January 2.
Numerous people in our dark and sad world long to be able to believe
the simple but profound Christmas message. Many are hoping that it is
true that, in Christ, heaven and earth really are reunited and all that
Christmas really means will one day be fulfilled.
Some churchmen may try to excuse their unwillingness to believe what
Matthew and Luke clearly intended their readers to understand as literal
fact. However, many ordinary people realise that to deny that Christ was
''conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary'' is to take
out of the birth of Christ the very heart of the meaning of the
Christmas message.
Someone said to me today that if this goes on there will be no
Christmas congregations next time.
No Virgin Birth reduces the relationship of God to our humanity to, at
the most, a mere spiritual contact that can do nothing for our sinful
earthly existence. It therefore contradicts our belief that it is really
God who intervenes in our bodily existence and through the death and
resurrection of Jesus redeems this physical world from sin and death.
Some have said they do not believe in the Virgin Birth because it
seems unscientific, the Gospel writers being unfamiliar with modern
biology. I can hardly think of a more pathetic and miserable reason. The
Gospel writers certainly knew what was necessary for babies to be
conceived.
I do not believe there is anything to be ashamed of, intellectually,
in believing that He who is the creator of the world and the source of
its life should, in the midst of history, break into our human bodily
life to save a world He loves.
It is our Christian belief that this real ''breaking in'' is
foreshadowed in His drawing near to the world in the remarkable history
of Israel. It is out of this very real interaction between God and His
people that the Bible came to be written.
Unless we believe, not only in a spiritual but also a material
interaction between God and our physical world -- expressed in such acts
as the Virgin Birth -- the Bible itself loses all ultimate authority for
the meaning of human life, and the Gospel becomes an empty hope.
Rev. Howard Taylor,
60 Southbrae Drive,
Glasgow.
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