The traditional Christmas carol asks the question: What Child Is This? Great question. Did you know that over four million babies are born in the United States each year? The most popular day for babies to make their entrance into this world is Tuesdays—at least according to recent statistics. The next most popular day is Monday. Sunday is the slowest day, with 35.1 fewer births than average. The most “popular” month be born is September. (I am proof of that!) When we think about all the new babies and giving birth, it happens so often that we have to ask some fundamental questions: Why is this Child—the Child that we celebrate every Christmas—so special? Four million babies enter the world in the United States in one year, and we sing about one child born over two thousand years ago, far away in the Middle East. So what’s the big deal about this one?
There are three stand out qualities which make this child a big deal:
- This baby’s birth was foretold 700 years before it happened.
- This baby was born of a virgin.
- This baby would bring the presence of God to earth in a greater way.
Big Deal # 1: Foretold 700 Years Before the Event
Approximately seven hundred years prior to the birth of Jesus, Isaiah gave this prophecy:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.
Isaiah 7:14
The circumstance of the prophecy involved a king named Ahaz (reign was 735 to 731 BC), who was king over Jerusalem and the surrounding area of Judah, and had his reign threatened with an attack from two other kings. These rulers were Rezin (Aram) and Pekah (Israel to the north). This threat had shaken the people of Judah, “as the trees of the forest are shaken by the wind.” (v.2) Isaiah was summoned by God to tell Ahaz, “Be careful, keep calm and don’t be afraid.” (v.4) Ahaz was given reassurance that his kingdom would not be overtaken; nevertheless, Ahaz and Judah were apparently not able to overcome their fear. So, the Lord commanded Ahaz, “Ask the Lord your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights.” (v.11) Out of asking for this sign, God announces what it will be: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” (v.14) This sign is ultimately the prophecy of the virgin birth of Jesus which Matthew references in Matthew 1:23: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).
Some encounter this passage with a skepticism, responding that Ahaz’s situation was not about the virgin birth, making the prophecy irrelevant. This criticism contains a small measure of truth. The prophecy related only partially to Ahaz. Its greater and ultimate fulfillment is in the birth of Jesus. What the criticism fails to understand is that when prophecies were given it wasn’t assumed or expected that every detail would be fulfilled in that immediate or near future. They were often fulfilled in stages or layers. This is what is known as a double or multiple fulfillment. In a Sesame Street episode, the friendly blue character, Grover, teaches kids the difference between “near” and “far.” He begins close to the camera saying “near,” and then runs away yelling “faaaaaar.” His lesson is helpful in how we learn to read prophecy. Prophecies often have a near (partial) fulfillment that applies directly to their hearers as well as a far (ultimate) fulfillment related directly to Jesus. And so it is here in Isaiah 7:14. The immediate fulfillment is that there’s going to be a child. It’s Isaiah’s son with his wife, even though she’s not a virgin, and the child is not technically Emmanuel. His name is Maher-shalal-hash-baz. (Isaiah 8:1-4) It was, nonetheless, a sign that God was with them because it was a divinely ordained birth pointing to the fact that God would protect Judah. The ultimate fulfillment, however, will be with the virgin birth of Jesus.
Big Deal # 2: Virgin Birth
But then another objection is levelled to the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 in relation to the virgin birth. It is claimed that Isaiah did not mean virgin but a “young woman” of marriageable age. In response consider this. The word in Hebrew translated “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14 is “almah” in Hebrew. It occurs nine times in the Old Testament. It’s used in Psalm 46:1 and 1 Chronicles 15:20 as a musical term whose meaning is not clear. Psalm 68:25 speaks of young women playing the tambourine. Proverbs 30:19 speaks of the way of a man with a maiden, and it may or may not be a virgin. Song of Songs 1:3, most likely is speaking of single and unmarried virgins when the writer expresses, “no wonder the maidens love you.” Song of Songs 6:8 speaks of “virgins beyond number.” Genesis 24:43 and Exodus 2:8, speaking of Rebekah and Miriam, are clearly referencing unmarried virgin women. Those are all the occurrences of this Hebrew word “almah” in the Old Testament. On some occasions, it’s unclear whether it means virgin or not. But in every instance, when the context is clear, it means unmarried virgin women. Old Testament scholar, Alec Motyer, sums up the evidence this way:
Alma lies closer to this meaning than the other word. In fact, this is its meaning in every explicit context. Isaiah thus used the word which, among those available to him, came nearest to expressing ‘virgin birth’ and which…opens the door to such a meaning.
