Mary, Mother of the Messiah

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we have the enormous privilege today of talking about Jesus.

There’s a sense in which we’ve been doing that all along, but in the same way that you can talk about the providence and sovereignty of God in general and then talk about a miracle or a specific testimony, a specific way that God worked in your life, now we get to talk about Jesus as Jesus in the time that he spent on earth. Where should we start, Greg? I feel like the answer to my question is so painfully obvious that I shouldn’t have asked it.

Well, where did the gospels start? Depends which gospel.

Abraham.

If you’re in Matthew it’s with Abraham. If you’re in John it’s, “In the beginning was the Word.” If you’re in Mark, “There was this guy in the wilderness calling out stuff about the kingdom of God,” and if you’re in Luke you start with a priest named Zacharias. With this in mind there are some things I think we can do up front that I mentioned to you earlier.

Everyone listening by now has heard one of my tirades on Bible people, Bible times, Bible lands, Bible stories, a sort of Gnostic timeless thing where everybody in the Bible obviously could have known everybody else and every other ancient person, including maybe mythological people for all we know. It’s this vague non-historical time called Bible times, which actually lasted for the first 4,000 years of human history, which is 4/6 or 2/3 of human history.

It’s also a while. It’s kind of like how if you tell people from other places that you’re from California, they’ll be like, “Oh, do you know movie stars?”

“California is a really big place. No, I do not live next door to whoever you’re thinking of.”

The question I always get is, “Oh, so you go surfing all the time?”

“Why aren’t you blond?”

In the same way you can have someone who lived in Bible times that was 400 BC, and someone who lived in Bible times that was 4,000 BC.

Yes, so we’ve been trying to stress all along the importance of real chronology, real counting and passing of years from the time that God made to the world now to the coming of Christ.

Now, there’s still a lot to be worked out about the chronology of scripture because we haven’t paid much attention to it for the last couple hundred years, but roughly speaking there’s about 4,000 years between the creation of the world and the fall of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. I know Usher pushed it back. He made the 4,000 years from creation to Christ. For all practical purposes it’s close enough for now, but not for always. Someday we need to really nail down exactly when some of these things happened, and we need to wrestle with the prophecy of the 70 weeks in Daniel 9. Is that 490 years or 490 vague symbols or what’s going on there? Calvin thought it was literal. Most people today don’t.

We know the chronology of the ancient world before Solomon is really screwed up, thanks to our reliance on Egypt. How accurate is the chronology between the testaments? I’ve seen a little bit of work done there, but not a whole lot.

The point is for now at least we’re not talking millions of years. We’re not talking vague epochs. We’re not talking about symbolic panels upon which God portrayed His power. We’re talking about real calendar years, real geographical locations, real flesh and blood people who did not all at the same time know each other, because some are the great-great-great-great grandchildren of the other people. There’s that for starters.

The Bible describes the time when Jesus came as the fullness of time. It wasn’t an accident. It’s funny to read some Christian history books that say, “And this was this great time, just the perfect time for Jesus to come into the world.” There’s a reason it was because God had been scheming and moving and predestinating and ordaining and providentializing the world so that everything was just what it needed to be to make it the most perfect time for His son.

Since we’re starting in history, we will come back many times and talk about Jesus’ deity, particularly when we talk about the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon. We see in the future his ministry and his resurrection.

Right now we’re going to talk about his human nature, his birth into our history and into our world. Yes, he came as the eternal Word of God, the second person of the trinity. If that’s not there, none of this makes any sense. But if he didn’t come as a real baby, as a real human person, then it still doesn’t make any sense.

Each of the gospel writers looks at that a bit differently. John starts, “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God…and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth,” and then moves very quickly into the ministry of John the Baptist.

Mark starts with the ministry of John the Baptist. “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. There was this guy in the wilderness in fulfillment of prophecy. His name was John the Baptizer and he was busy heralding the coming of the kingdom of God, and Jesus comes to him,” so we’re right into the story.

