Is the Virgin Birth an Essential Doctrine?

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Is the virgin birth of Christ an essential doctrine? That's what we're going to talk about today on Conversations with a Calvinist, which begins right now.

00:27

Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist.

00:29

My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

00:33

If you're a regular with the program, you'll know that I usually have one of the CWAC regulars with me, either Uncle Rich or Matthew Henson or Jake Korn or another guest on the program.

00:44

Today it's just going to be me and I'm going to be talking about the subject of the virgin birth.

00:50

Every year around Christmas time, I am reminded about the importance of this doctrine and the importance of expressing how vital this doctrine is within the church.

01:04

Today what I want to do is I want to address why this particular doctrine is so important.

01:11

I want to talk about a little bit of the history that I have in our church with this particular doctrine and I want to go through what the Bible actually teaches about the virgin birth and talk about why Christians should continue to affirm this vital and I would say essential doctrine about our Lord Jesus Christ.

01:32

So let's begin by talking about the subject of why this matters to me in a very unique way.

01:39

As many of you know, our church has not always been reformed.

01:44

I've been a member of the same church since I was a little boy.

01:49

I came to this church when I was seven years old and at that point it was called Forest Christian Church.

01:55

It was part of the old Disciples of Christ Church and the church left the denomination in 1999, which was interestingly the same year I got saved.

02:06

And then a few years later, felt God's call to ministry.

02:10

The church helped me go to seminary and then when our former pastor retired, I took over as the pastor in 2006 and I've been the pastor ever since.

02:20

And through a series of God working in our church, he has brought us through a time of reform and growth and change and that's where we went from Forest Christian Church to being who we are today, Sovereign Grace Family Church.

02:32

It's an interesting story and I've told it on the program a few other times, so I won't regale you with all of the details today.

02:39

But one of the things that I wanted to mention that not everybody knows about is that the Disciples of Christ, which is the denomination that we were formerly a part of, is a very left-leaning group.

02:54

It's one of the mainline denominations and as many of you probably already know, the mainline denominations are known for having gone to the liberal side on many things, particularly on the subject of Christian doctrine and the historic teaching that what the Bible teaches about the historic Jesus.

03:19

And in the 80s, our church hired a pastor.

03:24

Now I want to just preface this by saying our church, even when we were part of the Disciples, we were still pretty conservative.

03:33

We were still a conservative branch of that particular liberal denomination and we were at least socially conservative, I can say that.

03:44

Theologically, sort of all over the map.

03:46

But there was a time in the 80s where the church hired a minister and when they hired that pastor, they didn't know that he rejected the virgin birth.

04:02

And so when Christmastime came around and the subject of Jesus being born of a virgin was brought up, it became known that that particular pastor rejected that doctrine regarding Jesus Christ, that he just outright rejected that the Bible taught that Jesus was born of a virgin.

04:25

And for many of us, that seems like so wild for anyone to express such a thing.

04:32

I mean, isn't it obvious that the Bible teaches the virgin birth? And yes, it is.

04:38

But today what I want to talk about is I want to talk about what caused that movement in the last century of the church, and that's really where we see this sort of thinking come into the church, this sort of anti-miraculous, sort of anti-supernatural thinking sort of made its way into the church.

05:01

I want to talk a little bit about that.

05:02

I want to talk about why this man might have made the argument that he did regarding the virgin birth of Jesus.

05:09

And then I want to talk about why it's essential for us as believers to actually affirm the virgin birth, because I do believe that it is essential.

05:20

I've talked on the show before about the difference between what we might call the essentials and the non-essentials and the things that are just really opinions, or maybe like Matthew Henson, he has it good.

05:36

He says there are those things that are definitional, there are those things which are essential, and then there is what is known as adiaphora.

05:43

Adiaphora are those things which are neither essential or not.

05:49

They're things that are really, again, they're opinions.

05:52

And I've drawn this in concentric circles on previous programs.

05:56

I've talked about the center circle being primary and the second circle being secondary and then the last circle being tertiary.

06:05

And the question is where do we put the virgin birth in that? And some would say that the virgin birth, though true, is not an essential doctrine.

06:14

And again, I hope by the end of today that you'll see that the virgin birth, I believe, does fit very squarely in the center circle, and that being the circle of things that must be believed by Christians.

