The Birth of the King
Selected Scriptures
We're going to take a few weeks off our of study of 1 Timothy in order that we might identify ourselves with this wonderful time of year, the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I would encourage you, if you will, to take your Bible and open it to Matthew chapter 1. I want to read a couple of portions regarding His birth from Matthew and then Luke, and emphasize in the message this morning the significance of the virgin birth of Christ.
Matthew's gospel, chapter 1 and verse 18 says, "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: when His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. And Joseph her husband being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her desired to divorce her secretly. But when he had considered this, behold an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for that which has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit and she will bear a son and you shall call His name Jesus for it is He who will save His people from their sins. Now all this took place, that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled saying, Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son and they shall call His name Emanuel which translated means God with us. And Joseph arose from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took her as his wife and kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a son and he called His name Jesus."
And then in Luke chapter 1 beginning at verse 26, "Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city in Galilee called Nazareth to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph of the descendants of David and the virgin's name was Mary. And coming in he said to her, Hail favored one, the Lord is with you. But she was greatly troubled at this statement and kept pondering what kind of salutation this might be. And the angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you shall name Him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever and His kingdom will have no end. And Mary said to the angel, How can this be since I am a virgin? And the angel answered and said to her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you and for that reason the holy offspring shall be called the Son of God."
Now in both of these passages the emphasis of the text is clearly upon the truth that Jesus was born of a virgin woman, that His mother who bore Him had no knowledge of a man in the physical sense. This birth is without question the most startling, amazing of all births in the annals of human history. And history has some pretty amazing births. The birth of Isaac to nearly 100‑year‑old parents who were barren all their life and who laughed at the thought of a barren woman giving birth at that age and yet the miracle happened and Abraham and Sarah brought forth Isaac.
And then there was the amazing and miraculous birth of Samson. The wife of Manoah was also barren all her life long but the Lord opened her womb and gave her a child, a child not like any other child who had ever lived, a child who could turn a lion inside out, who could tie the tails of foxes together, set them on fire and send them through a field, a child who could kill a thousand men with a jawbone of an ass, a child who could pull down a temple on thousands and thousands of the enemies of God. A miracle child and a miraculous birth.
And then there was the birth of Samuel to the barren Hannah who longed so much to have a child. And having had her womb closed, the Lord also opened her womb and she brought forth that Samuel, that unique prophet, priest and anointer of kings.
And then there was the astounding birth of John the Baptist to Zacharias and Elizabeth who was also called barren. But in old age by a miracle of God was given a child of whom Jesus said he was the greatest man who ever lived up until his time.
Biblically then there have been some amazing births and even historically. We won't take the time to chronicle all the amazing births. I think back to the famous Dionne quintuplets born in 1934, receiving international attention. And even more recently the Stanic(?) sextuplets born in Colorado in 1973. And then I think to little Louise Brown in 1978, the first test‑tube baby, an incredible result of twelve years of research, the mother's egg being fertilized outside the mother's body by the father's sperm, conceived in a test tube, placed back in the womb, carried to full term until the child was born. That's an amazing birth. And the world, by the way, has made some monumental issues out of its capabilities in terms of childbirth in these days.
But even though the births that I've mentioned to you were amazing, in some cases the biblical ones were even divinely the result of God's action, yet none of them even comes near the incredible birth of Jesus Christ. Now science has done some interesting things in the area of quote/unquote virgin birth. I don't know if you realize this but if you take the word parthenos which is the word for a virgin and you take the word Genesis which is the word for birth or beginning and put them together you have parthenogenesis which is a historic scientific pursuit. Scientists even today are studying partheno genetics...in other words, the capability of producing a child from a virgin. It literally means virgin birth. And so, partheno genetic lab experiences go on all the time as they attempt to produce parthenogenic life among lower forms of life.
And there has been a modicum of some interesting results. For example, within the world of honeybees, unfertilized eggs develop into drones and they are sort of parthenogenesis. In 1886, Tacommeroth(?) a scientist developed the capability for artificial parthenogenesis in the unfertilized eggs of silkworms by creating an environment in which that took place. Around 1900 Morgan and Mead were able to start the eggs of sea urchins and marine worms to develop by placing them into various salt solutions and sea water.