Matthew starts with, “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Then he lays out the genealogy of father-to-son from Abraham through David and all the way up to Jesus’ adopted father Joseph. Matthew then takes us to Joseph and an angel saying, “Mary’s pregnant and it’s from God. Go marry her.”

Luke is the one who steps back a little bit. Luke is a physician. He was Greek and he was educated and he knew how to do research. Matthew was an eyewitness to a lot of these things, John was an eyewitness, and Mark was writing for Peter, an eyewitness. Luke wasn’t. Luke had to go find eyewitnesses.

I really love reading Dr. Luke because every now and then he’ll tell you what people were thinking, but this isn’t historical fiction. In historical fiction we’re always imagining what people said. Luke is not imagining. He actually found them and asked them. “So, Mary…”

His account is very personal.

Yes. “Mary, how did you deal with all this?”

“Well, Dr. Luke, I kept them and pondered them in my heart.”

“That’s a great one. I’m going to use that one.”

We’re told elsewhere that all this was known about the hill country of Judea. How did he know that? Mary was busy having a baby. She didn’t know that. He had to go hang out in some of those little villages in Judea by a well or a market or city gate and say, “Excuse me sir, sir? Just a question. Do you remember like 40 years ago now there was this baby that was born? I think it caused a sensation. His mother’s name was Elizabeth, a Levi?”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember that. Oh, that was a big story!”

So he does the research.

I wonder how much is him being a physician. You know when you’re writing a mystery you should always have a doctor or a lawyer because they encounter people of such variable social strata.

I actually had never heard that, but that’s interesting.

There you go. That tip is for free, as is the rest of this podcast. But I wonder how much Luke would just chat about this as he was seeing patients.”

“Oh yeah, I heard about that, doctor. My grandma, she used to say…”

“Really? Let me grab my journal and make some notes.” He’s that kind of historian.

There was a time when the second book of Luke, called Acts, was under heavy fire from the critics. They all called Luke a horrible historian, didn’t know anything, completely had things turned around, gave the wrong names to rulers and to districts and all kinds of things.

There was a scholar, and unfortunately I don’t remember his name right now, but he hated Christianity and wanted to prove it was all a lot of bunk, so he did archeological tours throughout Asia Minor and looked at the most recent evidence, and step-by-step he was horribly surprised to find that the latest evidence kept on confirming that Luke knew exactly what he was talking about. In fact, he was one of the most accurate ancient historians we have.

That doesn’t mean that everyone is going to buy into the virgin birth and all that, but he’s not a fool. He’s not stupid. He knows how to do research and, if he’s wrong, he’s deceiving us quite deliberately. It's something C.S. Lewis said about Jesus, that given his claims you either bow down before him as the Son of God or you write him off as a lunatic or a liar. That’s kind of what we’re dealing with in these accounts. These men were not stupid. They were not ignorant peasants. They were incredible writers of history and of literature.

Three of them were eyewitnesses. They walked with Jesus, despite what later critics would say – “Ah, these were written 100 years later.” No they weren’t. They were written by the people who were there. We’ve got fragments of Mark’s gospel that go back to around 70 AD, so this was first-generation eyewitness testimony or, in Luke’s case, research into first-century eyewitness testimony.

This is a history channel. We’re talking history and stopping to talk more thoroughly about who Jesus is. We’re not leading that. We’re immersing ourselves into that Jesus came into our world, our history, our time, our geography, with clocks ticking and calendar pages turning, and he came into the womb of a real flesh and blood young girl, probably a teenager, whose name was Mary or Maria. She was a very godly young lady and great poet and Bible student. We’ll talk more about that in a moment.

In the book of Luke we come to his account of what has happened. I do find it interesting, as we were talking about him as a doctor, that he’s the one that specifically highlights the miracle of John the Baptist’s conception, but then particularly the miracle of Jesus. Of all the writers, he is the most qualified to be able to speak as a physician on what would normally be happening, and the impossibility for both of these women, so it comes through to us as the miracle that it should. Therefore, we should not ever try to use some sort of medical answer for, “Oh, this is what happened. It was actually this, this, or this.” No, he knows what medically happens and he’s telling us these are miracles.