06:31

And as we talk about this, as I said, there's a major shift in thinking, particularly among mainline denominations, which began, I would say, in the 19th century, going into the 20th century.

06:49

There was a major shift away from the primary theological doctrines of the faith that dealt with things like resurrection and virgin birth and miracles and things like that.

07:04

And many of those things began to be reinterpreted as simply parables or illustrations or hyperboles.

07:16

They were not seen as things that were absolutely essential to the faith.

07:21

In fact, many of them began to be seen as things that just were not true.

07:25

I remember hearing John Dominic Crossom.

07:29

He was teaching on – actually, I think he was debating James White.

07:35

And I remember hearing him say that the stories that we read about Jesus' miracles are not to be taken literally, but they're to be taken in the same way that the parables are to be taken, that they're to be taken as stories that have a meaning.

07:52

And I'll never forget the example he gave.

07:55

He said, imagine the feeding of the 5,000.

07:57

He said, I don't believe Jesus took five loaves of bread and two fish and multiplied them to feed 5,000 people, even though that's what the text clearly says.

08:06

He said, no, what Jesus did was he encouraged those who had food to share it with those who did not have food.

08:13

And what we have is we have this great miracle of brothers caring for their brothers, those who have caring for those who don't have.

08:22

And therefore, what we have is we have the miracle of sharing.

08:25

We have the miracle of caring.

08:26

We have the miracle of giving.

08:29

And that was how John Dominic Crossom interpreted the feeding of the 5,000, which again is not what the text says.

08:38

But understand that that particular frame of mind is not bound to the text, because they would look at the text of the Bible as being simply an expression of men's thoughts and opinions.

08:53

They certainly don't see it as the word of the living God.

08:55

And therefore, the way that they handle the text is much different than those of us who would consider ourselves conservative, evangelical, those who would see the Bible as being the inerrant, infallible word of God.

09:14

And there are those, I have some notes here I want to reference.

09:18

There are those who call themselves Christians, and again, this John Dominic Crossom, they would say they're Christians, but they deny the miraculous.

09:31

They deny whole parts of the Bible.

09:34

And the question becomes, is that an essential thing that they're denying, or are they denying things that are secondary? Are they denying things that are adiaphora? And again, I hope to show again today that the doctrine of the virgin birth is in fact an essential doctrine.

09:54

In my notes, I want to quote, this is actually a quote that Al Mohler gave, but he's speaking about Harry Emerson Fosdick, who was an unabashed liberal.

10:07

And this is what he says, again, quoting Mohler, who is speaking about Fosdick.

10:14

Quote, in his famous sermon, Shall the Fundamentalist Win, Harry Emerson Fosdick, an unabashed liberal, aimed his attention at the vexed and mooted question of the virgin birth.

10:26

Fosdick preached from the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, allowed that Christians may hold quite different opinions of view about a matter like the virgin birth.

10:36

He accepted the fact that many Christians believe the virgin birth to be historically true and theologically significant.

10:43

Fosdick likened this belief to trust in a special biological miracle.

10:48

Nevertheless, Fosdick insisted that others, equally Christian, could disagree with those who believe the virgin birth to be historically true.

10:56

Quote, but side by side with them and the evangelical churches is a group of equally loyal and reverent people who would say that the virgin birth is not to be accepted as a historical fact.

11:06

To believe in the virgin birth as an explanation of great personality is one of the familiar ways in which the ancient world was accustomed to account for unusual superiority, end quote.

11:17

Now notice what Fosdick is saying here as being quoted by Moeller.

11:22

He's saying it's equal to believe in the virgin birth or not believe in the virgin birth.

11:27

To him, he's saying you can take it or you can leave it.

11:32

And that has appealed to many people.

11:34

I know many, many people who would say, well, that's fine.

11:40

What does it matter if somebody says they believe in the virgin birth or don't? As long as they trust Jesus, does it really matter if they believe that he was born of a virgin? And again, Fosdick is not alone on this.

11:54

This particular way of thinking has permeated throughout the church and continues to exist within the church today.

12:01

I want to quote again, because men like Fosdick gave rise to other, even more devout liberal pastors and Christian leaders, men like John Shelby Spong, who I've mentioned on the program before.

12:12

Gerd Ludeman, and this is who I want to quote here.

12:16

Ludeman says that, quote, most Christians in all the churches in the world confess as they recite the apostles' creed that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary.

