A Sermon on Luke 1:26-38 “I Believe What?”
This transcript of a sermon on Luke 1:26-38 has been lightly edited for ease of reading.
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If you have your Bibles, please open them with me to the Gospel of Luke. We are in Luke chapter 1, and we will begin our study today in verse 26 through 38.
Did everybody get a handout of the Chalcedonian definition? Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you proclaim that here today. I’m just going to read the Chalcedonian definition, and since it is such a long quote, I wanted you to have it there to be able to follow along.
I also do want to say that we’re going to dabble our toes into some deep waters once again today, and so please be aware of that. I’ll try to simplify us and bring us back into the shallow end as much as I can, but we are covering some deep things today, so I wanted you to be aware before we started.
But today we are going to look at that line that we just read, that we just professed together a few moments ago, that “I believe that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary,” or as the title says, “I believe what?” So beginning in verse 26 of Luke chapter 1,
“In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, to a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, Greetings, you who are highly favored, the Lord is with you.
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be, but the angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 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, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever. His kingdom will never end. How will this be, Mary asked, since I am a virgin? 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. 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, for nothing is impossible with God. I am the Lord’s servant, Mary answered.
May it be to me as you have said. Then the angel left her.”
Let’s pray.
Father above, we do ask today for clarity, for understanding as we study your word and as we look into this doctrine, into this miracle. Clarity because our finite minds cannot fully comprehend what you have done in salvation, and understanding because our salvation is as dependent upon this miracle as it is the resurrection. May we grow in our love and trust as we consider Jesus’ virgin birth, for it is in his name that we pray. Amen.
INTRODUCTION
So last week we looked at Jesus’ title as the Messiah or the Christ. We looked at his role as the Son of God, and we were reminded that he is our Lord.
He has rulership and reign over the life of all of creation and especially his people. And now we’re going to move into some specifics that the Creed focuses on regarding the life of Jesus, the work of Jesus, and how these things apply to our salvation. And regarding these specific biographical details of Jesus’ life, the Creed is not afraid of dealing almost immediately with a difficult yet important doctrine, the doctrine of Jesus’ virgin birth.
The life and work of Jesus really hinge on two miracles, this miracle that we’ll study today and the miracle of the resurrection. And because these miracles are so important to the work of Jesus and to our salvation, they are also the two most attacked, doubted, and rejected miracles in the life of Jesus.
Some theologians are trying to balance a naturalistic worldview and the goodness of salvation in Jesus, ultimately rejecting the inspiration of the Word of God. They have gone so far as to say that the early church created an “entry myth” and an “exit myth” for Jesus in order to convince the world that a mere human being was truly God as well.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says that if you and I are pursuing righteousness and the resurrection is false, then we are fools. And with far less authority than the Apostle Paul, I would add if the virgin birth is a myth, we are fools as well. You and I ultimately have to accept the on faith in God’s inspired Word.
God’s Word is our lifeline. It is the revelation of the salvation of God. And in that Word, he has revealed to us that Jesus was born of a virgin.
If the Bible is not the inspired Word of God, then we’re wasting our time. But if it is, and it is, then all of humanity, including you and I, are required to respond to what is written. And I point this out because I cannot give you definitive proof of the virgin birth.
I can point you to answers to objections, which we will do. We will briefly look at three objections, which is where some of the deep waters come from. But ultimately, you and I have to decide, like Abraham.
Abraham believed God, we’re told in Genesis 15 and 6. But you and I have to decide, will we believe God or will we not? Because our hope, our faith is not in logic. It’s not in science. It is in God.
And you either believe God or you don’t. As we think about the virgin birth today, we are going to see that both his humanity and his divinity are dependent upon the virgin birth. And then we’ll cover three common objections.
THE DUAL NATURE OF JESUS
First, the dual nature of Jesus. The virgin birth is not only a difficult miracle, it is also the root, the foundation of a difficult doctrine. And that doctrine is the hypostatic union.
The hypostatic union is the doctrine that Jesus has two distinct natures, one divine, one human. And these two distinct natures are joined together in one person, that person that we know as Jesus, the Christ. The Bible teaches this.
And in 451, a summary of this doctrine was developed at the Council of Chalcedon. You have the summary there before you called the Chalcedonian definition. And so I’m going to read this. I’m going to encourage each of you to take this and to study this definition in your free time, because we’re only really going to cover a brief part of it. But I wanted to read the whole thing.
“Therefore, following the Holy Fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in the Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body, of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood, like us in all respects apart from sin, as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood, begotten for us men and for our salvation of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, recognized in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.
The distinction of nature is being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and only begotten, God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ, even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us and the creed of the fathers, as an aside which you and I are studying now, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.”
