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Transcript 257B — The Timing of Christ's First Coming
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Good evening. Could you tell me why God waited so long to send Christ to be crucified?
HC: The question is raised, Why did God wait so long to be crucified? When we read Acts 2, we find that God speaks of the cross as the "last days." It's the beginning, in other words, of the final period of God's dealings with the earth. When we work out the timetable of the earth, we find that 11,000 passed before Christ went to the cross. And since then, of course, 2000 years have passed, approximately. And now we know that we are, in all probability, very very close to the end of time. Now why did He wait 11,000 years?
Well, I'm not really sure why He did. The Bible speaks about Christ coming in the "fullness of time." First of all, we must remember, of course, that the world during the first 6000 years of its existence, which was the period before the Flood, was not very heavily populated. People lived to be 900 or more years of age, and when we carefully study the Bible, we find that they did not bear a whole lot more children than a family today. Noah lived to be 950 years of age, and he only bore three children, which is not uncommon for a family today. And there are other evidences in the Bible of men who lived for a long period and still had relatively small families.
Ant so, based upon this, we might conclude that probably, before the Flood, the world never did reach a population of much over a million people, or thereabouts. So compared with, let's say, the four billion people who live on the earth today, it was a very insignificant number.
Then, beginning at 4990 BC, the date of the Flood, God began all over again with Noah and his family. And so again it would have taken thousands of years before the earth really began to be very heavily populated. And more than that, during this period God also had to work out all of the types and signs, and so on, particularly through the nation of Israel. This all had to be accomplished. And so for the 2000 years prior to Christ's coming, we have the account of the history of Israel, beginning with Abraham, who came out of Ur of the Chaldees, out of Haran, in the year 2092, at which time he entered the Promised Land, going all the way through to the time that Christ came.
Well, that doesn't really answer the question, except that we know that the Bible says it was in God's own particular timetable. There was a very special moment in history when this would be accomplished, and the Bible speaks of this as the fullness of time.
Now by the same token, we know that when Christ comes on the Last Day it is at a precise moment. God has decreed. And again, it will be in the fullness of time.