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Now modern Christians completely discount the historicity of the virgin birth and understand it in a completely figurative sense.

12:33

Now hear what he's saying.

12:34

He's saying, he's saying, you know, we confess it as truth, but we believe that it is figurative.

12:40

According to Ludeman, many people believe that it is figurative.

12:44

And he goes on to say, or he's quoted as saying, the tomb was full and the manger was empty.

12:50

Hear that again.

12:51

He says the tomb was full and the manger was empty.

12:56

Now imagine that.

12:57

What he's saying there specifically is he's saying that Jesus wasn't born of a virgin, so there was no miraculous birth.

13:06

And he's saying that he didn't raise from the dead.

13:11

The tomb was full and the manger was empty is a, is a, is a, is a, is, is, well, it's hard to fathom someone still calling themselves a Christian, yet at the same time rejecting the bookends of Jesus's life, which are both miraculous, of course, his entire life is miraculous.

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But the two bookends of, of being conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, and then his death, burial and resurrection, which of course is the very foundation for our forgiveness and the gospel.

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So it's just an amazing thing.

13:48

And again, this man is a renowned Christian scholar among liberal teachers.

13:53

This is not some, some random person.

13:56

This is a man who is uplifted and exalted by those who would consider themselves to be consider themselves to be progressive in their Christianity or liberal in their Christianity.

14:09

So what I want to look at now is I want to look at one of the, one of the reasons why some scholars have taken to deny the virgin birth.

14:22

So it's, it's interesting that if we, if we look at this, we could simply say they just deny what the text says.

14:29

And that is true.

14:30

That is true that they are denying what the text clearly says.

14:34

But there's also, there is a scholarly argument that is made that I think it's important to respond to that.

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If we, if we are not honest, if we simply say, oh, well they're, they're just ignoring the text and don't look at what they're saying.

14:50

Sometimes we miss something very important and what's often missed is there is an argument which is made about the prophecy regarding Jesus on this particular subject.

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That is something that we all need to be aware of as evangelical Christians.

15:08

So I'm going to pull up a text right now.

15:11

I'm going to pull it up on the screen.

15:13

So if you're watching this, you can see it.

15:14

Of course, if you're listening to the podcast, you won't be able to see this, but if you're watching this, I want you to see what I'm talking about.

15:21

So on the screen here, I pulled up Isaiah chapter seven.

15:24

Now, if you're familiar with messianic prophecy, then you'll know that Isaiah chapter seven actually is one of the prophecies that we believe regards the Lord Jesus Christ.

15:39

And you'll see that it says in verse 14, which is highlighted here in red.

15:44

It says here, beginning with the word, therefore it says, therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign, behold, the Virgin will conceive or shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel.

16:04

Now very important just to mention this text.

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I mean, we sing this song, we sing songs with this text in it.

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We know this text.

16:13

It's very familiar to us to hear this text read that behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son.

16:20

We know this.

16:21

But I want you to note very quickly the word Virgin here.

16:25

You'll notice there's a little superscript here where if you go down and highlight some other texts, these are cross references that are being mentioned.

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But also if we just highlight the word, you'll notice that the word comes up as in the bottom down there.

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That is the Hebrew.

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And the Hebrew word here is the word Alma, Alma.

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Keep that in mind for a moment because what I've often dubbed this argument, the Alma Bethula controversy, the Alma Bethula controversy, because when Isaiah writes, Isaiah 714, therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign, behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel.

17:13

It's obvious to us that the word in English is the word Virgin because that's the way the translators have translated it.

17:20

But not all translations of the Bible translate that word Virgin because the word Alma is a generic term and it can be translated as maiden.

17:33

It can be translated as young woman.

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And the idea of the word Alma is not just that it's a young woman, but that it's a woman of marriageable quality.

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So it would be speaking of a Virgin, a young woman, unmarried, a Virgin, someone who has not been with a man.

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That's the idea behind the word Alma.

17:57

But there is a more specific word in Hebrew and that is the word Bethula.

18:05

Bethula is the word that is more akin to the scientific or specific word, which means Virgin.

18:16

So when the liberal scholars see that Isaiah has chosen here, again, the word Virgin, that he's chosen the less specific word rather than choosing the more specific term for Virgin, many of them automatically jump on that and they say, see, this was not a prophecy of a Virgin birth.

