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Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. The Resurrection of God Incarnate. Find in Worldcat. The Gospel of Matthew tells Christians about the miraculous conception of Jesus and describes the events leading to his birth. It also describes the journey Mary and Joseph took from Nazareth, where they lived, to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born. The Gospel of John is less like a story and takes a more theological approach.
After identifying the Word as the second person of the Trinity , John highlights the human nature of Jesus, emphasising that Jesus was God in human form. John states that, The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us John In Jesus, humans can see what God is like. This is the first truth to which the miracle of the virgin birth points us. Just as when the world was first made it was by means of God at work through his Spirit Genesis , Psalm , and when humanity was created the first human created by God without sexual intercourse was given life through the Spirit Genesis , so also in the birth of Jesus there is through the creative work of the Spirit the beginning of new humanity with Jesus as the second Adam as the first fruits of a renewed creation Romans Thirdly, like the story of the birth of John the Baptist with which it is intertwined in the opening chapters of Luke, the story of the miraculous birth of Jesus points us to the truth that the saving grace of God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
Yet what seemed impossible became possible because the action of God enabled them to become the parents of John the Baptist. Yet God took her virginity and used it as a symbol of how salvation, which we are unable to achieve through our own actions, is made possible through the action of the free grace of God. In the story of the birth of Jesus, all human striving and activity, symbolized by the begetting of children through sexual intercourse, is set aside in favour of simply accepting grace as a gift.
As Charles Cranfield puts it:. In the words of St. This truth is highlighted for us by St. The language St. John uses in these verses has a deliberate double reference. He is describing how Christians become children of God, but he describes this process in language that also refers back to the virgin birth of Christ.
What he is saying is that through faith and baptism we become children of God through Jesus and this happens through a supernatural work of God that follows the pattern of Jesus own birth. In John Jesus tells Nicodemus that that the new birth referred to in John comes through the work of the Spirit:.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. In summary, the virgin birth of Christ as recorded by Matthew and Luke points us to four key truths:. God does all things for a purpose. With God there are no accidents and so we may be sure that the form of the miracle by which Jesus was born into the world was intended by God to point to these truths.
This is what he wants us to learn as we think about the manner in which Jesus Christ was born. You are commenting using your WordPress.
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