It is now two thousand years, more or less, since the incarnation of the Son of God. We today live as many years after Christ's birth as Abraham lived before it. Abraham, the father of the faithful, saw Christ's day coming and rejoiced. Being a prophet, he had insight into the promises of God. He hailed the coming of Jesus Christ from afar and rejoiced that all the nations were to be blessed in Christ, the promised 'seed'.

Two millennia were to elapse before Jesus came to take our flesh and bear our sin. The Scriptures of the Old Testament are God's royal record of what happened among his people during that long preparatory age. The people of God in that time passed through both evil things and good. They saw enemies come and go; they saw empires rise and fall. Their faith at some times rose to lofty acts of heroism; at times it sank to abysmal depths of shame. But the flame of their hope in a coming Saviour, now less, now more, burnt steadily on with the slow passing of the years.

In the fulness of God's time and according to his purpose, the blessed Christ was born at Bethlehem. 'The hopes and fears of all the years' met in that fateful village destined to be the cradle of Christ and the womb of mankind's redemption. Many catastrophic events had threatened, or had seemed to threaten, the coming of Jesus into the world. Many frowning providences had cast their menacing shadows upon the birth of our gracious and holy Saviour. Treachery at home in Israel and Judah had threatened the fulfilment of God's promise of a Messiah. The brute force of pagan monarchs had imperilled the realisation of the age-long hopes of Israel, that 'the Lord whom they sought would suddenly come to his temple' (Mal. 3:1).

But in the course of time, the God who cannot lie and whose purposes are most sure brought into the world that glorious and unspeakable gift of his only Son, our Lord. Two millennia after Abraham's day and two millennia before ours the miracle took place which beggars all other miracles! 'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us' (John 1:14). The Son of God, who was eternally begotten of the Father in a divine person equal in glory and power to the Father, took manhood into union with himself. Well might the angels sing their loud anthem in the hearing of the happy shepherds: 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men' (Luke 2:14)!

We must not be unduly shocked or surprised at the world's treatment of Christ when he came. It is not possible, certainly, for us to be other than grieved at the manner in which the world behaved when our Lord, all those two thousand years ago, was 'despised and rejected of men' (Isa. 53:3).

But it is not surprising that Herod sought the young Child's death (Matt. 2:13) almost as soon as he was born. The Herods of this world have no interest in God's high and heavenly purposes. Even the devout and the religious of that day had no love for Christ when he appeared. That, admittedly, is strange to our minds. The religious leaders had believed in the coming of their Messiah. Their rejection of him was not out of ignorance, but out of contempt for the kind of Messiah who came. Jesus was a 'stone of stumbling and a rock of offence' (Isa. 8:14). He appeared on earth in such poverty and weakness that all natural men, however religious, were bound to regard him with disappointment and contempt.

There is an aspect of Christ's humiliation that we are apt to overlook. When he appeared on earth two thousand years ago, he came to a generation which was spiritually very dead and formal. Faith was found only in a few in Israel. The bulk of the nation was at a low spiritual ebb. The visible church was governed by men who were, for the most part, carnal and unregenerate. The religious leaders in the church of that day were largely graceless men who were hurrying the nation into apostasy. 'For three transgressions and for four', as Amos had put it, the Jewish people were about to provoke God's wrath to fall upon them. Their crucifixion of Jesus was the crime of crimes which finally drew down judgment and wrath upon them. A few short years after Jesus' death, this wrath came 'upon them to the uttermost' (1 Thess. 2:16).

For two thousand years the gospel of Christ has been preached among the Gentile nations. This fact is what gives to the two millennia, now so recently ended, their unique importance. There was no gospel for the wider world in Old Testament times. The grace of God was, by divine purpose and intention, confined to the small nation of Israel alone. Such Gentiles as came to the saving knowledge of God in Christ did so by becoming members of the Jewish church.

But two millennia ago, following the great day of Pentecost, the Spirit was poured out on the Gentiles. Now, for these twenty centuries, the church has 'lengthened her cords and strengthened her stakes' (Isa. 54:2) so that men and women out of the Gentile nations the world over have heard the good news of God's grace and become children of Abraham by faith. The advent of a new millennium inevitably invites us to review the past. The year A.D. 2000 is, by any reckoning, a mighty milestone in the story of mankind. What has there been of special importance to the world in these two millennia that are past?