18:40

This was a prophecy of a young woman having a child.

18:44

Young women have children all the time.

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Therefore, this is not anything special.

18:49

And later writers simply grabbed a hold of this and mistranslated or misunderstood it.

18:56

And this is not what Isaiah was intending to say at all.

19:01

And so you can see right away how someone who automatically is dismissing the miraculous might look at such a thing as that and say, well, there's the evidence that we need.

19:13

The evidence is overwhelming that, of course, the word Alma is used and Alma simply means a young woman.

19:22

So right away, let's just stop and put our bookmark in Isaiah for a moment, because I want to jump over and I want to look at how Matthew translates this particular text.

19:37

Because Matthew is quoting from Isaiah.

19:43

If we go over to Matthew's gospel, we see here it says in verse 22, this is Matthew chapter one, verse 22, speaking of the virgin conception of Christ, it says, all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet.

20:02

And now he quotes Isaiah chapter seven, verse 14.

20:08

He says, behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall call his name Emmanuel.

20:16

All right.

20:17

So, again, going back to Isaiah, we see that that is almost a direct quote, behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son shall call his name Emmanuel.

20:26

It's obvious that Matthew here is quoting from Isaiah 7, 14.

20:33

So if we go to Matthew chapter one and we walk down, behold, the virgin shall conceive, we know that Matthew is not writing in Hebrew.

20:42

Matthew is writing in Greek.

20:44

And so we want to see how does Matthew translate the Hebrew from Isaiah into the Greek of the New Testament as he translates from Hebrew into Greek? How does he do that? So let's go to the word virgin here and we'll look down and we'll see that the word that he translates is the word Parthenos.

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Now in the Greek language, Parthenos only has one meaning.

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It's not like Alma that can be a maiden, a young woman or more generic.

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No, this is the very specific word has a very specific meaning.

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And that specific meaning is the word of a virgin.

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And so again, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall call his name Emmanuel.

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So, so right away we know that Matthew, when he translates from Isaiah, Isaiah 7, 14, translates it into his gospel.

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He translates it as Parthenos, which is virgin.

21:52

And again, the liberals might say, well, that was Matthew reading into the text.

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That was not something that Matthew, that was not something that Isaiah meant to include.

22:01

That was something that Matthew superimposed upon it.

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And that is an argument that sometimes is used that New Testament writers imposed upon the Old Testament writers, things that they never intended to say.

22:12

And while I would certainly disagree with that, that is the argument.

22:15

So let's, let's address that argument right away.

22:18

And let's talk about a different document and, and for a moment I'm going to step out of this because I don't have this one pulled up, but for a moment I want to talk about a different document and that is a document known as the Septuagint.

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The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament and it was translated before Christ.

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So the Septuagint existed during the time of Jesus.

22:46

We know this because we often see the New Testament writers actually citing the Septuagint when they cite the scriptures, which tells us something about the value of translations because it tells us that even God's word, even when it's translated, as long as it's faithfully translated, it's still God's word.

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And that's what we see with the Septuagint.

23:05

The New Testament writers use the Septuagint.

23:08

They reference the Septuagint and when we see Isaiah 7, 14 in the Septuagint, what we see is that the Septuagint translators who would not have been influenced by Christianity because again, they wrote about 200 years prior to the coming of Christ.

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When the Septuagint translators translated the Bible or the Old Testament Bible into Greek and they got to Isaiah 7, 14, they understood Isaiah to be saying the Virgin will conceive because they translated the word Virgin.

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The word that was by Isaiah was Alma.

23:50

They translate it to Parthenos, which is the Greek word, specific word for the word Virgin.

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So it is obvious to me that prior to Christ, there were those who when they read Isaiah's words, they had no doubt that what Isaiah was saying was that a Virgin would conceive.

24:12

In fact, that's what would make it a sign because a young woman conceiving, as I said, young women conceive all the time, but young woman conceiving, how is that a sign? It's a sign because it was a Virgin who conceived, not just a young woman, but a Virgin, an unmarried woman, a woman who'd never been with a man.

24:39

This is, and again, I want to jump over real quick to the Gospel of Luke because this is the next thing I want to point out.

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When we go to Luke's Gospel and we begin to address or we begin to see how Luke tells the narrative, this continues to tell us about what happened when Mary was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

25:04

Let's go to Luke 1 26 and let's see.

