The Angel and the Virgin (Part 2 of 3)

There are people today who may who can't believe the Gospel accounts of Jesus' birth. They say science can't explain things like the virgin conception or his incarnation. Today on Truth for Life, we'll see why science is not able to disprove miracles and how that affects our Christian faith.

Alistair Begg is examining the angel Gabriel's extraordinary message and Mary's extraordinary response. Father, as we turn now to the pages of the Bible, we pray that you will be our teacher. We come from such a variety of backgrounds.

Our level of knowledge is as different as the difference that exists on our faces. It certainly is beyond the ability of any man to even know what people are thinking and let alone understand what they are thinking and be able to apply the Word of God to such a diversity of need and concern and questioning. And that's why all of our confidence lies in you and in your Word, the Bible. And we pray that you will come now and bring it to bear upon our lives in a way that will allow us to understand that this is God who speaks, and in a life-changing, mind-altering, Spirit-renewing capacity. This is our expectation, and we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. I encourage you to take your Bibles again and turn to the verses that we read in Luke in the first chapter. We began to look at the section which begins at the twenty-sixth verse of Luke chapter 1. And we said that we would gather our thoughts around four phrases, and that was the phrase in verse 27, where it says of Mary that she was pledged to be married.

Pledged to be. And then in verse 31, you will be. And then in verse 34, how will this be? And then in verse 38, may it be.

Now, we left Mary last time perturbed and wondering. That is recorded for us there in verse 29. Mary was greatly troubled at his words, namely the words of the angel.

What words were they? The words that are recorded in verse 28, Greetings you who are highly favored, the LORD is with you. And in response to her sense of bewilderment and puzzlement, the angel provides for her—what we are beginning to learn is the kind of standard angelic reassurance—namely, the phrase, Do not be afraid. And in an almost matter-of-fact way, the angel then proceeds to declare this staggering news.

It is of importance that we understand that there is no discussion, at least in this initial statement, as to the mode of conception. It is as though the how is subservient to the what. And if you think for a moment, that is largely true of every dramatic unfolding revelation of God in all of Scripture. Genesis, in its early verses, is far more about the what than ever about the how. In the description of the ascension, it's what, not how. In the resurrection, what, not how. In the return of Jesus Christ, it is largely what, not how. Therefore, it is no surprise that when we deal with this issue of the virgin conception, the preoccupation of Scripture is with the what. Now, before Mary has time to adjust to the fact that she's going to be a mother, which is what he tells her initially in verse 31, you will be with child. Remember, this is a teenage girl who has no thought of being with child, because she hasn't been with a man.

It's not as if there had been activity that she was married, and so the news came, you're going to have a baby. That was fairly standard practice. But this was absolutely out of the ordinary. This was extraordinary. This was unnatural.

This was supernatural. You will be with child, and then the angel tells her that there will be a boy, and furthermore, here's the boy's name. You will call him Yeshua, Joshua, Jesus, or, if you like, the Lord is salvation. And so, in a matter of just a phrase or two, the angel cuts through a lot of the dilemma which presents itself to the average mother-to-be. First of all, the mother learns that she is expecting, and then she has to wonder about whether it will be a boy or a girl. As standard practice is, you wait until you find out.

Contemporary practice varies. But assuming you're waiting until you find out, then you have to come up with a list of boys' names, a list of girls' names. You have to have a kind of bipolar approach to the thing until eventually you find out. Well, here the angel says, You're going to have a baby, it's going to be a boy, and let me give you his name. Matthew gives to us the explanatory comment concerning the name Jesus, He will save his people from their sins. And also reminds us that this was in fulfillment of the word of the prophet in Isaiah chapter 7 and verse 14. Now, Gabriel adds to the name this succession of phrases which are there before you in verse 32 and 33.

We might be tempted to pass over these very, very quickly. Indeed, we probably have, most of us, in the course of reading the Christmas story. And we may even have wondered in passing, I wonder why the angel says these things. Well, it is surely to anchor in the minds of the initial readers the fact that this Jesus is in a direct line of continuity from all that was unfolding in the Old Testament, and that the phraseology which he uses is phraseology that can be found in Deuteronomy and in 2 Samuel and in the prophets and in the Samos words, and it is always pointing forward to its fulfillment in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember that Luke has set out to write an orderly account of things on the basis of his careful investigation of the eyewitness reports. He is not providing for us a kind of haphazard, emotionally driven record of some anecdotal material concerning this Jesus of Nazareth. No, he is with great care laying it down, especially in these opening verses, so that when the great panorama, if you like, in the life and ministry of Christ unfolds, it will be directly related to the information that he has provided in his opening statements. It is a reminder to us of the fact that the Bible is a book about Jesus.

And I hope you've learned along with me to rehearse to yourself these simple truths so as to keep you on track. That in the Old Testament, Jesus is predicted. That in the Gospels, Jesus is revealed. That in the Acts, Jesus is preached. That in the Epistles, Jesus is explained. And that in the book of Revelation, Jesus is expected. So that if there's ever a time when we're about to lose our way and get cut adrift, as it were, in our study of the Scripture, the great anchoring dimension to it all is that it is pointing to he who is the incarnate Word of God. Now, we don't have time to work our way laboriously through these phrases, but let me make a comment or two in passing.

Notice what he says. You're going to have a child, you'll give birth to a son, you will give him the name Jesus, and first of all, he will be great. He will be great. Who is this Jesus to come?

Well, he is great. In a far more significant way than the John the Baptist. And you will recall that when the angel comes to Zechariah, he says of John the Baptist, in predicting his birth, that he will be seen as great in the sight of the Lord. But now he comes and he says, and this Jesus, he will define greatness, if you like. The herald is great in the sight of the Lord. The Messiah is none other than the Lord himself. And his name is above every name, and it will be at his name one day that every knee will bow. He's going to have a title, and his title is Son of the Most High. You'll need to study your Old Testament.

Get a commentary, get a concordance, and go through it and look up these sections. And you'll find yourself in Deuteronomy, as I say, and in 2 Samuel and in the Psalms, and you will find that the greatness of this one who was predicted is a greatness that was going to be discovered not only in his majesty but also in his meekness. It was a greatness that would be established not only in his kingship but in his servanthood. Consequently, since he has this majestic title, he will also have a throne. And I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever was the word of God to David the king in establishing his covenant. And he goes on to say to David, I will set up your seed after you, one who will come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. So when people say, Well, where did this Jesus appear from? Does he just drop down in a moment of time without anything before or anything following?

No, not at all. The whole of redemption history was moving forward to this event which Gabriel is now providing the news of to this unexpected, bewildered, pondering little girl. And his kingdom, unlike the dynasties of men throughout history, these earthly kingdoms and rulers and principalities which will all crumble and disintegrate, the kingdom and the rule of Christ will last forever, and his kingdom will never, ever end. When Paul writes of this in Romans 14, you may recall, he says, and this kingdom is not a matter of eating and drinking, he says. We can't reduce it to these sort of principles. No, he says, this kingdom is a matter of righteousness and of peace and of joy in the Holy Spirit. This is not a kingdom that was established in an earthly or political way.

This is the rule of grace, the rule of truth, established in the hearts and lives of all of those who have the God of Jacob as their refuge. Oh, you say, is this really significant? It's profoundly significant. When people say to us, You know, I don't think we have a space for your Jesus in our Christmas celebrations. I don't think that you should be here with your little display, or I don't see why you should intrude Christ into Christmas or whatever it is. They're treating in a dismissive fashion, not an infant child, as it were, who may be set aside in the way that we may set aside a child as possessing no power or influence or words that we might hear, but they're setting aside the King of kings and the Lord of lords. And the way in which we need to speak to our generation concerning Jesus is not ultimately, in some diffident fashion, to go with cap in hand, saying, Excuse me, I wonder, would it be okay if we included, you know, Jesus in the event here?

No, we want to go to people and say, Do I have news for you? Every king who ever reigned, every president who ever took office, every government that ever sat, every judge that ever offered a decision will bow before the throne of Jesus Christ. That is why it is important, we say to our friends, that we let you know about this Jesus. That is why we are here to tell you of this Christ. This is not some child in the manger, infant of Mary, little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes, as if somehow or another, by dint of his divinity, he didn't cry, as somehow he was abnormal.

No, he was very normal, very real, but very different. Meekness and majesty, manhood and deity, in perfect harmony, the man who is God. So you cannot set aside my Christ, misagnostic, misagnostic, so easily he stands up to be reckoned with. He hounds you down the corridors of your days.

He niggles in your mind, and he tweaks at your conscience, and he stirs your emotions, and he stands up before you as one with whom you must reckon. That's very different, you see, from the average little, let's get Christmas over with and get on with the sales. Now, after this little outburst by the angel, it's hardly surprising—you say, a little outburst by you, never mind the angel. Well, it's no surprise that Mary then asks the inevitable question, How will this be? How will this be? She was pledged to be. You will be.

How will this be? It's not surprising. Among humans' conception, conception without insemination was unheard of. And it is clear—and this is wonderful, as we will see in a moment—it is clear that Mary is willing for this to happen as per the angel's directive, but the fact is, she cannot comprehend how this will be accomplished. And so she asks the question. And the angel's answer, once again, is absent any detail. The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So, then, the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God. In other words, the angel makes clear, absent any detailed information, that the birth will not come about by the ordinary method of human generation but by a totally unparalleled action of the Holy Spirit. Luke does not theorize about how conception, independent of a human being, could have taken place. He simply states it. Lenski, the Lutheran commentator, says, the conception was a miracle, and all who reject miracles will find some other way to interpret the angel's word.

And that's exactly true. People say, well, the miracle can't happen, therefore the virgin conception didn't happen, therefore we must explain it in some other terms. So if they want to retain it, they retain it with a new twist to it, or else they dismiss it completely.

