He sent Him as "His Son." To speak of Christ, with the mystical Germans, as the _ideal Urmensch_--the ideal Son of man, the foretype of humanity--is to express a great truth. Mankind was created in Christ, who is "the image of God, firstborn of all creation." But this is not what Paul is saying here. The doubly compounded Greek verb at the head of this sentence (repeated with like emphasis in ver. 6) signifies "sent forth from" Himself: He came in the character of _God's_ Son, bringing His sonship with Him. He was the Son of God before He was sent out. He did not become so in virtue of His mission to mankind. His relations with men, in Paul's conception, rested upon His pre-existing relationship to God. "The Word" who "became flesh, was with God, was God in the beginning." "He called God His own Father, making Himself equal with God" (John v. 18): so the Jews had gathered from His own declarations. Paul admitted the claim when "God revealed His Son" to him, and affirms it here unequivocally. "The Son of God," arriving "in the fulness of time," enters human life. Like any other son of man, He is _born of a woman, born under law_. Here is the _kenosis_, the emptying of Divinity, of which the Apostle speaks in Phil. ii. 5-8. The phrase "born of woman," does not refer specifically to the _virgin-birth_; this term describes human origin on the side of its weakness and dependence (Job xiv. 1; Matt. xi. 11). Paul is thinking not of the difference, but of the identity of Christ's birth and our own. We are carried back to Bethlehem. We see Jesus a babe lying in His mother's arms--_God's Son a human infant_, drawing His life from a weak woman![113] [113] Comp. Rom. i. 3, 4; ix. 5; 2 Cor. xiii. 4; Eph. iv. 9, 10; Ph. ii. 6-8; Col. i. 15, 18; ii. 9; 1 Tim. iii. 16. Nor is "born under law" a distinction intended to limit the previous term, as though it meant a _born Jew_, and not a mere woman's son. This expression, to the mind of the reader of ch. iii., conveys the idea of _subjection_, of humiliation rather than eminence. "Though He was (God's) Son," Christ must needs "learn His obedience" (Heb. v. 8). The Jewish people experienced above all others the power of the law to chasten and humble. Their law was to them more sensibly, what the moral law is in varying degree to the world everywhere, an instrument of condemnation. God's Son was now put under its power. As a man He was "under law;" as a Jew He came under its most stringent application. He declined none of the burdens of His birth. He submitted not only to the general moral demands of the Divine law for men, but to all the duties and proprieties incident to His position as a man, even to those ritual ordinances which His coming was to abolish. He set a perfect example of loyalty. "Thus it becometh us," He said, "to fulfil all righteousness."