He begins in the temple, and therefore we see in Luke that he is a compassionate writer and we see a priestly aspect in what he does. He begins with a priest and will carry us through in his description of what’s going on with more of that approach. He is the one who will give us two different angel encounters, the first one coming to us in the temple itself.

We have Zacharias, who is an old man at the time. He is one of the priests, and at the time the priests would rotate who got to go into the holy place to offer incense. Most likely, given the number that there were, it may have been a once in a lifetime, or maybe a couple times that he would ever have been able to do this. This is not just, “Oh yeah, I go offer incense every week, and this week I met an angel.” It was, “I’m going in for my time and, shock of shocks, an angel comes!”

We see that the angel tells him his prayer has been heard, and we can think of a couple different things there. Most obviously he’s potentially been praying for a son, because that’s what he’s going to receive, but we also know from the chronology we have in the scriptures that the people at that time would know that they were in the fourth kingdom of Daniel’s visions. They would know and be able to count the years from the other visions of Daniel and know that there is this imminence to what they’ve been waiting for.

They won’t know the exact year, but we see a number of people that the scriptures were telling us were waiting for the kingdom or looking with expectation or had been told by the Lord, one of them being here in Luke, Simeon, that he would not taste death until he’d seen the Lord’s Messiah.

There is this anticipation among the people who have been studying the scriptures that it’s coming, it’s close, we’re almost there, we’re on the edge. We’re praying for these things, and then the Lord, through his angel, breaks into history and begins this. He begins this not because they had been perfectly preparing themselves, but rather because it is the perfect moment that the Lord chose to bring this all about.

He unfolds it in the exact order he desires, so he begins with his messenger. As Mark presents Jesus as the king, as the true Caesar to the Romans, he starts with the herald of the king. All kings have their victory herald that comes in to prepare the way for them so that everyone is ready to receive them and celebrate.

In this way, Luke also begins there but instead of with his ministry he begins with his birth, so we see John from his very beginning in his mother’s womb, and we’re going to get to see that even from then the Lord had already given him the spirit that he would respond to his Messiah, and thus is ready to proclaim the ministry that is coming.

Now, we call the conception of John a miracle, but it is still through normal means, not through like what we’re going to see with Mary. The angel comes to John’s father, to Zacharias, to announce this. Zacharias, in spite of the fact that he was praying, doesn’t believe. In spite of the fact that an angel is standing in front of him, presumably terrifying him, because angels love to tell us not to be afraid, he still doesn’t believe. And yet his son’s birth is going to be less miraculous than Jesus’ birth will be, and yet Mary is commended for her faith. Though she asks the question, “How can this be?” hers is a bit more legitimate than Zacharias is in his question.

She kind of has to know if there’s anything she has to do.

With Zacharias, these are normal things. With Mary, this is one of a kind, so she speaks in faith when she asks the question, and Zacharias – we understand from the consequence that he receives – is not acting in faith when he asks the question, “How can this be?”

Does he ask for a sign? Is that the phrasing of it? “How shall I know…” is it one of those?

“Whereby shall I know this? I’m an old man…”

When we saw that phrasing in Gideon’s story, that was an expression of faith. But we can tell from the angel’s response that either the angel can read his heart or he had a tone.

The Lord knows our heart and therefore we can guess someone’s heart by how the Lord responds to them, whether He’s gracious or whether He in a sense reprimands and gives a consequence.

It’s interesting because I believe this is the only angel that we see who we have a name for. In the Old Testament we will see the angel of the Lord appear, which we would say is the preincarnate Christ, but I think this is the first time that we see another angel appear who is not the angel of the Lord, but is coming to announce this.

Gabriel first shows up in Daniel by name. When he says, “I’m Gabriel,” it’s like – if you’ve seen my movie, I’m him.

“Hey, it’s that guy!”

Which should have lent him sufficient legitimacy for Zacharias to listen.

