I BELIEVE…WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY SPIRIT, BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY
Luke 1: 26-38
09/25/2011 © Dr. Ronald W. Scates
Is it credible, in a day and age of great scientific advancements, at a time in history when 90% of all the scientists who have
ever lived are alive today, when life is complicated enough without confusing theology with gynecology, is it credible as welleducated thinking people to believe the Virgin Birth of Jesus?
In our sermon series on The Apostles’ Creed, we come now to that clause in the creed where we, as Christians, say that we
believe that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. We’re talking about the Virgin Birth here. We’re
saying that the birth of Christ was a unique miraculous event.
One of the great ironies of the 21st Century landscape is you’ve got Muslims, all over the world, totally affirming the Virgin Birth
of Jesus while you have more and more Christians balking at putting their full weight down upon this venerable doctrine.
How about you and me? Are we willing to stand with the Creed and affirm this miracle? Let’s take a look at what Scripture
reveals to you and me about the birth of Jesus. I invite you to turn in your bibles and keep them open to Luke’s Gospel, the 1st
chapter and we’re going to take a look this morning at verses 26 through 38. And I invite you to pray with me before we read.
Holy Spirit, open our hearts and minds now to Your Word that we might clearly understand it, that we might gratefully receive it
and that we might faithfully apply it to our lives. For Jesus’ sake! Amen.
Now, if you’re able, please stand for the reading of our New Testament lesson this morning, beginning to read at Luke, chapter
1, the 26th verse. This is the Word of God:
In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named
Joseph, a descendent 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! 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 the angel, “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. .
Please pray with me again. And now Father, as my words are true to Your Word may they be taken to heart but as my words
should stray from Your Word, may they be quickly forgotten. Through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.
Please be seated.
Karl Barth, one of the most renowned Reformed theologians in the 20 th Century graduated from seminary not believing the
Virgin Birth of Jesus. Schooled in classic 19th Century liberalism where reason and rationality trumped everything, all miracles were
suspect, especially a miracle like the Virgin Birth. For Barth, something like the Virgin Birth was a poetic, fictional, maybe
mythological, most likely metaphorical way of talking about the origin of Jesus. But it certainly, for Barth, did not fall in the realm of
biological historical reality. He did not believe the Virgin Birth. Now this put Barth in quite a moment of crisis as he took his first call
to a small country church in a town in the Swiss Alps. A congregation, that every week in worship, just like we do here, they would
stand and affirm their faith using the Apostles’ Creed.
Now, Barth was a man of great integrity. He wanted to be honest and open. He wanted to be transparent so he was in a crisis.
What should he do? He didn’t believe the Virgin Birth. Should he remove that clause from the Creed? “Or maybe,” he thought, “I’ll
just fall silent at that point as the congregation recites the Creed.” He toyed with the idea of just taking the Apostles’ Creed and
removing it from their order of service. What should he do? What would you do if you had been in Karl Barth’s shoes?
In this Scripture text before us this morning, it’s obvious what the gospel writer Luke wants you and me to believe. He wants
you and me to believe that God the Father actually sent an angel named Gabriel to a young peasant woman in Palestine, named
Mary, and this angel was sent on a mission, a mission with a message to tell her that she was specially chosen by God to give birth
to the promised Messiah. And she would do so as a virgin, without the aid of human father.
Do you really believe that? Can you swallow that in the 21st Century? Well, I’ll tell you, Mary had a real tough time believing it
as well. Now she was no Ph.D. in obstetrics but Mary knew that babies didn’t come from the stork. She was no dummy. She was no
more prone to expect to run into an angel in her life, let alone an angel that’s going to tell her that, “Oh, by the way, you’re going to
be pregnant as a virgin.” She’s no more prone to believe that than you and me. She’s no more prone to believe in a virgin birth than
was the writer of this gospel—Luke. Remember he’s Dr. Luke. Doctor—he knows how babies are made. Mary’s no more prone to
believe in miraculous births than I am. I’ve got a Master’s Degree in Cell Biology, specifically in the area of Reproductive Physiology.
