We’ve seen a lot of spectacular births lately. Remember Octomom?
What about that nineteen-pound Indonesian baby?
Still, even in light of those crazy births, the birth of Jesus was a truly spectacular event.
One big reason why it’s so amazing is the fact that Jesus was born to a virgin:
When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. … All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (Matthew 1:18-23)
Throughout Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, he throws in repeated reminders of Mary’s virginity. So why is that such a big deal?
Maybe you thought the virgin birth was just another quirky part of the Christmas story that doesn’t make much difference. Lots of people have felt that way. One popular version of Hark the Herald Angels Sing has changed the line “offspring of the virgin’s womb” to “offspring of the favored one” Some hymnbook editor apparently didn’t believe in the virgin birth, or didn’t think it mattered.
But without the virgin birth, the rest of the gospel falls apart.According to Wayne Grudem, there are three major reasons why the virgin birth is crucially important:
- It shows that salvation ultimately must come from the Lord. Just as God had promised that the “seed” of the woman (Gen. 3:15) would ultimately destroy the serpent, so God brought it about by his own power, not through mere human effort. The virgin birth of Christ is an unmistakable reminder that salvation can never come through human effort, but must be the work of God himself. Our salvation only comes about through the supernatural work of God, and that was evident at the very beginning of Jesus’ life when “God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:4-5).
- The virgin birth made possible the uniting of full deity and full humanity in one person. This was the means God used to send his Son (John 3:16; Gal. 4:4) into the world as a man. If we think for a moment of other possible ways in which Christ might have come to the earth, none of them would so clearly unite humanity and deity in one person. It probably would have been possible for God to create Jesus as a complete human being in heaven and send him to descend from heaven to earth without the benefit of any human parent. But then it would have been very hard for us to see how Jesus could be fully human as we are, nor would he be a part of the human race that physically descended from Adam. On the other hand, it probably would have been possible for God to have Jesus come into the world with two human parents, both a father and a mother, and with his full divine nature miraculously united to his human nature at some point early in his life. But then it would have been hard for us to understand how Jesus was fully God, since his origin was like ours in every way. When we think of these two other possibilities, it helps us to understand how God, in his wisdom, ordained a combination of human and divine influence in the birth of Christ, so that his full humanity would be evident to us from the fact of his ordinary human birth from a human mother, and his full deity would be evident from the fact of his conception in Mary’s womb by the powerful work of the Holy Spirit.
- The virgin birth also makes possible Christ’s true humanity without inherited sin. All human beings have inherited legal guilt and a corrupt moral nature from their first father, Adam (this is sometimes called “inherited sin” or “original sin”). But the fact that Jesus did not have a human father means that the line of descent from Adam is partially interrupted. Jesus did not descend from Adam in exactly the same way in which every other human being has descended from Adam. And this helps us to understand why the legal guilt and moral corruption that belongs to all other human beings did not belong to Christ.
If Jesus wasn’t born to a virgin, you wouldn’t be saved. So when you sing about the “offspring of a virgin’s womb” this Christmas, sing it loud!