He says, “I’m Gabriel who stands in the presence of God.” I think there’s your tone and your response. “So, you’re not going to be able to speak here for a while, until the baby is born.”

My husband David actually preached through this first part of Luke over the Christmas season, and one of the things he pointed out was that we would see that Zacharias is not filled with faith also because he claims, “How can this possibly be?” and yet the Lord did already do this in the Old Testament, particularly with Abraham and Sarah, so this is not unprecedented. It’s actually a very famous situation to have happened in the past.

It’s a thing that God is known to have done.

Yes, so again we go, “Oh, Zacharias,” but at the same time what would we do and said, “Yes, just like Abraham and Sarah, you are going to have a child in your old age.”

“Are you aware that I’m just a normal person living an everyday life?”

Yes. “I’m not a Bible person.”

“I don’t live in Bible times.”

Again, chronology, in the sixth month Gabriel was sent to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary or Maria. So six months into Elizabeth’s pregnancy (that’s Zacharias’s wife) Gabriel gets sent on another mission. This one is far more special. As you say, it’s not an Abraham/Sarah kind of thing. This is wholly unprecedented. I’m going to just read the text here for a moment –

Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

Most of us are familiar with the phrase “blessed art though among women.” Catholics perhaps make too much of it, and Protestants too little, but it’s a thing. It’s real. No other woman in the history of the world gets to be the mother of Messiah. That is an incredible gracious privilege that God grants to her.

As she’s going to tell us in her song, it’s not because she’s sinless. She looks to God as her Savior. This is simply God’s overflowing grace. This is the woman he’s made and prepared, and she’s going to bear a child. Mary is wondering, “What does this mean?” and the angel says, “Fear not, Mary.”

This impresses me. Mary is not afraid when the angel shows up. She’s got to be the only one in scripture. Maybe I’m missing someone. Maybe the apostles. They’re at the end of the story and they’re getting used to it, but to this point Mary is not afraid of the angel, it’s the message that concerns her.

“Wow, Mary! You’re the most blessed among women.”

“Uh oh.”

It’s like that line from Fiddler on the Roof. “We’re God’s chosen people and we wish He would choose somebody else.”

Exactly. She probably knows when God picks you for a very special mission, it can be complicated. The angel says –

Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. [It’s Yeshua, Jehovah Saves]. He shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Highest, and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David. And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

A lot of that she would more or less have got. “Throne of his father David.”

“Okay, he’s the Messiah, got that. Somebody has to be his mom. It looks like it’s me. That’s going to get complicated. But what’s this bit about he’ll be called the Son of the Highest? Son of God?”

I think we need to recognize that Mary didn’t live after the Council of Nicaea or 300 or 500 or 1,000 or 2,000 years of Christian theology trying to sort out what it truly means for Jesus to be the Son of God. She knew it was something incredible, something huge. Did she understand that the baby in her womb was God? I don’t know. It would be really difficult to put diapers on God every morning.

That’s why I love Mark Lowry’s song, Mary Did You Know? I think a lot of people kind of dismiss it because it’s like, “Yes, the angel told her,” but no, that doesn’t mean she knew. I think Catholics just hate the song because it’s Protestants talking about Mary, which we don’t do enough. I think the lyrics of that song are very worthwhile.

I think also it helps to humanize Mary in the sense that she was a believer, a saint who was also a sinner just like all the rest of us. We all doubt the Lord’s promises regularly. So even having Jesus right in front of her, I think we should remember that she is like us in that she did not perfectly embrace and believe everything the Lord gave her. I’m sure there were many times where she thought, “Really? This is the Lord’s way? Did he really say…?” Again, even the great saints of old still have doubts.

We don’t want to be Roman Catholics, but sometimes I think we just kind of ignore Mary and don’t really think about what it was like for her.

There is something perplexing about her answer, but I don’t think we’ve quite got there in the story yet, have we?

