Ask the Pastor 89

What is so important about the virgin birth?

The real Christmas story has nothing to do with Santa Clause bringing gifts to all the children of the world using flying reindeer which certainly would be a miracle. It is about an even greater miracle that a virgin teenage girl would be overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit and conceive a child who was and is the very Son of God! The importance of the virgin birth is in the fact that the Bible says so and the Bible is true. The story begins back in the book of Genesis where we read that it is the seed of the woman who shall bring the final victory over Satan (Genesis 3:15). Even though the woman was tempted of the Devil and took the forbidden fruit it was given that the man was responsible for that action and therefore, it is by man that sin entered into the world and death as the wages of sin is passed on from one generation to the next, that in Adam all die (Romans 5:12-21; I Corinthians 15:22). It is certainly possible that the Lord God could have shielded the woman so that the sin nature would not be passed on but He chose a virgin birth to make the point clear that which was conceived in her was of the Holy Spirit and not of a man. Then the prophet Isaiah spoke of a virgin that would conceive and bear a Son, who would be called Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14). There are those who contend that the Hebrew word translated virgin can just mean a young girl. What they fail to see is that in that culture and at that time a teenage girl was a virgin and the word was never used of a non-virgin, therefore the English rendering of a virgin is correct. That verse is quoted in the Gospel of Matthew 1:23 in reference to Mary as that virgin. In the account given in the Gospel of Luke and chapter two Mary is referred to as a virgin (vs 27) and when the Archangel Gabriel that she was to bear a special child, she asked, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?” (vs 34), she was a virgin. The virgin birth of our Lord is a part of this great story of how God became man, dwelt among us and then died for our sins and rose again for our justification. Have a Merry Christmas!