God Is In Control

In our Sunday School class we’ve been going through the book of Matthew, and so I’ve decided to start posting our lessons in condensed form here on the Manifest Blog.  I think we’ll call them Matthew Mondays.

So let’s start in Matthew chapter 1.

Matthew starts out with the genealogy of Christ.  Early on in my walk with Christ I looked up what the names in the genealogy meant and was amazed to find that from Adam to Jesus the names come together to present the salvation story.  Here is the translation below:

Man is appointed mortal sorrow, but the Blessed of God will come down teaching that his death shall bring the despairing rest and comfort. He will be a renowned healer, possessing a mission that joins division. God’s shepherd will twine the branches, through the exhalation of His spirit.

The father of a great multitude laughs; he prevails with God through the praise of the Lord breaching divisions. Rise up; my people is liberated by a helper that rewards a servant with strength, a gift well-beloved who pays the price to enlarge the people. The father of the Lord is the physician.

The Lord is a judge elevated with strength from God. He is the perfection, the faithfulness, the fire, and the stability of God. He was asked of God to break up confusion. He is the father of praise, the resurrection of God. In court, He is just in His preparation, His vengeance, and His confirmation. God is His praise. In the courts of God, His gift undermines wrath and increases salvation.

You can see the break down of this translation on the post entitled The Genealogy of Christ (Matthew).

Secondly, there’s the virgin birth.   There’s some speculation that Mary had to be born without sin in order for Jesus to be born without sin, but that wouldn’t make any sense unless her parents were born without sin, and their parents, and their parents . . . all the way back to Adam.  Of course that isn’t the case. 

However, God does say that He visits the iniquities of the fathers onto the third and fourth generation, and not the iniquities of the mothers, which means that a virgin birth would in essence not pass on original sin and give Jesus a clean slate at birth.  He wasn’t born into sin, and unlike Adam, He resisted the temptation to sin when it was presented. You can read more about this idea in the post entitled Why a Virgin Birth?

The application we can take away from these two points in Matthew chapter one is that God is in control of every detail.  He knew what His plan was before Adam and Eve ever ate the apple, and He knows every detail about your life: past present and future.  He knew what everyone’s names would be in Jesus’ genealogy, and some of them He audibly gave before they were born, and some of them He changed while the person was alive.  He knew that sin would be passed on through the fathers and that there would be a virgin birth.  We know because it’s prophesied hundreds of years in advance. 

Here’s the rub:  You’ll never do anything that surprises Him, and though things might surprise you, He saw them coming before time began and has plans for everything that happens in your life.

I for one find this incredibly comforting.  There is rest in God’s omniscience.

Why a Virgin Birth?

I would have posted this on Christmas, but it’s a busy time of the year, so it’s a few days late.

Why did Christ need to be born of a virgin? That’s a question I have wondered about often, and I have a theory.

Obviously, there are the prophecies that necessitate a virgin birth in order to be fulfilled:

• And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." (Gen 3:15)
• Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)

Then there’s the issue of Joseph’s lineage. According to the prophecy of Jeremiah 22:28-30, there could be no king in Israel who was a descendant of King Jeconiah, and Matthew 1:12 relates that Joseph was from the line of Jeconiah. If Jesus had been sired by Joseph, He would not have been able to claim the legal rights to the throne of David.

However, I believe these issues are secondary to something even more important. I believe God has reasons for the way He does things. And my theory in this case is that the virgin birth is related to God’s innate sense of justice and the issue of iniquity.

According to the Strong’s concordance iniquity is defined as perversity, depravity, or guilt or punishment of iniquity. It is in essence the propensity for evil that was passed on through Adam to us all, as well as the punishment for evil he passed on: “just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).

In Exodus 34:6-7, God passes before Moses and proclaims, “The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear [the guilty]; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth [generation].” This sentiment is repeated in Ex 20:5, Num 14:18, and Deu 5:9.

Notice how iniquity is passed on to the next generation? The fathers are the one God chooses to use as the progenitors of iniquity. If Christ had been born of an earthly father, He could not have “committed no sin, nor have any deceit found in His mouth”. He would have, by the very nature of being conceived through Joseph, some iniquity or as some might call it, “original sin”.

My son is only two months old, and I already see glimpses of a sinful nature in him. He covets, manipulates, gets angry, etc. It is this original sin that causes some to follow the third century’s initiation of infant baptism for the removal of sin, which could lead to a discussion of “the age of reason,” but that is another topic for another day.

The point is, I think Christ had to be born of a virgin, so that the iniquity of Adam would not be passed on, so that He could be the “pure and spotless” lamb, and so that in His death and resurrection, we might find reconciliation as sons of God. There would be no need for Mary to be immaculately conceived as only the father’s iniquity is passed to subsequent generations.

That’s my theory anyway.