And then perhaps most interesting of all, in 1939 and 1940 there was a scientist named Pinkus(?) who produced several rabbits through chemical temperature effects upon the ova. Now this has been part and really the extent of the capability of parthenogenetic science but no success has ever been known in the higher forms of life and none at all in the human level, of course. Virgin births at the human level are biological impossibilities. And no explanation of science can in any way, shape or form explain the birth of Jesus Christ. Science has no explanation.
The best that science could do would be to trump up some kind of imaginary possibility of Mary partheno genetically producing a child because some circumstances might have been made right within the environment of her body. But the best that that could accomplish is very interesting. That absolutely impossible dream could never bring forth a son...and I'll tell you why. Geneticists have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that mammals, including man if you look at man from the standpoint of his physiology, have two x chromosomes in the females and in the males there is an x and a y chromosome. Thus when an unfertilized egg cell would duplicate its chromosomes in response to some artificial stimulation, since it can only happen in a female and since a female only has two x chromosomes, a female if it could parthenogenetically reproduce could only reproduce another what? Female. And so there is absolutely no scientific possibility for a parthenogenetic birth that can be explained in any natural way at all. Even if we can allow for some natural thing, Mary would have produced a daughter not a son, but that even producing a daughter is an utter impossibility. When Mary gave birth to Jesus without a father, Jesus was a son, the theory of any natural explanation was forever eliminated. And since the human male determines the sex of the child, it is obvious that the sex of Jesus' human nature was determined by a miracle of God. He was God the Son and not to be parthenogenetically produced as God the daughter...in spite of what Women's Liberationists would like to think.
God divinely created male chromosomes, planted them in the body of Mary so that she without any contact with a man her life time could produce a male child. The birth of Jesus Christ then stands alone as utterly inexplicable from any natural vantage point. He was born of a woman who had never known a man and He Himself was a son, produced by no earthly father at all but by the heavenly Father who because He created all that is found it not difficult at all to produce the God/Man Jesus Christ. No thing is hard for God, no thing is easy for God, all things are equally done by God at the express purpose of His will and intention.
The message of Christmas, people, is not gifts and trees and presents around the tree and cards and manger scenes and all of that, that's peripheral. The message is the incarnation God born in human flesh. And that's what we want to communicate when given the opportunity.
Some Jewish leaders at the time of the birth of Christ, no doubt, believed that the promised Messiah would be the son of David. They must have believed that. They were happy to sing hosannas to the Son of David at His triumphal entry. They assumed the Messiah would come through the line of royalty based on 2 Samuel 7, the promise of God to David. But they really didn't know anything more than that and there certainly was no pervasive belief that the Messiah would be a virgin born incarnation of the very God of Gods Himself. In fact, when Jesus claimed to be God incarnate, they accused Him of...what?...of blasphemy. And the same denial persists today. The virgin birth is attacked constantly. And it's attacked because people deny the deity of Christ. Whether they are atheists, skeptics, liberals, or occultists, typically two of which came to my door yesterday while I was studying and they were the Jehovah's Witnesses who wanted to argue with me that Jesus is not God.
Well, I'm ready for that. But it's amazing to me...it's amazing to me that even within the framework of Protestantism, for example, the last available survey that I saw of students in Protestant seminaries in America, indicate that about 56 percent of them believe in the virgin birth. And 59 percent of the people in the major denominations believe in the virgin birth. And it's on the decline. Now if you deny the virgin birth, you have a major problem. One, the Bible is lying so you've just lost your authority. Two, you have eliminated the possibility of Jesus Christ being God. Therefore the whole of the gospel is destroyed. But fortunately truth is not established by the vote of seminary students...nor is it established by the vote of people in the major denominations. Paul said, "Let God be true and every man a liar." If God loses by 20 million to one, God is still right. We don't determine truth by majority vote.
But the virgin birth is so essential and that's why it's constantly being attacked. But the attack on the virgin birth is simply a way to deal with the issue of denying the deity of Christ.
Go to Matthew 16 for a moment as we begin to look at the Scripture a little more closely. In Matthew 16 we find a typical scenario that can be pulled into our own time today. When Jesus came to the district of Caesarea Philippi, which is way in the north area above Galilee, He began asking His people saying, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" In other words, what is the latest Gallup Pole tell us the popular viewpoint about Jesus is? And here comes the answer. "Well they said, some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, others Jeremiah, and still others say one of the prophets."
