Of a virgin for a reason
The next verse of our Christmas Carol runs like this:
He
came down to earth from heaven
who is God and Lord of all;
and his shelter was a stable
and his cradle was a stall:
with the poor and mean and lowly
lived on earth our Saviour holy.
The Scriptures are adament and persistent: The Son of God came down from heaven, Jesus Christ was supernaturally conceived without the help of a husband.
The Scriptures may even be saying that he was conceived without the help of a woman's DNA, because we read that the "holy one to be born will be called the Son of God" and more tellingly, "what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit."
We know that Jesus inherited no DNA from Joseph, and we have no idea if he inherited DNA from his mother. He may not have. He was called Joseph's son (John 6:42), though Joseph was not his biological father. And it could be that Jesus was called Mary's son without sharing her DNA. We do not know.
The reason Jesus' conception was wholly supernatural was to protect him from sin inherited from human parents. If Jesus did share some of Mary's DNA, it would have had to be sanctified to preserve Jesus from possessing a fallen nature.
The truth is that we don't know exactly what happened in that womb, except for these two things: Jesus did not inherit a sinful nature from Mary, but on the other hand he was a human being like us in every way, except for sin.
Paul goes as far as it is possible to go when he says that the Son of God came "in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Romans 8:3). He cannot mean that Jesus had a sinful nature, perish the thought. But he wants us to know that Jesus was a real man like you and I.
The supernatural conception of Jesus protected the Son of God from the effects of Adam's fall, while his birth ensured that he was a real man. Rather than sending a pre-made baby into the world from heaven, God "abhors not the Virgin's womb." The Son of God must pass through all the stages of human devlopment the rest of us do.
The God-man mediator
And so the Son of God became what he was not (a man) but continued to be what he always was (God).
Why?
So that he could be the perfect mediator between the two parties at war - God and man.
And so that God could understand and empathise with frail creatures of dust, "the poor and mean and lowly."
Prayer for the Day
Our loving Father in heaven,
We acknowledge your Son as Lord and God, the holy One who came down from heaven. We thank you that through his work as the perfect God-man mediator, he was able to pay the price for all our sins.
We thank you that a real man sits in the throne room of heaven and understands us in our frail humanity.
Teach us to love and trust him more.
We ask these things in His Name
Amen.
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