I, like Mary, know that babies are not found under cabbage leaves. Mary’s not prone to believe the virgin birth. Now, right here, we’ve
got to stop and say, “That term, ‘virgin birth’ is not the best term to use.” It’s a misnomer. Jesus’ birth was a normal birth. He was
born just like any of us. The miracle that Luke is directing us toward in this text would better be termed, ‘virgin conception.’ The
virgin conception!
But the virgin conception defies everything I learned from Biology 101 onward. Mary herself stumbles over this whole idea of a
virgin birth or virgin conception—in verse 34. She says to Gabriel, “How in the world can this be? I am a virgin!” She knows how
babies are made.
And Gabriel responds to her skepticism by reverently and with a reticence, telling her that the Holy Spirit is going to
overshadow her and in some kind of mysterious powerful way, she will become pregnant as a virgin.
Now right here, a lot of people file charges against the biblical orthodox faith and say, “Ah, what we have here is a
Christianizing, an adoption, of Greek mythology. Now I will admit it’s true. If you study Greek mythology, you’ll run across
beaucoups of stories about gods coming down and mating with young virgin women. But unlike Greek mythology, the story that we
have before us this morning is totally non-sexual. Think about it! How does God create? He speaks! God speaks and then the entire
universe comes into being. God creates through the spoken word. And one of the jobs of the Holy Spirit is to take God’s spoken
word and bring it home to your lives and mine in such a way that the product is new life.
We’re not dealing with a sexual miracle here. We’re dealing with a spoken miracle. We may be more sex-obsessed but we are
not more theologically-savvy than the generations of Christians that have come before us.
I once saw a medieval painting of the Enunciation. That’s what this story is called—Gabriel announcing to Mary that she will
give birth to the Messiah. And in this painting of the Enunciation, interestingly enough, the Holy Spirit is portrayed as entering
Mary’s ear. You see, this is a spoken miracle, not a sexual miracle.
Now, as a biologist, let me just say to you it’s futile to try to probe the physiology of the virgin conception. Don’t even try to do
it. That is not Luke’s intent. That is not the Apostles’ Creed’s intent. But what is going on here, what Luke wants you and me to
understand is this, that in the Virgin Conception, God was able to bring about the earthly existence of Jesus with no help from us—
that He was able to bring Jesus into existence in His earthly life through a miraculous way.
In such a way that points us immediately to the reality that Jesus is fully-God and fully-Man, Son of God and Son of Man.
A reality that points you and me to the fact that Jesus, the God-Man, then is the perfect mediator between God and humanity.
But it points us on beyond that to the fact that Jesus is the perfect sacrifice, the Lamb, slain before the foundation of the world and
then ultimately it points us to the reality that Jesus is the perfect Savior. Only God can save. Only Jesus can save you and me, from
ourselves and for God.
Christianized Greek mythology? I don’t think so.
Did you know that centuries before the virgin conception, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle had all so ridiculed the virgin birth stories
in Greek mythology that by the 1st Century A.D., the whole idea of the Virgin Birth was a complete joke to Greeks. So if you were truly
serious about winning Greeks to Christ as Luke is, the last thing that you would ever make up and insert into your story would be a
virgin birth—unless it actually happened, historically, biologically!
My friends, don’t be fooled! The most controversial, the most hard-to-swallow thing about the Christian faith, and about the
Apostles’ Creed in particular, is not, and never has been the virgin conception.
Remember two weeks ago I told you that the most difficult, hard-to-swallow clause in the Apostles’ Creed is the very first one—
I believe in God the Father Almighty!
In similar fashion, the big, hard-to-swallow pill in the story before us this morning is not the appearance of an angel, not an
announcement that a virgin is going to become pregnant, not the metaphysics of how a human egg might be fertilized in some way
by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit. No, no, no!
