We’re going to pick up from where we left off in Matthew (1) I: Fourteen and we are moving into the birth account of our Lord Jesus. Despite the familiarity of this story, you're going to be surprised by some of the things you’ll learn because so much of what we know about the birth account of Jesus has been imparted upon us by things like movies or Christmas carols or bedtime stories. As a result, a lot of the details of that story, or what we think we know of that story, have either been lost in our understanding or they've been changed by these other cultural impacts.
So, even what you think you may know about the birth story may not be exactly accurate. Thankfully, we got the whole story right here in the Gospel so we could go back to it and get the full account. So let's revisit it together with fresh eyes.
Previously, we had looked in Chapter 1:1-17. And now we're picking up right where we left off. Verse 18:
Matt. 1:18 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.
Matt. 1:19 And Joseph her husband, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her, planned to send her away secretly.
So, imagine Matthew, or one of Jesus’ half-brothers, sitting across from Joseph, getting this story when they're doing the research to write the Gospel, when Matthew is trying to get his background. And he's asking Joseph, “Tell me a little bit about what it was like for Jesus to come into the world; when you remember your son being born.” And we imagine Joseph sort of leans back a little bit, begins with his wife-to-be coming home, telling him that she is pregnant. That's probably where this story starts. Right?
And unfortunately, that's a problem that's happened to men throughout the centuries. That’s what every man thinks under the same circumstances. “You know, my fiancé, (or in this case, my betrothed woman) has been fooling around on me, and here she is now breaking the news.”
Joseph thinks Mary's been fooling around. That's the natural conclusion, and Matthew explains to us so that we would understand, obviously, “No, no, no, that's not what happened. It was the Holy Spirit”.
And Joseph eventually came to understand this, obviously at some point. But in the moment, Joseph assumes what every guy would assume under the same circumstances - Mary's guilty of cheating on him.
It says, Mary and Joseph were betrothed, and that's a unique pre-marital status that doesn't compare to anything we do today. And so it deserves a minute or two of explanation so that you could understand what Joseph's thinking is. It's not the same thing as being engaged. If you think about it, engagement is nothing. It’s not binding, it doesn't require anything. It really has no meaning other than ‘we’re kind of thinking about fixing to get married’, and that's fine for our culture.
But that's not how it worked in their day in Jewish culture. In Jewish culture, betrothal was something far more binding than an engagement is today. Yet it was still a step short of full marriage. To understand the difference, you’ll have to remember, marriages in Jesus’ day were normally arranged marriages.
So, the family of a woman who was of marrying age would negotiate with the family of a son of some man who was an eligible bachelor. They try to arrange these two kids to get married. And the family of the man had to pay the family of the prospective bride a price, a certain amount of money in order to make the deal happen. Now the price had to be generous because if that groom's family tried to bargain down the price for the bride, it was kind of suggesting that this girl wasn't very desirable, as if she was on the discount rack. So, the idea was to actually bid the price up to show how much you wanted this woman.
Eventually, if these two families came to an agreement on the price, then the deal for marriage was struck at that point. And at that point they paid the price, and the girl was betrothed to the groom even though the two of them had never met. And because money was exchanged in that deal, the betrothal was a legal arrangement. There was an actual contract of sorts.
So, legally speaking, the couple had entered into a preliminary form of marriage at that point. And months later there would be a formal marriage where the marriage ceremony would take place, and the couple would then officially become husband and wife. But there was an interim period there between betrothal and marriage when they still had a legal agreement to marry.
Now only when they had the full marriage later could the couple then go into the marriage tent and consummate the marriage. Prior to that moment of the marriage ceremony when they consummated the marriage, while they're still betrothed, they had to remain chaste. Both man and woman had to remain virgins during that time. In fact, one of the reasons why there was that waiting period between betrothal and marriage was so that they could make sure that the woman was not already pregnant by some other man before she got married. It's all part of a system of making sure people did the right thing.
So, that's where we are now. Mary and Joseph are betrothed at this point, which means they have not yet formally been married. They haven't had relations yet, as Matthew points out. But here we are now during that betrothal period that Mary turns up pregnant. Matthew says, “Mary was found to be with child” like it was just some chance discovery.
