1:34
“How can this be since I am a virgin?”. Sometimes sceptics give the impression that 1st century people were ignorant and gullible. Well, they weren’t. They knew how babies were made and they knew what death was. In fact they had more contact with death than we have today. Mary’s question also implies that she took the angel’s words to mean that the promise was going to happen imminently.
1:35
The angel replies that the Holy Spirit would come on her, and the power of the Most High would overshadow her. The child would be the Son of God. Jesus was not born of the seed of Adam. Actually it is not necessarily the case that any egg cells of Mary were involved either. The conception of Jesus was a miraculous event. It certainly did not involve any man, and Scripture does not actually say it involved an egg cell from Mary. However, while the conception was miraculous, Jesus then developed and was born in the normal way. The true wonder here is not so much that there was a virgin birth, though that is miraculous, but that God should become incarnate. One aspect of the doctrine of the trinity that is particularly important here is that there are three distinct persons. He was still the Father when He became incarnate as the Son, and the Holy Spirit was still at work. The lazy view of the trinity is modalism, ie God acting in different modes. This view is incorrect, and most analogies that are used to try and describe the trinity actually describe modalism. Eg the water being ice, liquid and steam analogy. In summary, the doctrine of the trinity is:
- There is one God
- God exists eternally as three persons
- The three persons are co-equal and distinct
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