Christmas – God becomes man

Read Luke 1:5 – 2:21

When we began looking at the Christmas story several weeks ago, we read in Isaiah that Jesus would be called Immanuel. The name means “God with us.”

Immanuel – God with us, in our nature, in our sorrow, in our daily work, in our punishment, in our death, and now with us, or rather we with Him, in resurrection, ascension, triumph, and Second Advent splendor. ¹

Last week we looked at the kingship of Jesus according to the book of Matthew. As we read Isaiah’s prophecy and Matthew’s history, we read in both places that the savior was conceived by a virgin. We see it again here in Luke’s Gospel. We often call this the Virgin Birth. Virgin Conception might be more to the point, but Virgin Birth encompasses the conception and is the accepted term.

The Apostle’s Creed reads as follows.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,

the Maker of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,

born of the virgin Mary,

The witness of Scripture is clear on this point. Luke says in verse 27 that Mary was a virgin, engaged to Joseph. When told that she would conceive (v31), she asks how this could happen since she was a virgin (v34). In verse 35 the angel tells her that the conception would be caused by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Matthew had said that Mary was found to be pregnant before she and Joseph had come together sexually in marriage, and that the pregnancy was “from the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:18, 20)

How important is this doctrine? Should we believe it?

There have been many false teachings that have sought to explain away the virgin birth over the years.

Mormonism claims that God the Father inhabits a physical body just as we do, and that he had sexual intercourse with Mary to impregnate her.

More recently the film The Da Vinci Code, based on the novel by the same title, makes the case that Jesus was “merely human.” The book has sold more than 40 million copies since its publication in 2003.

It is not surprising that non-Christians would take aim at the virgin conception/birth of Jesus. If it could be proved false, Jesus’ claim to divinity disappears and it becomes much easier to ignore the teaching of a “mere human” than it is to ignore the teaching of Almighty God!

Unfortunately, even “Christian” writers question the importance of this doctrine. Rob Bell, a leading voice in the emerging church movement and a popular speaker and author, wrote in his book Velvet Elvis that the Christian religion should be seen as a trampoline rather than a wall. If it is a wall and you pull out a brick at the base, the whole things falls apart. If it is a trampoline and you remove one spring, you can keep on jumping without too much trouble.

On the topic of the virgin birth Bell asks,

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archaeologists find Larry’s tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysain religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? But what if as you study the origin of the word virgin, you discover that the word virgin in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at the time, the word virgin could mean several things? And what if you discover that in the first century being “born of a virgin” also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse?

What if that spring was seriously questioned?

Could a person keep jumping? Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian?

Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?

Or does the whole thing fall apart? ²

Bell goes on to affirm his belief in the Virgin Birth, but how would you answer the questions he’s raised? Could we remove the doctrine of the virgin birth without doing damage to what is left of the Christian faith? Bell thinks so. Of course,we would also have to remove any other doctrines which are dependent upon this one. Are there any? What are they? What would we have left, if we were to remove this doctrine and its dependents?

I would argue that very few doctrines live in isolation. They are tied to one another and if you start removing them you create a real mess. In this particular case, I believe the entire system does collapse. Here’s why.

1. Matthew and Luke both insist that this IS a virgin birth.

…before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. (Matthew 1:18)

And

…that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. (Matthew 1:20)

Matthew leaves no room for doubt. Without even using the word virgin, he describes the conception of Jesus as being supernatural. He clearly states that the child is conceived by the Holy Spirit.

Bell’s theoretical reasoning concerning Matthew’s use of the word parthenos while quoting Isaiah, is another problem. Isaiah uses a Hebrew word that means “young maiden” and implies sexual purity. Matthew quotes that passage from Isaiah using a Greek word that literally and unarguably means “virgin.” If we are to let Scripture interpret Scripture, then we must conclude that Isaiah meant virgin.

And from Luke.

And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

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.”

