The Gospel of John

The Virgin Birth

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 55- 70

Genre:

Track: 055

Dictation Name: RR197AE57

Location/Venue:

Year:

…Unto us a son is given and the government shall be upon His shoulder and His name shall be called wonderful counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father the prince of peace. Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, goodwill toward men. Let us pray.

All glory be unto Thee God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost who has made known unto us the fullness of Thy revelation. Who hast made us Thy people and has ordained that we should prevail against Thine enemies and be more than conquerors through Christ. Make us joyful in this blessed season, throughout all the year and all the days of our life knowing that we are in Christ victors, that in Him we are ordained to be governors of all things in Christ. That throughout all eternity Thy kingdom shall prevail. How great Thou art oh Lord and we praise Thee. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is the first chapter of John, verses one through eighteen. Our subject: The Virgin Birth. John 1:1-18.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2 The same was in the beginning with God.

3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

7 The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.

8 He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

9 That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

10 He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.

11 He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

12 But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:

13 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

15 John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.

16 And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.

17 For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.

18 No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”

In John 1:13 we have been told, we are told very plainly that the rebirth or regeneration of all the redeemed in Christ is comparable to the birth of our Lord, a miraculous birth because as many as received Him to them gave ye power to become the sons of God even to them that believe on His name. We know that as early as Tertullian and the second century verse thirteen was seen as clearly as a reference to the virgin birth however interpreted or read. But this is not all. In John 1:14 the apostle said:

“14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

In John 1:12 we are told that our regeneration is a miracle like Christ’s birth. His virgin birth, because our regeneration was not a birth of blood or of man’s will or of the body’s desire but an act of God. In John 1:14 again we are told that the word or logos, God the Son, was made flesh or incarnated. He dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, the glory of God the Son. He had in Himself the fullness of grace and truth. This is not a reference to any natural birth but to a supernatural event. If we were not told that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary it would be easy to believe that He came directly from heaven. We are told of the virgin birth to enable us to realize that Jesus Christ is not only God but also man. God incarnate in human flesh.

What we forget and scholars nowadays do not like to remind us of is that the heresies about the person of Christ in the early years of Christendom or of the Christian era arose because people had trouble believing that He was also a man. Now in the thirties when I was in seminary one of my professors was Arthur Cushman McGiffert. An interesting family because the son I think has recently retired as a professor Church History like his father before him and the grandfather, Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Senior, all modernists. Perhaps the fourth one is starting teaching. Nobody has ever written a book about such families in the modernist camp they are not too common but on the side of orthodoxy they are very common place. I don’t know how any of you are familiar with the name of Dr. Ida Scudder coming out of the Reformed community she was a great woman doctor, she was born I think sometime in the early eighties of the last century and she was still reasonably active in India at the age of eighty six. She started a medical missionary work there, one that her father had carried on before her and her grandfather before her, and her uncles and cousins and nieces and so on so that by the mid-thirties the service by Scudders as missionaries totaled more than a thousand years, just one family. Their story is a remarkable one. Well, Author Cushman McGiffert almost a century ago wrote a book in which in passing he said that the problem in the early church was accepting Christ’s humanity because he was so obviously divine in their eyes.

McGiffert as a modernist was simply honest with the data. The gnostic heresies rejected Christ’s humanity, seeing it as a façade God the Son had used and the church fought this, insisting on Christ’s humanity as well as His deity. Remember, to the end of the first century there were still people who had seen Jesus Christ in the flesh. They were still around. We are told in one document that these elderly people when they were taken to church would greet one another joyfully because they were the ones who had been there and had seen Jesus, had known Him. And their joyful cry which is echoed at the beginning of John’s first letter was as they greeted one another: ‘have you seen? We have seen. Have you heard? We have heard. Have you touched? We have touched’. They had heard, seen and touched the Lord of glory. There were too many eye witnesses so it was not until they died that the ungodly began to say that the resurrection was not real, the miracles were not real and so on. And it took a while before they could do it. The problem for some time was how could He have been human, so that was the first great heresy, the first problem in the church. So in the New Testament they are not trying to prove the virgin birth they are saying this happened and this shows you that He was truly man. So that the problem then was the reverse of what it is now when people refuse to believe the Virgin birth, then the virgin birth was proclaimed to say he was truly God in the flesh, God incarnate. Paul in Galatians 4:4-5 says:

“But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,

5 To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”

Machen pointed out that some have held that this text does not refer to the virgin birth because Paul does not say ‘virgin’ whereas others hold that it is a reference to it. The reference as Machen pointed out was to the humiliation of Christ. Coming from the trinity to earth to be born of a woman, this is a miracle in itself and an act of humility on the part of God the Son. Now this fact tells us much because the whole point of the incarnation and the virgin birth is not on its miraculous nature although that’s real because for God this was nothing, but on the amazing grace and humility of the event. God’s grace was so great that in the person of the Son all the limitations and problems of being human were assumed by the Son for our salvation. He who was one with God became one with us, very God of very God and also very man of very man. Therefore in the virgin birth in all the narratives of it we are told not of a mighty miracle work for my God for nothing is too great for Him but rather we are told of a startling act of grace, the incarnation. We are not asked to marvel at this miracle but to be humbled and awed by God’s grace. From our perspective the virgin birth is a great and miracle which is true enough but the New Testament repeatedly stresses the humility of the incarnation. It is more than humility when we realize that the goal of the incarnation was the crucifixion and our atonement. The humility of the virgin birth culminates in a gruesome and exceedingly painful form of death. Because the incarnation was real the pain and the agony of the cross was real. The incarnation was a necessity because apart from it there could be no atonement, no restitution made by man for his sin which could be efficacious. God had to do it.