Now what do all of those have in common? They are all...what?...men...people, human beings. Common opinion is that Jesus is a man, maybe a reincarnated man, maybe...not a reincarnated man really but a resurrected man, but nonetheless a man. He is John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. Nobody's saying He's God. "But He said to them, Who do you say that I am? And Simon Peter at that very moment was compelled by the Holy Spirit to open his mouth and say, Thou art the Christ the Son of the living God." Men say He's a man, but God says He's God. And that is the crux of the issue. If you go out today to survey the world around you, you will find that the popular viewpoint is that Jesus was a man, Jesus was a good man, Jesus was the best of men, Jesus was the noblest example of humanity who ever lived. The answer is wrong, He is God. And a real incarnation, a real incarnation of God in human flesh demands a virgin birth. You cannot have a being who is God and man unless the progeniters of that being are God and man. And so God fathers and Mary mothers the product being the God/Man, the incarnate eternal Son of God.
Now let's look at the virgin birth from a couple of angles. Okay? I want you to understand it. The foundations, first of all, of the virgin birth, why do we believe this? Well, first of all, we just affirmed why we believe it from the standpoint of Scripture, right? So the first foundation on which the virgin birth is built is the veracity, authenticity, inerrancy and inspiration and truthfulness of the Word of God. It's very clear in Matthew 1:18 to 25 and in Luke 1:26 to 33 and following that Jesus is said to be born of a virgin. Now if you deny the virgin birth, you are denying the truth of Scripture. If you deny the truth of Scripture, you are denying the truthfulness of God. If you are denying the truthfulness of God, then you have an unholy God. And if you have an unholy God, we can pack the whole thing in and forget it and live like animals because nothing matters anyway. So you tear the whole of the seamless garment and rip it to shreds if you attack only the virgin birth. Everything else goes down, too.
So, the first thing is the New Testament document very clearly says He was born of a virgin. In fact, to just illustrate that a bit further, Matthew chapter 2 having followed up, of course, the statement of the angel with the details of the birth of Christ affirms this. You will find something conspicuously absent in the testimony of chapter 2 and that is any identification of Joseph as the father of Jesus. None exists. And there's ample opportunity for that to have been stated, if indeed it should have been. For example, verse 11, it says, "And they...being the wise men, the Magi...they came into the house, saw the child with Mary His mother." Then you'll notice further in verse 13, "When they had departed, behold an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph...it doesn't say Joseph His father but Joseph...arise and take the child and His mother." Verse 14, "And he arose...it doesn't say the father arose...he arose, took the child and His mother." And down in verse 20, "Arise and take the child and His mother." Verse 21, "And he arose and took the child and His mother."
Now you'd have to be blind not to understand the emphasis there. Mary is the mother but nowhere is Joseph ever alluded to as the father...nowhere, because he wasn't the father. In fact, the father is designated in verse 15, "And there, it says, they went into Egypt and were there until the death of Herod, that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet," this is from Hosea verse 1 of chapter 11..."the prophet might be fulfilled saying, Out of Egypt did I call My Son," and that's God speaking. God is Father, Mary is mother. And with a divine Father and a human mother, you have the God/Man Jesus Christ.
So, the first foundation of the virgin birth is found in the pages of the New Testament. The second one is in the Old Testament. Let's go back to Genesis chapter 3 to a somewhat familiar text and just make mention of it. The foundation of the virgin birth is not only in the New Testament but also in the Old. When the serpent is cursed by God because of his part in leading the human race into sin, verse 15 of Genesis 3, the judgment of God comes upon that serpent, Satan, and God says, "I will put enmity," that is antagonism, hatred, opposition, "between you and the woman and between your seed, the offspring of Satan, and her seed. He shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise Him on the heel."
Now there's a general sense in which this could be understood to be nothing more than a statement that the children of Satan and the children of the covenant, or the promise, the righteous seed that will eventually come out of Eve will fight against each other. It could be a very general statement that Satan in the end is going to be defeated by man. But it has to be seen as more specific than that because what man is it who will ultimately defeat Satan? If Satan and his children are set against mankind and the children of men, and if Satan will bruise the heel of mankind but Satan's head will be bruised by mankind, what man is it who bruises the serpent's head? There's only one man and that man here, I believe, is most interestingly identified as HER seed, between your seed, Satan, your offspring and HER seed. It is obvious that no one woman has ever had a seed. No woman has ever produced a child parthenogenetically, and yet here is the prophecy that the seed of the woman would bring about the devastation of the serpent. And we know that in the cross of Christ and the victory that He gained there, He accomplished the devastation of Satan and his eternal damnation. And so there is a sense in which the very term "her seed" alludes to the reality of a virgin birth because the only time a woman ever had a seed was when Mary was impregnated by the Spirit of God to bring forth Christ.
