The Questions of Christmas (2)
The Question of Mary
How Will This Be?
Scripture Reading: Luke 1:26-38
The biggest surprise of my life
happened in the summer of my sixteenth year
when a tall, lithe, beautiful brunette--
whom I had asked out the summer before
and been refused--
started going out with me,
and eventually became my wife.
The biggest surprise of Kristin Marks’s life was when she met a suave, handsome, smooth-talking man, became engaged, and got married--all in less than eight months time!
The biggest surprise of Henry and Deb Saas’s life was when the lady performing an ultrasound on a very pregnant Deb informed them that there were at least three babies in her womb. Henry quickly told her she had five minutes to change her story.
The biggest surprise of Vic Conner’s life was when his mother remarried a few years ago, and to such a man that Vic says he couldn’t have picked better himself!
And Kay Johnson was quite surprised when, expecting her first child, she learned that not only was her mother pregnant, but so was her father’s new wife!
The biggest surprise of Jon Saas’s life happened one day in Arizona, when his parents got him and his brothers into the van under the pretense of looking for land to buy, and hours later announced that they were all packed and going to Disneyland!
The biggest surprise of Gary Manka’s life may have been when he got the news that a suitable kidney had been found after only three weeks on the transplant list.
For Greg and Pam Beck, the big surprise happened in 1994, when--after receiving a dream promotion in their dream location and the day before closing on their dream house--Greg was tapped by his company to fill an emergency vacancy in the company somewhere else, bringing a rude awakening from all those dreams.
The biggest surprise of Jill Oglesbee’s life was somewhat like Mary’s: she and Mark had been told that they couldn’t have kids, so when Kyla came along. . . and then Traister . . . and then Aidan! . . . they were quite surprised.
Good morning. My name is Bob Hostetler, and this morning at Cobblestone Community Church we continue a four-week series of messages from the Bible, entitled “The Questions of Christmas.” And through the course of those four messages, we’re going to encounter some of the most basic,
most searching,
most revealing
questions that any human being has ever asked.
So, if you would, please turn in your Bible to the Gospel of Luke, the 3rd book of the New Testament
—Matthew, Mark, LUKE—
and to the first chapter of that book.
If you’re reading from one of the
table Bibles today, you’ll find it on page 710 . . .
Once again, that’s Luke, chapter one, where we’re going to meet a young woman
who received perhaps one of the biggest surprises in history,
a surprise that turned her world--and ours- upside down,
and we’re going to discuss her response to that surprise,
which was a question,
a question that has been a part of the Christmas story for two thousand years now . . .
Now, if you worship here regularly, you’ve heard me say this before, but I encourage you to get in the habit of bringing your Bible with you to our Cobblestone celebrations each Sunday,
so you can read
with your own eyes
from your own Bible
what’s being taught up here at the front.
And if you’re here without a Bible of your own this morning, please feel free to use one of the copies we provide for you in the center of each table.
And if you don’t own a Bible of your own, we’d be thrilled if you would take one of ours home with you . . .
So, let’s look together at Luke chapter 1, and our study of God’s Word this morning will begin in verse 26 of that chapter and extend through verse 38. So I invite you to follow along with me in your Bible as I read aloud from mine, beginning at Luke 1:26:
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 descendant 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 for ever; 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.
Can you imagine?
Maybe Henry and Deb Saas can understand a little bit about how Mary must have felt. . .
Maybe Jill Oglesbee can, too. . .
But none of us can fully comprehend the impact of the angel’s announcement to Mary.
She was told
that she would give birth
while still a virgin . . .
AND that her child
would be the long-awaited Messiah,
the Christ,
the Incarnate God.
There’s no mistaking it,
no changing it.
If the New Testament is to be believed--
and I believe wholeheartedly that it is--
then Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin.
And that teaching, that truth,
as presented here
in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel,
ought to say at least 3 extraordinary things to us.
And the first is that the Virgin Birth gives us:
1. An Indication of Who Jesus Is
Last week, we talked about all the messianic prophecies--that means, the predictions about how, when, and where the Jews’ Messiah (and the world’s Savior) would appear--about how at least sixty major prophecies were fulfilled in one person, Jesus Christ.
And do you know what the chances are that such prophecies could come true in one person?
Do you know how improbable it is that such a thing could happen by accident, by coincidence?
