The Miracle of the Virgin Birth
Christmas can be a depressing time for many people. An article written by the director of the California Dept. of Mental Hygiene warns: “The Christmas season is marked by great emotional stress and more acts of violence than at any time of the year.”
That’s because, for many people, Christmas is an empty holiday. Our culture has exchanged the real meaning of Christmas for a story that goes something like this:
And there were in the same country, children keeping watch over their stockings by the fireplace. And lo! Santa Claus suddenly came upon them and they were sore afraid. And Santa said unto them “Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people who charge their credit cards to the limit.
For unto you shall be given great feasts of turkey and dressing and many gifts. And this shall be a sign unto you. You shall find the presents, wrapped in colorful paper, laying beneath a tree of tinsel and lights. And suddenly there will be with you a multitude of relatives and friends, praising you and saying “Thank you so much, it is just what I wanted.”
And it shall come to pass when the friends and relatives have gone away into their own country, you will say to yourself “What a relief that’s over. Thank God Christmas only comes once a year.”
What is Christmas really about? When you strip away the ornaments and the presents and all the rest, what do you have left?
The Bible tells us that Christmas is about the birth of a baby—a birth unlike any other before or since—a baby who was born of a virgin.
Does it not seem to you rather odd that the Christmas story should begin there? If the Christmas story was merely a myth invented by Christians to persuade the world to believe that Jesus was somebody special, why would they come up with a virgin birth?
After all, there are few facts that are better known than the fact that it takes two people to make a baby—a father and a mother. Women simply do not spontaneously get pregnant on their own!
Yet the Bible doesn’t just mention the virgin birth in passing—it makes a special point of it. Mary was a virgin when she bore Jesus and his birth was utterly unique in human history.
This is especially intriguing when you realize that the Bible’s account of the virgin birth was written by a man named Luke. Luke happened to be both a medical doctor and a very respected historian. As both a doctor and a historian, he would have been extremely skeptical about a story of a virgin birth. Yet he records it simply and clearly. Listen to what he wrote:
Luke 1:26 In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”
How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.
In Matthew’s gospel, we read…
Matthew 1:22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”—which means, “God with us.”
The Bible tells us that the birth of Jesus to a virgin was a miraculous birth. This child didn’t come from the union between a man and a woman: this child came from God. God was his father; Mary was his mother.
But why did it happen this way? Why couldn’t the Son of God have just suddenly appeared as a full grown man? Or why couldn’t God have arranged to simply use a man who had been born the ordinary way? Why go to all the trouble and complexity—not to mention the embarrassment—of a virgin birth?
Well, to put it as simply as I can, if Jesus had come any other way, then what he ultimately did when he died on the cross wouldn’t have worked.
You see, if Jesus had merely dropped down out of heaven one day dressed in a human body, I’m sure that he would have looked like a man, and talked like a man, and acted like a man, but he would not have been a man. He would not have been a flesh and blood human being. He would have been an apparition, an illusion, a mirage - something that looks real, but isn’t.
And if Jesus was not a real flesh and blood human being, then when they nailed him up on that cross, he wouldn’t have been qualified to serve as our representative. Therefore, he couldn’t have been our substitute, and he couldn’t have died for our sins.
But the Bible says that when Jesus hung on the cross, he was really dying. He was really shedding his blood for us, and it was real human blood. It wasn’t some fake red liquid that God invented for the occasion - it was real human blood.
And the only way it could be real is if Jesus was a real human being. And to be a real human being, you have to be born.
That’s your membership card in the human race - you have a mother who carries you inside her body for nine months. Her body nurtures yours. The food she eats becomes your food. Her bloodstream supplies yours with nutrients and energy so that you can grow. And as you are knit together in that secret place, you come to share in the essence of what it is to be a member of the human race. Jesus experienced this. He was a real person, just like you and me.
But what about the other alternative? Suppose that Jesus were just a man who had been conceived like any other human being—with a human father and a human mother. Then suppose that at some point in his life, perhaps when he became an adult, he became very godly, very spiritual, filled with the Holy Spirit. And that enabled him to teach better than any other teacher, and perform miracles, and do all those remarkable things that he did.
Well, that scenario (which, incidentally, a lot of people believe) would not have sufficed either. An ordinary man, even a very holy, very spiritual man, could not do the work of a redeemer according to the Bible’s own definition of it.
The Bible tells us that to be human is to be sinful. When Adam—the father of the human race—sinned in the Garden, he passed down to all his offspring two things: consequences, and character.
1. The consequences for what he did. Physical death is a consequence of sin. The Bible says that “the wages of sin is death.”
Every human being since Adam has been subject to physical death. Even little babies who have never sinned and have never even had a chance to sin are still subject to death. Babies die. Because they, like all of us, have inherited the consequences of Adam’s sin.
2. Adam bequeathed to all of us a character trait that makes us sinners. We call this the sin nature. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, they rebelled against God. They tried to replace God at the center of their lives with themselves. That conscious, willful decision fundamentally changed them.