Now I want you to look to a second passage in the Old Testament, Isaiah 7:14, a very familiar one, we won't take the time to develop the whole context. We've done that on other occasions. Simply to read Isaiah 7:14 and then allude to the commentary on it which comes in Matthew 1:22 and 23. Isaiah 7:14 says, "Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign, behold a virgin," and the word here is almah in Hebrew, it appears nine times in the Old Testament, eight of those times it means pure virginity, and so that is its predominant meaning and certainly its meaning here because that's the way it is interpreted by the inspired writer Matthew. And Matthew being inspired and interpreting Isaiah gives us its true interpretation. So it should be translated a virgin. Some people say no, it just means a young woman. Well if it means a young woman shall be with a child and bear a son, that's nothing special. Why and how would that be a sign of any significance? But when a virgin is with child and bears a son and then calls his name Emanuel, the last two words...pardon me, the last to letters "el" is the name of God. The first part means with us. When a virgin has a child named "God with us," that is unusual. So Isaiah predicts here the birth of a child born of a virgin whose name will be "God with us."
Now as I said, in Matthew 1:22 and 23 that is very directly interpreted. Now all this took place that was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled saying, Behold the virgin. And Matthew uses parthenos which means virgin and nothing else but virgin. She will be with child and bear a son and call his name Emanuel, translating that it means God with us. So Matthew tells us essentially what Isaiah meant. The total absence of sexual intimacy is bound up in the word parthenos or virgin.
Jesus used that word three times in the parable of the ten virgins to emphasize their virginity. Luke used it twice of Mary and used it also of Philip's four daughters when he wrote the book of Acts. Paul carefully in 1 Corinthians 7 distinguished between a virgin and an unmarried woman who was married prior and been divorced and a wife who was presently married. John records the word as descriptive of men who had no sexual relationships with woman but were totally yielded to God, he so speaks in Revelation 14. So sexual abstinence is essential to the meaning of parthenos. Mary was a virgin and a virgin with child is a miracle. In fact, the text can be literally translated, "Behold, the pregnant virgin is bearing a son and she calls His name God with us." God has come down, joined in this miracle, that seed of a man with the egg of a woman to produce the God/Man. This is the sign, the divine miracle.
And then there is Jeremiah 31:22, you don't need to turn to it. But in Jeremiah 31:22 it says this, listen to this, "The Lord hath created a new thing in the earth." Having a baby is not a new thing. The Lord has created a new thing. Listen, "A woman shall encompass a man." Now we cannot be explicitly dogmatic on that but it is interesting if you look at the rabbis' interpretation of Jeremiah 31:22. They said, for example, this is a Messianic context to be sure, they said, quote: "Messiah is to have no earthly father." Another rabbi said, "The birth of Messiah alone shall be without any defects." Another said, "His birth shall not be like that of other men." Another said, "The birth of Messiah shall be like the dew of the Lord as drops upon the grass without the action of man."
So when the rabbis looked at the Messianic text of Jeremiah 31 and looked at that verse, they saw in it a miraculous birth. It may well be that even at the time of the birth of Christ, though the vast majority of people did not expect Him to be virgin born, though the vast majority of people obviously didn't believe He was virgin born. There may have been some who understanding this rabbinic interpretation of Jeremiah 31:22, understanding the meaning of Isaiah 7:14 and Genesis 3:15 may not have been surprised at all when Jesus claimed to have been born of a virgin. By the way, that claim must have gotten out. It must have been known. The testimony was that this Jesus was born of a virgin. That was not hidden.