Professor Peter W. Stoner, a statistician, writing in a peer-reviewed analysis, took just EIGHT messianic prophecies and calculated the chance that they could be fufilled in just ONE person. Do you know what the chances turned out to be?
1 in 100 MILLION BILLION!
That’s the numeral 1 followed by 17 zeroes!
Let me put it this way:
If you were to take that many silver dollars and spread them over the face of the state of Texas, they would cover the whole state with a pile of coins two feet deep!
Now, imagine taking one more silver dollar, mark it with a red X, and toss it into that pile and mix up the whole mess. What are the chances that you could blindfold yourself, and then walk through that two-foot pile of coins the size of Texas, and stoop just ONCE to pick up a coin at random, and find the one you had marked?
That’s the chance that just EIGHT messianic prophecies could have been fulfilled in one person by coincidence.
But, of course, it didn’t happen by coincidence. And the one important prophecy we left out of our consideration last week was the one that was fulfilled in the part of the Bible we just read a moment ago, the prophecy that made Mary’s question necessary.
Do you remember her question? What was it?
That’s right. When the angel Gabriel appeared and said, “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,” Mary asked,
"How will this be . . . since I am a virgin?"
What Mary may not have realized at that moment was that the “HOW” had been decided--
and announced--long before.
You see, long before the prophets spoke—before any man had heard of a Messiah—God erected a signpost in the Garden of Eden which pointed directly to the means by which his Son would be born. It happened in the wake of Adam and Eve’s original sin, in the very first words of judgment God spoke into earth’s atmosphere. When God cursed the serpent who tempted Eve, he said:
“I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel” (Genesis 3:15, NASB).
The natural process of conceiving and giving birth involves the egg of a woman and the seed of a man. But in Genesis 3, some scholars believe that God referred to a supernatural process when he promised that the serpent would be vanquished by the seed of a woman—not the seed of any man.
Scripture foretold that same supernatural process again, seven hundred years before Christ’s birth, when the prophet Isaiah said,
“The Lord himself will choose the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel—‘God is with us’” (Isaiah 7:14, NLT).
What striking words: “the virgin will conceive.” In the course of nature, virgins don’t conceive. But God, speaking to the serpent, and again through the prophet Isaiah, promised something that human history had never seen before (or since): a child would be born outside the natural process of conception. Instead,
the Holy Spirit of God himself would form,
in the dark ocean of a virgin’s womb,
a child who would receive half his genetic information from a virgin…
while the other half would be divine in origin!
Thus, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ was a clear indication of who he is . . . he is not, in the words of the song, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” from the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar,
he is not “just a man”. . . .
He is, in the words of the Nicene Creed,
“very God of very God,
begotten, not made.”
But that’s not all.
Mary’s question, and the virgin birth, also provide us with . . .
2. A Demonstration of What God Can Do
When Mary asked her question,
"How will this be?,"
she was posing something
we have all asked at one time or another,
a question some of us here
may be asking right now.
Whether you’re hoping for help in an impossible job situation,
or wondering if you’ll ever find someone to love you the way you want to be loved,
or wishing for a way out of your debt,
or praying for a loved one to find forgiveness and salvation through faith in Christ,
or worried day and night for your kid or your parent,
or longing for the courage or strength to face some trial,
or deliverance from some hardship,
or something entirely different but just as hard,
or worse,
Mary’s question, "How will this be?" is your question, too. . . and so is the answer the angel Gabriel gave.
Do you remember what that was?
He gave her specifics first:
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.”
In other words, he said, “Look, Mary, you wanna know how? I’ll tell you how . . .” and he did. He said, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” And then he said, in effect, “Believe me, girl--
“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."
“ . . . For nothing is impossible with God."
Whaddya got in your life? Fear?
“Nothing is impossible with God."
What, loneliness?
“Nothing is impossible with God."
Confusion?
“Nothing is impossible with God."
Feel like you’re too tired to go on?
“Nothing is impossible with God."
Can’t get along with your parents?
“Nothing is impossible with God."
Think you’ll never get over your anger?
Think you’ll never be able to forgive?
Think you’ll never feel capable?
Think you’ll never be loved?
Think you’ll never heal?
Think you’ll never be happy?
“Nothing is impossible with God."
