R.C. Sproul

We use the term historic to refer to specific moments in time that are pregnant in their significance and meaning, because after that particular event, everything changes.

And everything that happens before it, in a sense, leads up to it.

You think of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

That was a historic moment in American history.

It changed our culture forever.

September 11, 2001 changed our national culture forever.

It was a historic event, a historic moment.

But both of these moments that were historic, these kairotic events, take place not in some never-never land of existential Gnostic thinking, but actually in the plane of history.

At the heart of the biblical announcement of the coming of the Messiah is the statement that Jesus came in the fullness of time.

The fullness of time.

The word there is pleroma, and it's translated fullness, but it's the kind of fullness that indicates satiation.

If I take my glass and I put it under the water faucet at home and I say I'm going to fill up this glass, if I filled it right up to the edge of the glass, that still wouldn't be pleroma.

I would have to leave the glass under the faucet so that the water is flowing over the top where it's at the bursting point.

That's pleroma, fullness so full that there's not any more room for another ounce or another speck of anything to be added to it.

And that's what the Bible says, in the plan of God, Christ came in the fullness of time.

And that whole idea is inseparably related to the gospel itself.

that when Paul announces the gospel in his letters or the preachings in the book of Acts, they talk about how Jesus was born according to the Scriptures in the fullness of time, that God had prepared that throughout all of history.

Everything in Old Testament history before the birth of Christ was moving towards that chirotic moment.

And everything after the death and resurrection and ascension of Christ refers back to those chirotic moments that shape the whole future of the people of God.

But again and again and again, the context of covenant redemption is real history.