A Birth Announcement from God

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It’s strange to me how much pressure there seems to be nowadays on coming up with a creative way of announcing a pregnancy. Charla and I had to have several conversations about this because with each baby she would ask me, how shall we announce it? I’d say, we just tell people.

Oh, no, that must be a guy thing because that was the wrong answer. and we’d have to look through Pinterest and we’d have to look over Facebook. And yes, she’s watching from home at home with a sick kid and I don’t think I’ll be in trouble for telling this this way.

But she wanted something creative. And looking back on it, I’m glad she did because they turned out nicely. I’m going to ask Brother Jack to go to the first picture.

This is my favorite one. Now, not my favorite child, but my favorite baby announcement. Sorry, Benjamin, I wanted to clarify that.

My favorite baby announcement of all the ones we ever did. You can see the shoes, and this was her idea, but you can see everybody’s shoes lined up with their year of birth and then the little shoes for Charlie. And I think he wore those out pretty quickly.

Now, this is not from us. The rest of these are some that I pulled off the Internet. Alexa, call Grandma.

And if you were to post that on Facebook, your family would know something was up. Definitely, I thought that was clever. Alexa, call Grandma.

I like this one. that little campaign sign. Bennett, and I blurred out the face and the last name just for privacy reasons, but Bennett, whoever, for Big Brother, May 2021.

I thought that was neat. Let’s go to the next one. I really like this one because Baby Shark is big at our house.

And if you don’t know the song Baby Shark, except they play on words with do, do, do, do, May, March 2020. I really like that one. All right, let’s go to the next one.

This might have been my favorite one. Parents tied up, officially outnumbered in March 2020. And by the way, none of what I’m telling you is because we’re announcing anything, we are done.

And for this very reason, we have five, and we figured once the ratio was three to one, we were going to end up tied up at some point. So we’re at two and a half to one and that’s about the uh the extent that we’re comfortable with being outnumbered but you see and this is just a sample I I spent I spent more time than I should have on thursday or maybe friday pulling pictures of people’s birth announcements just looking through some of them some of them were cute some of them were funny some of them were tacky um so I pulled out some of the ones that that I thought would be good to show this morning but there there’s definitely a lot of creativity involved in announcing a birth nowadays, but I don’t think anybody will ever top a birth announcement that came out about 2,000 years ago when it came time for Jesus to be born. And that’s what we’re going to look at this morning.

No one can top the announcement that came from Jesus’ birth. And this morning, we’re going to look at that announcement. We’re going to look at what it tells us about Jesus, and we’re going to look at what it means for us today.

So if you would turn with me in your Bibles to Luke chapter 1. Luke chapter 1. I know it’s not Christmas time yet, but we’re going to talk about this anyway as we go through our series on who is Jesus.

Luke chapter 1. And once you find it, if you’d stand with me, if you’re able to without too much trouble. And if you don’t have your Bible, it will be on the screen for you here as we read together from God’s Word.

And we’re going to start in Luke chapter 1, verse 26, and go through verse 38 this morning. It says, Now in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.

And having come in, the angel said to her, Rejoice, highly favored one. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.

But when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying and considered what manner of greeting this was. Then the angel said to her, Do not be afraid. Mary, for you have found favor with God.

And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a son, and shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the son of the highest. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. Then Mary said to the angel, How can this be, since I do not know a man?

And the angel answered and said to her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the highest will overshadow you. Therefore also that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God. Now indeed, Elizabeth your relative has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is now the sixth month for her who was called barren.

For with God nothing will be impossible. Then Mary said, Behold the maid servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.

And the angel departed from her. And you may be seated. Jesus’ birth was announced in advance by a messenger from God.

That’s one of many reasons why nobody can top that birth announcement because very few of us have angels that just appear to announce the impending birth. The rest of us have to use Photoshop and Facebook, right? We have to go about it that way.

We don’t have just angels showing up, and especially it’s not news to the mom. But everything about this was just supernatural from the beginning. Jesus’ birth was announced in advance by this messenger, the angel Gabriel.

And in his initial announcement, in the first several verses of this passage, he tells her a few things about Jesus, about this son that she’s going to bear. He tells her that the coming of Jesus was a sign of the Father’s favor. If you notice in verse 28, he tells her, the Lord is with you, blessed are you among women.

He calls her a highly favored one. See, the fact that Jesus was coming to her, while it might have been frightening, while it might have even been an imposition on her plans, the fact that God had chosen her was a sign of God’s favor, that Jesus was going to be present in her life in this way. And then we see in verse 30 also, he reiterates, you have found favor with God.