Not quite. She’s been told this. The language is messianic. It’s drawn from the Old Testament. She’s going to understand that as well as any rabbi would have understood it, which unfortunately isn’t saying a whole lot. Her religious and spiritual sensibilities are actually probably higher than most of the rabbis of her time, as we’ll see in her song. But she has some time to meditate on scripture before she writes it, and to pull things together in the light of this new revelation.

Mary now asks the very practical question. “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?”

This is what I think is perplexing, because she clearly knew Joseph – not in that sense, obviously. What she means is that, “I have not consummated a marriage with this man,” but he’s clearly in her life because he has to be told, “Yes, it’s okay to continue and finish the marriage ceremony with this woman.” So she knows it’s not about Joseph, but he would be the obvious man in her life.

Maybe she’s asking the question, “I’m not married, so am I waiting until I get married?”

“Are you going to use Joseph as the father, using me as the mother?” By now she probably knows that Joseph is descended from the kings of Judah, banned by the curse on Jeconiah but still in that line. They probably joked about it. “You could have been king if it wasn’t for that old sinner Jeconiah.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t that be funny because it would sure be different,” and those kinds of conversations. Then suddenly – throne, David – “I’m not married so am I supposed to go through and finish the marriage with Joseph, consummate the marriage, and that’s how this is going to work? Or is something else going on here, and I think the answer is #2.” God does not leave her hanging.

And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee. Therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

We’re not told what her face looked like at that point. We’re not told if she tried, “Sir, question please? Just one more thing, sir.” We don’t know what happened. She maybe just sat there dumbfounded or obediently listening for the next line, because he has more to say. What he says is –

And behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For with God nothing shall be impossible.

Something else probably that was in the back of her mind was, “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son and call his name Emmanuel.” The language is not only that the virgin will conceive the son, but a virgin will bear the son. If this is what Isaiah is talking about, if she’s understanding correctly, then she’s not going to finalize the marriage with Joseph until this baby comes, and the baby is going to come by divine miracle that men will label impossible. Otherwise, why would God say, “Nothing with God is impossible.” He’d said that about Isaac’s birth, but this is a whole different level.

She’s being asked to exercise a degree of faith that I think most of us would find challenging, intimidating, and just beyond where we are in our walk with God right now. And yet her response is, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to Thy word,” and the angel leaves. So whatever she understands, she submits. It is the word of God. It is the will of God. It’s going to be a miracle. It’s not going to involve a human father. God will do this through her while she’s still in her virginity.

Which is not perpetual, by the way. That’s another Catholic thing that we can talk about.

Jesus is her firstborn son, implying there are others. Had she refused sexual relations with Joseph she would have in fact been a great sinner.

Joseph did not know her until after the baby was born. There’s lots of proof texts here.

Yes, there are. At this moment, this has got to be difficult. Again, the Bible story, Bible people, Bible times kind of kicks in and we’re just like, “Oh, so then Mary knew she was going to be the mother of the son of God and she got ready to have him.” That’s probably not remotely how it worked out.

If we just get some good news like, “You’re going to inherit a million dollars,” you wouldn’t be like, “Oh, that’s nice. I know just how I’ll spend it. I’m going to bed now.” No, you’re up, you’re tossing and turning, you’re talking to your friends, you’re talking to your fiancé.

By the way, who can Mary talk to about this? I think that’s a wonderful gift of God to her in Elizabeth. “Oh, here’s an older woman who believes what the Lord has said regarding the nature of this pregnancy.

Another question is when does she tell Joseph? Depending on when she leaves – “Mary rose in those days…” so she wouldn’t start showing yet. The question is did she immediately or within a day or two go to Joseph and say, “Something’s come up,” and how did that conversation run exactly? Whether she had it then or whether when she came back from Elizabeth’s, she stayed with Elizabeth for three months.

You ladies both have experienced this of late. At three months how obvious are you?

Not very.

Especially if it’s your first.

So it might not have been wholly obvious, but it would be how long before everybody would start seeing?

Maybe another month.

And then you can think of how the village is going to react. What is she going to say. “Hey everybody, there was this angel and he told me I’m going to be the mother of the son of God and it’s a miracle. I’m going to bring the Messiah into the world. Isn’t that great?”