The controversy of the Christian faith always centers in verse 37 of our text where Gabriel says to Mary, where he counters her
unbelief, by first saying to her, “Now, Mary, think for a minute. Remember your aunt Elizabeth? She’s pregnant, in her old, old, old,
ancient age.” But then Gabriel brings the zinger home to her and to you and me this morning in verse 37 when he says, “Nothing is
impossible with God!”
Now do you believe that? Can you swallow that? Nothing is impossible with God?
My friends, here you and I are confronted with a fish-or-cut-bait question, whether you believe that or not. Nothing is
impossible with God!
I’m convinced you can’t be a Christian; I’m convinced you can’t really follow Jesus; I’m convinced that you and I will never be
people of hope, that you and I will never have hope in the face of things like cancer and plunging stock markets, in a world of
uncertainty and finally in the face of death, until you and I can put both feet down on verse 37. Nothing is impossible with God!
That’s either true or it isn’t. If it’s true, then the Christian faith, in its entirety, is totally credible. If it’s not true, then at best the
Christian faith is a joke.
Nothing is impossible with God! And this is the point where Mary emerges as THE paradigm—the model of faith for you and
me! She doesn’t believe in virgin conceptions any more than the average person in the street today. But here we watch our model of
authentic faith as she takes all of her doubt, all of her unbelief, all of her confusion and fear and she gathers it up and she brings it
before the Lord. And then she does a humble act of submission here
She puts her full weight down on the Word of God, over and against her doubts and fears. That’s a model for you and me. How
to deal with those tough parts of faith! She says, “Let it be done to me.”
Now, not only is this not easy for her to swallow but this is really existential for Mary. It’s a life-and-death decision for Mary. It’s
not just an intellectual theological doctrine. She’s putting her life at risk here. If you’re pregnant and unmarried in the 1 st Century,
that has a death sentence attached to it but she, in her actions, she’s saying, “The Word of God is more trustworthy than my fear!”
Wow! What about Karl Barth? Whatever happened to him? We left him back in his little church, there in that Alpine village, in
agony.
Barth finally came to a decision. He decided that he would not remove that clause, “Conceived the Holy Ghost, born of the
Virgin Mary,” from the Apostles’ Creed in their service of worship. He decided he would leave the Creed in their service, intact, but
he made a 3rd decision which ended up being a life-transformational decision for Karl Barth. He decided that even though he did not
believe the virgin birth, he would go ahead and not be silent at that point but he would go ahead and say it along with his
congregation.
Now is that not the height of hypocrisy?
Just the opposite!
For underlying that 3rd decision of Karl Barth is this reasoning: Barth thought to himself, “Could it be? Could it just possibly be
that the collective wisdom of Christians through the ages, if I put that wisdom on a scale with my wisdom, could it be that that
collective wisdom might just outweigh my singular individual finite mortal fallen perspective on reality?” In other words, he
submitted himself to the larger wisdom of the church.
The result: By mid-20th Century, Karl Barth becomes the greatest, staunchest, the most articulate champion of the virgin birth,
virgin conception, that has ever been. He reached the conclusion that the wisdom of God trumps the wisdom of men. Karl Barth took
his stand with Mary as a humble servant of the Lord and His Word.
How about you and me? Can we stand with Apostles’ Creed and affirm that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of
the Virgin Mary?
I take my stand with Karl Barth and with Mary and I do so as a scientist, even though I can’t explain scientifically to you how
the virgin conception physiologically operates; I take my stand on that being historic, biologic truth because I believe verse 37 is
true.
You see, my friends, our job as Christians is to attend to the Word of God, not contend with God’s Word. And I believe the
Virgin Conception is a reality also, because personally I have seen God work a miracle that makes what was an impossibility, as
something that makes the virgin conception pale by comparison, I have witnessed God do it as He took a 24 year-old, rebellious,
spiritually-dead, sinful graduate student and do something in that student’s life that turned him inside-out, right-side-up, that
brought him to new birth, into a life in Christ. I know that’s true. I witnessed it, for he stands before you in this pulpit this morning.
Nothing is impossible with God!
Therefore, my friends, never give up! And never give in! Nothing is impossible with God! Even a virgin conception!
In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen!