Mary Had A Little Christmas Lamb

Galatians 4:4    But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman,

That phrase literally means “at the appointed time.”   The arrival of the Savior in a dirty feeding trough in a strange town was not an accident.  He came exactly on schedule in the precise place, and time, and circumstances as God ordained and foretold in prophetic scripture.

What can we say really happened on Christmas day?  Well, the short answer to that question is, “Easter.”  And without trying to sound trite about it, It’s like the nursery rhyme, “Mary had a little lamb,” That’s the Christmas part of the rhyme but the verse continues, “It’s fleece was white as snow.”  And that is the Easter part of the rhyme; The Lamb of God would be the pure, spotless, and only acceptable sacrifice for the sins of many. 

The Savior was born in Bethlehem for the express purpose of redeeming His people by the deliberate and voluntary sacrifice of His life on the cross at Calvary.  His death was the purpose of His incarnation.  We get a glimpse of that purpose at his birth where we see that He was swaddled in burial cloths and later, one of the gifts of the magi was myrrh; a kind of embalming fluid.  He was born to die.

The birth of Jesus is meaningless and irrelevant without His death, burial, and resurrection. It was all part of His divine plan that started “when the set time had fully come.”