The Messiah comes in the "Fullness of Time": Five Ages

The Messiah comes in the "Fullness of Time": Five Ages

I argue the Messiah would come after five particular major ages in ANY world, not just ours.

How? Let us work it out. First, ANY world always has two reasons it exists, ALWAYS, regardless of its science:

1. To know, love, and serve God in THIS world
2. To be happy with God forever in the NEXT

The first is a Baptismal disposition--faith, repentance--the second, a Divine Eternal life.

If the creatures fall, because they are materialistic, God will first have to prefigure the deeper mysteries of Trinity and Incarnation by material pictures, before Incarnating Himself. That is, a child first has to start with illustrations before they can handle written abstraction without words. Hence, the necessity of a prefiguring covenant.

Now, we ask, could God commence a prefiguring covenant right away after the material creatures fall? No way, for they will be highly disposed to the fallen nature.

And the fallen nature has two lies, since there are two reasons the creatures exist:

1. Wickedness: no faith, no repentance

2. Materialism: the creatures turning from life with the Creator in order to be superficially joined to the Creation. Choosing this world in place of the next: pleasures, possessions, and accomplishments instead of truth, beauty, and love.

So they will digest these in two ages, each requiring positive discipline. (Flood, Babel).

Then God can form the prefiguring covenant.

Now, we ask, how long should God let the prefiguring covenant journey before Incarnating? Well, do not all Catholic saints have before them a process of growth in holiness that has three greater overlapped stages: The Purgative, Illuminative. Unitive?

Therefore should the Holy Ones of Prefiguring journey these three HISTORICAL stages before God Incarnates.

So two ages for the lies of the fall, and three stages for the prefiguring ones to mature in covenant holiness equals five total ages.

Little wonder is it that Ss. Augustine and Methodius of Olympus agree, FIVE are the ages of the Old Law.

I am just taking their reasoning to a higher level: If, in any world, the laws of the fall would always be two, and the stages of overcoming sin would always be three--purgation, illumination, and union--like our world, how could the Messiah not come in another world except after these five ages, ALWAYS, like our world?

And is it, therefore, any wonder that of the beast, it is written, in Apoc. 17:

"Five [kings] have fallen", as if to convey to that three great phases of spiritual darkness must necessarily precede any fallen world's reception of an Incarnation.