Further, the Greek word used in the Septuagint (Old Testament translated into Greek two centuries before Christ) in Isaiah 7:14 is the word “parthenos,” which clearly means virgin. Parenthos is what Matthew uses in his gospel in Matthew 1:23. The Septuagint was considered an authoritative translation for the Jews, who were commonly speaking Greek in many regions outside Israel, by the time of Jesus. The New Testament writers often quote the Septuagint. There is no way that the Jews who translated the Septuagint would have translated almah in Isaiah 7:14 as parthenos unless the word really meant virgin. There wasn’t much of an expectation for a virgin birth in the theology of the Jews, so they weren’t reading their hopes back into the verse. It would have been easier to translate the prophecy as “young woman” (Greek would be numphe) because that is much easier to find a young woman giving birth than a virgin. There was no good reason to think that the translators just put virgin into the text unless they were giving an accurate understanding of the word.
Big Deal # 3: God Is Closer as Emmanuel
The Son of God became conceived and born as a human. This means that the second person of the Trinity became forever wedded to human nature. This is for all time. That means that a man, the resurrected Jesus, sits at God’s right hand as the King over universe as a man. In becoming a man as we are, the Savior did not cease to be God, as he has always been. In the virgin birth there is now the uniting fullness of deity and the fullness of humanity. Jesus, the Son of God, born to Mary, comes to us as a man but he does not come to us in the line of Adam’s fallen sinfulness. Because of the virgin birth Jesus is not born with a sin nature. He can now live a sinless life and redeem humanity from sin. As the ancient theologian Athanasius so simply conveyed, “[Jesus] became what we are that he might make us what he is.” Because of the virgin birth we may become children, yes family, of the living God.
What Difference Does This Make?
God has demonstrated our value.
Our faith is based on a real history of God coming into our world. Emmanuel is “God with us,” literally. This is not just a great idea about God which gives psychological meaning. This is not just an inspiring fantasy story like “Lord of the Rings” or “The Chronicles of Narnia.” It is not a moral tale like an Aesop’s fable. The Christmas story isn’t to just inspire us to a better way of living; it expresses a whole new reality of how we connect with God. It is a reality that matters in the most personal way because it happened. God became flesh. Jesus is not introduced by the gospel writers with “once upon a time” or “in a land far away.” He was born:
- on our earth
- in one of our countries
- in one of our villages
- to one of our stables
- to our calendars
- to our clocks
- to our way of organizing schedules
Jesus counted birthdays and spoke of the days of the week and lived in terms of bedtime and get-up time and work days and days off. Christ who had lived in all of the expanses of an timeless eternity became caged in space and time. Bono, the lead singer for U2, attended a Christmas Eve service one year in Dublin. At some point in that service, he grasped the truth at the heart of the Christmas story: in Jesus, God became a human being. With tears streaming down his face, the legendary singer later wrote:
The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself by becoming a child born in poverty … and straw, a child, I just thought, “Wow!” Just the poetry … I saw the genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this … Love needs to find a form, intimacy needs to be whispered … Love has to become an action or something concrete. It would have to happen. There must be an incarnation. Love must be made flesh.
Yes…LOVE MUST BE MADE FLESH.
God has demonstrated our significance.
To quote another musician, Ariana Grande, “The universe has a plan, sometimes it’s a really #%$# gnarly plan but nonetheless, it still has a plan.” Yes, the is a larger plan, indeed. The coming of Christ shows that this plan behind the universe has a name and is just as personal as we are. This purpose–our purpose–centers around this person, Jesus.
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind
John 1:1-4
Think about the “beginning,” as John expresses. Before there were vast black holes sucking matter into the staggering abyss of space; before there existed stardust and subatomic particles forming matter and energy; before there was time or space; there was only and always God. This God was and is infinite in being and perfection, immense, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, and not standing in need of any creatures. This God has always existed, and there was no time he did not. Imagine 10,000 years ago or ten million or how about a billion years ago or a trillion or a billion trillion years ago? No matter how far back in our wildest imagination any of us can go back, the beginning was before that. Here is the crazy thing…In all of this time, there was never a point that God did not have you in mind and your purpose mapped out on the planet earth. No matter the circumstances of your birth. You were no accident. God became fully human, just like us, to show in the clearest way that each of our lives eternally matter. Through a relational connection with God, we can extend God’s light in darkness through carrying out the mission of Jesus: restoring the world from brokenness of sin to God’s original plan.
For Further Equipping:
Memorize: Isaiah 7:14