All right, everybody with me so far? All right, as I mentioned, please take some time to study, to meditate upon the Chalcedonian definition. Realize that when you and I talk about the church fathers, we are talking about the men who wrote the Chalcedonian definition, but when they are talking about the church fathers, they are talking about men who came one to two hundred years previous to them, and even those men declared that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he was truly God and that he was truly divine.
I want us to look at these four negative statements that are right there in the middle that I believe might be in italics in your copy. If they’re not there in italics in mine, so I’m good to go. But he says that these two natures exist in these four negative states, and the first one is that they exist without confusion.
When we say that God has joined two natures together, we are not saying that he has mixed these two natures together to form a new thing. He has not taken blue and yellow and mixed them together to be green. These two natures do not confuse with each other.
They do not mix with each other. They are two distinct, unmixed natures existing together in one single person.
The natures also exist without change. Jesus is still fully and truly God. He did not cease to be God in order to become the savior of the world. He is the second person of the Trinity who added a human nature without changing the divine.
These natures exist without division. He’s not part God and part man in one being. He is fully and completely and totally and truly God while at the same time being fully and completely and totally and truly human. He’s not some Greek mythological figure who’s half God and half man.
And finally, they exist without separation. This union is real. It is organic and it is not some partnership between two different beings.
We point these things out because throughout the history of the church, whenever the nature of Jesus has been attacked, it has often been attacked in these four areas. That he’s more human than God or he’s all human with a little bit of God sprinkled in on top, or he’s just part human and part God in this one being.
But Chalcedon, following John 1:14 and Romans 8:3, teaches that the divine nature is united with a human nature. And following Romans 1:3-4 and Galatians 4:4-5, it also teaches that these natures are united in one divine person.
Now, you may be asking, because this is a difficult doctrine to understand, you may be asking, so what? Well, here’s the so what.
Only a sinless human can pay the penalty for human sin. And only an infinite being could take the judgment for every single sin committed by every single believer to exist, to ever have existed, or whoever will exist. Only an infinite being, only God, could survive the wrath of God poured out against those sins.
And the hypostatic union finds its beginning in the virgin birth. And that’s why the virgin birth is so important.
Firstly, a human father could not produce a human offspring without sin. In Genesis chapter one, verse, excuse me, Genesis chapter five, beginning in verse one, we read,
“When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And when they were created, he called them man. When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image, and he named him Seth.”
What was different between the image of God and the image of Adam? Well, it was sin. And Adam could only produce sinful offspring. And so for us to have a sinless human savior, God had to intervene in the natural process for Mary to produce a sinless child.
Regarding Jesus’ divine nature, two human parents cannot produce a fully and truly divine being. In order for Jesus to be truly God, God had to intervene for the divine nature to be joined to the human nature.
And I want to be very clear on this, brothers and sisters, if there is no virgin birth, there is no gospel of salvation.
I will also warn you, brothers and sisters, that there is a well-worn, often traveled, slippery slope into apostasy that begins with the denial of the virgin birth. In 1923, the Northern Presbyterian Church General Assembly stated that a minister must affirm several things, including the virgin birth, in order to be ordained.
One of their presbyteries later in that same year, meeting in Auburn, New York, said, “No, you don’t. You don’t have to believe in the virgin birth to be ordained.”
Now, the Northern Presbyterian Church no longer exists. After a series of mergers and acquisitions throughout the history of the American, the Presbyterian Church in America as a general thing, the largest mainline Presbyterian denomination looks nothing like even what that presbytery in 1923 looked like in the denial of the virgin birth.
Questioning the virgin birth is just Satan’s age-old tactic that he came to Eve with when he asked, “Did God really say? Did God really say that a virgin conceived a son? Did God really say that there is only one way to salvation?” Whether it’s the virgin birth or any other part of the gospel that God has presented to us, what you compromise today may put you on a slippery slope to judgment if you don’t repent and find restoration from God. The dual nature of Jesus, the virgin birth, is foundational for our salvation.
COMMON OBJECTIONS TO THE VIRGIN BIRTH
Now, some common objections to the virgin birth. One comes from science, one supposedly comes from mythology, and one unfortunately comes even from within the church.
First, science claims that the virgin birth is a scientific impossibility.
We live in a culture that in many ways worships at the altar of science. And science, for most of human history up until about 20 minutes ago, science said that conception involves a human male and a human female. And so, science would say it is scientifically impossible for Jesus to have been born of a virgin.
Now, there are two main misunderstandings here in this declaration. One, science speaks to the realm of probability, not possibility. A scientist sees something happen in nature, they make a hypothesis about that, they test the hypothesis, they then make a theory.
If the theory is proved for long enough, it becomes a law, but it can still be disproved in the future as scientific knowledge grows. And so, even scientific laws deal with probability, not with possibility. If something in this world happens a billion times and it’s observable by a scientist, are we guaranteed that the billionth and first time it will happen the exact same way? No. And so, science deals with probability rather than possibility.