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It says, 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.

25:20

And he came to her and said, greetings old favored one, the Lord is with you.

25:24

But she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.

25:29

And the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God and behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and he will be great and he will be called the son of the most high and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David.

25:45

Let me scroll down here and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom.

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There will be no end.

25:53

And then in verse 34 and Mary said to the angel, how will this be since I am a virgin? It's interesting that I've actually heard people who try to make fun of the Bible who've said, well, those people lived in a pre-scientific world and they didn't understand that virgins don't get pregnant and that's why they believed in the virgin birth.

26:17

Listen, Mary, young woman, young maiden of Israel understood that virgins don't conceive.

26:25

Now there is something interesting I want to point out about this word here.

26:29

As we noted that it says, Mary says, how can this be since I am a virgin? That's the way it's translated in the ESV.

26:37

But what you'll notice when I hover over the word virgin here, I don't get the word Parthenos and somebody might say, oh, well, she didn't say, she didn't say I'm a virgin, I'm Parthenos.

26:47

Well, if we go back up, we'll say that when the angel visited a virgin betrothed to a man, that word virgin there is Parthenos, but bringing it back down to here, it says since I'm a virgin, what she actually says, and I'm going to pull up here the Greek so you can actually see it and make it a little bit bigger so it's actually readable.

27:06

Here for those of you who are able to follow along in the Greek, you'll see here that what it says is it actually says epe, which is since, and then andra eugenosko, andra eugenosko.

27:22

Man is andra there.

27:24

It's the word for man or husband.

27:27

Ewe is the adversative or no, not, or so the idea is man, not, and then genosko is the word to know, and we know that the idea there is to have a relation with, we think about Adam knew Eve and they conceived and they bore a son.

27:48

So the idea of knowing here, genosko here is the idea of, of she hasn't had a relationship with a man.

27:55

She has not had intercourse.

27:58

She has not, she is a virgin.

28:00

Again, if we go back up to earlier in Luke, it says the angel visited a virgin, uses the word Parthenos here, doesn't use the word Parthenos.

28:08

It uses, Mary says, how can, how can this be since a man I have not known since I don't know, I have not been in a relationship with a man.

28:21

So it's clear that Mary of course was intelligent enough to know the virgins don't have children and she knew that she herself was a virgin.

28:31

So she, she asked the question, the very, very legitimate question.

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How is it that I'm going to have a child if I've never known a man? And so it is clear within the text that we have both in the gospel of Matthew and in the gospel of Luke, very clear testimony to the virgin conception of the Lord Jesus Christ.

28:56

And we have it connected to the promise in the book of Isaiah written 700 years before Christ that the virgin would conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, which we know Emmanuel means God with us.

29:15

Now with this in mind, I want to, I want to move now to the question of why this is essential.

29:23

And I think there are at least four reasons that I want to give you today as to why the virgin birth is essential doctrine.

29:35

We, we have to look at four things and here, here are the four things that I'm going to give you.

29:41

Number one is the, the virgin birth and its relationship to the scriptures.

29:47

The doctrine of the virgin birth is, is tied to the scripture in this sense.

29:52

We just saw very clearly that this is what the Bible teaches.

29:55

It doesn't teach it in parabolic form.

29:58

It doesn't teach it in hyperbolic form.

30:00

It does not teach it as an illustration or a picture.

30:04

It says clearly Mary was a virgin that she was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit.

30:10

She was conceived by God, the Holy Spirit, and bore a son, Jesus Christ.

30:15

And so, um, I want to just quickly quote here from, from Machen who observed that if the Bible is regarded as being wrong and what it says about the birth of Christ, then obviously the authority of the Bible in any high sense is gone.

30:32

Hear that again.

30:33

If, if the Bible's regarded as wrong and what it says about the virgin birth, then the authority of the Bible is, is, is, is called into question.

30:40

We are saying that the Bible is not true if we are saying that the virgin birth is not a historic fact.

30:49

Now within the liberal circles, that is certainly something that is willing to be confessed.

30:54

Many of them confess the Bible is not true.

30:56

I remember a man sitting on my couch and he was a member of our church from the old church and he had said, when I became the pastor, he had some issues with what I was teaching and I started to say, well, the Bible says this and he said, well, I don't believe the Bible.

