The Necessity of the Virgin Birth; 2
John 8
2 John 1:8 NASB
“Watch yourselves, that you do not lose what we have
accomplished, but that you may receive a full reward.”
Areas of
assault.
The virgin birth: five basic questions
a)
To be a
substitute for mankind. Only a true member of the race could die as a
substitute for the human race. Like must substitute for like. This is one
reason animal sacrifices could never do anything in relationship to sin. They
were only training aids related to ritual observance that taught spiritual
principles. Hebrews 10:4 NASB “For it is impossible for the blood of
bulls and goats to take away sins.”
b)
To be a mediator.
A mediator needs to be fully equal with both parties in conflict. Thus the
mediator needed to be fully equal with mankind. Jesus Christ is the one and
only mediator between God and man, 1 Timothy 2:5 NASB
“For there is one God, {and} one mediator also between God and men, {the} man
Christ Jesus.”
c)
To fulfil the
office of priest. To be our high priest—He is a king-priest, 1 Peter 2:9—a
priest must be a part of the group he is representing, therefore the priest had
to be fully human in order to represent man before God. Jesus Christ became
true humanity in order to be our high priest after the order of Melchizedek.
Hebrews 7:4, 5,
d)
To be
e)
To fulfil Old
Testament prophecy. He was to be a descendent of Abraham, the seed of Abraham,
Genesis 22:18. He was going to be from the tribe of Judah, Genesis 49:9, 10. He
would be from the root of Jesse, Isaiah 11:1.
f)
To fulfil God’s
covenant with David He had to be in rhe physical line of David, 2 Samuel
7:8-16; Psalm 89:20-37.
g)
To fulfil the
office of prophet—Jesus Christ is prophet, priest and king.
h)
In order to
pioneer the spiritual life of the church age believer,
based on the filling of God the Holy Spirit.
i)
Old Testament
prophecies and types teach His humanity. Example. In the construction of the
ark of the ark of the covenant. It was made from
acacia wood and it was covered with gold. The acacia wood represents the
humanity of Christ; the gold represents the deity of Christ. Therefore it
represents the hypostatic union. Second example: Melchizedek, the king-priest
of
a)
No human being could be qualified to go to the cross because every human
being would be a sinner. So no human being alone could satisfy the requirements
to go to the cross and pay the sin
penalty
for the human race. No angel could substitute for the human race because, once
again, there is the principle of like being a substitute for like and angels
could not substitute for humanity.
No other creature could serve the
role because of the principle of substitution. Therefore the creator Himself
must substitute. He was the only option for a Saviour.
b)
A second reason the substitute must be fully God is that only one with
perfect righteousness could qualify. And He would be the source for the
imputation of righteousness, so he would have to
have a
righteousness that could be imputed to others in the race.
c) Only deity could provide the substitute
that would have infinite value. If the Saviour was to die for all mankind He
had to pay a penalty that would have value for more than one, in fact a value
that
could pay the penalty for all mankind.
a)
The Saviour
couldn’t just appear on the scene; He couldn’t just materialise out of nowhere,
He had to be true humanity.
b)
A second idea
that has come up in history is that deity was added after birth, the position
that in the early church was known as adoptionism.
c)
Therefore He had
to appear through normal birth, but it couldn’t be through copulation between
two parents. It has to be something that blocks the inheritance of the sin
nature.
d)
We must realise that there can be no doubt at
all about Jesus’ genuine and permanent humanity. He is still in hypostatic
union as the resurrected Lord sitting at the right hand of God the Father.
e)
The problem is
the inherited sin from Adam, Romans 5:12. How is the sin nature kept from being
passed on to Jesus? The only real solution to this is to recognise the
principle of Scripture that it is Adam who is the head of the race, it is
Adam’s sin that resulted in the fall of the human race (not the woman’s), and
therefore it is through the male that the sin nature is passed down.
