New Testament Survey

The Fullness of Time: The World the New Testament Entered

There is a single page in most Bibles between Malachi and Matthew, and it usually sits there blank. That blank page covers four hundred years. No prophet spoke. No new Scripture was written. A Jewish family praying for the Messiah in 400 BC and a family praying in 5 BC were praying out of the same last recorded promises. It is tempting to call those centuries the silent years and move on. But when Paul looks back on them, he does not describe a God who had gone quiet. He describes a God who had been watching a clock.

⁴But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, ⁵to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.Galatians 4:4-5 · NIV

"When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son." Not a random time, and not merely a convenient time: a set time, appointed and prepared. The claim underneath that sentence is the claim underneath the whole New Testament: the coming of Jesus was not an improvisation. This session steps into the world he entered, because the better you know the stage, the more clearly you will see how deliberately God set it.

The silence that was not empty

Between the testaments, the world turned over several times. Persia gave way to Alexander the Great, whose conquests spread the Greek language from Egypt to India. After him came the empires of his generals, then the brutal years when Antiochus Epiphanes profaned the temple and the Maccabean revolt won it back, and finally Rome, which swallowed the whole map. Through all of it the Jewish people were scattered across the nations, and wherever they settled they built synagogues, local gathering places for Scripture and prayer that had not existed in the Old Testament era. The groups a reader meets on page one of the Gospels took shape in these years too: the Pharisees with their fierce devotion to the law, the Sadducees managing the temple, the scribes copying and teaching. None of this is in your Bible as narrative, yet all of it is on every page of the Gospels as furniture. The silence was not God being absent. It was God arranging a room.

The stage God set

Look at what "the fullness of time" had gathered by the year Jesus was born. One language, Greek, could carry a message from Jerusalem to Spain without translation. Roman roads ran straight and Roman peace kept them passable, so a traveler could move between continents in relative safety for the first time in history. Jewish synagogues stood in every major city of the empire, ready-made places where a visiting teacher could open the Scriptures to people who already knew them. And those Scriptures had already been translated into Greek, so the nations could read Moses and Isaiah in their own common tongue. Take any earlier century and at least one of those four is missing. The gospel was about to become the most mobile message the world had ever heard, and every road it would need was already paved.

A people leaning forward

Into that prepared world, add a people at a boil. Daniel had promised that in the days of a fourth kingdom, God would set up a kingdom that would never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44), and by the first century everyone could count: Babylon, Persia, Greece, and now Rome. Malachi had closed the Old Testament with the promise of a forerunner, an Elijah who would come before the great day of the Lord (Malachi 4:5-6). So expectation was everywhere, from revolutionaries sharpening swords to quiet believers holding promises. Luke introduces us to one of the quiet ones.

²⁵Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him. ²⁶It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. ²⁷Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, ²⁸Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying: ²⁹“Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace. ³⁰For my eyes have seen your salvation, ³¹which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: ³²a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.”Luke 2:25-32 · NIV

Simeon had been "waiting for the consolation of Israel," and when he finally held the infant Jesus he said he could die in peace, because his eyes had seen God's salvation. Anna the prophetess, in the same chapter, spoke of the child "to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem." That was the posture of the faithful: leaning forward. But notice the mismatch that will drive so much of the Gospel story. Israel largely expected a political liberator who would break Rome the way the Maccabees broke Antiochus. God sent a suffering King who would break sin and death instead. Much of the drama ahead, the crowds that surge and scatter, the disciples who confess him and then correct him, comes from that gap between the Messiah expected and the Messiah given.

The shape of the New Testament

Before we walk into the story, get the map in hand. The New Testament is twenty-seven books written within roughly one lifetime, and they come in four kinds. The Gospels give the foundation events: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, told four times by four witnesses. Acts gives the spread: how the message of those events traveled from Jerusalem to Rome in one generation. The letters are the mission's correspondence: apostles writing the gospel into the real situations of real churches. Revelation gives the hope: where the whole story is going. And one arc runs through all four kinds: promise fulfilled, kingdom announced, church born, gospel spreading, Christ returning. That is why this course moves by era and arc rather than book by book. Twenty-seven titles memorized in order is a pile. One story understood is a map, and a map is what you will actually use.

Here is that preparation traced through a single thread. Two centuries before Jesus, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, a translation we call the Septuagint. It probably seemed like a modest project at the time: help Greek-speaking Jews read Moses. But follow the thread forward. When the apostles carried the gospel out of Judea, the nations they reached could already read Isaiah in the world's common language. When Paul stood up in a Greek-speaking synagogue and reasoned "from the Scriptures," as he does in Acts 17, the Septuagint is what lay open on the table. God had the mission's tools ready before the mission was announced. That is how he works: the provision is in place before the need is visible.

Where in your own life has a long silence from God turned out, in hindsight, to be preparation? Write down one season that felt empty at the time. What was God putting in place during it?

Go Deeper

Study question: Read Daniel 2:31-45 and name the four kingdoms. What does it do to your confidence in Scripture that the kingdom "not made by human hands" arrived on schedule, in the days of the fourth?

• Michael Kruger, Canon Revisited. (Reformed.) How the church recognized the twenty-seven books; the best one-stop answer to "who decided what made it into the New Testament?"
• D.A. Carson & Douglas Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament. (Broadly evangelical.) The standard reference work on every book's author, date, setting, and message; technical, but worth owning for the long haul.