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The Virgin Birth of Christ.
ECHOES IN OTHER SCRIPTURES. I t was, indeed, when one thinks of it, only on the supposi tion that there was to be something exceptional and extraor dinary in the birth of this child called Immanuel that it could have afforded to Ahaz a sign of the perpetuity of the throne of David on the scale of magnitude proposed (“Ask it either in the depth, or in the height above.” Ver. 10). We look, therefore, with interest to see if there are any echoes or sug gestions of the idea of this passage in other prophetic scrip tures. They are naturally not many, but they do not seem to be altogether wanting. There is, first, the remarkable Beth lehem prophecy in Micah 5 :2, 3—also quoted as fulfilled in the nativity (Matt. 2:5, 6 )—connected with the saying: “Therefore will he give them up, until the time that she who travaileth hath brought forth” (“The King from Bethlehem,” says Delitzsch, “who has a nameless one as mother, and of whose father there is no mention”). Micah was Isaiah’s con temporary, and when the close relation between the two is con sidered (Cf. Isa. 2:2-4, with Micah 4:1-3), it is difficult not to recognize in his oracle an expansion of Isaiah’s. In the same line would seem to lie the enigmatic utterance in Jer. 31:22: “For Jehovah hath created a new thing in the earth: a woman shall encompass a man” (thus Delitzsch, etc.). TESTIMONY OF THE GOSPEL. TThe germs now indicated in phophetic scriptures had ap parently borne no fruit in Jewish expectations of the Messiah, when the event took place which to Christian minds made them luminous with predictive import.! In Bethlehem of Judea, as Micah had foretold, was bom o f a virgin mother He whose “goings forth” were “from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5 :2; Matt. 2 :6). (Matthew, who quotes the first part of the verse, can hardly have been ignorant of the hint of pre-exist ence it contained. This brings us to the testimony to the miraculous birth of Christ in our first and third Gospels—the
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