31:09

And I said, okay, but our church does.

31:13

We've confessed.

31:14

By that point we had a confession that confessed the authority, reliability, historicity, tenacity of the text of scripture.

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And so when he said, I don't believe the Bible, I said, well, you're just in the wrong church.

31:27

The Herod churches, I wouldn't say they're legitimate, but I would say there's churches that don't believe the Bible.

31:33

You know, feel free to go there, but we believe the Bible.

31:37

And again, a Christianity without the Bible has no authority.

31:42

There is no power without the word of God to proclaim the truth.

31:48

And so if someone says, well, I just don't believe in the virgin birth because I don't believe that portion of the Bible, you have to begin asking them the question of, well, what portions of the Bible do you believe in? When that becomes an issue of, well, I believe this, I don't believe that, then the authority is no longer scripture.

32:07

The authority is the individual who sets himself up as judge over the scripture and feels like he has the ability to make that decision.

32:18

So that was first the virgin birth and scripture.

32:20

The second thing I want us to consider is the virgin birth and the deity of Christ.

32:27

John Frame writes this.

32:29

He says, quote, while we cannot say dogmatically that God could enter the world only through the virgin birth, surely the incarnation is a supernatural event if it is anything.

32:40

To eliminate the supernatural from this event is inevitably to compromise the divine dimension of it.

32:48

So again, what Frame is saying is he's saying, could God have done it another way? We can't say that he couldn't because he is God.

32:56

But God did it this way to demonstrate the magnificence of it and the very fact that this was a miraculous entrance into the world.

33:09

There's never been another virgin conception.

33:14

In fact, there's no one like Christ.

33:20

I say this all the time.

33:21

Christ is absolutely unique.

33:23

He's the only theanthropic person who's ever lived.

33:25

Theanthropic is a word which means he is the God man.

33:29

And we believe that asserting the hypostatic union that he is fully God, fully man, as the Latin fathers would say, vera homo vera deus, fully man, fully God.

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And he carried the two natures perfectly, not partially.

33:48

He didn't have a partial God nature and a partial human nature, but he carried two completely unique natures in his one person.

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The God nature and the human nature were unified in him as one person with two natures.

34:06

And this comes as a result, I would argue, of the virgin birth where you have the divine conception of the human Jesus.

34:16

And therefore, there is this miraculous event that takes place that cannot be, we cannot simply say this is unnecessary because we're speaking about now something that is necessary.

34:28

Because if you deny the deity of Christ, you have denied historic Christian orthodoxy.

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And if the virgin birth is tied to the deity of Christ, and I believe that it is, then what we are doing when we deny the virgin birth is we are denying an essential aspect of the faith.

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And again, what's in that center circle is the doctrines that are absolutely definitional to the faith.

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And one of those is the deity of Christ, the hypostatic union, which of course is a result of the virgin conception.

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All right, so let's look at the third thing, the virgin birth and the sinlessness of Christ.

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Now this one is going to take a little bit more thought because having been born of the virgin Mary, Jesus was human and we say he's fully human.

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But having been conceived of the Holy Spirit, overshadowing the virgin and the power of the most high, giving that conception life, this is the sinless son of God who is being conceived.

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And the doctrine of the virgin birth impacts the sinlessness of Christ in at least this way in that there is no, there's no transference of the original sin of Adam to Christ.

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And we do believe that Adam's sin does affect all of his progenity.

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Adam's sin affects us all.

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We read this in Romans chapter five and in first Corinthians 15, which says, and Adam all die and Christ all are made alive.

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First Corinthians or Romans five says, sin came in the world through one man and death through sin and death spread to all men because all sin.

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How did all men sin? All men send an Adam because it goes on to say that death rain from Adam to Moses even when there was no law.

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But the reason why it rained from Adam to Moses is because all men carried that, that sin nature of Adam and they died as a result.

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This is why all men die because we all bear the sin nature.

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But when we look to Christ, we can say, did Christ bear a sin nature? I would say, no, he did not.

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He was born without the taint of original sin.

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And how that happened, I can't give an exact answer.

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Some have tried to argue that it's passed through the father.

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And I think this is reasonable that the idea is that it's passed through the father and therefore because Jesus did not have an earthly father, that the sin nature was not passed to him.

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I think that's a reasonable way of understanding it.

