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THE 24-DAY MIRACLE #2
"BEHOLD! A VIRGIN SHALL CONCEIVE"
It's one of the shortest little pieces in all of Handel's
Messiah. Song #8, that is. It's a recitative for the alto soloist, and
it runs only about 35 seconds. Here's the title — and it's almost the
whole song. "Behold! A Virgin Shall Conceive."
That's taken from two passages of Scripture. Isaiah 7:14, and then Matthew
chapter one, which is basically quoting back from Isaiah. But here's the
whole verse as written by this Old Testament prophet some 700 years before
a baby Boy in Bethlehem was given the name Jesus.
"Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin
shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel."
In Matthew, the Bible writer adds the footnote after "Immanuel":
" . . . which being interpreted is, God with us."
There's a very fundamental question facing us today
as we listen to this song and as we ponder the mysteries of what Christians
call the Incarnation. Here it is — and any street-wise nine-year-old these
days can point us to the dilemma. Virgins don't conceive. Babies arrive
on this planet according to a certain process, and they don't come at
all to persons in a state of virginity. Everybody today knows this, and
everybody in the year 4 B.C. knew it too. If you stay right here in Matthew
chapter one and read in verses 18 and 19, you discover that Joseph, Mary's
fiancé, knew this. Virgins don't conceive. They just don't. There's
a certain IF-THEN process that governs this process of pregnancy and childbirth,
and if his beloved Mary was pregnant, then he and the whole world knew
what must have happened earlier.
We can really ask two tough questions here about one hundred thousand
Tuesdays after the fact. First of all, why would God do things this way?
Why a virgin? And then secondly — putting it simply — do we believe it?
Do we buy this once-in-a-lifetime story? Does it matter?
If we stay with Isaiah, we discover at least part of God's motivation
immediately. "The Lord Himself shall give you a sign." Here's
a Baby going to be born, and if we accept the Word of God as truth, it's
born in a different way than all other babies. I wasn't born this way,
and neither were you, and neither are our children. But one Baby, if the
Bible is telling the truth, was born of a virgin. Just this one time a
virgin did conceive. Is that a sign to us? Friend, let me tell you right
now: I accept it as being one.
In both the Matthew and Luke accounts of this miracle, we discover even
more. The virgin Mary didn't just conceive all by herself; the Word of
God tells us that the Holy Spirit moved upon her. The Holy Spirit was
in a very real sense the Father of this Child. Jesus Christ, born as a
Baby with real flesh and blood and a newborn's wrinkled skin and all the
rest, was at the same moment a divine Being. He was God there in that
manger; He was conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Now friend, the theology of this is much too deep to solve today or even
if we spent the rest of the Christmas season on it. But I believe the
Bible when it tells us that a virgin conceived . . . and that this is
a miracle designed to be a sign to us, to give us confidence that God
has intervened on this planet. We can know that this was a different birth,
that something otherworldly took place in Bethlehem.
But now to the second question. And people are asking it bluntly these
days: do you believe it? Do you buy this story? We all have brains, the
critics say. We've all been to biology class. We've all picked up the
facts of life from somewhere. We all know that virgins don't conceive;
they just don't. And then they ask: why in the world would you believe
that it happened this way here?
You've probably heard of the name Bishop John Shelby Spong, a theologian
who's been in the news lately. He makes a couple of startling assertions.
Number one, he says, Jesus' mother, Mary, was not a virgin. No way. Number
two, in his opinion, the marriage feast at Cana — you remember, where
Jesus turned water into wine — he claims that was Jesus' own wedding.
Jesus Himself got married that day. In his book, Rescuing the Bible From
Fundamentalism, he also asserts that the Apostle Paul was a homosexual,
so we have here a trilogy of challenges to the Christian faith.
But there's a growing army who are red-inking the Virgin Birth out of
their Bibles. Russell Shorto, writing for the secular magazine GQ, short
for Gentlemen's Quarterly, did a major piece in June of 1994, reporting
on the Jesus Seminar. And he poses the question in this article which,
very appropriately, is entitled "Crossfire."