Humanity was fallen and in sin, doomed to die. In Adam’s sin all had sinned. Adam’s sin was to submit to the tempter’s plan whereby every man would be His own God, knowing or determining for himself what constituted good and evil, law and morality and all things else. Man the sinner seeks to be his own god and law. All men born of Adam have the same fallen will and goal, this same mind and purpose, to be as god, to be the determiner not the obedient creature. There was therefore a need for a new Adam, a new human race so that all born of it would have a different goal. Instead of sin and death a humanity whose nature moves in terms of righteousness or justice and life was needed. Jesus Christ by His life, death and resurrection became the last Adam, the head of a new human race, born to justice and life as our nature and goal. Paul in First Corinthians 15:45 following speaks of Jesus Christ as the last Adam, as the head of a new human race. His birth was miraculous because the last Adam had to be different from the first. There was a sharp break in His person from the old human race born of Adam, the doctrine of being born again tells us that our regeneration is like the virgin birth, a break with the old order of sin and death. The world apart from Christ has good reason to be pessimistic and cynical about its future or desperate as it often is in its efforts to correct its wayward destiny. The virgin birth points us to the miracle of regeneration and a hope that is grounded in God’s purposes, a hope that cannot be shaken. The virgin birth itself was a humiliation for God the Son but its purpose was our salvation and our exaltation.

It is clear why Douglas Edwards said the virgin birth was one of the foundation truths on which the church was built. Again Edward said and I quote:

“It is not the Christian faith simply that Jesus Christ is God, the Christian faith is that Jesus Christ is God in our manhood and it is with a divine manhood that the virgin birth is consistently connected by the apostles like Saint Paul, like evangelists like Saint Matthew, Saint Luke and Saint John, by the creeds and canticles and carols. Thus the value of the doctrine of the virgin birth consists in this: that it guards the truth, that the divine savior of mankind, albeit it truly and forever God, is nonetheless genuinely and completely man.” Unquote.

This is the glory of the virgin birth. It demonstrates to us the reality of the incarnation because if we read the gospels with honest eyes we would say with the early Christian how is it possible that this man was totally God and we would have trouble as they did in saying he was also truly man. The miracle of His being was so great a one, let us pray.

Our Father we give thanks unto Thee that Jesus Christ has come. That God the Son became flesh for our sakes, creating a new human race and by Thy grace we are members thereof. Grant oh Lord that we move in the joy of this miracle¸ knowing that He who took upon Himself our humanity and made it a new creation will also in the fullness of time and for all eternity make us and our world a new creation in Thee. Make us ever mindful that ours is the victory in Jesus Christ and that He will never leave us nor forsake us. So that we may boldly say the Lord is my helper, I shall not fear what man may do unto me. Our God how great Thou art and we praise Thee. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] The Greek doctrine of the logos has only one relationship the biblical one, that the same word logos is used. The term was widely used by those who were Jews. We have a classic example of its surviving in Palo’s writings so that it was made very early a thoroughly biblical concept, God the word, God the logos, so that it was no longer the Greek concept. In fact, the Greek concept which we have in various forms of Hegelianism is very, very different because instead of having one God and three persons you have in effect three gods and those who think in terms of this see God the Father as only God the Substance, the basic substance of the universe. God the Son as reason and that’s how they interpret logos and God the Spirit as process, so that they lead right into process theology which is anti-Christian. So that to say that the two are the same is really ridiculous, it is impossible to absorb into what is essentially Greek and process theology, the doctrine of God the Creator, one God three persons.

Any other questions or comments, yes?

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] What is His nature…?

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] Well, we know that eternally there will be God incarnate. We don’t know in what sense He surrendered kingship when he entered eternity so that God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit are now king over all creation. But He is eternally there as head of the church and yet He is also eternally God the Son. So it is a mystery that is beyond us. Yes?

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] For the law was given by Moses, grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. But is not in the text, you see it in the Authorized Version in italics which means it’s understood and it could be and or any other connecting term. It simply deals with the historical sequence. God’s law was given in written form by Moses, His grace and truth came in the person of Jesus Christ. It has nothing to do with antinomianism. They are really reaching when they use that verse. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Parentheses are put in there of course by the translators but it’s just a way of extenuating the comma after ‘us’. In other words, the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. Parenthetically John says because he dwelt among us we beheld His glory. The glory is of the only begotten of the Father. So he interjects there that phrase. Yes?

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] Well they cannot in terms of the text but the idea is that since there is a question how, since he was born of a woman, did he not receive a fallen human nature. And theologians have puzzled over that and foolishly so, because we don’t have to understand everything. All we need to do is believe and the whole point of the Immaculate Conception is somehow to preserve immaculately the deity of Christ from human corruption, so in effect it happened through Mary and it didn’t happen like any ordinary birth. To separate the immaculate nature of the human nature of Christ, which meant of course that some have then theorized that the Virgin Mary’s mother had to be like her and Mary’s birth was...yes. If you are going to preserve it on the human level by something that you can explain, rather than God’s miraculous act you are going to go on with one interpretation after another designed to preserve something.

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] Exactly, very good point. Any other questions? Well if not let us close with prayer.

Our Father indeed Thou hast through Jesus Christ brought joy to a fallen world and made it now the locale of Thine eternal kingdom. The place where victory is to be brought forth, the kingdoms of this world made the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ. How great Thou art and how full of grace are all Thy ways. We thank Thee that we have been made the people of Thy kingdom and of Thy son’s new creation. Bless us into faithfulness and service. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.