Who is Jesus?/Book 2/Chapter 7
VII. WHY WAS THE VIRGIN BIRTH NECESSARY?
THERE are many earnest, honest Christians in these modern days, when naturalistic criticism is at work to destroy the very foundations of human belief, who feel that the virgin birth of Jesus was unnecessary. They ask in all sincerity, Why could not Jesus be Divine, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, and still be the son of Joseph? They urge that perhaps the Bible account was a later invention of men, and say frankly that they do not see any need of it.
The question implies a lack of careful, discriminating thought. It arises from the desire to hold on to the truth of the deity of Jesus which they recognize, and to explain away the apparent difficulties which spring from materialistic conceptions.
We have already answered the question, but we shall do so again: The answer is, Jesus being what he is, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, Divine as no other human being ever was or can be Divine, one with the Father as to essence and being, unavoidably had to have a soul-form from the Divine directly. If he had been the son of Joseph, he would have had a soul-form from Joseph, fashioned from the inner spiritual substances of Joseph's being, and he would have grown in manhood to be only the son of Joseph.
Let this thought penetrate deeply into our souls: Every man is the son of his own father, from whose being he receives his soul-form or rudimentary receptacle of life, and he becomes only a reproduction of his father, of a similar essence, type, and character.
Upon the assumption that Jesus was the son of Joseph it could not have been written of him, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and The Word was God. . . And the Word (or God) became flesh." If Jesus had been the son of Joseph, he could never have said, "Before Abraham was, I am," or, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," nor the thousand and one other things where he claimed his absolute uniqueness and differentiation from all other men who have ever lived. As the son of Joseph, Jesus would simply not be Jesus. We cannot imagine even an ordinary man being the same man if born of any other than his own father. Much less could he who proved himself to his disciples and is accepted by so many myriads of men as the actual Son of God be different from all other beings if he were not born of a virgin the son of the living God.
Any man born of a human father has forever human limitations. He could not develop ever into "The Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the Almighty." The human essence cannot be mixed with or transmuted into the Divine. The Divine can dwell directly and immediately only in its own things.
The descent of the Lord through the heavens in order to dwell in the flesh was an orderly descent, but the soul-form by means of which it was accomplished was taken from the Divine things found in its descent, first those existing in the minds of angels in the angelic heavens, then in the natural minds of those in the lower spiritual world corresponding to the human mind, and then in the knowledge of the Incarnation known to men through prophecy and the Word of God in its letter. This latter existed on the material plane.
It is true that in taking a soul-form in this way this soul-form was tainted on every plane by the imperfections of angels and men, for the Divine is never fully and perfectly received by any creature; but nevertheless it was a soul-form which could receive the Divine life directly and not indirectly; into which the Divine could flow as into its own, and gradually, but surely, drive out the imperfections, substituting therefor the absolute Divine, and thus enable the very God of heaven and earth to descend in this way into the natural plane of life, its ultimate. In this way Jesus could be God and Man, eventually the God-Man, wholly Divine on every plane of being, present on every plane in fullness.
As the Divine Being cannot be divided, any more than a human essence existing in an individual can be divided, this projection of God into nature, known on earth as the man Jesus of Nazareth, was always and essentially God. To appearance Jesus was one person and the Father another, but reason shows us that if he as the Son of God were a different being than the Father, there would be two Gods, and that means polytheism, the impossible. The Infinite could not beget another Infinite, since neither then would be infinite; but by extension God could project His life directly down into nature and become present in His own things there.
Now, some minds find it disorderly for God so to have projected Himself into nature. Of course, it is not more impossible for God to do this if He had desired it, than to effect creation on any other plane or in any other way. The creation of the spiritual universe involved in it the creation of the natural universe. The creation of the mineral kingdom, the grossest form of matter, provided a basis from which the Divine influx into nature could work upward again to its source. But each separate step in the program of creation was a separate and distinct act of creation. The creation of the vegetable kingdom, with its innumerable species, was at every step a new act of creative activity, as was the creation of the animal kingdom. And man was as distinctive a creation as anything that preceded him, for, as we have seen, there was created in him that which had not existed in vegetable or animal, the plane of the spiritual, with its inmost receptacle of God to enable him to become the moral image and likeness of his Creator. He who created all things could create anything He desired in any manner or according to any mode that seemed useful. There was no precedent for the sending of the Son of God, or projection of God into nature, and inherently there could be no repetition of it, for once here in His infinitude God is forever with us on the plane of the natural. Thus the possibility of the virgin birth is seen to exist if the Creative Power saw it to be essential.
It is idle to assume that it could not take place because it is not the mode followed in other cases. The creation of the soul-form from the spiritual substances of the human father is a distinct act of creation on the part of the Divine; but it is a projection of the human father's life, or life through the human father, and hence like the human father as a type. The creation of the soul-form by means of which God came down into the kingdom of nature directly, as the man Christ Jesus, was similarly a projection from the Divine, but instead of being through a human father and hence through a permanently limited soul-form, the soul-form provided was a projection of the very Divine itself by means of its own things existing on the various planes of life through which the descent into nature was made, in order that God might have ultimately an unlimited medium for His immediate presence in nature. Thus it was most orderly.
Nor can it be urged successfully that the act of a virgin giving birth to a child is in the case of Mary immoral. The fact is no one is ever distressed by its immorality except those critics who would destroy the foundations of all religious belief. Singularly enough, it is an event which seems the purest and holiest that ever took place.
There was no violation of Mary's freedom. While it perhaps cannot be definitely proved historically, yet because of prophecy it is highly probable that Jewish maidens expected the Messiah would be born of a virgin. The angel in his announcement to Mary left her free to act as she desired, for her reply indicates it: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." The whole world has admired this voluntary acceptance of the Divine honor conferred.
It was not something which could come without Mary's perfect acquiescence, any more than the fact of motherhood ever normally comes to women without their consent.
Nor was there any violation of Joseph's conjugal rights. He was fully informed of the condition that was to be achieved, the coming to earth in fulfilment of prophecy of the Messiah to be born of a virgin. It is perfectly evident that he regarded it, as all sincere men regard the birth of any child, as an act of God, mysterious, relatively inexplicable, but God's way of working, and yet in this case necessarily effected without His instrumentality in order that Mary's son might be the Son of God.
Both Mary and Joseph were sincere and honest people whose lives, as to their minutest detail, had been known from eternity. In the sight of Him who exists apart from space or time all things past or future are as present. God knew from the beginning the characters and dispositions of Mary and Joseph. They were prepared by the Lord for this very mission long before the time of Abraham, through whom the promise of the blessing first openly came. They were indeed prepared for it in Eden when the Lord promised the woman that her seed should bruise the serpent's head.
The secret of the mysterious birth was probably known to only a very few. No public feeling was offended, for Joseph took Mary to wife; they were publicly married. Joseph knew that that which Mary had conceived was to be the Son of God, the Messiah of his race, the deliverer of mankind, as did Zacharias and Elizabeth, and those nearest to them. But there was no suspicion of scandal; instead, overwhelming gratitude that, through them, God was fulfilling prophecy. Mary treasured all these things in her heart in order to give them to future generations, and all generations have indeed called her blessed. Through Mary as a chosen instrumentality of the Lord the Messiah came into the world, from her as a virgin in whom the Divine soul-form was Divinely placed. "The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." God could not come directly into the world in any other way. It was orderly, pure, chaste, holy, holier than any other birth.