From that point on, they possessed a fatal character flaw. They were rebellious and self-centered. And they passed that character flaw down to their offspring. That spirit of rebellion and self-centeredness—that desire to have our own way—is present in all of us. Some of us may do a better job of hiding it than others, but we all have it.
And we have Adam to thank for it, not Eve. That sin nature is passed down to us by our fathers, and you can trace it all the way back to Adam. We don’t get our sin nature from our mothers, we get it from our fathers. (Now before you women start gloating, let me remind you that we have a woman to thank for the problem of sin in the first place!)
Sin came into the human race via the woman—Eve, but it is passed down through the human race via. the man—Adam. You’ll see why this is so in a moment.
Think about babies. Babies are wonderful. They are cute. They are innocent. They are charming. They are cuddly.
But before too long, you begin to notice that they don’t like it when they don’t get their own way. As they grow into toddlerhood, you begin to see that there is a streak of self-centeredness and rebellion just lurking below the surface of their personality.
Parents discover very quickly that there are some things that children do not have to be taught. They do not have to be taught how to disobey. They already know that, because they are born knowing it. They are born with a positive potential for doing wrong. That’s the sin nature that we all inherited from Adam. And that sin nature makes us not only sinners in theory, it makes us sinners in fact.
Now if Jesus were just a man—even a very good man—he would have had a human father. And through his father, he would have inherited those two things from Adam—the consequences of sin, and the character of being a sinner.
He would have been subject to physical death and he would have possessed a sin nature. If Jesus had had a human father, those two things would have been his legacy just as surely as they are our legacy. And if so, then Jesus’ death on the cross wouldn’t have accomplished anything at all for you and me. Why not?
Because if Jesus were truly an heir of Adam’s sin and guilt, then physical death for Jesus would have been inevitable. It would have been his ultimate destiny. Even if he had succeeded in avoiding the cross, and living to a ripe old age in the Nazareth Nursing Home for retired prophets, sooner or later he would have died.
I want you to understand that, because of the virgin birth, Jesus’ death on the cross at the age of thirty-three was in no way a premature death, it was an optional death. The Bible says that when Jesus died on the cross, He did so as a matter of choice. It was his option to die. He could have gone on living forever if he had wanted to. But he chose the time, he chose the place, he chose the manner, and he chose the reason for his own death. Listen to what he said about it…
John 10:17 The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.
Jesus didn’t have to die—ever! He was totally immune from the consequences of Adam’s sin because he had been born of a virgin. But he chose to die in order to redeem us.
Secondly, if Jesus were just an ordinary man with a human father, he would have had that character flaw that we call the sin nature. He would have been a sinner.
Now some people might say, “Well, suppose that Jesus was a sinner at first, but as he grew to maturity, he became such a holy, spiritual, godly man that he overcame his sin nature.” Well, that’s an interesting theory, but it is not what the Bible says about Jesus.
The Bible says that he was perfect from the very beginning—he was completely without sin throughout his entire life. He was a lamb without blemish or defect.
1 Peter 2:22 “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.”
Hebrews 4:15 he was tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.
That is a vitally important point, because you cannot die for the sins of someone else if you yourself are a sinner. A drowning man cannot save another drowning man.
Jesus could not have served as our substitute if he himself had inherited from Adam via. a human father that sin nature that we all have. If he died on the cross as a sinner, then his death could not have paid for the sins of even one other person, much less the sins of the whole world.
But Jesus did not inherit Adam’s character as a sinner because he did not have a human father to pass on to him that character.
Now do you see the reason for the virgin birth? Although Jesus was fully human, he did not inherit Adam’s death sentence and he did not inherit Adam’s sinful character. The chain was broken. He was a new man, a new Adam. A “second Adam from above who will reinstate us in God’s love”, as Charles Wesley wrote in Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
Though he was fully human, he was without sin in his own character, and he was immune from the consequences of sin. That is how he could serve as our substitute on the cross.
1 Corinthians 15:22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
So you see, the virgin birth actually has as much to do with Easter as it does with Christmas. There is always the shadow of the cross over the cradle.
Christmas is when God became one of us so that he could die for us. If Jesus were only God masquerading as a man, then he couldn’t really die. Oh, he could go through the motions, but it wouldn’t be a real human death.
And if Jesus were only a man masquerading as God, then his death couldn’t have helped anyone else. It was the miracle of the virgin birth that enabled Jesus to be both God and man. That is the central fact of Christmas.
I guess it is only appropriate that Christmas has at its very center a miracle. You can never understand what Christmas, or Christianity, is all about unless you are ready to believe in miracles.
The miracle of Christmas is that, by the work of the Holy Spirit, a baby was born of a virgin. The miracle of Christianity is that, by the work of the Holy Spirit, you can be spiritually born.
John 1:12-13 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The miracle of Christmas is that the birth of Jesus brought a new beginning for mankind. We still refer to the years before his birth as BC and after as AD. The miracle of Christianity is that Jesus wants to bring a new beginning for you.
2 Corinthians 5:17 If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone; the new has come.
The miracle of Christmas is that God became one of us. The miracle of Christianity is that God wants to make you one of His.
But will you believe the miracle? That’s the question.