The Necessity of the Virgin Conception of Christ

Good morning.

We are going to be doing something I do annually here at Set Free and I talked about it the last couple weeks.

Every year I do a special Christmas lesson on the Thursday before Christmas and so the topic today is going to be the necessity of the virgin conception because when we think of Christ we think about some of those miraculous things that surround the birth of Christ and often you hear the term virgin birth.

Well it wasn't a virgin birth, it was a virgin conception.

It's one of the first things to point out.

I mean Jesus was born like any other child was born.

He was born naturally but he was conceived supernaturally and so today we're going to talk about what the Bible says about that in the Old Testament and what the Bible says about that in the New Testament.

We're going to talk about why some folks have some disagreements about it.

There are those in the more liberal communities that deny the virgin birth and virgin conception.

One of the things I remember growing up is I grew up in the church that I still pastor today but back then there was more of a liberal bent in their theology and in the 1980s we had a pastor who we hired and again I was eight years old so I don't really remember much about it but there was a pastor and come Christmas time he was preaching and he denied the virgin birth of Christ and everybody was like whoa whoa whoa wait a minute you know how do we get how do we get somebody with a link missing in the chain here but they didn't even think to ask you know I mean that's a question you figure everybody would affirm that but this fella didn't and come to find out he had you know come from a liberal university that taught against it and so like I said what I like to do every year is reaffirm the virgin conception of Christ and reaffirm the necessity of it.

Go ahead.

What do you mean? Yes.

When I said what I was saying the point I was making is the birth of Christ was natural because we say virgin birth well it was virgin conception.

The virgin the virginal part matters in the conception.

After he was born everything was normal.

Is this making sense? Are you having a hard time with it? It seems like conception is when he was when the conception is when the seed meets the egg and they produce a child right conception is what happens uh nine months before the birth.

Okay yeah and so we talk about virginal conception so let's uh let's let's very quickly look at it.

I'm going to write a few passages up here.

We'll start out with the first one which is Isaiah 7 14.

Go to Isaiah chapter 7.

Now very specifically it's important to remember that Isaiah was written about 700 years before Christ.

The Bible was not written all at one time.

The Bible was written over a period of about 1500 years beginning with Moses beginning to write around the year 1450 AD somewhere I'm sorry BC somewhere around 1450 is when Moses was in the wilderness and that's when he wrote Genesis through Deuteronomy and then of course the rest of the history books and the other books of the Old Testament are written down throughout the ages down to down to about 400 BC was when the last of the Old Testament books were written and then there was a 400 year period where there were no books written.

There were other books such as Maccabees and things like that but what we would consider to be sacred scripture there was about a 400 year period where there was none written and then Matthew through Revelation is written approximately between the year 48 to the year 70.

Some people push it out as far as 95 but the New Testament is written in approximately a 30 to 40 year period.

So the reason why I bring all this up and I'm going to write this on the board.

I'm trying to hold my place here and do all this at one time.

If we consider the universe or the time of the world on really one long timeline and we put the creation of the world here and then we put us you know here and obviously the world isn't hasn't ended yet so we'll just put a little arrow there because you're going to keep going until it don't you know keep going until it's it's done so from creation to the flood we don't know how long that was so there's there's really no there's we have some indications but we don't know for certain how long it took from from Adam to the flood but then from the flood to Abraham we have a pretty good indication of the time frame there but that's the next major event is the is the call of Abraham which begins the the time period known as the patriarchal period and then we have the Abrahamic Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that period which ends with slavery in Egypt after the death of Joseph.

Remember Abraham's grandson or great-grandson because Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's son Joseph goes to Egypt he's enslaved and becomes the prefect of Egypt and then after his death the people of Israel are there they become slaves and they're slaves for 400 years they have a 400 year period here and after which you have the exodus the exodus happens after that 400 year period so this is where Moses comes in all right the first books of the bible are written here okay so all of the things that happen up until that point come to us in Genesis everything here happens in Genesis right after this we have Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.