Thursday, December 10, 2009
The Child Mary Delivered
12.10.09
J.A. Matteson
“And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name Jesus.” Luke 1:31
The earthy life and ministry of Jesus Christ was bookended by two remarkable pronouncements; the initial being to Mary, “And behold, you will conceive….” and the final being “It is finished!” The full weight of the first pronouncement was to give fulfillment to the last declaration uttered by our Lord as He hung on the cross. The miracle of the incarnation defies comprehension; not that it is unintelligible, but that understanding it escapes the human capacity to fully grasp its spender, for as the Apostle discloses, “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him” (Col. 1:16). And in regard to this statement consider this: the eternal God of glory condescend into the likeness man, walking among those He created, conversing, sleeping, and eating with them.
The Ancient of Days who set in the heavens the Pleiades, Orion’s Belt, and the Milky Way, and Who set the foundations of the earth, governing over all that dwell upon it and upholding it by the power of His Word, Who knows the essence and design of the subatomic molecule, Who drafted the chemist’s periodic table of natural elements, Who designed the laws of physics responsible for bringing to earth the leaf from an oak tree in Autumn, Who is the Author of light and life and all knowledge, things of the natural and spiritual order, He possess a perfect knowledge of all things past in what is called history, Who knows perfectly the present and is intimately acquainted with the heart of man, familiar with all his ways; Who knows the future plainly and His knowledge of all things exceeds merely what has been, is, or will be, but includes every possible combination of things that might have been, or could be in the present but will not be, and future things that could be but by His decree will not come to pass. He is also completely familiar with all secondary causes, maintaining governance over their effects to the satisfaction of His eternal decrees. And so as mother and father gazed into the face of the little babe lying in the feed trough intended for beasts they unwittingly peered directly into the eyes of the unfathomable depths of eternity Himself, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God” (Ps. 90:2).
In our day some champion the naturalist position which rejects the virgin birth out of hand, suggesting it is a mere human contrivance, a biological impossibility and, thus, an absurdity. These voices of what is called “reason” deny the supernatural, eliminating the possibility of miracles. These same opponents, however, are often quick to acknowledge that science is correct in noting that the universe is not an eternal system, and in fact has been shown to have a beginning. The irony is that the opponents to the virgin birth appear to have no problem accepting the proposition that all the matter which makes up the universe came into being from a predicate state of nothingness, yet they insist on a natural first cause, denying a supernatural one, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). A state of nothing is impossible for the human mind to grasp because whenever our minds think of nothing we by nature think of something, such as an empty space of total blackness which is not nothing but something, because it has been described, for nothing to truly be nothing it must be indescribable, there being nothing to describe. There exists therefore an philosophical inconsistency by the opponents of the virgin birth who hold to the birth of the universe from nothing and who deny the birth of the Lord of glory in the womb of a virgin, to this end the Scripture is explicit, “For with God nothing will be impossible” (Lk. 1:37).
And the angel announced to Mary that His name would be Jesus, which means Yahweh is salvation. The eternal plan of salvation initiated in the Garden of Eden through the declaration of the Lord to the serpent found its fulfillment on a roman cross when the Son of God declared emphatically to the whole of creation, “It is finished!”, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ bore witness to the Father’s acceptance of the atoning sacrifice of His only begotten Son. It was into this Face—the very face of God—that Mary and Joseph gazed. The child Mary delivered would not only deliver her from the bondage and penalty of sin, but also all who might call upon His name by faith.
Copyright (c) 2009 Immutable Word Ministries (”…the word of our God stands forever.” Isa. 40:8).
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