nor a mailed fist can save a lost world. Yet both Greece and Rome made
positive contributions to the preparation for Christ. Greece fashioned a
marvelous instrument for propagating the gospel in its highly flexible
and expressive language, and Rome reduced the world to order and hushed
it into peace and thus turned it into a vast amphitheater in which the
gospel could be heard. Greece also contributed philosophy that threw
light on the gospel, and Rome gave it a rich inheritance of law.

God thus set this event in a mighty framework of preparation. He got the
world ready for Christ before he brought Christ to the world. He was in
no haste and took plenty of time before he struck the great hour. The
harvest must lie out in the showers and sunshine for weeks and months
before it can ripen into golden wheat, and the meteor must shoot through
millions of invisible miles for one brief flash of splendor. The
centuries seemed slow-footed during that long and dreary stretch from
Abraham to Mary, "but when the fulness of time was come, God sent forth
his Son."




III. A Wonderful Fulfillment of Prophecy


This birth was a wonderful fulfillment of prophecy. The Jews had
cherished the hope of the promised Messiah for thousands of years.
Through all their national vicissitudes, enslavement in Egypt,
wanderings in, the wilderness, establishment and growth in the promised
land, internal division and external captivity in Babylon, restoration,
and final subjection to the Romans, this hope burned on the horizon of