We read in Luke's Gospel that Mary initially went - after she heard she was going to have this child from the angel - to spend time with her cousin Elizabeth, who was pregnant with John the Baptist at the time. And Luke says she spent three months there with Elizabeth.
So, after three months of being with Elizabeth, Mary returns home now, knowing that she was going to have to tell Joseph sooner or later about her pregnancy.
Now, imagine Mary starts with something like, “Joseph, I got good news and bad news. Good news is, it's a boy!”. And from there that goes downhill fast. Right?
Now, Mary tells Joseph that she's with child, but then, obviously, quickly denies that it's anything untoward. She says, “No, no, no. I haven’t been unfaithful.” She says, “Not what you're thinking. This is the result of the Holy Spirit.” In other words, “God made me pregnant.” That's what she's saying to Joseph.
Now that's a significant moment in the story and here's why. Under Jewish theology, the thinking of Jews in that day, they did not acknowledge the Third Person of the Trinity. In fact, they didn't acknowledge the Trinity at all.
So, they had not even heard of such a thing as the Holy Spirit. There was no concept in their thinking that there were multiple Persons of God. There was just ‘Jehovah God’ Yahweh, that was it.
Now you can't get past the second verse of our Bible in Genesis without seeing the Spirit described distinctly as a Person apart from the Father. But nevertheless, the Jews never grasped that in their concept of the teaching of God. So, you can imagine that what Joseph's hearing Mary say right now is complete nonsense to him. If you want evidence of this, just go to the book of Acts in Chapter 19 when Paul comes upon some Jewish men who claim to be believing when Paul's not quite sure what they mean by that. So, he asked them this:
Acts 19:2 He said to
them, "Did you receive
the Holy Spirit
when you believed?"
(Now here's what these Jewish men said) And they said to him, "No,
we have not even heard whether
there is a Holy Spirit."
That's the nature of Jewish thinking. They had no concept of that thought until it was taught to them. Joseph didn't understand that either. There's no reason to think he did at this point. So, when Mary blames her pregnancy on the Holy Spirit, he must have thought that is a completely ridiculous excuse.
So, Matthew says in verse 19 that Joseph does probably the only thing anyone would do in his situation. He says, “I'm just going to end this relationship but I'm going to do it in a merciful way for Mary’s sake.” In other words, he is setting about to divorce Mary. Now, if you go back and look at the original Greek of what Matthew wrote, the word he used for ‘send away’ is actually the Greek word for ‘divorce’.
So, Matthew was saying Joseph had the intention of divorcing Mary. And that would have been the natural response in this case because the husband had the right to an unblemished bride. And since Mary and Joseph have not yet consummated their marriage, he has no obligation to stay with her at this point. And so he was ready to divorce her.
But nonetheless, it says he's going to divorce her secretly. By ‘secretly’, what he means is that Joseph is not going to press charges against Mary. Because what Mary has committed, or at least seems to have committed, is a crime under Jewish law that is punishable by death by stoning. In the law, Deuteronomy 22:20 it says:
Deut. 22:20 "But if this charge is true,
that the girl was not found a virgin,
Deut. 22:21 then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death because she has committed an act of folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father's house; thus you shall purge the evil from among you.
Now, this is in the time of Israel. They’re under the law, and this would have been the prescription. If Joseph had wanted to make a big deal out of this, this is what would have happened to Mary.
Joseph, being a righteous man, couldn't marry the woman because it appears she's immoral. But on the other hand, his righteousness also gave him a measure of mercy. And so he chose to, instead of making a big deal out of it, probably take her somewhere away from her home, from her family, somewhere she wouldn't be recognized, find a magistrate and then give her a writ of divorce and be done with her.
Now, consider what Mary was thinking about this point. Having heard from Joseph, “I'm divorcing you because you have this baby.” Having told him what she knows, nevertheless, this is now what she's facing.
