We challenged ourselves in a previous meditation about the importance of being on time to meet the requirements of God’s timetable. We noted the disastrous consequences of being late.
When Jesus Christ stepped out of eternity into time, He was never late. Luke tells us in his Gospel, ‘Now it came to pass, WHEN THE TIME WAS COME for Him to be received up, that He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before His face’, Luke chapter 9 verse 51. If He had failed to meet this predetermined time in God’s plan, there would be no message of good news for us to tell today. There were those who would have prevented Him taking this journey. Indeed, as His messengers set out to go to prepare the way for His journey, they passed through a village inhabited by the hated Samaritans. As enemies of the Jews, they refused to receive Him. James and John asked Jesus if they should command fire to come down from heaven to consume them. Their response showed they had not grasped why He was going to Jerusalem. His response stopped them in their tracks: ‘But He turned and rebuked them, and said, You do not know what manner of spirit you are of. For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them’, Luke chapter 9 verses 52-56.

The time, planned in eternity, had arrived for Him to go to Jerusalem, because it was there that He would suffer and die to save us. If He had allowed His disciples to destroy the Samaritans, it would have contradicted the purpose of His coming. At precisely the right time, the ninth hour, ‘Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and breathed His last’, Mark chapter 15 verse 37.
The time had come, when ‘Christ, the incarnate Maker died, for man, His creature’s sin’.

‘For when we were still without strength, IN DUE TIME Christ died for the ungodly’, Romans chapter 5 verse 6.