This idea of having found favor means God has chosen you. God has chosen to bless you in this remarkable way that not everybody gets. And so it was a blessing.

It was a sign of God’s favor in Mary’s life. But as you go through the description of all that he says Jesus is going to be, Jesus is a sign of God’s favor for the nation of Israel. God has chosen the nation of Israel out of all the nations in the world to be the ones to bring his Messiah, his Savior, to earth.

And for that matter, the presence of Jesus is a sign of God’s favor for all of mankind. Because as we’ve covered the last few weeks, Jesus is the only way for us to have a relationship with the Father. Jesus is the only way for us to be reconciled to a holy God.

And not one of us deserves that. Not one of us can look at God and say, I earn, I deserve to have a relationship with you because I’m just that good. If God had looked at us in our sin and said, you know what, I’m through with you.

Figure it out for yourself. Or as my grandfather used to say, rain on you. If God had looked at us and said, rain on them, he would have been completely justified in that.

He didn’t owe us anything else except eternal separation from him. And yet he chose to send the son for us. Not because we earned it, not because we deserved it, but because God chose to extend his favor to us.

So the presence of Jesus is an incredible blessing to Mary, to the nation of Israel, to all of mankind. He’s not only a sign of the Father’s favor, He says He’s going to be a mighty king. Look with me at verse 32 again.

He will be great and will be called Son of the Highest. The Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David, and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of His kingdom. There will be no end. He said He’s not going to be any ordinary baby, and He’s not going to grow up to be any ordinary man.

He’s going to be the king. Even God is saying He’s going to be great. He’s going to be called the Son of the Highest. He’s going to rule over the throne of His father David.

That is not just something God’s throwing out there. That is a phrase that has immense prophetic implications. Going back to the Old Testament and the prophecies of the throne of David and someone being raised up who would sit on that throne forever.

The angel is claiming for Jesus the mantle of all these prophecies. And we’ll get back into that in just a moment. But he says he’ll rule over the house of Jacob.

That’s the nation of Israel forever. Imagine being told that, number one, you don’t even know you’re pregnant. Number two, you don’t even know how that’s possible.

But not only are you told you’re pregnant in this impossible way, but this tiny baby you bear is going to be the greatest king that your nation has ever known. And that’s what Mary’s being, that’s what is being sprung on her at this moment. And not only that, but we see that Jesus, in the telling of the angel, He’s going to be the key to God’s redemptive plans.

It says in verse 31, you will call His name Jesus. Now, what is not included in Luke’s assessment here, is what the angel said, I believe, to Joseph in Matthew 121, that He will be called Jesus because He will save His people from their sins. The word that we have translated into English as Jesus, through the Greek, Iesus, is the Hebrew name Yeshua.

that’s what Jesus was known as in Hebrew and the word means that Yahweh the God of Israel saves was identifying Him as the salvation that the Lord was sending just by His very name and we look at it just as a name but there was something immensely important to the names that you were given in that culture especially if you were given that name directly by God and here this messenger from the Lord says your baby is going to be called Yeshua your baby is going to be called the Lord saves. So over the last few weeks, we’ve looked at how the Bible describes the nature of Jesus. We’ve talked about what it means that He’s God the Son, the second person of the Trinity.

We’ve talked about what it means that He’s the Son of God, meaning He’s the Son of the Father, who’s the first person of the Trinity. And I realize we very quickly get into deep water there. We’ve talked about what it means that He has always been God, and then also became man without ever ceasing to be God.

And if you find that any of that is a little challenging to understand, number one, you’re not alone, because me too. The more I understand of it, the more I realize how much I have yet to understand. Right?

So if you find that challenging, you’re not alone, because I find it challenging to understand too. But Mary, Mary didn’t understand. The first people who heard this were perplexed by it.

This idea of the Son coming in human flesh. Mary in particular said, wait a minute, flag on the play here real quick. This is impossible.

It’s impossible. And so it was something that naturally she was going to sit up and take notice to. And that’s because the birth of Jesus was meant to disrupt history and attract attention.

Everything about his birth was meant to cause people to sit up and take notice that something different was happening and someone different was on the scene. So when Gabriel announced to Mary that she’d been chosen by God to bring his son into the world, first of all, she was frightened. I love how when the angel of the Lord shows up, one of the first things they say is usually, don’t be afraid.

You know why? Because most of us would be afraid, right? Most of us would not be expecting that and would be scared to death.

