30th October 2024

30th October 2024


Pray (ACts)


Read (Luke 1:26-38)


Message (Alan Burke)


If you read Monday’s devotion you already know the craic, if not go read it and catch up. Today we are thinking of the incarnation ie how the Son of God became man and why it was necessary that the Son of God became man. Now this is a key moment in the covenant of grace being fulfilled (again see Monday’s devotion) as the one God promised would come through the incarnation so that we could be saved for God saves sinners by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. It was the hope that we see in Adam and Eve with the birth of Cain that is expressed in the words of Eve, “with the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man” (Genesis 4:1). Adam and Eve understood that the promise of God was reliant on an incarnation. There hope was evidently in Cain, for they believed he was the one who would undo what had been done, who would be the serpent crusher. 


You can trace this hope right throughout the scriptures, we haven’t got time for that today but God had been pointing his people to the terminal point of his promises, Jesus Christ and the entirety of the scriptures, all sixty-six books are focused on him. How did it all happen, well in a small village, a place of no real significance God would send this child, his Son and the means that God would use was a virgin, Mary who was no older than 13 or 14. Mary asked how could this all be and we are told in v35 as the angel answered her; “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.”


The creator God who created all things can create life within her, and his creative work in Mary will result in a child. The creator God who brought life out of nothing in the very beginning and created humans from the dust would create life in her womb. As God’s glorious presence through the Spirit overshadows Mary. This child will be Holy, the Son of God. He is the only man created by God’s direct involvement since Adam, his birth is a new beginning, for the second Adam has come, the true Adam who did what the first could not do. Though Jesus was a genuine human being, he did not inherit a sinful nature and disposition from Mary as she was part of Adam’s sinful race and was a sinner like you and I. Christ took a human nature from Mary, and did it in such a way that Mary’s own sinfulness was not taken with it. His human origins are grounded in God’s creative activity, it is a supernatural origin for the Son of the Most High.


This virgin birth, by the work of God, as the Holy sprit overshadowed Mary, this miracle of God that Jesus Christ could be born with a true human nature and without sin, as the virgin birth is the means by which God became flesh. It is the vehicle of the incarnation. It shows us that Jesus Christ was a true man. a "real son of a real mother." He didn't simply resemble man, he was man. And yet, he was conceived by God the Holy Spirit. His birth comes directly from God himself. Because of this, he can be fully man and fully God. He can stand in solidarity with sinners, and yet he can be the sinless sin-bearer. Conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the womb of the virgin Mary, and conceived in the mind of God in eternity past. Take away the virgin birth, and you take away our once-for-all-time perfect sacrifice. You take away our hope. You take away our atonement for sin. You take away the idea of God being both the judge and the justifier.


This was all necessary since as Hebrews 2:14 reminds us; “14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—“. Since children, ie human beings have flesh and blood, he too speaking of Jesus, shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death. This description of the incarnation reveals the purpose of Christ becoming a flesh and blood man was to enable him to die, that is the startling claim of scripture all so that we could be saved from our sin..


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q 22. How did Christ, being the Son of God, become man?
A. 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 Ghost, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and born of her, yet without sin.
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