The Virgin Birth of Christ

The virgin birth of our Lord is a supernatural, historical, irrefutable truth—a cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith anchored forever in the counsels of God.

  All individuals born into the world are the seed of man, contaminated and polluted by sin, having Adam as their father (Rom. 5:12).  This is not true of the Lord Jesus.  Since the Lord Jesus is the eternal pre-existent Son of God (John 8:58; 17:5), He had to enter the world as no other before or after Him.  He is the Seed of the woman, born without a human father, to fulfill the plan of God in salvation.  After the Fall God promised to Adam and Eve a Redeemer who would be the Seed of the woman.

   The Lord Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary, became the Seed of the woman to bruise the head of Satan.  The Lord Jesus Christ is holy, sinless, untouched by the stain of sin.  He became man to deliver us from the blighting, ruining effects of sin against God. 

    The inspired record of Matthew 1:2-15 gives the genealogy of fathers and sons from Abraham to Joseph, the husband of Mary.  The genealogy is recorded from Abraham downward to 

establish the fact that the Lord Jesus is the son of Abraham, the promised Son, the Messiah for whom the Old Testament saints waited. 

  In Matthew 1:16 the usual order of a father begetting a son is suddenly interrupted by the words, “And Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born.”  The inspired text simply says that Joseph was the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born.  It does not say he was the father of our Lord Jesus. 

  The Greek relative pronoun translated as ‘whom’ is feminine gender, singular number. The rule regarding the pronoun is that it must agree with its antecedent in gender and number.

  Joseph is not the antecedent since he is masculine in gender. Joseph and Mary cannot be the antecedent since that would require the pronoun to be plural in number.  The only word in the verse that is feminine in gender and singular in number is Mary, from whom Jesus was born; hence the Lord Jesus was virgin-born.  God is His Father in the relationship of Christ’s humanity (Eph. 1:3; 1 Pet. 1:3). 

  Mary was the mother of the humanity of our Lord (Matt. 1:21); she was not the mother of God.  God the Father gave the eternal Son to be the Redeemer of mankind (John 3:16).  God the Holy Spirit created the sinless humanity of our Lord within the virgin Mary (Luke 1:35).  

  In the virgin birth, the Lord Jesus became the God-Man (1 Tim. 3:16) so He could be our Savior.  The glorious Person born of the virgin is the eternal God who died on the cross to be our Savior. In God’s purpose and time, the Lord Jesus came down from Heaven’s glory.  He brought God down to man so He could in His redemptive grace take man up to God.