Day 6 - Luke 1:26-27
05 Dec 2023
You can listen to an audio version of this blog post here -
“In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary.”
Our attention is now moved away from the big city to Nazareth in Galilee. It is six months on from the events of the first part of the chapter.
We meet Mary, barely more than a girl, who is going to be married to Joseph. Just like Zechariah she is about to have her own angelic visitation.
The most important thing we need to notice is that she is a virgin. This is emphasised twice in two verses. Luke doesn’t record this because he is some kind of tabloid style journalist interested in the details of someone’s private life. It is because our salvation depends on the fact that Jesus’ coming is a miraculous intervention into our world.
We cannot fully understand who Jesus Christ is without recognising he was born of a virgin. We talk about the virgin birth. It is true that Mary did not have relations with Joseph until after Jesus was born. The more significant point is that Mary was a virgin at the time of conception.
Just like the previous incident with Zechariah these verses pick up on promises made hundreds of years ago. This time it was promises made through the prophet Isaiah.
Like all miracles of God, this isn’t a magic trick, it is a sign. God is drawing our attention to who Jesus really is. The fact that Jesus was born of a virgin shows us that he is God really with us. He is fully man - taking a real human nature. He is also fully God - he has his origins beyond Mary’s womb (and certainly not in Joseph’s will).
The fact that Jesus was born of a virgin emphasises to us that only God can save us. Our sin is so great that even the best of us cannot save us. Even a godly man like Zechariah expresses doubt in God’s word when faced with an angel. No ordinary human being can put an end to death. By recording the angel’s visit to Mary, Luke is emphasising Gods intervention into human history. Only God with us can save us. Jesus needs to be fully man - as it is those who are fully men who need saving. But he can’t just be fully man - we cannot work our way out of the hole of sin and judgement we are in.
It is right that these verses make us stop and think. This is a unique event. It is unrepeatable. That’s the point. The child that is about to be announced, the one who is already being knit together in Mary’s womb, is like no other (before or since). But we shouldn’t disbelieve that such a thing could happen. After all - God created the world from nothing. He gives us our every breath out of the life he has in himself. It makes sense that such a God can save miraculously.
As the evangelist Glen Scrivener so memorably puts it “Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Materialists believe in the virgin birth of the cosmos. Choose your miracle.”