And so, number one, she’s frightened in verse 29, and then she’s confused in verse 34. Mary said to the angel, How can this be, since I do not know a man? And we have a wide variety of ages in here, including some of my children, who I’m not ready to have these conversations with, so I’m going to keep things very general today.

But just understand, Mary is looking at the angel and saying, this is biologically impossible. Because the process, I know she’s not going into all the scientific jargon, but the processes that have to take place for this to happen have not taken place. So she’s, she’s not saying, no, that can’t be.

But she is saying, how in the world is this supposed to have happened? This was a plan that in Mary’s view did not make sense, at least biologically. By the way, it wouldn’t make sense in our view biologically either.

If your child came to you and said, I’m pregnant, but I don’t know how this happened. Oh, really? And I’m sure that had to be going through her mind.

How am I going to tell? How am I going to tell? Because that was even a bigger deal in their culture than it is today.

When you get things out of order in our culture, I mean, it’s still wrong according to God’s word, but we’re not going to stone anybody. But this could have been very dangerous for her. And she wants some answers.

But the thing is, it can’t be explained naturally. It can’t be explained biologically. Now, I think it’s funny that over the years, I’ve seen this transition take place with some skeptics about their argumentation about this.

That there have always been people that have doubted the virgin birth. As a matter of fact, early on, the story among the Jews was that she became pregnant by a Roman soldier. But nowadays, people will deny the virgin birth for scientific reasons.

And used to, I would hear skeptics say, well, that’s not possible. The virgin birth is not possible because there’s no scientific evidence that that could happen. Right.

Cause we’re not talking about a law of science that we can replicate. We’re talking about something that happened once in history. Now that I’ve, I’ve noticed a new argument cropping up and saying, not denying that it happened always, but saying that’s not necessarily miraculous because there’s this thing called parthenogenesis that they observe sometimes in certain species that they’re able to reproduce with just a female.

And it does happen in some lower order species. But let me tell you, there’s no documented evidence I’ve ever seen that points to the possibility of a story like this occurring through a solely biological natural process. You see, the evidences that the story, the cases that I’ve read about in mammals occur when there’s a father and a mother, and part of the cells of the offspring are just the female, but there’s still a genetic contribution of the father.

So you’d say maybe some of the cells are just from the mother. In mammals, there are also situations where a female cell may divide without a father, but it does not produce a viable embryo. I had to write down the term.

It results in something called a teratoma, which is like a kind of benign tumor. I’m not a science guy, so there’s like three science teachers in our congregation. You can correct me later if I’m pronouncing any of this wrong or explaining it wrong, and I’ll come back and correct it.

But my point being, in mammals, including humans, I’ve not seen any documented evidence of a fully formed human embryo developing without some contribution from a father. And so the idea that we can point to something that happens in certain species of worms or fish or whatever, and say, oh, that’s what happened in Luke chapter 1. No, I don’t buy that.

If we’re going to follow the science, let’s follow the science, and it’s never happened in mammals that we’ve documented. Everything about this is miraculous. Everything about this defies natural explanation.

The only way this would work is for God to be directly involved, And that’s what the angel said happened. He said, with God, nothing is impossible. And the father could have chosen any method of sending his son to earth as a man.

If he wanted to send the son to earth as a man, he could have picked any method he wanted to. He could have had him sprung up from the ground fully grown if he had chosen. And there are myths and stories like that.

One of the great war chiefs of the Choctaw nation is a man named Pashmataha. And nobody knows where he came from. And so the story that he told was that he popped out of the ground one day as a full-grown man, ready to do battle.

Now, as a Choctaw, I have tremendous respect for the man, but I don’t buy that story either, okay? But if God wanted to send his son to earth, he could have orchestrated something like that. And there are all sorts of world leaders who have obscured their identities of where they came from and tried to make it sound as though they just came onto the scene that God put them there.

Instead, God chose this that everybody would look at and say, wait a minute. This is a story that attracts attention, whether you believe it or not. I mean, here we are 2,000 years still talking about it.

Here we are still 2,000 years debating it. Tells me God hit the mark if he intended even the birth of Jesus to be something that drew people’s notice. And so the angel explained that Jesus’ existence could only result from supernatural intervention.

He said in verse 35, the Holy Spirit will come upon you. and the power of the highest will overshadow you. Now, this was not the result of natural processes.

There are some churches today that will teach. For example, the Latter-day Saints teach that God the Father once had a physical body and that Jesus was the result of natural biological processes. That is not what the Scripture is saying here.