From Luke's gospel, we know that she had by this point already been visited by an angel who told her the news of her pregnancy. Plus, she knows she's never been with a man, and she clearly sees this baby growing inside her. So, she knows she's got a miracle happening in her body. This is the Messiah, the long-promised Savior of the world that is coming to save men from their sin. The one that He promised to deliver ever since the fall of Adam and Woman in the Garden. There will be no more important event in all human history than the birth of the Messiah. And God has put Mary at the center of this event.
And so she is absolutely convinced that what she has is a miracle birth ordained by God, and she has shared this news with her prospective husband, and he doesn't believe her.
Now do you suppose Mary at this point was wondering if God was failing her at this time in her life, as He was putting this upon her and then letting this come from it? Did she cry out to God asking why God wasn't keeping her marriage together in a faithful way although she was being a faithful servant to Him? Or do you think she supposed God lacked the power to save the marriage? Or maybe He didn't care about her anymore? The kind of thoughts that you and I would run to in a moment like this?
Well, the text is silent. But can we consider that perhaps Mary was thinking that God will take care of this problem, and that He knows how to protect her marriage, and that she was responding in faith, trusting God would figure out a way to solve this problem?
Now, let’s go over to Luke 1:31-38 to take a look at Mary’s response to the angel:
Luke 1:31 "And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name Him Jesus.
Luke 1:32 "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;
Luke 1:33 and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and His kingdom will have no end."
Luke 1:34 Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?"
Luke 1:35 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 Child shall be called the Son of God.
Luke 1:37 "For nothing will be impossible with God."
Luke 1:38 And Mary said, "Behold, the bondslave of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word." And the angel departed from her.
So, what Mary just hears is the impossible - she hears that a baby is going to come out of a virgin womb. And when she asks the angel how this is going to happen, the angel just says, “Well, nothing is impossible with God” To which Mary says, “Okay, fine. Let it be done according to your word”.
Mary was probably a little more emotional than that. But the point is, she was ready to go with it. In other words, you could say Mary accepted in faith what she had been told by an angel because she knew the Lord's word was certain and sure, and she believed God could do impossible things.
So, now back to where she is with Joseph. Ask yourself this: What's easier for God to do? To bring a child out of a virgin's womb or to save Mary's marriage? Which is harder for God? How foolish would it have been for Mary to stare down at that baby bump on her body, knowing she was a virgin and at the same time complain to God that He's letting her marriage fall apart, right? I mean, what would she have expected God to say to that if she had made those comments? Would He have said something like, “Calm down, Mary. I got this. Don't you understand? We got a plan going on here.”
That's a level of insight and spiritual maturity that is sometimes hard for us to obtain. Because don't we sometimes make the same kind of leap in logic when we're dealing with the events of our own life? When our world is coming apart and we turn to God in those moments and in frustration or fear we accuse Him of failing us like somehow the plan has gone awry?
But perhaps ask yourself this question: what's more challenging for God? To part the Red Sea or to solve your relationship problems?
Or what's harder? For Him to speak the universe into existence or to cure your illness or addiction?
What demonstrates His love more to you? That He died on a cross to save you from your sins? Or that He would settle your financial debts?
What's the measure you need to know that God is not only all-powerful, but also all-loving?
Hasn't He already shown you those things?
Hasn't He already sufficiently proven that He loves us, and that He has demonstrated the power to solve problems when He chooses to?
Of course, He has. The real issue and question here is, are we willing to accept His will for our life, even when we don't understand it, and don’t like it? Can you trust Him to be working on your behalf?
You and I know God does not solve every problem in our lives the way we want, and He does not give us everything we want, despite what some are trying to tell the Church. The Bible does not say that.
What our Bible does say is that the Lord works all circumstances in the lives of believers to arrive at eternally good things for us and for His glory. And sometimes the good things that the Lord wants to accomplish in our spirit will require that we first endure some not-so-good things in our earthly lives.
And there are a lot of examples:
If God wants you to improve your prayer life, He may bring you some hard trials that throw you on your knees.
And if God wants to develop a greater sense of self-restraint or humility in you, He may expose your pride or test your patience in some kind of uncomfortable.
And if He wants you to seek Him more earnestly and to depend on Him more desperately, He's willing to bring you to the end of yourself because the outcome is worth it.
