Luke’s Christmas Story
Luke 1:1-38
God Appears to Mary
Acts 11: 18 (NLT)
In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you."
29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. 31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32 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, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."
34 "How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?" 35 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. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. 37 For nothing is impossible with God." 38 "I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered. "May it be to me as you have said." Then the angel left her. Luke 1:26-38 (NIV)
Pastor’s Thoughts
There is no more famous passage in the entire Bible than this one.
Talk show host Larry King once said that if someone could prove to him that Mary was actually a virgin that he would believe that Jesus is God.
Personally I do spend of a lot of time trying to reconcile what we know about the world from history and science with what we read in the Bible. Just taking hard to believe things I read in the Bible as accurate without thinking them through as completely as possible is foreign to me. There’s something in me that wants to know what’s true, to make sure I’m getting things as right as I possibly can. I am absolutely convinced that any truth about God will stand up to the most rigorous scrutiny.
My method of doing this has been to check out the reliability of the Bible from a number of angles, then to decide that what the biblical authors wrote can be trusted, and finally to conclude that what they wrote means exactly what they intended it mean and then I go from there.
In the case of the virgin conception (not birth) I have to conclude simply that the account we have above is accurate, especially in light of Monday’s reading.
One of the things that helped me early on to believe in the virgin conception is that the Gospels simply mention it as a fact and do not find the need to use it as a proof of Jesus’ deity. It’s just there along with all the other details. It seems to me that there no compelling reason that the Son of Man had to be conceived that way. The documents simply say that’s how it happened.
I still wonder how Joseph felt. Yet, contradictory as it is to what I wrote above, I feel absolutely certain that I would just have believed Mary stuck by her even without an angel showing up. So there is a place in me that just trusts in the most important of circumstances.
Scientists and theologians have come to recognize that "our galaxy, comprising a hundred billion stars, is one part of a universe that includes immense superstructures containing thousands of galaxies" and this is unexplainable without "a God whose creative ability is much larger than we could ever imagine before, a God who is easily capable of holding 10 to the 500th power of universes in His hand." A small part of this is the creation of laws of physics and nature. Thus we must preceive God as the Primary Source and the fundamental laws of physics and nature as secondary. CT, Dec 2010, p 47f. It is therefore a piece of cake for God, who made man to start with, to make and place a human fetus in Mary's womb. And He might just do this so that the "Son of the Most High, Who will reign over the house of Jacob forever and His kingdom will never end" would not be born with the sinful nature of all human father's.
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