There are some people who try to make Christianity more palatable by taking away the supernatural elements, things like prophecies or miracles or angels, even the virgin birth.
Today on Truth for Life we'll find out why a Christianity devoid of miracles isn't more believable, it's ultimately meaningless. Alistair Begg is teaching from chapter 2 in Luke's Gospel. Well, this morning we sought to deal with the first five verses, leaving behind, in the section that we read, verses 6 and 7. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth, and she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. Now, of course, we recognize that behind the straightforward statement that we have just read in those verses, there is a quite staggering announcement which is in your Bible probably open to you.
If not, you'll just need to turn back one page. And that is the section that begins at the twenty-sixth verse, beginning in the sixth month. The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David, and this angel has come and has greeted her. You immediately find that when you move from the fourth verse of the fifth verse of chapter 1, those sights and sounds may, on first reading, provide—at least for some of us, the cynics among us—we may find ourselves saying, These provide more of a basis for curiosity than they provide a basis for certainty. Because the whole balance of chapter 1, reading into chapter 2, concerns these supernatural things.
Let me just point it out to you. In verse 15 of chapter 1, introducing the Lord, and you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth. For he will be great before the Lord. He mustn't drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. When you go to the thirty-fifth verse and the angel answered her, when she says—and we'll come back to this—"How is all this supposed to happen?" the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Supernatural. Verse 41. In the visit between Mary and Elizabeth, entering the house of Zechariah, she greets Elizabeth, and when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and he began to have this amazing conversation. And the same thing is true in verse 67.
I'm simply highlighting, in each of these four incidents, the drama that unfolds. And his father, that is, Zechariah, was filled with the Holy Spirit, and he prophesied. The commentator Wilcock, in a wonderful sentence, says, when we read this, it's as though we arrived at an international airport to find all of the signs in Hebrew. Because in actual fact, what we're introduced to is the world of the Jew. We are introduced to an entirely Jewish context. Admittedly, in chapter 2 we are considering Caesar Augustus and the impact of the Roman Empire, but in the balance of chapter 1 and leading from it there into chapter 2, the environment is Jewish.
And if we think about it, it should be Jewish. The environment is the environment of the Old Testament. And in each of the incidents that are recorded for us as Luke goes into his gospel, Luke is making it absolutely clear that there was, at this time, a small group of faithful folks who had been reading their Bibles, who had reflected on the silence of the intertestamental period, and who now were keenly anticipating that God was going to break into their environment in a way that had never happened before and would never happen again. Now, when you realize that this is the case, you realize that from one perspective the narrative immediately appears to be almost so remote as to be conceivably irrelevant, and it appears so dramatically supernatural as to be quite incredible—i.e., beyond belief. And of course, you know that there are those who do what I do, and they have concluded a long time ago when they were theological students that the whole thing is actually beyond belief.
And so they don't believe it themselves, and they don't teach it to anybody else. And they decided that the best way that they can make it acceptable to everybody is to make it as believable as possible, and the way to make it as believable as possible is to get anything that is supernatural out of it and to get anything that smacks of Judaism out of it as fast as you possibly can. But no, no, Luke doesn't do that. Luke offers these events not as poetical speculation but as pure history.
The reason I belabor this is because I want you to understand this. What we said this morning was that Luke is operating as a historian. You go back to chapter 1, and you come to this narrative, which is full of Jewish elements, and it is full of supernaturalism. The temptation is to say, Oh, he must only have started to operate as a historian in chapter 2, because he clearly wasn't in chapter 1.
No, he was operating as a historian from the very beginning. And so when he reports these events, he reports them not as imaginative stories or poetic speculation, but he reports them as they are real history. These things really happen, says Luke, and you have my credibility to deal with insofar as I have introduced you to these things and in that way.
All right? Whether we like it or not, the story of Jesus is filled with angels, with predictions, with miracles. And all this angelic stuff and all this supernatural stuff is an intrinsic part of the gospel. It's not superfluous. It's not supplemental. It is foundational.
It is central. It is, as I say, intrinsic to it. And we ought to understand it to be so, because after all, the story of the gospel is supernatural in its entirety. It is the story of the Creator of the universe breaking into time, revealing himself as Savior and as King. And the Jewishness of it ought to be obvious to us, because it was at this time and in this place and in this way that God chose to come. He came to his own, and his own received him not.
It's as many as received him. To them he gave power to become the children of God, even to those who believed in his name. The good news that reaches out to the entire world that breaks the boundaries of the nations is news that was delivered in the crucible of Judaism. And that's why, when you read the opening chapter of Luke, it's Jewish.
It should be Jewish. And that's why, when a Gentile in the twenty-first century turns to a book that is essentially Jewish concerning the first century, they're going to need help—they're going to need your help—to make sure that they understand that what Luke has written here, he affirms not as a speculative theory, not as a philosophy, not as an idea, not as a religion to be introduced, but as factual events which took place in a moment in time. So when we read that she brought forth her firstborn son and she laid him in a manger, it's because she did. And when we read that what was conceived in her was by the Holy Spirit, it's because it was.
You can't do keyhole surgery on the Bible. The doctrine of the virgin birth is not like your appendix that apparently we can remove without it having a detrimental impact on the rest of our physical being. The doctrine of the virgin birth is at the very heart and core of the Christian message. Christianity is actually both irrelevant and ultimately meaningless, apart from the almighty, miraculous intervention of God in time.
The story of Christianity has no basis, it has no substance, it has no relevance, it ultimately has no meaning at all. And God comes to meet us not at the top of the towers that we have created on the strength of our investigation or our mysticism, but he comes now to meet us in a cattle shed in Bethlehem. He comes to meet us on a Roman cross in Calvary. He comes to meet us in the extremity of our individual lives. Now, I actually have a very long introduction, and I just had two observations. First of all, to note that in verses 6 and 7, which are really our verses, we have the record of what is a straightforward arrival. A straightforward arrival. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth, and she gave birth.
That's pretty straightforward. Many of us have been around for that kind of thing, and Joseph was there, admittedly in the company of an interesting group of characters—not all of them Homo sapiens. Because we're told that there was actually no place for them to be secured in the normal accommodations that would have been represented at the time. Presumably, the registration process had drawn many more people than they had anticipated, and those who were not the early birds would not be able to have access to the best accommodations. And although we might think that any meaningful society would have made room for a lady in extremity like this, apparently that was not the case. There was no room for Jesus to be born.
That, of course, gives us an opportunity to preach a whole run of sermons, which I will leave for you to preach. But it is of interest, is it not, that many in Bethlehem miss the whole event because of their response, just as many in the city of Cleveland will miss the whole event once again as we consider the coming of Jesus, because they basically have no room for a consideration of Christ. So he's born in a stable. He's born where animals were kept. In the birth of Jesus, the Son of God became Son of Man. In his birth, he who was rich, for our sakes, became poor, that we, through his poverty, might become rich.
We don't really need to do too much with that. It is a straightforward arrival. It is as we said this morning, not the birth of Jesus, which is so remarkable, but the conception of Jesus, which is remarkable.
And to that we turn as our second and final point. Because if you have a straightforward arrival recorded in verses 6 and 7, you have a staggering announcement that comes back in chapter 1 and beginning in verse 26. And we've looked at this already, and the arrival of the angel. The angel is dispatched in order to make sense of what is going on. Without the angel to actually speak, then all that they would be left with would be conjecture. Verse 28. He came to her and said, Greetings, O favored one! The LORD is with you. So far, so good. But, verse 29, she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.
That's fair enough, isn't it? You get an angelic visitation, says, The LORD is with you. So she says, Wow, I wonder just exactly what that means. So verse 30, the angel said to her, Don't be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. She's going to be entrusted with the privilege of bearing this child. And in verse 31, Behold, you will conceive in your womb, and you'll bear a son, and you will call his name Jesus. He will be great. He 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, and of his kingdom there will be no end. Mary doesn't seem to be staggered by any of that. What's the question she asks? No, verse 34, she asks the how question.
How? How will this be? Now, of course, the answer would have been, Well, you know, you get married, you have a baby. But no, that's not the answer. How will this be, since I am a virgin?
I can't have a baby. So it's a sensible question. It's the only realistic question, isn't it? And here we are at the very heart of the Christian story. Answer, verse 35, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. This, again, is very, very Jewish.
We don't have time to work our way back through it, but, for example, you will remember that in the Old Testament, classically, in the wanderings of the children of Israel, God led them by a pillar of fire and by a pillar of cloud. How is this going to happen? Well, God is going to do this. You will be overshadowed, and the child that will be born will be called holy.
In other words, the conception is going to be supernatural. And in his humanity, he will be revealed not only as divine but also as holy. Again, that is a very Old Testament statement. And when Paul picks it up, when he writes—remember, in the Gospels he's revealed, in the epistles he's explained. You remember in Galatians and in chapter 4, when Paul is working through the theology of the incarnation, he says in Galatians 4, but when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. He is explaining just exactly what has happened and why it has happened. He's pointing out the fact that it was absolutely necessary for the Redeemer to be born of a woman so that he should be of the same nature as those whom he came to save—man dying for man. And it was equally imperative that the Redeemer should be perfectly holy, because no sinful person could ever affect reconciliation for the sins of others. That's why you have cur des homo, the explanation that he had to be God, he had to be man.