The power of the Holy Spirit. It was the creative power of the God who spoke the universe into existence. and if you start as I do with the premise that God created the universe out of nothing with just the the force of his will and the words of his mouth that he was able to command nothing to become something if you start from that premise it is really not hard for God to put two cells in the womb of that girl and cause them to start dividing right if he did this it’s really not hard for him to do this.

And so the angel said, it’s going to be the result of supernatural intervention. The Holy Spirit is going to cause this to happen. And the angel identified Jesus as the Messiah and as the Son of God.

He said in verse 35, therefore also that Holy One who is to be born. The child was going to be the Holy One who was to be born will be called the Son of God. And then he goes a step further and he sort of preemptively provides evidence because at this point, if somebody shows up and says, you’re going to be pregnant and you know that’s impossible, You’re going to have some questions, right?

And so he goes ahead and before she can even ask the question, gives her the evidence. Here’s something you can look at to verify what I’m saying is true. And in verses 36 and 37, he tells her, Now indeed, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is now the sixth month for her who was called barren.

For with God, nothing shall be impossible. Knowing what’s on her mind, he says, And if you have any questions about whether God is able to do this or not, look at your cousin Elizabeth, who has never been able to have children, and now is too old to have children. You know that, Elizabeth?

Six months pregnant. And we see after this, Mary goes to visit Elizabeth. Mary believed.

We see at the end of the story, at the end of her conversation with the angel, Mary believed. But I suspect there’s a part of Mary that said, let me go check this out for myself. Because she went and visited Elizabeth.

but he told her nothing will be impossible with God. And Mary was convinced enough. And so she submitted to God’s plan for her.

And in verse 38, it says, Mary said, behold the maid servant of the Lord. Basically, she’s saying, I’m at your service, Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.

Do what you said you’re going to do. So we have this miraculous birth announcement and it reflects his role. It reflects what he was coming to do.

The birth announcement was miraculous and needed to be because it was the announcement of the coming of a miraculous person. And I want to be very clear that the virgin birth here that we believe in, that Jesus Christ was born from a virgin, it’s not the same as mythology. We will hear that over and over from modern skeptics.

That the stories of Jesus are copies of pagan myths or it’s just a fairy tale. There’s nothing about this that reads like a fairy tale. Mary Jo Sharp from Houston Baptist University talks about location, locating stories in the Scripture.

What she means by that are clues in the biblical accounts that point to persons, places, things that we can identify. That these are not stories that say once upon a time in a kingdom far, far away. They’re not just vague and set somewhere out there, but there are in the Scriptural stories, there are things that locate them in time and space.

And looking at Luke chapter 1 this week, I counted 13 things that locate this story. that help us know that Luke wrote this as history, not as a myth. The timing, verse 5 tells us it took place during the reign of Herod the Great.

Verse 26 tells us it took place during the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. We see items about place. Verse 26 says all this took place in Nazareth and Galilee.

We see identifiable participants. Verse 27 tells us that he came to marry this young woman from Nazareth. We see family connections that point to which Mary we’re talking about and how she fits into the greater social structure because it says she’s betrothed to Joseph, that he’s from the house of David, that’s all in verse 27, that she’s related to Elizabeth in verse 36, that she’s a descendant of Aaron in verse 5, that Elizabeth is the wife of Zechariah in verse 5, that Zechariah was a priest in verse 5, that Zechariah served in the division of Abijah in verse 5, so we even know what shift he worked in the temple.

All right, how’s that for mythology? Verse 39, that they lived in Judea where she lived up in Galilee. And verse 13 tells us that they were the parents of John the Baptist. So we see all these connections with other places and people and concepts that we can look up in the history of the time.

Luke wrote this believing it really happened. This bears no resemblance to fairy tale stories. And that’s important because the virgin birth points to Jesus’ role as the promised Messiah.

And this story that points to Him as the Messiah is more than just a myth. It points to His role as the promised Messiah. Because way back about 700 years before this, in Isaiah chapter 7, there was a prophecy that said, Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign.

Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Emmanuel. You might say, well, His name is not Emmanuel. One of his titles is Emmanuel because that means God is with us.

And I can’t think of God being any more with us than God himself showing up in human flesh. Now that prophecy in Isaiah chapter 7 has a dual fulfillment. In the short term, it’s talking about the days of King Ahaz when Judah was under threat from the Israelites and the Aramaeans.

