EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR
3/5/2026 8:14 AM
My
Worship Time
Focus: PT-2 Intro
to “The Virgin Birth: A Divine Miracle”
Bible
Reading & Meditation Reference:
Luke
1:34-38
Message of the verses: 34
And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
35 And the angel answered her, "The
Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow
you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. 36 And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her
old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was
called barren. 37 For nothing will be
impossible with God." 38 And Mary
said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your
word.” And the angel departed from her.” (ESV)
I begin where I left off this morning: “Highlighting the crucial, indispensable role
of the doctrine of the virgin birth John M. Frame writes:
“The
consistency of this doctrine with other Christian truth is important to its
usefulness and, indeed, to its credibility.
For Matthew and Luke the chief importance of the event seems to be that
it calls to mind (as a ‘sign,’ Isa. 7:14) the great OT promises of salvation
through supernaturally born deliverers, while going far beyond them, showing
that God’s final deliverance has come.
But one can also go beyond the specific concerns of Matthew and Luke and
see that the virgin birth is fully consistent with the whole range of biblical
doctrine. For example, the virgin birth
is important because of : (1) The doctrine of Scripture. If Scripture errs here, then why should we
trust its claims about other supernatural events, such as the resurrection? (2)
The deity of Christ. While we cannot say
dogmatically that God could enter the world only through a virgin birth, surely
the incarnation is a supernatural event if it is anything. To eliminate the supernatural from this event
is inevitably to compromise the divine dimension of it. (3) The humanity of
Christ. This was the important thing to
Ignatius and the 2d-century fathers. Jesus was really born; he really
became one of us. (4) The nature of grace.
The birth of Christ, in which the initiative and power are all of God,
is an apt picture of God’s saving grace in general of which is a part. It teaches us that salvation is by God’s act,
not our human effort. The birth of Jesus
is like our new birth, which is also by the Holy Spirit; it is a new creation
(2 Cor. 5:17). (‘Virgin Birth of Jesus,’
in The Concise Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell, abridged by Peter Toon
[Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991], 540, emphasis in original.)
Now if you want to look more into
this subject you can see John MacArthur’s book Nothing But The Truth.
“Though fully revealed in the New
Testament, the virgin birth is foreshadowed in the Old. In Genesis 3:15, God declared that the seed
of the woman (Christ) would crush Satan’s head.
Psalm 2 predicts that at a specific time (‘today’; v. 7) the eternal
second person of the Trinity would be born into the world. The only way for that to happen, as
previously noted, would be through a virgin birth. Isaiah 7:14 records the startling prediction
that ‘a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name
Immanuel’ (God with us’ [Matthew 1:23]). Some translations render the
Hebrew word alma (‘virgin’) ‘young woman.’ But the common, everyday occurrences of a
young woman becoming pregnant in the normal manner could hardly constitute the
sign from the Lord promised earlier in verse 14. Further, ‘There is no instance where it can
be proved that alma designates a young woman who is not a virgin’ (R.
Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr., and Bruce K. Waltke, eds., The Theological
Workbook of the Old Testament [Chicago:
Moody, 1980] s. v., ‘alma’).
Noted Old Testament scholar Edward J. Young agrees: ‘We may confidently
assert that the word’ almah is never employed of a married woman’ (The
Book of Isaiah [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985], 1:287). Matthew’s inspired translation of Isaiah’s
prophecy places the issue beyond doubt; it translates alma using the
Greek word parthenos, which can only mean ‘virgin’ (Matt. 1:23; cf. 1
Cor. 7:28, 34, 36-38; 2 Cor. 11:2) The
Septuagint (an ancient translation of the Old Testament into Greek) also uses parthenos
to translate alma.
“Despite the virgin birth’s solid
biblical foundation, there have always been false teachers, purveyors of ‘doctrines
of demons’ (1 Tim. 4:1) who, for the purpose of rejecting the deity of
Jesus, deny it. In John 8:41, the Jewish
leaders scornfully said to Jesus, ‘We were not born of fornication,’ thus
implying that He was. Later Jewish
writings propagated the blasphemous lie that Jesus’ real father was a Roman
soldier who slept with Mary. Others
throughout history have maintained that Jesus was the natural son of Joseph and
Mary, ignoring the Bible’s explicit statement that Joseph ‘kept [Mary] a
virgin until she gave birth to a Son (Matt. 1:25). The biblical evidence clearly gives the
lie to any teaching that denies the virgin birth.
“This passage may be summarized
under five points: Mary’s supplication,
God’s strategy, God’s sign, God’s sovereignty, and Mary’s submission.”
3/5/2026
8:54 PM
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