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And I think that there's other ways that possibly we could come to that same conclusion.

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But the idea is that Christ, because of the virgin conception, was conceived apart from the sin nature of Adam and therefore he is the second Adam.

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He is, as the Bible says, the last Adam.

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That's who Jesus was.

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And so the sin nature, when we take away the virgin birth, we say Jesus was born just like the rest of us.

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And if he's born just like the rest of us, he comes into this world, as we would say, D-O-A, dead on arrival, he comes into this world already having the taint of Adam's sin on him.

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And we know that Jesus was without sin at all, perfectly.

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He had no guilt of sin in him, either by imputation or by expression.

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He didn't bear Adam's sin and he didn't have any sin of his own.

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And therefore he's able to bear our sin because he was the sinless Savior.

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So what we can know for certain was that Christ, because of being conceived by the Holy Spirit, was kept from the taint of original sin and the virgin birth ensured that Christ was kept from all sin.

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All right, so that was the third thing.

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So again, we look at it, we say the virgin birth affects how we understand Scripture.

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If we deny that, we're denying Scripture.

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The virgin birth affects how we understand the deity of Christ.

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If Christ is not virgin born, no miraculous birth, no overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, then how do we come to the conclusion of the hypostatic union? The virgin birth affects how we understand Jesus' sinlessness.

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If he bore the sin of Adam, then he himself was a part of that sin.

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But then lastly, we come to the virgin birth and salvation.

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This one is very important.

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The doctrine of the virgin birth is closely tied to our salvation in that if Jesus had been tainted with sin, he could not have been a sufficient sacrifice.

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On the other hand, if Jesus had not been born of Mary and so had not been the man Christ Jesus, then he could not have died and therefore could not have been a suitable substitutionary sacrifice for men.

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Christ became human in a miraculous way.

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The provision of salvation therefore is all of God and none of man.

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This is important to understand.

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As God alone, Jesus could not die.

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But as man alone, Jesus could not save.

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Therefore he is rightly called the God-man, the only one who can save.

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Therefore the virgin birth not only affects how we understand scripture, how we understand the hypostatic union, how we understand the sinless nature of Christ, but it also affects how we understand our own salvation.

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Christ born of a virgin comes to save sinners and it is through that virgin birth that he is able to accomplish what God had set him out to do.

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So when we come to the season of Christmas, the manger scene is one of the most prominent figures we have, and this is rightfully so as the manger scene itself is a picture of one of the most important miracles that's ever happened in human history.

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It's a miracle to be studied, pondered, meditated upon, and prayerfully considered.

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It must never be forgotten.

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It must never be put aside as myth or wishful thinking.

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It must never be confused with the false doctrines that are often associated with the miracles of Christ and the things that are taught by those who would deny Jesus and his miracles.

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The true doctrine of the virgin birth as it is relayed in scripture is a foundational truth of the Christian faith.

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It's absolutely essential that God in his grace send forth his son through the womb of the virgin Mary.

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And I want to end with this quote.

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This is a section taken from Hartog.

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It says this, the virgin birth touches upon the doctrines of scripture, Christ, and salvation.

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For this reason, we affirm our belief in this doctrine.

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We teach it and we call others to do the same.

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It is a doctrine that should be proclaimed, especially during the Christmas season.

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Ignatius wrote of the virginity of Mary and her childbearing and likewise also the death of the Lord as, quote, three mysteries to be cried aloud, end quote.

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We firmly believe that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary throughout the year, but especially during this Christmas season.

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Let us cry it aloud.

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And I echo that as I say, let us cry out this Christmas season.

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Yes, Jesus was virgin born.

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He was conceived in the womb of the virgin Mary.

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He was born to the virgin Mary.

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He was brought into the world in a miraculous way.

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And this is not secondary Christian doctrine.

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This is not adiaphora.

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This is something that all Christians should, with one voice, cry aloud.

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Jesus, in fact, was born of a virgin.

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I hope that this lesson today has been helpful for you.

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I hope it has been an encouragement to you and has added to your celebration of this season where we celebrate the incarnation.

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Keep in mind also over on YouTube, I have our short videos that we do that are sometimes humorous, sometimes educational, and you can find all of them again at calvinispodcast.com.

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Thank you for listening to Conversations with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I've been your Calvinist.

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May God bless you.