SPEAKER_00: Alright, everybody.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, thank you for these brothers and sisters in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for the gift that is the church, not just the church in the present, but the church in the past as well.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Lord, for this catechism that was developed under the illumination of your spirit and handed down faithfully through the generations.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Lord, for the way that it leads us deeper into Scripture and helps us to see the parts in light of the whole.
SPEAKER_00: Help us this morning as we consider the incarnation, how our Lord took to himself a true body and a reasonable soul.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, it's a glorious mystery.
SPEAKER_00: It's at the heart of our faith, and we are so thankful for it that God will become man, that you would put on our flesh, and you would accomplish what our weakened flesh could not accomplish.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Help us to understand this beautiful mystery just a little bit more this morning.
SPEAKER_00: We pray in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
SPEAKER_00: That's right, you just heard a Hail Mary in a Protestant church, in a Presbyterian church, even.
SPEAKER_00: I grew up saying that prayer.
SPEAKER_00: It's funny, I for the longest time I thought Hail Mary and Holy Mary were two different people.
SPEAKER_00: There was a Hail Mary, and there was a Holy Mary, and the Holy Mary was the mother of God.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't speak English in my Catholic church, so it tells you some things about what I learned and what I didn't learn.
SPEAKER_00: So that prayer that I just read, um this is kind of an unkind way to put the question, but I'll do it anyway.
SPEAKER_00: What about it most offends you?
SPEAKER_04: Say it again.
SPEAKER_00: The prayer?
SPEAKER_06: Oh, how'd it go again?
SPEAKER_06: I've not heard it before.
SPEAKER_00: You've never heard it before?
SPEAKER_06: No, yeah.
SPEAKER_06: We need you to do at least 10 hands.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, I'm just there you go.
SPEAKER_00: I'll say it one more time so you can be listening for lines who take offense over.
SPEAKER_00: Hail Mary.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not praying it.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just saying it.
SPEAKER_00: I'm citing it.
SPEAKER_00: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
SPEAKER_00: The most offensive lines, the lines that most offend your Protestant ears in that prayer.
unknown: Hail Mary.
SPEAKER_00: Hail Mary.
SPEAKER_01: That's from the sacred scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: Well the what the angel hailed Mary and Lou.
SPEAKER_01: But they don't pray for her.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't mean what the Catholics mean.
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
SPEAKER_00: Ruby.
SPEAKER_03: He said all the words up to pray for us in the outer meeting.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: He said most of those words, I think.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, a lot of it is really taken from the Vulgate version of the enunciation.
SPEAKER_03: The thing against me is the idea that I need some extra mediator.
SPEAKER_03: And that Mary is that person.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the very idea of the prayer that we'd be praying to Mary.
SPEAKER_03: And I think we Protestants may have gone over too much and forget Mary's role in the incarnation.
SPEAKER_03: And do not, I don't want to use the word veneration because I thought it's the right word.
SPEAKER_03: Do not treasure the role that Mary played.
SPEAKER_03: And Jesus himself would not let people.
SPEAKER_03: Blessed are you, and the rest of the gave you something, or whatever, that verse where he said, No, blessed are the people who hear the word of God and do it.
SPEAKER_03: So even Jesus wouldn't let them go.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: You'd be surprised just how high a regard the Protestant reformers had for Mary.
SPEAKER_00: When they address Mary, because she's presented to us in Luke as an example of faith.
SPEAKER_00: She is very much a model to be followed.
SPEAKER_00: Because the Roman Catholic Church swung the pendulum so far in one direction, we tend to swing it in the other direction, where you know we don't want much to do with Mary.
SPEAKER_00: But you know, Mary is presented to us as a model, someone to emulate, someone to appreciate, someone who played a key role in the in the incarnation, for sure.
SPEAKER_00: But we definitely do not pray to her.
SPEAKER_00: She's not a mediator or a co-mediator.
SPEAKER_03: Where they get that is from John when the disciples went and said to Mary.
SPEAKER_03: Hey, we ran on one that whole passage there.
unknown: That's where the Catholics, I guess, originally got the biblical basis for.
unknown: Yeah.
unknown: And what drives me crazy?
unknown: What's that?
unknown: What drives me crazy is the fact that Mary is not omnipresent and omnipotent.
unknown: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Who's to say she can even hear hear you while you're praying?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
SPEAKER_00: How about the line mother of God?
SPEAKER_00: Anyone offended by that one?
SPEAKER_00: What?
SPEAKER_00: That's a goo.
SPEAKER_00: That's a plus?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, we got your thumbs down.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is God.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, Randy just taught the lesson.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: It does all depend what you mean, right?
SPEAKER_00: If you have a problem with that line, then you find yourself in historical company with an ancient bishop by the name of Nestorius.
SPEAKER_00: And he got this sum from his teacher, Theodore of Mopsuestra, and there are other people.
SPEAKER_00: And he didn't like that.
SPEAKER_00: Because how can a human being bear God?
SPEAKER_00: How can a human being give birth to God?
SPEAKER_00: And so he his solution was to basically dissolve the union between the two persons of the, or sorry, the two natures of Christ, the divine and the human, so that he could say that she bore the human nature of Christ, but she didn't bear the divine nature.