But no matter what circumstances He brings into your life, you and I cannot discredit or question His power or His goodness. We can't.
Think back to Mary again. God gave Mary the blessing to birth the Messiah. So, how could she stand there and declare to Him that, “You're not being good to me with my marriage”? What better thing could she have received? If God could supernaturally conceive a child in her womb, she knows He has the capacity to fix any problem.
God has already proven Himself to Mary that He was both good and powerful. She had every reason to remain quietly confident that God was in control. So that as her husband declares, “I'm divorcing you”, she can say, “Well, we'll see about that.”
For one thing, if it happens, it's a part of a plan God's got for Mary. Something good’s coming out of it.
But if it's not meant to happen, Joseph can't do it on his own, and there’s no good reason for Mary to worry about it happening.
In other words, that's the approach of faith. God, having given believers the blessings that we know, chief of all, His Son dying on the cross to pay for our sins. That in and of itself is sufficient evidence for us to stand back and say, “God is good all the time.” And then when He raised His Son to prove that He had the power of life over death, we can also say at the same time, He could do anything He wants.
So, knowing that He can resurrect even your dead body and give you an eternal one for life in the Kingdom, then what can't He do while you're still living in the dead body now?
We are talking about a perspective, about faith in God and in His promises, about living with eyes for eternity. It's the perspective that Mary probably had knowing nothing was impossible with God. And if God could do literally anything, we really shouldn’t be asking, ‘Why didn't You?’ or ‘Why won't You?’. The question we should ask all the time is, ‘What's best?” because God always does and only does what is best.
So, when He doesn't do what we want, it's not because He's unkind or He's unable. It's because there was a better option for the sake of eternity, and you and I may not understand that right now. But when everything's said and done, and we're with God in the Kingdom, we will look back on what He did and we will agree that everything He did was the best thing He could have done.
That's why faith is required now. Then, sometimes in mercy, God will give us exactly what we want, but only because it was the best thing. And that's what He does for Mary in this case. Look where He goes next in verse 20.
Matt. 1:20 But when (Joseph) 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 the Child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.
Matt. 1:21 She will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”
Matt. 1:22 Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
Matt. 1:23 “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which translated means, “God with us.”
Matt. 1:24 And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and took Mary as his wife,
Matt. 1:25 but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.
So, Matthew says in verse 20 that even as Joseph was considering this plan of divorce in a dream an angel appears to him.
Now, this is the Lord showing up in a big way to correct Joseph's thinking. And he starts by addressing Joseph as the son of David.
(Now know that that's a title that points back to the Davidic Covenant. And the Davidic Covenant was a promise that God gave to Israel specifically to David. He said that from David onward, there would always be someone in the line of David to rule the throne in Israel, and eventually it would culminate in one Man who would occupy that throne eternally, and we know that to be Jesus. And that's the term ‘Son of David’ – it’s a reference to that coming promise of a Messiah to rule. And Joseph, as we learned previously, is in the line of David down to the Messiah. So in a sense he's also a son of David. And yet the angel calls him that here to draw his attention to the bigger plan of fulfilling the Davidic Covenant. Basically, that's a wake up call to Joseph.)
So here's Joseph, his mind is squarely focused on himself right now. He is considering how to divorce his wife; he’s probably nursing his feelings of hurt and betrayal, giving no thought to Mary's explanation about the Holy Spirit except just to dismiss it out of hand. So the angel in the dream goes to Joseph and says, “It's time to think about something a little bigger than yourself here for a moment. ‘Son of David’ - that's to jar his attention.
In verse 21 the angel says to Joseph, “You know that wife that you're ready to divorce, she's going to have a Son just like she said and it's going to be Jesus, conceived by the Holy Spirit; the Messiah, the one God has promised to send to His people to save them from their sins. This child that you're getting ready to walk away from, this is the child that is going to save humanity from the fires of hell.”
And Joseph hears that in his dream, and it probably begins to sink in a little bit that the world doesn't revolve around him. There's something else going on and the Messiah's arrival is going to require that Joseph be willing to marry a woman who got pregnant out of wedlock. That's part of the plan.
