Empire. Borders weren’t a barrier to the message.
- Roman roads. All roads lead to Rome, as they say. And away from Rome. The good news spread via Roman roads.
- The Pax Romana. One thing dictatorships do well is keep the peace. Remember Yugoslavia, anyone? Jesus’s message spread in a time of relative peace.
- Prophetic promises. Jesus came when the Jews were expecting Him. From God’s promise in Genesis 3 to David’s Messianic psalms to Isaiah’s suffering servant to Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant, the Jews knew Messiah would come. And Daniel’s prophecy placed a flashing neon arrow on the timeline: MESSIAH IS COMING NOW!
Seventy weeks have been decreed for your people and your holy city, to finish the wrongdoing, to make an end of sin, to make atonement for guilt, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy Place. So you are to know and understand that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, until Messiah the Prince, there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again, with streets and moat, even in times of distress. Then after the sixty-two weeks, the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined. – Daniel 9:24-26
How did His coming impact the world?
Jesus has had more impact on the world than any other individual. He even changed the calendar. We calculate dates in BC and AD. Academics prefer BCE and CE, but one must ask, “What determines the Common Era?” Jesus’s birth, of course.
- More books have been written about Jesus than anyone else.
- Belief in Him sparked an explosion of art, architecture, music, scientific exploration, philosophical pursuit – every branch of education.
- Christianity offers the best explanation for the world around us, hands down.
The more I study His Word, the more I marvel at His perfect timing.