SPEAKER_00: She didn't bear the whole person of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Now the orthodox reply is what Randy just said.
SPEAKER_00: Eventually we get there in the Council Chalcedon in 451.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is, you know, fully God, fully man, one person and two natures.
SPEAKER_00: And that's the kind of stuff we talked about last week.
SPEAKER_00: But it brings us back to this mystery of, you know, if Mary did bear the God man, then she did bear God.
SPEAKER_00: She bore God, she bore man.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why Elizabeth could use those words when she in in Luke 2 when she sees her.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed are you, the mother of our Lord, right?
SPEAKER_00: And the fruit of your womb, all that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00: So what we're wrestling with today is really that mystery, that Jesus would become fully man, fully God, fully man, not just half man, but fully man.
SPEAKER_00: And the catech the catechism question goes like this: How did Christ become, being the Son of God, become man?
SPEAKER_00: And the answer is Christ, the Son of God, became man by taking himself to a truth.
SPEAKER_00: A true body and a reasonable soul, being conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary and born of her, yet without sin.
SPEAKER_00: So we'll take that piece by piece today as we talk about that.
SPEAKER_00: And first we'll look at the true body and the reasonable soul.
SPEAKER_00: Let's open to Hebrews 2.
SPEAKER_00: And if someone could read for us Hebrews 2, verses 5 through 18, that would be great.
SPEAKER_00: Hebrews 2, 5 through 18.
SPEAKER_06: So if no one else is reading it out.
SPEAKER_06: For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking.
SPEAKER_06: It has been testified somewhere.
SPEAKER_06: What is man that you are mindful of him, or the Son of Man that you care for him?
SPEAKER_06: You made him for a little while lower than the angels.
SPEAKER_06: You crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet.
SPEAKER_06: Now putting everything in subjection to him, I pressed the wrong button here.
SPEAKER_06: And uh he left nothing outside his control.
SPEAKER_06: At present we do not see everything in subjection to him, but we see him who, for a little while, has been lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
SPEAKER_06: For it is fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.
SPEAKER_06: For he who sanctifies those who are sanctified all have one source.
SPEAKER_06: That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying, I will tell of your name to my brothers in the midst of the congregation, I will sing your praise.
SPEAKER_06: And again, I will put my trust in him, and again, behold, I and the children God has given.
SPEAKER_06: Since therefore the children shall share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver all those who, through fear of death, were subject to lifelong slavery.
SPEAKER_06: I said 18.
SPEAKER_06: 18.
SPEAKER_06: I'm certain.
SPEAKER_06: For surely it is not the angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham.
SPEAKER_06: Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
SPEAKER_06: For because he himself was suffered when tempted, he was able to help those who are being tempted.
SPEAKER_06: Thank you, sir.
SPEAKER_00: So who to whom did God not subject the world to come?
SPEAKER_00: Who did God not put in charge of the world to come?
SPEAKER_00: Angels.
SPEAKER_00: Hebrews.
SPEAKER_00: One way to summarize the content of Hebrews is to say is that Jesus is better.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is better than the priests.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is better than the Old Testament sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is better than even the angels.
SPEAKER_00: In chapter one, it's you know, to which of the he talked about Jesus being fulfilling his work and taking a seat at the right hand of the Father.
SPEAKER_00: And then it says, For to which of the angels did God ever say?
SPEAKER_00: And he goes on to talk about the angels' place in the whole economy of redemption.
SPEAKER_00: Their servants, their messengers, their supporters.
SPEAKER_00: They're not the main character, they're the supporting caste.
SPEAKER_00: And then in chapter 2, he goes on to say, it's not the angels to whom God subjected the world to come, it's to man.
SPEAKER_00: And it's really important that, you know, we already know who that man is, but before we even get to that man, you have to reckon with the fact that he has subjected the world to come to a man.
SPEAKER_00: Because here he quotes Psalm 8.
SPEAKER_00: And Psalm 8 is David going out and looking at the night sky and saying, Oh Lord, who are we?
SPEAKER_00: Who am I?
SPEAKER_00: What is the Son of Man that you are mindful of him, that you would give me this place of authority, that you would place me in a place of dominion even over the angels.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, and so the art the writer of Hebrews is making this case where it's like, God has given it to humanity to rule the world, drawing back on Genesis 1 and the creation of human beings in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: And then he narrows down to Jesus, this one who we don't yet see him in subjection, or see him in dominion and all things subjected to him, but we do see him crowned.
SPEAKER_00: And how do we see him crowned?
SPEAKER_00: What does Hebrew say?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Glory and honor.
SPEAKER_00: Crowned with glory and honor.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because of what?
unknown: He suffered death.
SPEAKER_00: For what purpose?
SPEAKER_03: So that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
SPEAKER_00: So that he might taste for everyone.
SPEAKER_00: So you know, uh, I'm trying to roll through this.
SPEAKER_00: He was crowned with glory and honor by way of suffering, right?
SPEAKER_00: And what we just read, why was that fitted that he be crowned in glory and honor through suffering?
SPEAKER_00: Verse 10.
SPEAKER_00: So that in bringing men, he would make, go ahead.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, he through his suffering, he made the founder of their salvation perfect.
SPEAKER_00: And the reason for that is because he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source.
SPEAKER_00: Uh we share.
SPEAKER_00: We are brothers.
SPEAKER_00: We share the common human nature.
SPEAKER_00: Uh he calls his people brothers and sisters.
SPEAKER_00: We partake, his brothers, I'll just shorthand brothers, but know that include sisters.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, what do they partake of?
SPEAKER_00: They partake of flesh and blood.
SPEAKER_00: And so why did Jesus partake of flesh and blood himself?
SPEAKER_00: So that he could taste death in their place for them, and through death deliver them.
SPEAKER_00: So Jesus, who is himself fully man, comes not to help the angels, but he comes to help his brothers and sisters.
SPEAKER_00: He takes on our flesh, he enters our position, he uh submits himself to all the same weaknesses we face, so that in him we might have a merciful and faithful high priest.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus becomes fully man so that he can identify with us, so that he can know what it's like to be us.
SPEAKER_00: And because he's a priest, you know, this is the argument that comes up later in Hebrews, uh, what's one of the qualifications for being a priest?
SPEAKER_00: Seems super obvious, but Hebrews makes it a point to emphasize it.
SPEAKER_00: It has to be a man, has to be a person, someone called from among the people.
SPEAKER_00: God cannot be a priest unto himself and for his people.
SPEAKER_00: God is the mediator.
SPEAKER_00: Or sorry, God is the object of mediation, and the priest is the mediator.
SPEAKER_00: So God had to become man, come from among men, so that he might be the go-between by way of his human nature.
SPEAKER_00: So all that involves Jesus partaking of a body and soul, flesh and blood, Jesus becoming truly man.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't have that, you actually don't have a high priest.
SPEAKER_00: You have docetism, which we talked about last week, comes from the Greek verb doketo, which means to seem.
SPEAKER_00: And it was this ancient heresy where they believed that Jesus did not actually become flesh and blood, because God can't do that.
SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
SPEAKER_00: He would be sullying his divine nature.
SPEAKER_00: Uh so he just seen, he put on a show.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he appeared to sleep, he appeared to eat, he appeared to do all of these things.
SPEAKER_00: But what Hebrews is telling us right here is that if that's the case, then he didn't really partake of flesh and blood.
SPEAKER_00: And if he didn't really partake of flesh and blood, then he didn't taste death.
SPEAKER_00: And if he didn't taste death, he didn't taste death for us.
SPEAKER_00: And if he didn't taste death for us, we're still lifelong slaves.
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't end well for us.
SPEAKER_00: Like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, we of all people are to be the most pitied.
SPEAKER_00: So true body, true body, and also a reasonable soul.
SPEAKER_00: The catechism mentions a reasonable soul.
SPEAKER_00: There's another heresy, I think we briefly touched on it last week, known as Apollinarianism.
SPEAKER_00: And the view of Apollinarianism was basically that Jesus did not have a human soul.
SPEAKER_00: The eternal logos, so the word of God, this the eternal son, he supplied the soul in the place of the human soul.
SPEAKER_00: But what you have in that is, again, you don't have Jesus who's fully human.
SPEAKER_00: You have Jesus as just kind of a skin puppet that the Son of God takes up and uses for a time.
SPEAKER_00: So there are a number of scripture texts we can look at to refute that.
SPEAKER_00: Probably the easiest one is Matthew 26, 38.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus said to them, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.
SPEAKER_00: Remain here and watch with me.
SPEAKER_00: So if Jesus, if Jesus' soul was only the Lagos, if it was only the eternal Son of God, kind of filling the space for Jesus' soul, then what would it mean for him to say, My soul is sorrowful?
SPEAKER_00: What would it mean for him to say, my soul is sorrowful even to death?
SPEAKER_00: That's not stuff that God can say.
SPEAKER_00: The eternal word through whom all things were made, the Lagos that underlines all of created reality, how could that Lagos die?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is talking about his human soul.
SPEAKER_00: So true body, reasonable soul.
SPEAKER_00: Then the catechism goes on to talk about having this conception.
SPEAKER_00: The Christ, the Son of God, became man by taking to himself a true body and a reasonable soul, being conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, born of her, yet without sin.
SPEAKER_00: So, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
SPEAKER_00: We'll take the Virgin Mary first, this idea that God, by way of the Holy Spirit, caused this woman to have a child without her having had any sexual contact with a man.
SPEAKER_00: We hold that.
SPEAKER_00: We believe that.
SPEAKER_00: Why do you think that is?
SPEAKER_00: Why do people deny the virgin birth?
SPEAKER_02: Because besides Christ, there has been no other person born from a virgin, which is biologically impossible.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that's that's definitely one line of argument that people use.
SPEAKER_00: That's a line of argument used essentially by naturalists, atheists, skeptics, people who have no use for the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: It's like, you know, it's look around the world.
SPEAKER_00: When have you ever heard about a virgin birth before?
SPEAKER_00: You haven't.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, it's impossible.
unknown: The Pharisees sneered and jeered at it the same way.
unknown: I think that's in John 2.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, just slandering and slamming Jesus and his mother in one, and um I think that may be near the passage where Jesus says before Abraham was I am, but anyway, so they they were all aware that there was something about Jesus' birth situation that they could use against him.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Some thing that so they slandered.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so you know you kind of have two different things happening there.
SPEAKER_00: One is a denial of the metaphysical possibility of virgin birth, right?
SPEAKER_00: That cannot happen.
SPEAKER_00: Why can it happen?
SPEAKER_00: Because it doesn't happen.
SPEAKER_00: Well, that is a logical fallacy, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's what you're saying is you're you're you're confusing is and on.
SPEAKER_00: You're doing you're you're mixing up correlation and causation.
SPEAKER_00: Just because something 99.99999% of the ch time happens in a particular way does not in itself mean that it's impossible that it can go another way.
SPEAKER_00: So if God is God, and if the world is what the world is, then why in the world would it be impossible for God to say this one time, this is how we're gonna do it?
SPEAKER_02: So I also look at Adam and Eve, who I know they weren't born, but they were made, they were created.
SPEAKER_02: Um so God has um hasn't has performed the the impossible, the made it possible.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: So the there is there is that example that he has done this before.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: For the skeptic, for the materialist, the non-believer, they're just gonna say, well, no, he didn't, he made that up.
SPEAKER_00: Which is basically the Pharisees' move, right?
SPEAKER_00: Without denying the whole picture of God just saying, no, Jesus wasn't born of a virgin, he was just born of fornication, and you guys are trying to clean that up.
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of a question, too, to think about it as well when you're ministering to unbelievers.
SPEAKER_01: If, on one hand, God only operated within the mechanics and natural world in which he sat, then the unbelievable thing.
SPEAKER_01: What's so special about that?
SPEAKER_01: There's nothing special or miraculous about working within the confines of the natural world.
SPEAKER_01: On the opposite side, because of miracles and these technology, are they arguably well, yes, and by nature they are arguably, which is what makes them miraculous.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: It makes me think of a conversation I had was I wasn't fully aware of the conversation at the time.
SPEAKER_01: I think it was only 19, but I was working at an auto dealership out of California.
SPEAKER_01: Salesmen, you know, by and large, they're usually animal people anyway.
SPEAKER_01: But uh the guy I was uh one of the salesmen, he used to walk by me all the time.
SPEAKER_01: And he goes, you know what, this Christian thing that you're into.
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's I'm okay with it all, except for all the locust books.
SPEAKER_01: That was his name.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And that was a gotcha for me, but I didn't know what to do in 19 or 20, how to respond to that.
SPEAKER_01: Now that we've heard it in conversation, of course, but that that being stumped by that at 19 definitely made me think, okay, there is a response to this, I just don't know what it is yet, and it was bad.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, when we think about this stuff and we talk about it, it's really helpful to recognize that you know they don't like the hocus pocus, right?
SPEAKER_00: Or they deny the possibility of the incarnation because that just doesn't happen.
SPEAKER_00: It's like, let's be honest about what we're talking about here.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have a problem with the incarnation, you have a problem with God.
SPEAKER_00: Because if you believe there really was a God, incarnation and miracles will be no problem for you.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if God is who we all generally believe God is and what he would be like, then whatever, right?
SPEAKER_00: He can do that and make a person appear right here.
SPEAKER_00: That's not that's not that far out of uh the ballpark for what an all-powerful divine being can do.
SPEAKER_00: So it's good to do that.
SPEAKER_00: It's good to be able to recognize that and you say, okay, now we can talk a little bit about where the disagreement is.
SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes a lot of people think that Christianity is just an ethical system.
SPEAKER_00: This is a set of stories, a set of morals and practices that you inhabit in order to make you a better person.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm good with that.
SPEAKER_00: That's that's fine.
SPEAKER_00: Believe what you want to believe, but I don't believe the hocus pocus, right?
SPEAKER_00: That didn't happen.
SPEAKER_00: You're just you tell your story, I'll tell mine.
SPEAKER_00: And then you're able to come back, and not to say you're gonna convince them of this and say, hey, it is an ethical system, but the only reason why it's an ethical system is because it's true.
SPEAKER_00: Because it actually touches ground in reality.
SPEAKER_00: This God, this Jesus who tell me to do stuff and to live in a certain way, they're actually the creator of the universe.
SPEAKER_00: And the creator of the universe actually entered into the universe, actually entered into creation in order to save us and to tell us these things.
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it helps.
SPEAKER_00: Because in so much of this stuff, you're really having a metaphysical argument.
SPEAKER_00: Like, do you believe and you can press people on that.
SPEAKER_00: Do you believe in God?
SPEAKER_00: They might say no, alright, and then you're gonna have a different kind of conversation.
SPEAKER_00: But if they say yes, then you can play the part of the five-year-old and be like, well, why not?
SPEAKER_00: Why couldn't he do this?
SPEAKER_00: Why's that?
SPEAKER_00: Why is that?
SPEAKER_00: You said he believed in God.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, come on, right?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Now there are people who believe in God, who believe in Jesus, who would call themselves Christians, even, who would deny the virgin birth.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, part of the Genesis, you know, part of the story of American Presbyterianism, really American evangelicalism, is in the early 20th century, it became possible in certain Presbyterians and certain denominations to get ordained while denying key things like the inspiration of Scripture, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the incarnation, or the virgin birth.
SPEAKER_00: You could deny that and still get ordained.
SPEAKER_00: And so you had, like with the OPC in the 20s and 30s, kind of people like Jay Gresham Machin standing up and saying, hey, this isn't Christianity.
SPEAKER_00: This is something else.
SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna need to go elsewhere.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna need to leave Princeton, start a new seminary in Philadelphia.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, fast forward into the you know the 70s and the birth of the PCA.
SPEAKER_00: We had a lot of that same kind of stuff happening in the Southern Mainline Presbyterian Church, the PCUS.
SPEAKER_00: And in a movement led by ruling elders mostly, we said, hey, we can't do this anymore.
SPEAKER_00: We've tried, we've tried, we've tried, but we're denying key stuff here.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have to go and do our own thing.
SPEAKER_00: And the PCA was born in 1973.
SPEAKER_00: But you have, you know, Christians who will look at Matthew 1 and they'll say, well, the the Greek word there isn't uh, you know, it isn't what you'd expect for virgin.
SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's more of a word for maiden.
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, the virgin thing, it's just something that Christians have kind of read into it.
SPEAKER_00: But a good response is that, well, that word is used only for young women under of marriage or around a marriageable age or under it, uh it implies virgin virginity.
SPEAKER_00: And even if we leave that aside, in Luke 1, 34, when the angel makes this promise that she will be with child, what how does Mary respond?
unknown: Not been with a man.
SPEAKER_00: How?
SPEAKER_00: I've not been with a man, right?
SPEAKER_00: How did Joseph respond?
SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Right.
SPEAKER_03: Just uh don't put her away.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'll be nice about it.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Can't marry this girl.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: And the angel says that nothing shall be impossible with God.
SPEAKER_00: So if we're meant to infer that she had been with a man or that she would be with her husband before the baby comes into her, and the angel just kind of mushes all of that together, why would the angel say anything about the power of the Spirit of God and God doing the impossible?
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing impossible about it if that's what he meant.
SPEAKER_00: If he meant, yeah, you're gonna get married and you guys are gonna get pregnant.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's pretty par for the course for most people.
SPEAKER_00: Um so the narrative itself, right?
SPEAKER_00: Uh the the grammar, the language themselves, they they tell us, they show us that Mary was a virgin, uh, that this conception was miraculous.
SPEAKER_00: And I mean that's totally biblically plausible, right?
SPEAKER_00: We talked about Adam and Eve, but can you think of any other times in the Bible thinking specifically of granting a child in a way that seems impossible?
SPEAKER_00: Can you think of any other times in the Bible when God gives a child to a couple when it seems like that is just humanly impossible?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Abraham bunchers.
SPEAKER_00: Abraham and Sarah?
SPEAKER_03: Abraham and Sarah, Samuel, Samuel, uh even Isaac.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: It was a long time after she didn't have any children.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Happens over and over again.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Right.
SPEAKER_00: Rachel?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_05: It all goes back to, like you said, God can use.
SPEAKER_04: Right.
unknown: Yeah.
unknown: The Bible.
SPEAKER_02: And those sayings in the Bible.
SPEAKER_02: God to close the realm of the warranty now that there wouldn't be conception.
SPEAKER_02: So why can't he?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: He opens and closes.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Well, I think what you said before that the real argument is the question of authority and the question of supernatural.
SPEAKER_03: Is God can does God have the freedom to insert himself into human history in ways that would not have happened unless he did that.
SPEAKER_03: Right.
SPEAKER_03: That's supernatural.
SPEAKER_03: Right.
SPEAKER_03: And we're all objects of his supernatural grace.
SPEAKER_03: Right.
SPEAKER_03: Because none of us would be here or be Christian unless he had done that past.
SPEAKER_03: Right.
SPEAKER_00: Part of the motivation for these progressive memes in Christianity to downplay the virgin birth, it was a desire for intelligibility and respectability.
SPEAKER_00: You know, so much of Protestant liberalism has to do with a world where people are getting increasingly sophisticated in every way.
SPEAKER_00: And people want to be able to explain the faith to skeptics and unbelievers in ways that they can own, in ways that they can respect.
SPEAKER_00: And so what happens is what I talk about with Christianity becoming an ethical system where we start shearing off all of the miracles, and we just say, well, the Bible isn't really the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: It's the word of man about God.
SPEAKER_00: You know, God is this universal, luminous presence.
SPEAKER_00: We can't really know things about him.
SPEAKER_00: All we can do is respond to our experience of him, it, whatever, her.
SPEAKER_00: And some, you know, different cultures respond in different ways.
SPEAKER_00: And this particular culture responded by writing a Bible and interpreting all of these experiences of the divine through that Bible.
SPEAKER_00: And then in the New Testament, you have this man, unlike any other man who's ever been born, Jesus, and it seems like the divine is in him in some particularly noteworthy way.
SPEAKER_00: He can really draw a crowd, and people are giving their lives to him.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, how do we explain that?
SPEAKER_00: Well, they they had, you know, they explained it through the through the lens of their own Judaism and their own Bible and all that sort of thing, and right, and then they continue to write it down.
SPEAKER_00: They continue to rewrite the story surrounding or centered on this Jesus character.
SPEAKER_00: And that's all fine.
SPEAKER_00: That's a culture being a culture.
SPEAKER_00: You know, they're doing their thing.
SPEAKER_00: But we, sophisticated people of the 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st century, we realize that you know they're just expressing it in their own way.
SPEAKER_00: So what we need to do is think our way toward a pure vision of morality.
SPEAKER_00: The golden rule, right?
SPEAKER_00: Do to others what you would have them do to you.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Emmanuel Kant called his categorical imperative.
SPEAKER_00: You know, Jesus had it first.
SPEAKER_00: Actually, Jesus didn't have it first.
SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about that today in the sermon.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but you know, just kind of get to this sense of religion as something that we can all accept together after having arrived at it through the use of pure human reason.
SPEAKER_00: And so you look at the Christian story and you say, all right, you pull a Thomas Jefferson, right?
SPEAKER_00: You take your little scalpel, you sit down with your Bible, and you excise all of the miraculous bits, and you keep all the parts that align with your own sense of a pure natural religion.
SPEAKER_00: And so that was the mood, right?
SPEAKER_00: That was the mood, especially getting into the 20 to 21st century.
SPEAKER_00: And you say, well, we can have Christianity without the virgin birth.
SPEAKER_00: We don't need that, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's just a way of people to try and talk about how unique Jesus was.
SPEAKER_00: Now I want to ask you that question.
SPEAKER_00: We're really pressing the point here.
SPEAKER_00: Do you think you can have Christianity without the virgin birth?
SPEAKER_04: No.
SPEAKER_00: Strong nose?
SPEAKER_00: Strong nose.
SPEAKER_00: No one dares to say yes.
SPEAKER_00: I have not created a safe environment to say yes.
SPEAKER_00: What's that?
SPEAKER_00: Did your question propose that you did not have an alternative, or is that it died or the question I'm asking is can you deny the virgin birth and still hold to the Christian faith?
SPEAKER_06: Christ died for your sins.
SPEAKER_02: Because scripture says that in order to have salvation, we must it must be a belief in Christ.
SPEAKER_02: So we're your savior.
SPEAKER_02: So yes, you could be saved and not believe in the virgin birth, but I would think that eventually you would end up changing your mind on that.
SPEAKER_06: Well, yeah, and I would think there'd be a problem though as who your savior is.
SPEAKER_00: So what we'll we'll take something off the table here, right?
SPEAKER_00: All kinds of people are saved with all kinds of erroneous doctrinal beliefs.
SPEAKER_00: Right.
SPEAKER_00: So let's set aside whether, from the perspective of God, you know, someone puts their faith in Christ and the thief on the cross, right?
SPEAKER_00: Did the thief on the cross know anything about the virgin birth?
SPEAKER_00: Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, right?
SPEAKER_00: And you know, so we'll leave that option open.
SPEAKER_00: But what we're getting at is the integrity of the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_00: What we're getting at is the integrity of Christology.
SPEAKER_00: All the things that we want to believe, all the things that we need to believe about Jesus is our fully human, sinless Savior, though we lose those if we lose the virgin birth.
SPEAKER_03: Yes, the physical resurrection makes no, it's just as maybe even more miraculous.
SPEAKER_03: Now, your point of the thief on the cross.
SPEAKER_03: He just didn't know.
SPEAKER_03: He did not have that information.
SPEAKER_03: If he knew, all we knew that was new was that it was his word there.
SPEAKER_03: Remember me?
SPEAKER_03: He must have had some idea, or he wouldn't have said when you come into your kingdom.
SPEAKER_00: I'll bet, right?
SPEAKER_00: Because of that, I'll bet that he was actually raised a Jew.
SPEAKER_00: Or at least with enough contact with Judaism to know the story.
SPEAKER_02: Well, Christ was um to use this word because I don't know what else you use, a controversial person within Israel and Judea that he would have been known even if you didn't know him personally, followed him, you people would have known of him.
SPEAKER_02: They would have heard stories and stuff.
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna back my thing about the thief on the cross, because when you come into your kingdom, it says a whole lot of that, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Well, it it really does.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the um so many of the promises in scripture, even going back to Genesis 3.15, talking about the seed of a woman.
SPEAKER_00: All right, the fact that the deliverer, the conqueror, the snake crusher will come from a woman.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, there's a really important tell for the incarnation in Jesus' humanity of the promise to David in 2 Samuel 7, that he would give him a son.
SPEAKER_00: You know, and he would place him upon his throne.
SPEAKER_00: And place him there in perpetuity.
SPEAKER_00: Romans 1, uh, Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, concerning his son, who was descended from David according to the flesh, and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of Holiness by his resurrection from the dead, descending from David according to the flesh.
SPEAKER_00: It's central to the gospel story, is this coming of the divine son, by way of the flesh descended from David.
SPEAKER_00: In the place where the virginity of Mary, you know, the the in a general sense, the miracle of Jesus' conception.
SPEAKER_00: It is supremely fitting that Jesus would come in a miraculous kind of way.
SPEAKER_00: And again, these different, we we looked at the different times when God miraculously sent a baby to a childless couple, right, or a couple that was struggling to conceive.
SPEAKER_00: This is how God works throughout Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: He brings this miraculous baby, and through that miraculous baby, he accomplishes miraculous things among his people.
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, that's that's one definitive or one strong point in favor of the virgin birth, but also the reality of original sin.
SPEAKER_00: Because the way our catechism puts it, and this is a summary of biblical teaching, is that the covenant being made not only with Adam, but with his posterity, all mankind descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned with him and fell in him.
SPEAKER_00: All mankind descending from Adam by ordinary generation.
SPEAKER_00: This is like a Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15, Psalm 51 reality, that everyone who is born in the natural way inherits the sin of Adam.
SPEAKER_00: That's why David could say that we are sinful from birth.
SPEAKER_00: We are born in iniquity.
SPEAKER_00: That's true for all of us.
SPEAKER_00: So, how exactly was Jesus exempt from that?
SPEAKER_00: The virgin birth.
SPEAKER_00: The virgin conception.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that God entered in and interrupted that hereditary transfer of original sin from one generation to the next.
SPEAKER_00: It's all supremely fitting.
SPEAKER_00: And once you deny it, right, once you deny that, you're having to deny all kinds of other things.
SPEAKER_00: And you're having to retrofit all kinds of other things about who Jesus is and what he did in order to make your Christianity work.
SPEAKER_00: And that bumps you up hard against the wall of scripture and just Orthodox Christology.
SPEAKER_00: So the virgin birth, it's not this kind of optional sort of thing that you can take or leave depending on how modern or postmodern you want your faith to be.
SPEAKER_05: It's a foundation.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: It's on in all our creeds, Apostles, Nicene, as the nation.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: It's there for a reason.
SPEAKER_00: It's like Chesterton's fence.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: If you find a fence in a, you know, you find a fence in a field and you want to remove it, first you have to understand why it's there before you can remove it.
SPEAKER_00: Because you don't want to find out why it's there after you've removed it.
SPEAKER_00: And things are going where they're not supposed to be.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Alright.
SPEAKER_05: Can I ask you a question, Kim?
SPEAKER_05: Yes, sir.
SPEAKER_05: Later on in the second part, we was talking about the different eras about Mary and how the Catholics believe that she continues to be sinless.
SPEAKER_05: I don't understand that.
SPEAKER_05: But what are they accomplishing by trying to believe that she continues to be sinless?
SPEAKER_06: I've heard that answer, but I forgot what.
SPEAKER_00: I wish James was here because he'd tell us.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not super up on my Marian dogma.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's the Immaculate Conception where she's understood to be sin.
SPEAKER_00: There's also the assumption of Mary that she didn't die in a normal way, which it has to follow from you believing that she remained sinless.
SPEAKER_00: Because if death is the wage of sin, then you can't say that Mary died because she was sinless.
SPEAKER_00: So she needs to be assumed up into heaven.
SPEAKER_00: It's, you know, it's tradition, built upon tradition, built upon tradition.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's not important, but when I saw that, I don't even get out of here.
SPEAKER_05: What's up?
SPEAKER_05: Right.
SPEAKER_03: Uh y'all remember that scene in the gives the Mary Passion of Christ, where Mary's standing at the cross, and the soldier pierces Jesus' eye, and the spray of blood that covers her, so it spreads all over her.
SPEAKER_03: I don't know what Mel was intending to represent in that visual, in that scene, which all of these power using Uspot just even talking about.
SPEAKER_03: But I thought, yeah, Mary was covered by the blood too.
SPEAKER_03: Just like anybody, all of us.
SPEAKER_03: And that scene gives you a visual representation.
SPEAKER_03: Even though he might not have met that way, I don't know.
SPEAKER_03: But it just her son's blood sprinkled her too.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: And she's saved on that basis as well.
SPEAKER_00: I think we have plenty in the biblical presentation of Mary to show us that she is exemplary, like we talked about earlier, but she's exemplary in a way that every other human being in the Bible is exemplary.
SPEAKER_00: Short of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: She has the same clay feet as we do.
SPEAKER_00: So she needs to be covered by the blood of her son.
SPEAKER_00: And that's uh, you know.
SPEAKER_00: We don't want to give too much to Mary because in giving too much to Mary, we actually take something away from Mary, if you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_00: If the Roman Catholic tradition builds up around her and she's this sinless, uh angelic co-mediator kind of thing, well then, remember we talked about before, Luke holds out to her her to us as a beautiful model of how we should respond to God when He when He kind of enters into our life and lays something massive before us, right?
SPEAKER_00: She is a model of a faithful response to God.
SPEAKER_00: But not if she's an angel or something like an angel, right?
SPEAKER_00: Because we're not told to emulate the angels.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_00: So she she becomes this superhuman figure.
SPEAKER_00: And then it's like, you know, she's on another plane now.
SPEAKER_00: The only thing she can do for us is pray for us.
SPEAKER_00: Like we talked about at the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: She can't actually show us something about what it is to live.
SPEAKER_00: And it takes something away from Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Because again, he is fully human.
SPEAKER_00: He is born, you know, we taught his exemption from original sin, notwithstanding, he is born of a sinful woman.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Even maybe the best of all sinful women, but a sinful woman nonetheless.
SPEAKER_00: And that's who raised with Joseph.
SPEAKER_00: In some ways, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Well, but if you think of her all the error after the shear snacks, no.
SPEAKER_03: Not at all.
SPEAKER_03: But anyhow, while he was leaving for her sins, he did not forget his mother.
SPEAKER_03: And because he says to John, your mother, and uh and to his mother, your son, giving the career, his mother, the Jewish one of the career, his mother mother, giving it to one of his disciples.
SPEAKER_03: So he did not forget his mother while he was leading for our sins.
SPEAKER_03: But and I think you're right, it's really hard to find a way to appreciate what Mary's role was without going off the edge on either side.
SPEAKER_03: Either up or venerating her as some kind of super human.
SPEAKER_00: That's great.
SPEAKER_00: We have just a few minutes, and we'll make sure we talk about Jesus' birth.
SPEAKER_00: Uh Galatians 4:4, when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of woman, born under the law.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, Jesus was born.
SPEAKER_00: Like any one of us was born.
SPEAKER_00: The conception may have been miraculous, but the birth was not.
SPEAKER_00: It's, you know, Mary, Joseph, and some animals in a little house in Bethlehem.
SPEAKER_00: Uh a couple weeks ago in the upper room, I talked about the birth of Siddhartha Gitama, the Buddha, and the kind of mythology that grew up around that.
SPEAKER_00: They understood him to uh come into the world not as a baby normally comes into the world, but he was attended by a thousand angelic handmaidens, and he was able to speak even from the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: And it's just this, you know, it's it's it's kind of what you would expect, this grand mythology of some divinely given savior, enlightener figure.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus' birth isn't like that.
SPEAKER_00: His conception is miraculous, his birth is natural.
SPEAKER_00: And um that tells us something.
SPEAKER_00: You know, we'll get to his humiliation soon.
SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about his the state of his humiliation.
SPEAKER_00: I forget which it's coming up soon, within the next couple weeks.
SPEAKER_00: But just the fact of the God man being born, right?
SPEAKER_00: How humiliating, or a less limited word, how humbling that must have been for him.
SPEAKER_00: He took on flesh by being born, by becoming a baby, and going through everything a baby goes through in order to come into the world.
SPEAKER_00: Roy.
SPEAKER_06: I think uh my problem early on was that I kept thinking that God was under the same time constraints that we humans were.
SPEAKER_06: And so I I always I saw this as the beginning of Jesus, but then how can we have a trying with God at the very beginning?
SPEAKER_06: And and uh so who was it that appeared in in the Old Testament, several places, and something like that?
SPEAKER_06: So um it's it's something more that except now, and it's okay, but uh early on that was the problem.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, pre-incarnate appearance of the Son.
SPEAKER_00: That's how I think about those appearances and because he had not yet taken the flesh of Christ, so I actually don't call them Christophanes, because he's not there yet, or he's not Christ yet.
SPEAKER_00: That's straining out of that.
SPEAKER_03: And beware of somebody who starts saying the Christ.
SPEAKER_03: The Christ, you you always have to find out what do you mean by that, because a lot of liberal stuff is hidden behind that kind of language.
SPEAKER_03: And Isaac, who do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_03: It's always going to be some ethical teacher, some, you know, they use that New Testament language, but they don't mean what we mean.
SPEAKER_03: They do not mean the fully God, fully human, Lord Virgin, died and was rose, risen again.
SPEAKER_03: Anytime I read it even in print or hear anybody say the Christ, my head will go up a little bit.
SPEAKER_03: We know when you see a dog or a cat and its fur boat starts to crystal, that's maybe when she hears it.
SPEAKER_06: How simple is that?
SPEAKER_06: But I know it was like when the three men were that uh I ran into oak so many, you know?
SPEAKER_06: And uh yeah, and uh yeah, and uh and I always like well God was that spirit.
SPEAKER_06: Who were these three men?
SPEAKER_04: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know the answer to the question, so we'll pray.
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, uh thank you that you sent Jesus to be the answer to every question.
SPEAKER_00: How often people ask him difficult things and he didn't answer their question but pointed them toward himself in some clever, uh, deeply wise way.
SPEAKER_00: Uh thank you for becoming man in our place and for our sake.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for the fact that you did not count it sufficient to hover somewhere above our fallen condition.
SPEAKER_00: But you entered all the way in, you took our weakened flesh.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, help us as we seek to communicate these things to others, help us as we seek to embrace them for ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Help us to marvel all the more in the fact that Jesus came for us.
SPEAKER_00: He became one of us.
SPEAKER_00: And as we go to worship now, Lord, lift our hearts and lift our voices to rejoice in you and to embrace all of the good gifts that you have given us in Him.
SPEAKER_00: It's in His name that we pray.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.