Now that would be a significant sacrifice for both of them. Maybe not so much in our culture today. But in that day, that was a big deal. It was no small request.
Now, imagine, given how hard it was for Joseph to accept Mary's story, that she didn't go fooling around on him, that this was a virgin birth - how hard is it going to be for them to convince the culture at large that that's the story? Who's going to believe them? In a strict culture like ancient Judea, this kind of a scandal didn't just go unnoticed. This is a big deal. Family and friends are not only going to naturally conclude that she is immoral, they're going to despise Joseph for being willing to marry an immoral woman. These two are pariahs in their own families from this point forward.
That's the price that God wants Joseph to pay in serving His interests to bring the Messiah. God is requiring this young couple to begin their lives together under a dark cloud and probably with very few friends.
Now, you and I, we must think, “Oh, they're blessed. Mary, how lucky she was. Oh, Joseph, what a wonderful honor to have.” In eternity, that will be true but undoubtedly in this moment, that's not how they're thinking about this problem. In their early lives, they actually followed the footsteps of their Child-to-be. They suffered for the sake of glory.
So the angel tells Joseph, “Don't fear all of that. Take your wife as you planned. She has not been unfaithful. Press on. And the reason you could do this is because she was, in fact, as she said, made pregnant by the Holy Spirit.”
Now let's think about that for a minute. This process of the conception of God inside the womb of Mary - we don't have any explanation for how that happens. We understand that it happened, but we can’t tell how it happened. Not biologically. That's the whole mystery of it. It's supernatural. God supernaturally created the male component of conception and introduced that male component of conception into Mary's womb so that she would then conceive a child without a man being involved in the process.
But that just raises a huge question: why such an elaborate plan? Why go to such an effort to conceive Jesus? Why not just simply use the normal birth process of conception to get a ‘Jesus’ into the world? Now we learned one reason why not previously. We learned that there was that curse on the king that's in the line of Joseph, King Jechoniah, and that curse prevented any biological descendant of that man, of that king, from ever holding the throne of David.
So Joseph, being a descendant of Jechoniah, Jesus could not have been Joseph’s biological descendant because that would have barred Jesus from being on the throne.
But still, God could have solved that particular issue in other ways without going to the effort of a supernatural conception. He could have just chosen another man to be Mary's husband. Some other guy from the line of David who didn't go through Jechoniah. So why a supernatural conception for Jesus?
Well, the angel gives us a possible answer. When he tells Joseph that Jesus’ miraculous birth will be the fulfillment of a prophecy from the Old Testament. He's referring back in verses 22-23. Here he refers to this prophecy from a prophet. It's the Prophet Isaiah, coming out of Isaiah 7. In Isaiah 7, hundreds of years before Jesus, you have the prophet declaring that there would be a virgin involved in the arrival of Messiah. Isaiah 7:14:
Isa. 7:14 Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel.
So, this is written hundreds of years ahead of time. The prophet telling Israel, “This is what to look for. You know your Messiah when you see Him because he's going to come from a virgin birth. We're going to call him Immanuel. That's your sign.”
Obviously, the word ‘virgin’, in Isaiah's prophecy, it refers to a woman who's never been with a man, just like it does today. And since the way of conception naturally happens through men and women together, what Isaiah’s telling Israel is, “You're going to have to look for a supernatural beginning to this Messiah. It’s not going to happen through conventional means. That's why it will stand out. That's why it is a sign. That's why it will be noticeable.”
But here again, this just begs another question: why that particular sign, when God could use any sign? In fact, He uses a bunch of signs in telling us who is Messiah. He sends a star. He sends magi. He has shepherds and angels and other things. There is really no lack of signs to show that Jesus was the Messiah.
So again, why did the Lord want our Savior to come by way of a supernatural conception?
And the full answer is in verse 23. When the angel tells Joseph that the Child will be called Immanuel, he tells you what the word ‘Immanuel’ means. He says, “It is God with us”.
Now, we know the Lord was not actually named Immanuel. There is no moment in the New Testament when that name is used for Jesus. In fact, just a couple of verses earlier, the angel tells Joseph to just name the child “Jesus”. But he says, He'll be called ‘God with us’.
