The Reflection Series for this month is adapted from Reasoning the Rest, which you can read or download from the main menu. This month, we’re reflecting on the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. 

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Support for belief in the Virgin Birth can be traced backwards through five important events in the history of the Christian Faith:

1. The Ascension
2. The Resurrection/The Crucifixion
3. The Gospel
4. The Virgin Birth

This week, let’s consider how the Gospel and ministry of Jesus support our faith in the Virgin Birth.

For years the Gospels were viewed by many critics and unbelievers as works of fiction compiled by believers desperate to create a story worth believing, hell-bent on forcing others to believe in it. As history has come to validate the life and death of the man named Jesus, history has done the Gospels equal justice. The years in which the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were estimated to have been written have slowly worked their way closer and closer to the actual time of Jesus’ passing in roughly 33 C.E. In the presence of more research and study of the Palestine area, the information in the Gospel of Luke has slowly been legitimized piece by piece as fact, as opposed to fabrication or amateur scholarship. The Gospels as we find them now, of a man who clearly died and must have resurrected in order for the discussion of the virgin birth to be happening in the first place, are not only more evidence of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but included within them are incidences of divine power unparalleled by any prophet, teacher or spiritual leader. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only time in history where the Creator God literally entered into human existence in order to display his unlimited power over creation in the man of Jesus Christ. The Gospels document these moments by those who witnessed the divine power firsthand, as John recounts:

 1 John 1-4:  That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

Thus we find ourselves in a place where the Ascension, Resurrection and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ have been given solid footing in historical fact. Now we find ourselves in a place where the Gospels and the writers of them have been given historical validation as being the source of a life lived by the man Jesus Christ from a place of eyewitness testimony.