If God can reach all the way down from the
throne of heaven to the body of a teenage virgin,
if he can reach into time from eternity,
if he can shrink his infinity to a single cell
in the untouched womb of an innocent girl,
what can he not do . . . for you?
. . . in you?
. . . with you?
"How will this be?"
“Nothing is impossible with God."
Mary’s question,
and the virgin birth,
provide us with:
An Indication of Who Jesus Is,
A Demonstration of What God Can Do,
and, finally . . .
3. An Expression of How Greatly You Are Loved
Much preaching and teaching and commenting on the virgin birth focuses on how highly Mary was favored. After all, that’s how Gabriel addressed her, remember? In verse 28, he said:
"Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you."
But I don’t want anyone here to miss what Paul Harvey might call “The Rest . . . Of the Story!”
You see, there is an irony of grace operating in the Gospel accounts of how the people of Jesus’ hometown—Nazareth —reacted to him after he began his public ministry.
On one occasion, after he had taught in the synagogue, the people he had grown up with said,
“’He’s just the carpenter, the son of Mary’…They were deeply offended and refused to believe in him” (Mark 6:3, NLT).
Now, the label, “son of Mary,”
was an unambiguous insult
in a society that called children by the name of the father—
except, of course, in the case of children
whose paternity was doubted.
At another time, Jesus’ opponents threw a sharply pointed barb at him when they said,
“We were not born out of wedlock!” (John 8:39, NLT).
That insult--and the reference to Jesus as the “son of Mary”--imply that it was common knowledge in Jesus’ hometown that he had been conceived before Mary’s wedding to—and without the help of—Joseph.
In other words, from all indications,
the circumstances of Jesus’ miraculous birth
—to a virgin—
caused him to be labeled as an illegitimate child in the society of his day,
a society that heaped only abuse and derision and names and cruelty on such children, treatment which continued into the teen years and on into adulthood.
And it was not only the Gospel writers who recorded such smears. They persisted in the vehemently anti-Christian writings of Jewish rabbis in the years following his death, who (apparently capitalizing on the knowledge that Jesus was not born of an ordinary marriage) invented a story that called Jesus the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Panthera.
What does all that mean?
It means this. Most of us here are fairly accustomed to hearing that the circumstances and means of Jesus’ death on a cross demonstrates the depth of his love for us.
But it is not only his death that is an expression of his great love for you . . . it is also his birth!
Because get this:
Jesus, who was “very God of very God,”
equal with the Father in “power
and wealth
and wisdom
and strength
and honour
and glory
and praise” (Rev. 5:12),
loves you so much that he
not only accepted the limitations of humanity
but also endured
cruel taunts on the playground of his childhood and coarse ridicule from critics as an adult
as a direct result
of the unusual circumstances of his birth.
Though he was God,
who deserves only praise and thanks and love,
he loves you enough to willingly endure
the sneers of his playmates,
the scorn of his neighbors,
and the smears of his opponents
in order to be born of a virgin
and become a spotless sacrifice for your sins.
In an irony of grace and love,
the evidence of his divine glory,
the requirements of his divine purity,
became a smear on his human reputation!
Do you see?
Do you see how the virgin birth of Jesus Christ
is an expression of how greatly you are loved?
It’s no small thing that he loved you that much.
And he loves you that much still.
And he loves you that much forever.
And the virgin-born Prince of Peace
is here this morning among us,
to speak his love to your heart,
and to receive your worshipful response.
He’s here to say to you,
I am the Son of the Most High;
He’s here to say,
nothing is impossible for me.
He’s here to say,
I love you, and I want to meet your need.
That’s why he came, after all.
To forgive,
to save,
to deliver,
to strengthen,
to support,
to comfort,
to provide
whatever need is on your heart this morning.
So, in the closing moments of this celebration, we’re going to worship together with the help of the worship team, and as we do so, I invite you to respond to God’s great love in whatever way His Spirit prompts you.
If you’ve never trusted Christ for forgiveness and freedom from sin and the power to follow Christ day by day, I urge you to do that this morning, and there will be counselors up here at the front to help you do that.
If you’re experiencing any struggle,
any burden,
any fear,
any need
in your life right now, we’d love to talk and pray with you about that, too.
But whatever your need,
as we approach God in worship,
feel free to join any one of us in prayer,
or to pray with someone else at your table,
or to seek out a friend,
or to respond in any way that God leads you . . . .
