The Life of All Lives - Our Saviour Jesus - 3
The Annunciation to Mary (God's Proclamation to Mary through the Angel Gabriel)
In our study today we shall reflect upon the annunciation of the birth of Jesus Christ. Only Luke gives us a record of this event, in the first chapter of his ‘orderly account’ of the life of Christ.
One of the many remarkable things about Jesus is that we run into controversy even before he is born. I cannot think of any other person of whom that is true. It is as if God has deliberately placed a test of faith right at the very threshold of the gospel narrative and then says to us, “If you can’t take this, there is no point going any further.”
Ignoring later human elaboration, the Biblical account goes like this. Mary was a young girl who lived in Nazareth. She was a virgin. She was pledged to be married to a man called Joseph. She was visited by the angel Gabriel and told that she was to have a child without the intervention of a human father. She was to give him the name Jesus, and he was to be called the Son of the Most High. When Mary asked how this could be, she was told, “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.” Mary’s response was to say, “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.”
Christians humbly accept the truth of what is set down in Luke’s account, accepting without hesitation that ‘nothing is impossible with God’.
However, many are unable to accept that events unfolded as the angel said. In particular, they cannot accept the supernatural nature of the conception of the Lord Jesus. So, by one means or another, they shave off those elements of the account that are unacceptable to them. The angel told Mary that nothing is impossible with God. She believed the angel. These people think themselves wiser than the unsophisticated Mary, and in claiming to be wise, they become fools. It is interesting to notice that this unbelief never seems to stop at the virgin birth.
In days when there are strident claims being asserted about ‘a woman’s right to choose’ it is instructive to pay attention to Mary’s reaction to what was revealed to her. She was being told that she was to experience a pregnancy that she had not chosen to have. She was not even given a choice of name, but there was no protest, no appeal to her supposed “rights”, only humble, adoring submission to the God she recognised was sovereign and had every right to confer on her - without consultation - the incredible privilege of becoming the mother of the Saviour of the world.
Notice also that the story of Mary’s pregnancy is interwoven with that of Elizabeth who was 6 months pregnant when Mary was visited by the angel. It is striking that whilst Elizabeth’s pregnancy removed the disgrace of her childlessness, Mary’s risked disgrace; but the response marked by grace is always the same: “May it be to me as you have said.”
What does all this mean? Does it matter whether Mary was a virgin or not? It most certainly does!
First, the virgin birth was the means God used to unite full humanity and full deity in the Person of Jesus Christ. We may speculate that the God for whom nothing is impossible could have devised some other means. But it is impossible to think of any other route that would not have left a serious question mark over either His deity or His humanity. By the virgin birth, that essential truth is carefully preserved.
The heresies that troubled the Church in the first couple of centuries after Pentecost mostly related to either the true humanity or the true deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the New Testament answers them all. Modern liberal theories tend to be variations on old themes, and the answers are in the same place. Unbelief is neither novel nor imaginative.
Then also, the virgin birth of Christ tells us that salvation for sinful humanity could only be accomplished by the sovereign initiative of God, rather than from among its own ranks. Professor Donald MacLeod puts it like this: “The race needs a redeemer, but cannot itself produce one; not by its own decision or desire, not by the processes of education and civilisation, not as a precipitate of its own evolution. The redeemer must come from outside. Here, as elsewhere, ‘all things are of God.’”
Finally, we may say that the virgin birth was the means by which Christ was able to assume true humanity without simultaneously inheriting the entail of human sin that afflicts us all by virtue of our descent from Adam. This does not mean that the transmission of human sin only occurs through the father. The Bible does not teach such a thing. It simply means that through this break in the line of descent from Adam, God provided that the Lord Jesus should be free from the inherited sinful nature that would have barred him out from becoming our redeemer.
By reason of the virgin birth, the stream of guilt that passed down the whole race from Adam did not infect the Lord Jesus. He was ‘holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners.” However, whilst he did not inherit that guilt, he assumed it. As we read in 2 Corinthians 5: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
This statement helps us to understand why the things taught in the annunciation to Mary are foundational. What we need is righteousness. That is an impossible goal for us to attain by human effort, no matter how sustained it may be. God’s solution was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah 700 hundred years before these events took place. “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”
And so it is possible for a glorious exchange to take place. Our guilt has been borne by Christ on the cross; and his righteousness has been imputed to us. That righteousness is the very ‘righteousness of God’, imparted justly and freely by sovereign grace to repentant sinners who are united to Christ by faith.