"What happens when some of the world's leading
scholars of Christianity agree that the man behind the religion was just
a man?" He goes on: "He wasn't born in Bethlehem (Nazareth is
more likely), His mother wasn't a virgin, He didn't come back from the
dead, and He never fancied Himself a divine being."
This panel of theologians known as the Jesus Seminar
— we've mentioned them before — have essentially dismissed approximately
80% of everything Jesus Christ ever said. And here as reported by this
writer in GQ, they eliminate the virgin birth, the resurrection, and just
about everything else.
Well, friend, what do we do with this? Can we trust our own Bibles?
The critics pick apart Isaiah 7:14, which we just quoted, and they correctly
point out that the Hebrew word ‘almah is uncertain in its meaning, but
that it generally means "young woman," with the specific connotation
of being able to bear a child, sexually mature. The Hebrew word bethulah,
which Isaiah could easily have used and didn't, is much more precise in
meaning "virgin."
However, in the New Testament, Matthew 1:23, where the Bible writer Matthew
quotes from Isaiah, what Greek word does he use? Here it is: parthenos,
which means very strictly: "virgin" with the full and explicit
definition of sexual purity that we understand today. Of course, the critics
and the Bible scholars in this Jesus Seminar group and others like it
immediately suggest that Matthew simply compounds what they call the mis-translation
of Isaiah. "Isaiah simply meant ‘young woman,'" they conclude,
and Matthew turned an error into a full-fledged pillar of the Christian
faith. "And, lo, a tradition was born," scoffs one.
But you know, friend, I don't believe that argument holds up . . . and
all you have to do is to read the rest of Matthew chapter one or Luke
chapter one. In Matthew you don't just have the word "virgin"
there in verse 23. Verse 18 says explicitly:
"[Jesus'] mother Mary was pledged to be
married to Joseph, BUT BEFORE THEY CAME TOGETHER, she was found to be
with child through the Holy Spirit." Verse 20, and this is God's
own messenger angel speaking: "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid
to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from
the Holy Spirit." Verse 25: "He [Joseph] had no union with her
until she gave birth to a Son."
If you study the parallel passage in Luke chapter one,
this great Bible writer actually quotes Mary's conversation with the angel
Gabriel. And in verse 34, Mary herself asks:
"How will this be . . . since I am a virgin?"
"How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" is how the more
subdued King James Version puts it.
And then the same answer comes back again, upholding
this great Bible truth. Luke 1:35, and let's stay with the beauty of the
King James:
"And the angel answered and said unto her,
The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall
overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of
thee shall be called the Son of God."
Well, friend, there you have it. And you and I have
a couple of choices. We can say to ourselves and to each other, "There's
no such thing as miracles. Babies aren't born of virgins; that's never
happened, we've never seen it happen, and that's the end of it."
We could decide that even God Himself doesn't have the power to cause
this to take place, as a sign or as a miracle, or so that He Himself would
be the Father of this Baby or for any other reason.
Keep in mind, though, that we would have to accept some other things while
rejecting the Virgin Birth. Out with the Virgin Birth and IN with the
realization, then, that Matthew chapter one contains one, two, three,
four blatant lies. Four out-and-out falsehoods. In Luke chapter one, go
through and count them for yourself. Four more lies . . . and one of them
spoken by Mary, the mother of Jesus. "How can this be, since I'm
a virgin?"
In his book The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey recalls an TV episode
of Thirtysomething, where a character named Michael argues with his wife
at Christmastime:
"Do you really believe an angel appeared
to some teenage girl who then got pregnant without ever having sex and
traveled on horseback to Bethlehem where she spent the night in a barn
and had a baby who turned out to be the Savior of the world?"
End of quote. End of diatribe. And do you know something,
friend? That's exactly what I do believe. I want to believe my Bible;
I want Jesus Christ to be "(quote) that holy Thing." Here on
December 11, 2001, I'd gladly and willingly and openly stake my life,
my eternal life, on that exact scenario. Here's the 35-second song which
is our greatest hope today.
"Behold! A Virgin Shall Conceive." :35
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