So what he's saying is this. People will say this about Jesus, that He is God with us, and that's why we needed a virgin birth. To get a better sense of what this really means, we have to go to the very beginning, back to the moment of the very first human sin. When the human race consisted of only two people, Adam and his wife, who at that time he called Woman, when they were alone in the Garden that God prepared for humanity.
In that Garden before the very first sin took place, God gave Adam this instruction. He said to Adam that if he should ever disobey the word of God and particularly one word concerning a certain tree, that if he disobeyed that word, it will result in Adam dying spiritually.
Now to die spiritually means to have your soul consigned to a place of torment forever and always barred from God's presence. That's what we mean when we say ‘dying spiritually’. The Bible calls this spiritually death the Second Death because it will follow after your first death of your physical body.
So after your physical body dies, if you are without the covering of Christ, if you have not been saved from your sin, you then pay the penalty of the second death. Your spirit now goes through torment. That's what the Bible says. That's the penalty that God pronounced in advance for sin, should sin come into the world.
Now once God issues His word, once it goes forth, the Bible says it cannot be changed and it must be fulfilled. Isaiah tells us that also in Isaiah 55:11. The Lord speaking in the first person, He says:
Is. 55:11 So will My word be which goes out from My mouth; It will not return to Me empty, Without accomplishing what I desire, And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.
Remember the moment when Jesus is coming in, near the end of His life, coming into the city on the donkey - we celebrate it as Palm Sunday? He's riding in and all the disciples are there, and there's a crowd around Him, and they're declaring Him to be Messiah and the Pharisees who hated Jesus, they didn't like that. They didn't like Jesus being called Messiah publicly.
And they go up to Jesus and they say, “Jesus, silence Your disciples.”
And what did Jesus say? He says, “If these do not cry out, the rocks will cry out.”
And what Jesus means is there was a prophecy in the Old Testament that said when He rode into the city, they would be saying what they were saying. And what Jesus was saying to the Pharisees, “If I shut up these people, the rocks will start saying this because God's word said it would be said, and you can't change what God's word has declared.”
That's how certain His word is. Even if it requires rocks to say something, what He said will happen.
So God said to Adam, “The day you eat of it, you shall surely die”. Said. Done. In the books. Can't be changed. God also declared earlier that Adam and Woman would have the right and the obligation to reproduce and fill the world. And He said that they would reproduce, all creatures would reproduce in a way that was very specific. They would reproduce after their own kind, which is a simple way of saying what we are is what we make. And that was also decreed by God and cannot change.
So what you are both physically and spiritually, is what your children will be.
So here these two words having been declared before the first sin and they must be carried out without exception. And so, then as Adam and Woman disobeyed God and became sinful human beings by their active rebellion, they died spiritually because God's word said it would happen.
And that spiritual change in their nature made them a different person than they were before. And in the reproduction process that followed when they made Cain, the child that came out of them shared that nature. Cain didn't have to go up to the tree and eat the fruit. He didn't need to. He came out with that sin already in his nature. And of course, the story of Cain proves that to be true. He wasn't just the first child; he was also the first murderer.
So those principles have been in the race of humanity ever since. We reproduce who we are, and we inherit a sin nature from our parents who received it from their parents, and it goes all the way back to Adam. And that sin nature having been passed down, generation after generation, is the cause for all the pain and suffering and sin of humanity that you see everywhere. Paul explains it in one verse this way. Romans 5:12:
Rom. 5:12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned —
So that's the state of humanity, both historically and now again today. That is to say, we're all sinners by nature. That is the nature we inherited from our parents. We're all born with a spiritual birth defect, and that birth defect leaves us under condemnation right from the start, due to a penalty that God pronounces against humanity from the beginning. That is, if you have sin, you will suffer the Second Death. After your body dies, you go into an eternal state of separation from God.
Thankfully, that's not where the Bible story ends. The Bible goes on to tell us that God so loved the world, that He determined to make a way available to us, that we might avoid that fate because of His mercy and grace.