And as the early Christians hammered out the implications of this, they came to the convictions that are then affirmed for us in the early creeds, identifying the wonder of it all, bowing before the mystery of it all, unprepared to step back from the clarity of it all, and adopting and affirming the fact that he is very God and very man. And all of this is unfolding here in, of all places, a stable in a backwater province of the Middle East, to a slip of a girl and her betrothed, a fellow by the name of Joseph. Do you have a problem with the idea that God would supernaturally invade? I wonder. I'm not going to say that it's the easiest thing that you have to deal with in the Bible, but I agree with my friend David Robertson when he says, If human beings can manufacture a situation whereby a woman can become pregnant without the necessity of sexual intercourse, why should we consider it impossible for the Almighty God to do so?
Right? But people say it can't be, because virgin births don't happen. And since virgin births don't happen, this one didn't happen. End of conversation.
That's how it goes. Since the days of David Hume, that's how he dealt with miracles. He was a Scotsman. He didn't like the idea of miracles.
And so he just decided that there weren't any miracles, and he wouldn't ever have to deal with them. Well, the argument is circular, isn't it? Is our argument circular? Well, it may be in the way we present it, but in actual fact, what does the Christian do? Well, this is what we need to do, and I'll leave this with you as we draw things to a close. What we're doing is we're starting from the evidence as it is presented to us in the Bible.
Okay? So we read the Bible, and we start off, and we discover that a man by the name of Luke says, I'm telling you, this really happened. We then read the Bible, and we apply the same objectivity and selectivity to the understanding of the text as we do to the reading of any other genre of literature. In other words, there is no special way to read the Bible. There is a special help that is promised by the Holy Spirit, but there is no peculiar way to read the Bible. We're supposed to read the Bible and discover where verbs are and adjectives are and so on. We read it in its context. And as we read it, we are confronted, then, by the emergence of this Jesus of Nazareth, and we're forced to say, How do we account for this? What is the most probable explanation?
And then, on the strength of what appears to be the most probable explanation, we then consider the various elements in it. And for one, I don't believe that it is in congress in the slightest that the Almighty God should both enter as well as exit the world in an entirely supernatural way. In fact, it surely would be bizarre if the Almighty Creator of the universe did not both arrive and depart in a way that made mere mortals scratch their heads and say, Wow!
I've never seen anything like that before. And then the work of the Holy Spirit, in illumining the page to us and bringing it home to our understanding, opening our eyes to its truth, showing us not only that it happened but why it happened, not only that he is the one promised from all of eternity but that the promise has been fulfilled in his death and in his resurrection, and then affirming for us the absolute necessity of our responding to that in repentance and in faith. In other words, the work of conversion is the work of God.
The God who said to Nicodemus, a religious guy, you know, you've got a lot of really good questions, but I'm gonna tell you something. Unless a man is born again or born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. In other words, it's gonna take a supernatural invasion of God into the life of a man to bring them to living faith, along the lines of the supernatural invasion of God into the womb of Mary in order to bring to us the Redeemer, who provides the salvation which the Bible affirms each of us so desperately requires. Every transformed heart and life is ultimately a supernatural, miraculous event. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. Here at Truth for Life, we know that life can sometimes feel overwhelming. It can also feel underwhelming.
It's not unusual to get caught up in the monotony of the daily routines we're in and begin to feel like life has no significance or no purpose. Well, today we want to recommend to you a book that can help you remember that God works in the insignificant and boring details of life as well as in life's major events. The book is titled Every Moment Holy. This is a newly released third volume in this popular series, all with the same title. Every Moment Holy Volume 3 is a collection of short, thoughtful prayers designed to help you slow down, reflect, and recognize the presence of God, even in the small things that are often overlooked.
And it's a way to turn daily routines into moments of connection and gratitude. Ask for your copy of Every Moment Holy Volume 3. When you donate to support the ministry of Truth for Life, go to truthforlife.org slash donate. And by the way, next week our offices will be closed as we celebrate Christmas with our families. So if you need to reach us by phone to request a book or to make a year-end donation, be sure to do that before 5 p.m. Eastern Time this Friday, December 20th. Our number is 888-588-7884. Thanks for joining us today. Tomorrow we'll find out why when the angels announced the arrival of the Messiah, they chose shepherds as their audience. I hope you can join us. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