And usually, under the disguise of science. And our friends think quickly to dismiss Christ again, and especially the notion of the virgin birth, say, well, science has disproved all that miraculous material. No, it hasn't. It hasn't, it won't, it couldn't, and it can't. Miracles are unprecedented events. Whatever the current fashions in philosophy or the revelations of opinion polls may suggest, it is important to affirm that science, based as it is, on the observation of precedents, can have nothing to say on the subject.

Science can only deal with material that can be produced and reproduced time and time again. But the unparalleled, unrepeatable, one-off event is beyond the ability of science to say anything sensible about it all. Now, there's a mystery to it, of course.

And some of us don't like mystery. But the fact is, human conception is a mystery. And our ability to analyze and describe the process of physical human conception in birth is more than matched by the awesome wonder every time a new person, an immortal soul, comes suddenly into existence. Now, what has science got to say about this? It can observe the event and pontificate, but it's got no answer.

It just is a bunch of questions. At the beginning, when the little guy comes or the little girl emerges, despite all we know about DNA and all these other things, the fact is that human conception is in itself a remarkable mystery. And both the arrival and the passing of life is touched by a transcendent mystery.

So if we can't grapple with it from a purely physical perspective to the degree that we're able to get our minds underneath it and totally comprehend it, why would we be surprised if we are left in the realm of mystery with the incarnation of God Almighty Himself, who chose us to appear in our time-space capsule in this most dramatic of ways? We who cannot penetrate that everyday miracle, says Lenski, should not feel aggrieved when the miracle of the incarnation is veiled in mystery for us, the divine record presents the facts and no more. And you read this, and you realize that neither God nor Gabriel demanded that Mary understand everything. And for those of you who are waiting to understand everything to become a Christian, I've got news for you. You will never understand everything. And the journey of Christianity is essentially faith seeking understanding, that it is not mindlessness, it is not the removal of the brain placed under the pew and then the embracing of the Christian message.

No, it is historical, it is rational, it is substantial. But ultimately, as Jesus said, God has chosen to keep this from the wise and the learned and to reveal it to little children. Some of us are too bright for our own good. What a tragedy to find out how dumb we really were on the wrong side of the equation in eternity.

Somebody would do us a great favor if we were to find out a little sooner, would they not? You know, people say there's nothing that John mentions concerning this, despite Luke's preoccupation with it, despite Matthew's record of it. The mystery is not present in John.

I disagree. I think the mystery is present in John. Let me turn you for a moment to John chapter 3 and tell you what I mean. In John chapter 3, we have the encounter of Jesus and Nicodemus. And Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, according to John 3 verse 2, and he says, Rabbi, we know you're a teacher who's come from God, and the reason we know you're a teacher is no one could perform the miraculous signs you're doing if God were not with him.

It's kind of a nice introduction and an expression of his own humble heart. He understands that God must be with him. He doesn't understand that for Nicodemus, God is with him in the person of Christ. And Jesus declared, I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again, or born from above. How can a man be born when he's old?

Nicodemus asked. Surely he cannot enter his second time into his mother's womb to be born? Jesus answered, I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he's born of water and the Spirit flesh gives birth to flesh, but Spirit gives birth to Spirit.

You shouldn't be surprised at my saying. You must be born from above. Think about the wind. It blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound.

You don't know where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. In other words, the mystery that attaches to the arrival of Christ is akin to the mystery that attaches to the bringing of a man or a woman to faith in the living God. And that in itself is the most immense of mysteries.

Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that there is an element of mystery in our Christian faith, but it's clearly not a mindless faith. You're listening to a study in Luke on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. Just like Luke, our desire at Truth for Life is to help you think through the truths of the Bible in an orderly and rational way to help you apply the teaching of the Bible to your daily life. We rely on your partnership to take this teaching throughout the world. And as we move toward the end of the year, your support is particularly important to help fund this ministry and enable Truth for Life to enter 2023 with the resources needed to press forward. So will you go online and make an end-of-year donation today?

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All of these designed to elevate your time with God. Request a copy of the book Be Thou My Vision when you give a generous donation to support the mission of Truth for Life at truthforlife.org slash donate. And to express our gratitude for all you make possible through your prayers and your giving, we've got a terrific collection of books that are available for you to purchase at our cost. You can browse the titles at truthforlife.org slash gifts. When you scroll through the selections you'll find a set of four prayer books for parents. These books contain gospel centered prayers that you can pray for your children all the way from birth to adulthood. There are prayers on hundreds of topics from their physical health to their character development, their friendships, their possible marriage, their faith in Christ. These are books you'll want to keep nearby and may want to give to new parents as a gift. Again, visit truthforlife.org slash gifts. I'm Bob Lapine. What can we learn from Mary's humble and brave response to Gabriel's message to her? Find out as you join us tomorrow for the conclusion of today's message, The Angel and the Virgin. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.