The other fundamental objection is that most scientific endeavor is rooted in the presupposition that this is all there is. There is no supernatural agent outside of what we know of as creation that can act within the world to cause miracles.
The truth is your average naturalistic scientist begins with the belief that all that we can see is all that there is. And so, they deny the statement “Nothing is impossible for God,” because modern science is built on the assumption that there is no God. And so, yes, there is a scientific objection, but it does not stand.
The second objection comes from mythological parallels.
This says that there are older myths where god’s impregnated women and the church just took those older myths, tweaked them a little bit, wrote them into Matthew and Luke, and then went on their way to determine that Jesus was God. Now, this falls into, and I’m sorry for two things.
Number one, I’m going to speak Latin. Number two, I apologize, I’m probably going to butcher it. But this follows into a logical fallacy called the post-hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Or, since this happened before, therefore it is the cause of this. Let me give you a funny example. I used to go to hockey games, went to about four or five when I was living in Florida, go to see the Tampa Bay Lightning play.
And for four of those five games, I rooted for the Tampa Bay Lightning. And guess what happens when I rooted for the Tampa Bay Lightning those four games? They lost. The fifth game I went to, they were playing the Pittsburgh Penguins.
And I’m a Penguins fan. I’m an everything Pittsburgh fan. So, I was pulling for the Penguins that night.
And guess what happened to the Penguins? They lost. Did my pulling for a specific team cause them to lose? No. But, I could start a superstition to where I’m going to pull for the opposite team hoping that the team I really want to win, wins.
That’s the propter hoak ergo, or post-hoak propter, yeah, whatever. That’s the fallacy. Told you I’d butcher it.
It’s the same thing with this. Just because the Greek mythology came earlier, doesn’t mean that Christianity borrowed.
The other problem is that the mythological poets are clear in places that they are writing fiction. If you go back to the beginning of Luke chapter one, he says, I am presenting you eyewitness testimony to the truth of what I am writing. We can’t, we can’t just say, you know what, they were making it up. Because they, the authors of the scripture, claimed to be writing history.
And if that part’s a lie, brothers and sisters, all of it is. And yeah, I agree, we should throw it out. But it also says later on, Paul writes in second Timothy, that all scripture was inspired by the word of God. The author of Hebrews said that God has now spoken through his son Jesus. Peter says that the Holy Spirit moved the prophets and the scripture authors to write. This is history. This is true.
The third objection that typically comes is the use of Isaiah’s word in Isaiah 7:14, which is quoted in Matthew one, where it says the virgin will be with child. And the objection is, well, you know, Isaiah really didn’t use the word that really means virgin.
And they’re absolutely right. He used a word that could mean young woman or the old English word maiden. But just because he didn’t use the proper noun for virgin doesn’t mean that the idea of virginity is not included in the word maiden.
He didn’t need to use the technical term because God gave him the term that he should have used. And we have it today. And of course, we can look to scripture as well.
CONCLUSION
Joseph in Matthew is putting Mary aside because she was assumed to have had relations outside of their relationship. And Mary herself in Luke chapter one, verse 38, says, how is this going to happen? I’ve never been with a man. And that’s where I want us to wrap this up, brothers and sisters, is this is just as difficult for Mary and Joseph to have believed 2000 years ago as it is for you and I. Both Mary and Joseph had to make the hard decision.
Am I going to believe, worship and follow God in what he says? Or am I going to interpret my life according to the world around me? And it wasn’t just a difficult decision in that moment. It was a difficult decision for the rest of their lives. The looks, the rumors, the whispers, the accusations followed Mary and Joseph.
They followed Jesus because at one point in the Gospels, there is an underhanded comment about his fatherhood, about who his father was. And so even Jesus had to live his life with the weight of this hard revelation. We live under the weight of this hard revelation, as well as all of the others in scripture.
Mary and Joseph reacted to God with worship and obedience. How will you react when in your job people do things through dishonesty and laziness and deceit? When God calls you to be a hard worker, to glorify him and to be honest in your job?
How are you going to respond when the world tells you, hey, you are not a complete person unless you are in a relationship? And so pursue a relationship in any way you define to be good for you. When God says, no, you are complete, you are whole because I have created you that way and you flourish best in marriage as I have defined it.
Brothers and sisters, not only do we live under the hard revelation of the virgin birth, we live under the hard call of holiness in the world today. Will you believe God? Will you worship and will you obey? Or will you say, I know that’s what God really said, but I’m not sure that’s what he meant, so I’m going to live my life the way I want to. That one’s a slippery slope, brothers and sisters.
Let’s pray. To the great God above, we do thank you for the virgin birth and we thank you that our salvation is rooted in that. Lord, help us to have a greater appreciation for the incarnation of our Lord and help us grow in worship.
We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
And as you go this week now, may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with you all.
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen. Come Lord Jesus.
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