And he’s saying that by the time a virgin got married and had a son and before that son was grown enough to know right from wrong that God will have delivered the kingdom of Judah. But it also has been applied from the very beginning to the coming of the Messiah and points to Jesus Christ. A virgin shall conceive and bear a son. And skeptics today will tell us, well, the Hebrew word al-mah, it means young woman.

It can. It can mean young woman. It can also mean virgin.

But let me tell you, if it meant young woman, he says the Lord will give you a sign. Young women give birth every day, right? Now, if the Lord said like Elizabeth, somebody on Medicare will give birth to a son, that would be a sign, right?

So for it to be a noticeable sign, for it to be the neon sign, the flashing neon sign that says here’s the Messiah, it’s got to be virgin. Plus, when they translated it into Greek, they used the Greek word that means virgin there. This was a prophecy that said, part of the way you’ll know the Messiah is that He’ll come and He’ll be born of a virgin.

He will come in this unexplainable, miraculous way. So it points to his role as the Messiah, but it also points to his role as the promised Savior. Because they thought of the Messiah just as a political leader who was going to run the Romans off.

So it’s important for us to understand both Messiah and Savior. Because there’s this promise in the Old Testament as well in the book of Genesis. Genesis 3.

15 when God is judging Adam and Eve and the serpent over their role in the fall, the disobedience to God. And God tells the serpent, I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head and you will strike his heel.

I really like the way the King James frames it the seed of the woman. Very rarely was somebody referred to as the offspring of their mother. You’ll notice in Scripture, it’s always the men doing the begetting.

And you know the women are in there somewhere, but they’re just they’re not mentioned. And so it’s really unusual that God says the battle will be between the serpent and the seed of the woman. It doesn’t make a lot of sense until you consider that it fits the description of someone with no natural human father.

Jesus Christ was not that he was legally the son of Joseph, but his only human parent was Mary. If anybody was the seed of the woman, it was Jesus. and the striking of the heel by the serpent describes what would appear at the time to be a serious injury of the woman’s offspring.

And I’m sure that Satan thought he had won at the crucifixion. But God said that when the serpent struck the heel of the man, the seed of the woman, that in the process, the seed of the woman was going to crush his head. Now, which one is worse, a flesh wound to the heel or a crushing of the head?

Crushing of the head. Thank you. You’re paying attention.

Good job. The crushing of the serpent’s head is a fatal blow to the serpent. And it represents Jesus taking away kingship and dominion from the serpent.

Jesus broke the power of Satan over man through that strike on the heel. The crucifixion and resurrection that crushed the head of the serpent. And that only makes sense if we’re talking about somebody, again, with no natural human father.

This is important because Jesus Christ is the seed of the woman who came to deliver us from bondage. And so God wanted the world to know that Jesus was no ordinary person. That’s why He made it clear to Mary that this was no ordinary birth.

That it was something extraordinary and something supernatural that was going to capture people’s attention because the one being born was someone extraordinary and supernatural who needed to capture our attention. He was the one who was going to fulfill the promises of God. He was the one who was going to set us free from Satan’s clutches.

We needed to understand that. And that is why we cling to the story of the virgin birth. That’s why we must cling to the story of the virgin birth.

Because without it, Jesus is just an ordinary man. And so there are churches today that say we can be so intellectual and get rid of the story of the virgin birth because it makes us more acceptable to the world around us. We don’t have to believe all of that stuff to be Christians.

And yet sometimes the slippery slope is slippery. And when we let go of the story of the virgin birth, so much of the gospel is quick to follow. This is why we cling to this story.

Number one, because God’s word says it happened. Because it’s directly tied to Jesus’ sacrifice for us. He came born of a virgin so that He could be the seed of the woman and crush the serpent’s head for us.

That’s because you and I have sinned against a holy God and we’re separated from Him. Our disobedience separates us from Him. And just like any righteous judge, He has to punish our law-breaking.

And so we are destined to be eternally separated from God. And yet Jesus Christ came as God in human flesh. And He took responsibility for our sins, for my sin, for yours, for every disobedient action or thought or attitude you’ve ever exhibited.

He took responsibility for that. And He was nailed to the cross and He shed His blood and He died in your place to pay for that sin. And then rose again three days later in victory, crushing the serpent’s head.

And this morning, all that is left, all that is necessary for you and me to have a relationship with the Father is to give up trying to earn it ourselves, give up trying to be good enough, and simply trust that this miraculous baby, God in human flesh, who grew up to be the perfect, sinless, sacrificial lamb, that He did all that was necessary. Trust in Him and ask God’s forgiveness because of what He’s done.