Luke makes it even more difficult for liberal theologians to skate around. He doesn’t use the same Greek word that Matthew does. He’s not quoting Isaiah. The Greek in Luke, as is typical of Luke’s writing, is very precise. He uses a phrase, not a single word. The phrase is aner ginosko ouch, which literally translated means “a man to come to know not.” In other words, “I have never known a man.” In the way this phrase is used in Scripture, it is clear that she is saying, “How could I get pregnant, I’ve never had sex.”

The angel’s response is that the child will be conceived by the Holy Spirit and will not have an earthly father.

Matthew uses a very similar phrase in Matthew 1:25 to say that after the angel quotes Isaiah to Joseph, Joseph awoke from his vision/dream and

…knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.

Scripture is clear. To deny the virgin birth we must, as Bell recognizes, deny the truthfulness of Scripture. We must come to believe that the Gospel writers were simply “mythologizing” as Bell suggests, but then why would we believe anything they wrote? What could we believe that they wrote?

If they have mythologized and lied to us about this, why not the resurrection as well? And as the Apostle Paul tells us,

And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins…If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. – I Corinthians 15:17,19

So if we deny the virgin birth, we must deny the truthfulness of Scripture. If we do that, then we have destroyed the faith. For Scripture itself tells us that it is the very words of God (2 Timothy 3:16), and if God would lie to us, we are indeed wasting our time here.

2. Look back at Luke 1:35. In response to Mary’s question, the angel explains how she will conceive and then says “therefore.” Now anytime you see the word “therefore” in a text, you need to ask yourself, “What is the therefore there for?”

The angel is saying that because the child is conceived of the Holy Spirit, and not of man, he

…will be called holy – the Son of God.

Do you see the importance of this? If the child has an earthly biological father, he is just another normal human being, with all that entails. If not, then he is the Son of God. This is hugely important!

All humans inherited something from our first biological father, Adam. We inherited guilt for sin, this is the idea of imputed sin, or imputed guilt. We also inherited a sin nature. We are born into bondage to sin and Satan. It is in sin that we are conceived (Psalm 51:5). Jesus wasn’t conceived in the normal way though. Because of the virgin conception, he does not inherit the imputed guilt for sin, or the sin nature itself.

Had be been a normal human, conceived and born in the normal way, he would have been sinful just like me and you. He would have been just as incapable as we are of living a perfect, holy life that is fully pleasing to God. He would not have been a fitting sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind! The whole idea of Jesus saving us from our sins by appeasing the wrath of God through his perfect sinless sacrifice would be ridiculous.

If we erase the doctrine of the virgin birth, we lose not only the truthfulness and accuracy of Scripture, but we also lose our savior. That’s kind of a big deal!

This all leads us to a discussion of the nature of Jesus. Conceived and born of a virgin, he is a human with a physical body like ours, but at the same time he is the Son of God. This is called the incarnation. Emmanuel, God with us. God the Son, took on the form of man, so he could live the life we should have lived and die the death we should have died.

Remaining what he was [God], he became what he was not [man].

Jesus was God from eternity past, but at that moment in time, in Bethlehem of Judea, he took on a physical body. He became man, that he might become sin for us.

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. – 2 Corinthians 5:21

In the same way that Adam’s guilt and sinfulness are imputed to all mankind, Jesus’ sinlessness and righteousness are imputed to all who believe.

His nature as the Son of God is very important to his role as our savior.

Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man in one person, and will be so forever. ³

Many false teachings has arisen over the centuries to explain away the dual nature of Jesus. Some have denied his deity, others his humanity.

1. The Council of Nicea met in 325 AD to deal with one such teaching. A pastor in Alexandria by the name of Arius, was teaching that Jesus was not eternal God, but a created being, an emanation from the eternal God. This teaching was called the Arian Controversy. If that sounds familiar, it is. It’s a similar belief to that held by Gnostic philosophers of the late first century and the second century.

The resulting creed, the Nicean Creed, was careful to express not only Jesus divinity and co-equal substance with God the Father, but also his humanity. Some Gnostic philosophers had denied that Jesus even possessed a physical body. The creed clearly stands at odds with both heresies, confessing and summarizing the biblical teaching on the matter.

But even after the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, other false teachings would occasionally arise attempting to explain the nature of Christ in a different way. I want to briefly look at several of the most popular of these false teachings and then finally attempt to explain the biblical teaching on the nature of Christ.

2. Apollinarianism came about around 361 AD from a bishop of Laodicea named Apollinaris. Apollinaris taught that Jesus possessed a human body, but not a human mind or spirit/soul. His mind and spirit/soul were divine.

The problem with this teaching is that it is not our bodies only that are in need of salvation, but also our mind, our will and our emotions, our soul. For Jesus to take our place as a perfect sacrifice would require that he posses those things in the same way we do, and yet live a sinless life.

3. Nestorianism arose around 428 AD from a man named Nestorius. He was a preacher in Antioch and later a bishop of Constantinople. Nestorianism taught that Jesus possessed two separate natures. That he had a fully human person and a fully divine person, who did not mingle, both natures residing in the same body.

Had this been true, Jesus would have had a split personality. Nestorianism taught that Jesus acted out of one nature or the other, but never out of both simultaneously. Scripture indicates though that at no time does Jesus’ human nature act without his divine nature.

Some believe that Nestorius himself did not believe this, but simply was unclear in his teaching to the point that people misunderstood him and attributed this belief to him falsely.

4. Monophysitism, sometimes called Eutychianism after its founder Eutyches, arose around the same time as Nestorianism, sometime in the early 5th century. Eutyches was the leader of a monastery in Constantinople, who taught that Jesus had a unique nature that was neither divine nor human. He believed that the human nature and the divine nature had collided in such a way as to produce a third type of nature.

This required followers of Monophysitism to believe that Jesus only had one nature, his new one, and that his human nature had been irreversibly altered by his divine nature, and that his divine nature had also been irreversibly altered by his human nature.

This led to the belief that Jesus was neither truly God, nor truly man.

The difficulty with this belief is that Jesus would then be unable to accurately represent mankind since he wasn’t fully human, and also unable to save us as God, since he wasn’t fully divine. This belief destroys the effectiveness of Jesus life and death.

5. To counter these false teachings that were arising, a large group of church leaders assembled in Chalcedon (modern day Istanbul) in AD 451 for the purpose of biblically defining the nature of Christ. The resulting definition is sometimes referred to as the Chalcedonian Definition.

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood;

truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body;

consubstantial [co-essential] with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood;

in all things like unto us, without sin;

begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood;

one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably;

the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ;

as the prophets from the beginning [have declared] concerning Him, and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.

The phrase in this definition “one Person and one Subsistence” uses the Greek word hypostasis, meaning “being.” The union of Christ’s human and divine natures into one being is called the Hypostatic Union.

It is by far the most amazing miracle of the entire Bible – far more amazing than the resurrection and more amazing even than the creation of the universe. The fact that the infinite, omnipotent, eternal Son of God could become man and join himself to a human nature forever, so that infinite God became one person with finite man, will remain for eternity the most profound miracle and the most profound mystery in all the universe. ⁴

As I said earlier,

Remaining what he was [God], he became what he was not [man].

As we celebrate Christmas this year, consider the miracle of God becoming man for the purpose of bringing glory to himself through our salvation. Thank God for the miracle of the virgin birth and hypostatic union of Christ our Lord becoming a baby in Bethlehem. It is only through this incarnation of God becoming man in Jesus the Christ that we are saved.

By the grace of God we are united to Christ in his death and in his resurrection so that his righteousness is imputed to us and our sin is taken away.

For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. – Colossians 2:9-10

 

 

1. Charles H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening (Crossway Books, 2003) p.12-25
2. Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis (Zondervan, 2005) p.26-27
3. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Inter-Varsity Press/Zondervan, 1994, 2000) p. 529
4. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Inter-Varsity Press/Zondervan, 1994, 2000) p. 563
5. Much of this information, including the inspiration for the diagrams, was taken from Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology.