Wonder what the best way is to just take a soaking wet blanket and throw it all over the enthusiasm of the beginning of a podcast episode is. You wanna know what it is? It's with a content warning. Here's the thing, I'm not gonna do horribly offensive things on this podcast ever. This is generally going to be very safe fodder for the entire family to talk about theology and Bible and stuff like that, but I also know that some of you listen with kids, and I'm gonna be talking about the virgin birth, which I don't think is scandalous or bad, but I have some very practical questions about what went on there, and I'm guessing that many of you do as well, and I'd like to talk about those things. So as we get into it, I just want to give you the heads up that over the next handful of episodes you might just want to give it a listen first before you invite the kids. Okay, you have been advised, let's kick this thing around. Hey Matt, welcome back to the 10-minute Bible hour podcast where we take a few minutes every weekday to process through a book of the Bible. Right now we're working on Matthew, and I really want this podcast to be hyper shareable. And a lot of times when you're working through a big chunk of something like this, it can be hard to share it because you're like, oh well, you know, I don't want somebody that I invite to this thing to feel left behind and terrible. What I want to do is offer all kinds of on-ramps here by resetting the context so it's easy for other people to jump in and it's easy for you to remember where we were, because I know you have busy lives and a ton going on. And we're definitely trying to treat the book of Matthew as one big, important, cohesive document that is a part of a much larger, important, cohesive collection of documents known as the Bible, that advances one key story, and that is the story of redemption. God made stuff, stuff broke. Rather than washing his hands of it, God decided that he was gonna do something to redeem it. And so throughout what we call the Old Testament, he hurls forward all of these only partially completed stories and themes, and all of them seem to be just firing off into the distant future, who knows where they're gonna land. And as we get to the beginning of Matthew and specifically the genealogy of Matthew, offered in chapter 1, verses 1 through 17 that we've been looking at, we see all of those arcs of light and themes and stuff that God is doing converging in the person of Jesus Christ. And well, to the original audience, it would have been very evident what Matthew was intoning here, and that is Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus is the promised king. Jesus is the completion and fulfillment of all of God's work. Jesus is the King of kings who will reign in this new kingdom. We figure out pretty quickly that Jesus is creating a community of faith. We gradually come to understand that this is a new family of faith. And so there's a lot going on here with this that sets us up for the part of Jesus' early life narrative that is familiar to everyone. I am recording this on, I don't know, whatever it is, November the something something. It used to be that Christmas season didn't start until Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, but now Christmas season apparently starts on November 1st. So you take down the Halloween decorations and you put on that accursed Mariah Carey song, and we're off and running. So it's totally seasonally appropriate for us to be talking about the birth narrative of Jesus. But the birth narrative of Jesus comes with some tricky stuff, doesn't it? Because when you're a kid and you don't really know all of these equations, you're just like, and then she was a virgin and there was a baby that was born. How hard is that to believe? Because where babies come from kind of seems like a miracle at that point in life, anyway. But as you get older, at some point, if you're being honest, you kind of got to ask the question like, how exactly did that work? I'm not gonna get gross here in this episode, but I want to look at the verse in Matthew that brings up this very difficult topic of where did Jesus come from? Here's how it goes. Verse 18 of Matthew chapter 1. This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. So right off the bat, Matthew feels like he needs to address this question of how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. And I can think of a positive reason for that and a negative reason. Now let me phrase that differently. A and I can think of a proactive reason for that, and I can think of a reactive reason for that, as well as a proactive reason for that. So the reactive reason would be that Matthew is writing after Jesus has come and gone, done all of the amazing stuff, people are pretty excited about him and starting to follow, and the original audience would have wanted to know who is Jesus, where does he fit? Should I maybe be following him too? Is this the completion of Judaism? Or is this another one of those weird messianic cults? What do I do with this thing? So many of those people no doubt would have the objection that Jesus' pedigree is a problem. I mean, why'd Matthew just spend the first 18 verses dealing with that? And how can he be the chosen one of God if he's connected to the wrong people? And how can he be the chosen one of God if something was screwy with how he was born or if he was born into sin? Because isn't there some rumor going around about her having been pregnant before she was even married? Well, so reactionarily, perhaps Matthew is trying to push back scandal with truth about who Jesus is and where he came from. Here's an objection that people could have. Now we're gonna swat that objection aside by saying not only was this not a scandalous conception, this was the holiest and most godly conception of all the conceptions ever, one that would be reserved for only such a being as important as Jesus himself, the Redeemer Himself. But understandably, you know, people are gonna be skeptical about a claim like that, and we'll have more time to talk about that in a minute. Proactively, what I think he's trying to do is to establish that Jesus really is, frankly, the Son of God, that he is heir to the throne, that he has the capacity and the position to create and initiate this kingdom, to fulfill everything that is predicted in the Old Testament, both in literal prophecy and in thematic prophecy, as we talked about a couple of episodes ago. So reactively, Matthew is pushing aside scandal. Proactively, Matthew is demonstrating the authority and uniqueness of Christ. Well, it says his mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph. So you've heard this stuff before around Christmas. Joseph and Mary were betrothed because they didn't do marriage like we do marriage now. It's like this year-long betrothal period where functionally and legally he is the husband, but she still lives in the household of her parents. This dates back to a very different way of thinking about love and marriage, where parents were much more involved and where households weren't the way you think of a household now. Now people get married, they make their own thing, they live together, and all of us are kings and queens of our own little castles. Here, the idea of a domus or a shared familial household that was a part of a larger familial household was part of the deal. Marriage didn't just happen independent from stuff. And so when we think about sex and sexuality in the classical world, in the ancient Near East, it's very tempting for us to just imagine that it is needlessly prudish, and this is not a fair adjective, but people use it anyway, or puritanical. But instead, what we're seeing here is that, well, I don't know if you've heard about the whole sex thing, but it makes life. It it makes new humans. And which human was related to which human, as we've discussed over the last couple of weeks, was a very big deal in this pre-modern society. And so if you go doing things that create life, uh well, that has enormous implications for a whole lot of people other than yourself. It has huge implications for your family in putting two people together who are still a part of a very expanded household. You're putting two households together that maybe shouldn't be put together or should only be put together the right way. So there are a lot of considerations beyond just the biblical and moral Old Testament ethical considerations surrounding sexuality. There's also some very practical and also cultural things that are going on here. Well, there's an Old Testament allowance, and by this time it had probably developed into even more of a legal expectation that a betrothed husband would divorce a wife who was found to be pregnant. As crass as you might find this to be, at this time, such a pregnancy would be a violation of the terms between the two households that had been negotiated. This would be a violation of the covenant that was made between the man and the wife in the betrothal. And even though the formal marital ceremony had not happened yet, divorce would still be the term that would be used for what the dude would need to carry out. So what Joseph does here is actually pretty staggering because, well, you would expect his response to be much more harsh than it actually was. But I want to talk about this whole before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit thing. Because that, as I mentioned earlier, is pretty challenging. Did God take on some kind of pre-incarnate human form and have a relationship with Mary? Well, almost no Protestants, save some weird fringe sex cults, believe that. We don't believe that God and Mary had a relationship. Catholics certainly do not believe that. The church fathers certainly do not believe that. Now, Catholics and some of the church fathers believe that Mary was a virgin forever. I read the text and I just absolutely can't square that with what we see about the rest of her life, but that's a debate for another day. We're almost already at 10 minutes. Wow, this goes fast. Okay, executive decision. We're gonna hit pause right there, and we are going to pick up right where we left off tomorrow. No introduction or anything. We'll just get right after it, I promise. What I want to talk about next is the relationship between the word virgin in Hebrew and the word virgin in Greek. There's actually some really interesting implications and questions that this raises, and I want to get into it. How important is it that this is actually a virgin birth? And is that actually what the disciples meant? I'm guessing you can suppose what my opinion probably is, but let's give the questions a fair shake. In order to do that, once again, we're gonna have to hit pause. So tomorrow, we're gonna pick that up. I need to say one more time, thank you to everybody who has left a review or a rating on your podcast app for what's going on on this channel. That means a ton, and I'm bringing it up a lot right now because once again, it's apparently kind of a big deal in the early going of a podcast. I want other people to listen to this. That helps other people get involved in the conversation about the Bible. So if you have a chance to do that, that'd be awesome. Matt, this is a 10 minute Bible hour. More on virgin birth stuff, mana.