“Really?”

There’s a song by a Finnish metal band, although the song is not very metal, imaging what kind of slander the local women would have said about Mary at this point.

It would have been horrible because she is a godly young lady and probably went to shame to many of the older women who were godly. They see she’s pregnant and what can she say? If she does say, “Angel, son of God,” she’s either insane or she’s blaspheming because they’re not going to believe her. Even Joseph doesn’t believe her. She has to tell him at some point and he can’t wrap his head around it.

“Mary, just tell me who the father is.”

“I did.”

“No, Mary don’t blaspheme. We can work through this together. I love you, Mary, but you have to be honest with me. We have to be honest with each other. You know I love you.”

“I know you love me. If you love me can’t you believe me?”

“Messiah maybe. Son of God? What in the world does that even mean?”

“I don’t know but it means something that’s never happened before and it’s going to be wonderful and I really would like you to be with me because I don’t want to go through this alone.”

You can imagine. Everyone can imagine if we just stop and think of her as a human being, and Joseph as a human being, and young. The Roman Catholic tradition makes Joseph quite old so that he can die real fast and get rid of the possibility of other children, but he was almost certainly about her age. He’s poor. He has not been working for a lifetime saving money for this, so here are two young people, late teens maybe, maybe early 20s for him, and they’re looking at something they don’t know how to deal with.

We know from Matthew’s gospel that Joseph flat-out does not believe, but rather than make a public display of Mary he decides to divorce her quietly, privately, aside, and not press charges or make a big deal about it. And then what? Will she go away? Will he go away? What happens next?

He’s tossing and turning when the angel comes to him at night and says, in so many words, “Knock it off, you blunderhead. You’re not to take unto you Mary your wife, for the thing that’s conceived of her is of the Holy Ghost.”

Matthew refers explicitly to Isaiah’s prophecy. “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel.”

I’d like to take a moment here and talk about something that I’m not an expert on, and that’s the whole controversy over the virgin birth. Back in the late 1800s and on into the early 1900s the virgin birth became one of the key targets of liberals and moderates. Because I did not live then and have never spent the time to research, I don’t know why that was. I mean his deity obviously is the thing you want to shoot down, his resurrection, or all of the miracles for that matter.

As I was suggesting before we started, and maybe somebody who has studied this can send us an email and clarify things, it is one thing to say that Jesus is the son of God. You may remember that the creator and producer of Star Trek, Gene Rodenberry, said, “Yes, Jesus was divine, just like you’re divine and I’m divine. We’re all divine.” This was common stuff back then – Universalism and Unitarianism. To say that Jesus was the son of God was not necessarily a problem. You just redefine terms.

To say that Jesus rose from the dead was not necessarily a problem because, ”He’s alive in my heart. I’ve had an encounter with the risen Christ and it’s transformed me, but the body was still in the grave on the third day,” that kind of thing.

The virgin birth would seem to be the one place where you can’t get around it historically. Either Jesus had a human father or he didn’t. It’s one or the other. If he didn’t, this is incredible. Literally incredible means beyond belief, and it is incredible to unbelievers.

For Christians it’s an article of faith. This was the way the son of God had to come into the world so that he would not be polluted by our sins. He has to be a second Adam attached to our humanity, and yet his father is God. He in his human beginnings was created in the womb of the virgin Mary by the work of the Holy Spirit and therefore he’s called the son of God, because he always was the son of God. He’s the eternal deity and people would call him what he is.

That’s another thing that liberals say. “Well, it just meant that because of his special birth he was called the son of God.” No, he’s called it because he’s Yahweh, because he’s the second person of the trinity.

I think some of it has to do with the fact that they cannot conceive of a God who would humble himself to the degree of submitting to being in a woman’s womb. I think that’s it in many ways because when we speak of infants or we talk about babies in the womb, they are the most helpless and the littlest of us. And to think of the God of all the universe taking that on, some of it’s just too little, in a sense, for so great a God. The thing there is they’re discounting the greatness of God because they can’t understand how he can remain himself and yet also take on humanity.

I think a lot of it is flowing also from the rising naturalism of the time and the desire to have science explain everything, so the natural processes that they want to depend on can’t explain this. I think they want a God that fits within their universe and not one that’s outside of it that would come into it. It kind of wraps up everything that unbelievers don’t want.

In my also extremely limited experience, liberals want to move the conversation about this back into Isaiah, because they’ll argue that it’s about Isaiah’s wife and the baby that she’s going to have. That totally leaves out the book of Matthew, doesn’t it, because the angel here is using that as a proof text about this, so you can’t really argue that this is about Isaiah’s wife when the angel is saying, “No, this is about Mary and Joseph. You know you’re not the father.”

Yes. Liberals of all stripes have tried to explain who Jesus’ father might have been if it wasn’t Joseph. The Nazis actually talked about Germanic soldiers in service to Rome passing through Nazareth and having a good time with Mary – horrible, horrible slanders against Mary – because this is where God enters history in a new way. He’s always here. We live and move and have our being within the divine essence in mind. He’s not far from anyone of us, Paul says in Acts 17, and yet we’re not God.

Contra the Nazis also, although history is rife with people saying, “Oh my goodness, look at that person with the fair skin and the golden hair. They must be something special,” that’s not anywhere in scripture at all. The best we get is the angels who went to Sodom and Gomorrah were very attractive. That’s all we got. There’s no more details.

Attractive by the standards of that day and that culture. We don’t know if they actually would be attracted to fair skin blue-eyed people.

I was just thinking too, to contradict our Mormon friends, if we can call them friends, this is the first time that God takes on a human body and becomes man. We do not have Elohim descending down to come and visit Mary. It is the Holy Spirit. So while we want to make this historic and physical, we have to be careful not to go to that extreme. It is a work of the Holy Spirit and therefore is in that way not visible to the human eye.

And at the same time we can eliminate aliens and ascended masters and all those other things that like to try to get their foot in the door here.

We’ve been talking about the virgin birth, but we should step back just a second and say it’s popular to sing Happy Birthday to Jesus. I have mixed emotions about that. I think it’s a little trite and trivial, but more to the point this is not primarily the story of a baby being born. It’s the story of God taking to himself human nature and coming into our world to save us from our sins – God becoming man, the Word made flesh.

As I say, when we get to the church councils we’ll talk more about that, and as we pursue our Lord’s ministry we’ll see the evidence of both his true humanity and true deity – one truly human person, divine person, God and man who’s the only Savior and the Lord of creation.

This is why angels got up and started singing and talking and visiting people. This is why people started writing scripture afresh and writing praise songs and talking about this child was going to change the world.

Mary, from the time she finds out what’s going to happen until the time she visits Elizabeth, is digging into all the scripture she’s ever memorized. She probably doesn’t have a copy of the Bible. Those were rare. Her synagogue may have one and she may be visiting the rabbi every day. “Can I read some more of the Bible today? There are some things I need to find out.” She’s doing her Bible study. She’s remembering what she’s studied, and the Holy Spirit is working in this all the time so that when Elizabeth greets her she bursts forth into this beautiful song we call the Magnificat that pulls together strands from all over the Old Testament, including Hannah’s song when Samuel was going to be born, through the prophecies and psalms of Messiah.

Can we start with the Magnificat next time?

Yes, that would be a good place to start. Why don’t we do that, and we can look at the other songs – the angel’s song and Zacharias’ song and Simeon’s song.

You didn’t know this was a musical!

We’ll look at songs next time.

Sounds good. We said before we started recording that if we get to the wise men we’ll be doing really great. We haven’t even got to the birth of Jesus yet, so stay tuned for next week’s musical episode. But before we go, shall we leave with some recommendations?

I’m going to recommend a Christmas song.

Oh yay. I’m a Presbyterian. I’ll do that anytime here.

