Timing

In "A Man at Arms," author Steven Pressfield takes an early aside to describe a few of the many varied and profound effects that Roman domination had upon the different territories and cultures they conquered.

He eventually gets to this:

But the most revolutionary reordering was neither hewn from stone nor enforced by the sword. It was this:

Mail.

The daily post.

Before the Romans came, the Israelite in Bethlehem or the Syrian in Palmyra lived out his days dissevered from, and in fact in ignorance of, the wider world. His universe ended at the town gate or the communal well. Could he trade? Study? Venture abroad? How, when he could know no more of the world than he could see from his doorstep or make plans for the morrow no farther than the distance he could tramp today?

Rome brought the mail, and the mail brought the world.

At once one knew, even the meanest and most impoverished rustic of the region, not only of Athens and Alexandria, but could send forth missives to such places and, miraculously, hear back from them. The vintner could market his produce beyond the sea, the artisan and the smith could purvey their wares wherever Roman roads and Roman couriers could reach.

Rome’s motives of course were entirely self-interested. The conquers believed their highways and waterways and the trade and postal communications that sped along them would bind their subject people in such shackles of order and dependence upon their overlords as would render these submissive, compliant, and incapable of rebellion. Yet, as with any world-altering innovation, consequences unintended and unforeseen soon ascended to the fore.

The mail itself, it transpired (or, more accurately, the practicability of the empire-wide transmission of new and seditious ideas), would produce the greatest threat to imperial hegemony, not only in Judea and the East but across the entire compass of Roman dominion. And this peril would proceed neither from hosts nor armies but from the pen of a single man - Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul the Apostle - who, to compound the irony, had himself been among the foremost practitioners of Roman tyranny and oppression.

My friends, when Paul speaks in Galatians 4 of the "fullness of time" that had to come before Christ was sent into the world, that means many things on many different levels.

God's timing is never random or haphazard. The entire world works and progresses and changes and develops in accordance with His will.

You can never know what He's up to. The Roman domination of Judea brought with it the very mechanism that allowed the Gospel to spread so quickly.

You can never know what He's up to.

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"Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?” - Romans 11:33-34

"Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen." - Psalm 77:19