These twenty centuries have been very decidely 'the times of the Gentiles' (Luke 21:24). Israel, God's ancient people, has been rejected during this time in order to gather God's elect out of the nations. As the Apostle Paul expresses it: 'Through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles' (Rom. 11:11). And again: 'The fall of them is the riches of the world' (Rom. 11:12a). And again: 'The diminishing of them' is 'the riches of the Gentiles' (Rom. 11:12b). Still more comprehensively, Paul affirms: 'The casting away of them is the recon-ciling of the world' (Rom. 11:15). The purpose of God over the past two thousand years has been to shut out the great bulk of the Jewish nation from his kingdom and to throw open the door of faith to the non-Jewish world.

With but few exceptions, the great theologians, preachers and Christian writers have been of Gentile race and Gentile blood. It is no accident that almost no mighty Jewish figures have appeared in the history of the Church of Christ in this time. The list of Old Testament Jewish worthies such as Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Daniel and John the Baptist comes virtually to an end with the apostles of Christ. The torch of spiritual leadership then passed to Gentile hands: Athanasius, Ambrose, Augustine - and, much later, Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Calvin and their successors in the faith.

This fact of Israel's rejection now for almost two whole millennia is a phenomenon as clearly evidenced by the secular records as it was prophesied by the great Apostle Paul, whose words we have earlier quoted. The poor Jew - let us state it with deep sadness - has been a tragic figure over the twenty cen-turies now past. He has been persecuted from city to city, driven from country to country, subjected to pogroms, locked up in ghettos, almost exterminated in the 1940s in that inhuman machine which we refer to as the Holocaust. Let it be said with tears and with profound repentance by the Gentile world that these two millennia have been a horror story for the Jewish nation.

How long it will yet be before Israel is again grafted in to the church of Christ we cannot know. But of one thing we can be sure. Their re-incorporation into Christ's church is drawing near and has never been nearer than now. And their re-admission to their ancient covenant privileges will, when it occurs, be an event of such magnitude that the whole earth will feel the blessed effects.

It is Paul himself who conveys to us the revelation of this 'mystery' of Israel's future restoration to God's kingdom of grace: 'Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy' (Rom. 11:11). In case we should misinterpret this phrase, the apostle explains: 'If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness?' (Rom. 11:12). Again, he clarifies this prophecy of future good in this way: 'If the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead?' (Rom. 11:15). In order to summarise the secret purpose of God in all of this mysterious providence concerning mankind, the apostle concludes: 'For as ye [Gentiles] in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief: even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy' (Rom. 11:30-31).

If words express meaning at all, the Apostle Paul is surely here informing us that there is a mysterious balance and proportionality in God's dealings with the Jews and Gentiles. The Jews were to have the kingdom from Abraham's day to Christ's - two thousand years. But then the kingdom was taken from Israel and opened up to the non-Jewish world. In the end of God's dealings with mankind, says Paul, there will be yet a further period of history, in which the kingdom will be enjoyed by Jews and Gentiles together, equally favoured and side-by-side in their privileges.

No man knows how near the date of Israel's restoration is. But the passing of this millennial milestone is surely a call to the Christian church to redouble its prayers and efforts to have ethnic Israel saved. There is no doubt, if we take Paul's prophecy seriously, that there are days of bright glory and wide expan-sion ahead for the church of our Redeemer in the millennium now begun.

It is no objection to this blessed hope to say that we do not see much evidence of a spiritual revival among the Jews. And it is of no relevance to say that there is very little evidence of revival in countries of the Western world. The promises of God are not conditioned on what we see or hear. Besides, when did God ever send revival, except to a nation that was in decline or to churches which seemed about to expire? To 'walk by faith' is to live, pray and work in the light of what God has stated in his Word. The outworking and fulfilment of his Word we leave entirely to him as to time, place and manner.

One thing we fervently believe to be true and to be a light of hope and joy: the new millennium now just begun will, in God's good time, witness an outpouring of the Holy Spirit which will exceed in glory and influence all the revivals which have occurred before.

Since neither man nor demon can stop the coming of such hopeful and cheering events, let all right-hearted Christians labour patiently on in their service to God.