THE SHEPHERD’S CORNER

One of the central ideas of Christianity is the virgin birth of Jesus—that He was not conceived from a relationship between a man and a woman and that Mary was a still virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. It is perhaps one of the most mind baffling concepts and it’s one of the beliefs that gets rejected the most by the modern man.

C. S. Lewis in his book, Miracles, touches on this subject and defends the biblical account:

You will hear people say, ‘The early Christians believed that Christ was the son of a virgin, but we know that this is a scientific impossibility.’ Such people seem to have an idea that belief in miracles arose at a period when men were so ignorant of the course of nature . . . . When St. Joseph discovered that his fiancée was going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? Because he knew just as well as any modern gynecologist that in the ordinary course of nature women do not have babies unless they have lain with men . . . .

What C. S. Lewis tries to tell us is that the virgin birth is not a fairy tale made up by people in the olden days. It was a difficult fact to accept, then, as it is today. Joseph could not even accept it, and only agreed to marry his fiancée Mary after an angel of the Lord convinced him that the baby in her womb was of the Holy Spirit.

Since His birth till today, Jesus the Son of God has posed us with the unequivocal challenge of faith: Can we trust Him? He does online casinos not give us other alternatives: Either we trust Him or we don’t. Come to think about it, Christmas is a difficult message to accept. In fact, there is nothing easy and pleasurable about Christmas. We’d like to make it easy and pleasurable, but God didn’t—and He still doesn’t.

Pastor Paul