When God
Visited Earth
Edward B. Hart, D.D.
Pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church, Pasadena, California
A S we approach this Christmas season, I invite you to consider with me the Virgin Birth o f Christ. To some it may seem proper for discussion only in a seminary classroom. Yet the average man on life’s highway who thinks of Bethlehem with any sort of serious contempla tion is asking: Is it necessary to believe the Virgin Birth of Christ to be;a Christian? In other words: Can we take belief in the Virgin Birth of Christ out of Christian teaching and faith, and keep Christianity intact? Does it matter whether Christ was, in fact, “ God with us,” or only the best man who ever lived? Is there any essential difference for us whether Christ is the most “ godlike” man, or actually, “God mani fest in the flesh” ? If Christ is truly God, then He can do for us what only God can do. If He is only man, then He can do for us only what the best man can do. If Christ was begotten of a natural father, he is a natural human being, and not God. If He is not God, He cannot forgive our sins. Christ’s claim to authority to forgive sins was met by skeptics of His day with the pointed question, “Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2 :7 ). Do we question today Christ’s power to forgive sins? If Christ was only a natural human being, He is not the Second Person of the Trinity, as the New Testament so often affirms, and there is no Trinity. If there be no Trinity, we have only Unitarianism with its sterile record of lifeless intellectualism, with no missionary passion, no rescue missions to lift from the dregs of life the human derelicts o f sin, with no power to set the prisoner free. We have only Christ’s “way of life” for our imitation. I F we try to explain the Virgin Birth of Christ as Roman Catholics do by postulating an Immaculate Conception in which Mary is Seclared to be sinless, we assume the real miracle of the Virgin Birth by presupposing another mir acle, the sinlessness of Mary. The decree of Pope Piux IX, in 1854, affirming the Immaculate Conception, opened the way for the worship of Mary. Her sinlessness, only by papal decree, has earned for her the title “ mother of God” and entitled her to worship. Mariolatry is not warranted by the New Testament record. Mary made no such claim to sinlessness, but declared, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:46, 47). We underscore her words my Saviour as indicating her own acknowledged need of salvation.
If we deny the fact of the Virgin Birth of Christ, how shall we explain the unique life of Christ—without parallel in all human experience? Can we account for it on any natural basis? This may seem to be “ begging the ques tion” but it is far from it. We are faced with the facts of His sinless life, the manifestation of divine power in His miraculous works, and with the supreme credential of His resurrection from the dead. His life after death requires, nay demands, adequate cause and explanation no less than His life before death. The only rational way to delete the Virgin Birth of Christ is to discard all evidences of the supernatural in Christ. These evidences are, in toto, either fable or fact. The supernatural events in the complete life of Christ stand or fall together. We cannot retain some of the evidences of the supernatural in Christ, and reject other proofs. B EFORE examining the evidence of the New Testa ment, let us face a very practical question: Is it necessary to believe in the Virgin Birth of Christ to be a Christian? The answer, we believe, is twofold. Many peo ple, adults as well as children, receive Christ as their per sonal Saviour without knowing anything of the problems involved in the Virgin Birth of Christ. They believe Him to be the Son of God, the Saviour, and personally trust Him for their salvation from the guilt of sin. In this faith- experience is involved the trustworthiness of both Christ and the Scriptures. There is a foundation beneath such faith unto salvation of which many believers are often unaware. It is quite another matter, however, when the facts underlying the Virgin Birth are deliberately denied. It is my thesis that one who knowingly rejects the New Testa ment evidence of the Virgin Birth o f Christ cannot trust himself to Christ for salvation; he cannot savingly trust. The' liberalism of our day i& of so many varied shades and classifications of unbelief that it is difficult to identify each variety, but the direction o f liberalism is unquestion ably toward denial of all the supernatural elements of Christianity. One fatal weakness in “ religion” today is that it offers to sin-bound humanity a Christ of little or no divine power. There is actually nothing to trust if Christ be naturally born, if He is only the best person or the most “ godlike” man who ever lived. Divest Christ, in your thinking, of the supernatural credentials with which He came into the stream of life, and you aré bound to offer Him only as a martyr to the world. You cannot Page Nine
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