That is, He sends His Son, Jesus, who takes the penalty for our sin on the cross. And He comes to give us His life as a ransom payment, to free us from the debt we have before God in our sin.
And that if we believe in Him and in the death that He took in our place, we will receive the gift of eternal life.
That's the Gospel. That's the message of salvation, that we might have something better than eternal death. We might have eternal life as a result of what Jesus did.
But now here's why He had to be born of a virgin. If Jesus' death was to be an acceptable payment, an acceptable substitute for us, then He could not have had any sin of His own. Because if Jesus had been born in the nature of Adam like we were, He too would have come into life with a nature that inherited the sin of Adam. He would have entered into the world a sinful person by nature. We are not sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sinners by nature.
So if Jesus was born with a sin nature, He has been as guilty of sin as you and I. And therefore when He died, He would have just been paying for His own sin with His own death. It couldn't have been a payment available to anyone else. It just would have covered His own debt.
So it was necessary that Jesus be Immanuel ‘God with us’, not ‘God like us’. Jesus was fully human but He was also fully God. He was no less a human being than you and me but He was greater than we are in that one sense that although we had an earthly father that made us like Him, Jesus was like Adam - he had no earthly father.
Just like Adam's body came to life because God breathed life (And actually, the word in Hebrew for breathe is ruah, the same word for spirit) into it. So in the same sense that the Holy Spirit conceived Jesus, it was by the Spirit that God gave Adam life from his beginnings.
God starts the human race a second time through a new Adam, the Bible calls Jesus, who begins the process again, disconnected from the source of our sin, not tied to Adam in any way. Conceived supernaturally, restarting the race. That's why He had to come in a virgin birth. It is so that He could be a human being like us to serve in our place and yet remain free from the original sin, which is why He had to die for us in the first place.
So, having been born without sin, He goes on to live a life without ever repeating Adam’s mistake. He lives sinlessly thereafter. He never disobeyed the Father. So He was like an Adam that did everything right instead of the one that we traced our sin back to. And don't think Jesus wasn't tempted. We'll see later in Matthew's gospel that He had every opportunity to be tempted, just as Adam did, and even worse than Adam did. But Scripture says He never gave in to that temptation.
So when Jesus went to the death on that cross, He suffered a death He didn't deserve because He hadn't committed any sin. And therefore His death became payment for you and for me, to cover our debt before God as a perfect sinless sacrifice. That's what Immanuel means--God with us; not God like us.
And so Joseph wakes from his sleep and he accepts the angel's revelation and acts in faith because it says in verse 24 that he takes Mary as his wife. He set a date for the wedding. He enters into the covenant prior to the birth of Jesus so that at the time Jesus is born, He wouldn't be an illegitimate child; He would be legally Joseph’s descendant at that point. And yet you notice Joseph also respects Mary and the plan of God, and her place in that plan so that he allows her to remain a virgin. So in verse 25 we’re told he refrains from consummating the marriage, acting again in faith, believing the angel’s report that Mary must remain a virgin.
So, do you believe the same report? Do you believe the word of God concerning Jesus? Like Joseph eventually did? Do you believe He's the Saviour who came to save you from your sin? Do you believe He was conceived by a virgin so as to ensure that He remained sinless for your sake?
Do you believe He died on that cross 2000 years ago?
It's a crazy story, really. Your secret to Heaven is a convicted criminal who was killed 2000 years ago on a Roman cross. That's the secret. The world says it's by how hard you work, how good you are, how much penance you do, how much pain you suffer, how much sacrifice you make.
But Scripture says, you can't do enough. You can't be good enough. And you can't sacrifice enough, because there's only one sacrifice God will accept. And that's the one He prepared for Himself in His own Son.
The only question is, do you have enough faith to act in keeping with what you've heard?
For Joseph, the action that God required to see his faith lived out was simply to take his wife, to marry her and to leave her a virgin until after the birth. And he did that. And what did the Lord ask us to do in response to our faith? It's much simpler, thankfully. He’s asked that we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, believing in our heart that God raised Him from the dead and that if we do these things, we will be saved.
Isn't it amazing how easy it is in human terms,
yet how hard it had to be for God to make it possible?
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