And I’m going to recommend that we don’t butcher it. One of my favorite Christmas hymns for a long, long, long time has been What Child is This? For one thing it’s one of the few Christmas songs that actually mentions the cross – “Nails, spear shall pierce him through, the cross be borne for me and for you.”

I have noticed that in some modernized versions somebody, I don’t know who, has altered one of the verses. The original was “Christians fear for sinners here the silent Word is pleading,” and it’s been changed to something like, “With awe our hearts are beating.”

Oh, so we don’t need Jesus’ intercession?

I don’t know who made the change, but I’ve seen it in more places than one. I suspect that someone – it sounds worthy of a good Presbyterian, honestly – said in his heart, “Jesus is a baby here. He’s not interceding for anybody, so that’s reading his future work into this moment and, however sweet it may be, it’s not theologically accurate.”

I beg to differ. I’ve thought about it a long time and finally dropped it on my pastor in the middle of an elders’ meeting and said, “Look, there’s only always been one mediator and intercessor, right?”

“Yes.”

I’m thinking particularly of the passage in Zechariah where the angel of the Lord is crying out to Yahweh, “How long will the cities of Jerusalem lie desolate?” so we have precedent that even before he took human nature, the eternal son of God is the mediator and is, on the basis of what he will do, interceding.

The whole point of that song is, yes, in his human nature he’s finite, he’s limited, he’s ignorant, and yet he’s the eternal son of God and he continues what he always has done and what one day he will do on the merits of a finished crucifixion, a finished resurrection, a finished ascension, but he’s already pleading for us.

Anyway, I think it’s a song that’s very rich in theology and I think we need to take it a little more seriously. I know there are some hymns that have to be rewritten if we’re ever going to use them. Sometimes I think, “Well, then let’s not use them,” but we’d lose some good hymns that way, I guess.

I think I will recommend something on a totally different topic, a children’s book by the name of Roxaboxen. It’s about a shared world of the children in this little Arizona town and the world that they create in their shared imagination and it’s wonderful. I cry every time and my 3-year-old looks at me and says, “Mommy, are you crying about Roxaboxen?” and I say, “Yes, yes I am.”

I am going to recommend a book that also made me cry but for a very different reason. I’m going to recommend the book called Toxic Empathy by Allie Beth Stuckey. The reason it made me cry is she is addressing the fact that the progressive movement among Christians has basically hijacked the idea of empathy, that you need to feel for other people’s problems.

You need to enter into their feelings and imagine if you were them how would you want to be treated, and have basically have used it to manipulate people to agree with things that are completely unbiblical, often using catch phrases like, “Abortion is health care,” or “Love is love,” or “No human is illegal.” She’s addressing what they’re saying and how they’re basically hijacking people’s emotions to try to get them to agree with their positions.

The crying came in in the first chapter when we were reading about abortion, and she has a fuller description of abortion and all that it involves than any I had ever heard, so I was hearing and learning new things I had never heard before. I was sitting there listening to my husband read and looking at a monitor with my baby son on it and just was sobbing at the thought that people would do this to babies. It was all the more horrifying for exactly what goes into that. Her point is this is not health care. This is not compassionate. A lot of what she does is bring in, in a sense, the other side of the issue and also the scriptures and why what they’re saying contradicts scripture.

It’s another one of those books that’s basically trying to pull away the superficial play on emotions that is so common among a lot of social media and other places, where people have the little quip that you go, “Oh yeah, that sounds right.” But when you start to think about it, it’s pulling you away from what scripture would say and you’re being manipulated by your emotions to suddenly agree with these things. It’s a very useful book for all the things that are going on right now.

I would recommend it for basically high school and above. I could see it even being a good book for high school students to read when they want to think about these issues, because the methods that she describes are so insidious in the way that it sneaks in and gets you to agree before you realize you’ve agreed, and then you’re going, “Well, yeah, love is important,” and “Yeah, I can’t impinge on someone’s health care choices.” You forget God’s standard and how he should be the one that determines what is a good and a bad emotion, and what train our emotions should follow.

Yes, very relevant.

Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, Dear Listener, you can visit our Patreon at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.

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