But why couldn’t Jesus be born from a virgin mother? Look up the word “God” in the Dictionary and one definition given is “having no limits or boundaries.” God, therefore, can do what he jolly well pleases, so having a virgin give birth to Jesus was a walk in the park for him.
Predicting Jesus’ virgin birth hundreds of years before it happened was a walk in the park too. But let’s face it, we weren’t there when Isaiah predicted it, nor did we witness Jesus’ birth personally, so how do we know the virgin birth (and the prophecy of it) really happened? On the other hand, if Jesus’ unique birth did happen as Scripture says it did, and God really was Jesus’ Father and Jesus truly was both human and divine, the impact of such a being on this planet must have been huge, right?
And it has been huge. Billions of people have put their trust in Jesus in the centuries since his birth. But was it his miraculous virgin birth that captured their trust? No. It was their own miraculous birth. Suddenly, new and completely different things started happening to them. God, for instance, became a loving Father to them (not a distant ogre), Jesus became a personal source of strength for them, and they found themselves becoming much better people with great results in their relationships with other people. It was like a new birth.
And what had they done personally toward this new birth? Nothing. It came out of the blue, like some other power had suddenly conceived it in them. But that’s exactly what scripture said would happen to people because of Jesus’ birth – and in scriptures written many years before Jesus was born too, as in Jeremiah 31:31-34 and Ezekiel 36:25-27. Miraculous changes would happen in human hearts those scriptures said.
And why would these changes happen? Because of the Holy Spirit – ah – the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit that conceived Jesus. Is it any surprise, then, that Jesus had a unique virgin birth created by the Holy Spirit when that same Spirit is creating new births in people all the time? Conceiving new births is what the Spirit does. New birth, miraculously conceived by God, is his speciality. It’s a walk in the park for him.
Is the virgin birth so strange, then? Not when the Spirit is constantly giving birth to new creatures who are being “conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers,” Romans 8:29. Jesus, therefore, was simply the first miraculous birth by the Holy Spirit – to be followed by millions and millions more.
Buck To Basics 