For example, in John 7:27 speaking of Christ as compared to the Messiah, there's an interesting statement made by the people. The people say, "We know where this man is from." In other words, we know Jesus came from Nazareth. "But whenever the Christ may come, no one knows where He's from." In other words, they just couldn't accept that Jesus was the Messiah because everybody knew He came out of Nazareth and they may have had this lingering feeling that there would be some kind of grandiose supernatural birth and Jesus seemed to be such a normal common person. So some people may have assumed the Messiah was going to be born in a miraculous way. Others may have known Jesus was born in a miraculous way. And some wouldn't have believed that Jesus was born in a miraculous way at all.
But the Old Testament was clear. If they had understood Genesis 3:15, Isaiah 7:14, Jeremiah 31:22 and even Psalm 2, "Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee." And so the Old Testament, the New Testament lays the foundation for the virgin birth.
Can I give you a third foundation? The doctrine of the trinity. The Bible very clearly teaches that God is one God. Deuteronomy 6:4 and 5, "The Lord our God is one...the Lord our God is one." We believe in one God, there are no other gods, God will not tolerate any other gods. And the Scripture says you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.
What that means is you have no affection left for any other deity. You have no love for any other God. You are to love the one true God with all the capacity to love that you have because there is no other God and so you give everything to Him.
Now only if God was one God could we love Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. We couldn't love more than one with all our whole being, anymore than you could love one husband with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and love somebody else the same way. If there were three gods, as some would like us to believe, then we could love two and leave one off or love one and leave two off, or give a third of our love to each, but there's only one God and we are to love that one God with all our capacity and that one God reveals Himself in three persons. You say, "Do you understand that?" Of course not, I only believe that. I do not understand that. And there is no illustration that I've ever heard that makes it more understandable to me. Any illustration I've ever heard of the trinity confuses me and diminishes the reality of the trinity.
But even though God is one and we are to love Him totally as one, He has three persons. In fact, in Genesis 1 He uses the term God in the beginning, God created and the term is plural. Elohim is plural. In Genesis 1:26, "Let us make man in...what?...our image." That's plural personal pronoun. In Isaiah 6:8, "Whom shall I send and who will go for us, says God." God speaks as a plurality. In Isaiah 48:16, "Come ye near unto me and hear ye this, I have not spoken in secret from the beginning, from the time that it was there am I and now the Lord God and His Spirit have sent Me." That's Christ talking, preincarnate, about the Father and the Spirit and Himself.
In Matthew 3 at the baptism of Christ, Jesus in the water, the voice of the Father, "Thou art My Son in whom I am well pleased." The Spirit descends as a dove, you have all three at the same moment in time at the same event. In John 15 Jesus talks about going and He will ascend and He will send from the Father the Holy Spirit...Father, Son and Holy Spirit are there as well. At the end of 2 Corinthians, you know that beautiful benediction that comes in verse 14 of chapter 13, "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." All three members of the trinity in one verse. They are three and yet one.
Now if Jesus Christ is really God, then the virgin birth occurred, then the incarnation is real. This is a logical sequence. Putting it in frail human terms, you cannot have God born into this world unless God is born to God. You can't have God born to man being God. God has to be born to God to be God, but born to man to be man, so He is God impregnating a woman. The Old Testament demands it. The New Testament demands it. The doctrine of the trinity demands it. And so I say, if you attack the virgin birth, you wipe out the veracity of the New Testament, you wipe out the veracity of the Old Testament and you have just wiped out the heart and soul of everything we know to be true about the nature of God and that is that He is three in one.
And then fourthly, Messianic prophecy comes into the picture also. The Messiah had to be God in human flesh. He had to be God in human flesh. And this because of what the Old Testament has to say about God. Now let me give you what I mean then. There's so many scriptures but I'm going to boil it down to just a very brief look at Isaiah 43...Isaiah 43. Messiah has to be God in human flesh, thus His birth has to be a miracle of deity and humanity united. But notice Isaiah 43 verse 11, listen to this, "I...God speaking here...I, even I am the Lord." Okay? He just said in verse 10, "Besides Me there's no other God...no other God," before Me or after Me. "I even I am the Lord," no one else, "and there is no Savior beside Me." There is no Savior beside Me, now God says that.
You know what Matthew 1:21 says? "Call His name Jesus for He shall...what?...save His people from their sins." Now if there's only one Savior and God says I'm that Savior and Jesus says I'm that Savior, the logical conclusion is Jesus is God. The testimony of Messianic anticipation demands the affirmation of Jesus as God. And if He is