a)
Adam’s sin in the
garden was the origination of the sin nature in the human race. Romans 5:12,
“in Adam all die.” Genesis 1:26, 27 says that God created the male and the
female in His image, but
in Genesis 5
when we are given the genealogy we are told that when Adam fathered a son that
son was not in the image of God, he was in the image of Adam. So that every
descendant from
that point on is
born in the image of Adam, i.e. fallen and a participant in Adam’s original
sin, and under corruption from that original sin.
b)
Although both the
man and the woman in the garden were equally guilty of sin, the woman’s sin
wasn’t the issue. She wasn’t the designated head of the human race. The issue
was the sin of
Adam as the federal
head of the human race. The woman’s sin was due to her deception, 1
Timothy 2:14, and his sin was a sin of full
cognisance. Therefore his sin was the determinative and the
crucial sin. The
result, therefore, is that though both the man and the woman have a sin nature
only the male transmits the sin nature through the fertilisation of the female
ovum.
c)
The sin nature
clearly has a physical dimension as expressed in the Scripture. This is
communicated through the use of terms such as flesh in Romans 8:3 plus numerous
other passages; the body
of sin in Romans
6:6. Therefore all the cells in our body are contaminated by the sin nature. It
impacts our physical body and orients us in the direction of rebellion against
God. We are born with
this sin nature,
this capacity for evil and orientation towards rebelliousness, that affects
every single cell in our body. It is to that sin nature that God the Father
imputes Adam’s original sin at the
instant of our
birth. We not only have a sin nature, which means that we are born corrupt, but
through the imputation of Adam’s original sin we are just as guilty of Adam’s
sin as he is and are
partakers of
spiritual death.
d)
In physical
procreation the sin nature is then passed down through the male. At birth the
guilt of Adam’s original sin is imputed to that sin nature. So at procreation
the sin nature is passed down
through the
male.
e)
The sperm has 23
chromosomes that comes from the male. When the egg is
first generated it has 46 chromosomes. Then through a process known as meiosis
the egg throws off 23 of these
chromosomes in what are called polar bodies. That leaves 23
chromosomes that have been purified through this process. So what happens in
the virgin birth is that God the Holy Spirit
miraculously fertilises these 23 chromosomes. He creates a new and
unique life that is fully human but does not inherit anything from Adam. He
supplies the other 23 chromosomes necessary for life to begin and the result is
the birth of Jesus of Narareth who is minus a sin
nature. Because He was born without a home for the imputation of Adam’s
original sin and He is born with perfect righteousness in His humanity just as
Adam was originally created with perfect righteousness. Therefore Jesus is
called the second Adam.
The doctrine of the hypostatic union
Definition:
The word hypostatic comes from the Greek word hupostasis
[u(postasij] which refers to something of a substantial nature,
essence, actual being, or reality. In terms of a theological definition the
hypostatic union describes the union of two natures: undiminished deity and
true humanity in the one person of Jesus Christ. These natures are inseparably
united without loss or mixture of separate identity, without loss or transfer
of properties or attributes, the union being personal and eternal.
In
church history:
Apollinarius
came along after the Nicene creed had been written.
The Council of Nicea dealt with Arianism
which didn’t believe in an eternal deity of Christ but a deity that was
secondary. Apollinarius was very much opposed to Arianism so he sort of went to the other extreme in trying
to explain the relationship of the humanity of Christ. He went so far, though,
that he essentially denies the humanity of Christ. He said that Christ had a human
body, a divine soul (not a human soul) and a partly human spirit. But this is
not true humanity. So he ended up with a Christ who was not fully human. That
was condemned at the Council of Constantinople in AD 381 as a
denial of Jesus’ humanity.
Nestorius
came along and tried to explain the hypostatic union. Nestorianism
makes the problem of blending the deity and the humanity of Christ. Instead of
acknowledging two distinct natures in one person Nestorius
denied that there was a real union between the divine and human natures of
Christ and he virtually held the idea that there are two natures and two
persons. So this is a divided Christ. He separates things too much.
The
third person to take a stab at things was Eutychius.
He unites them so closely that they blend their attributes, so that the
humanity blends into the deity and the deity blends into the humanity.