If God Became Man

In his bestselling Evidence That Demand a Verdict, Josh McDowell posed this question: “If God became a man what would we expect Him to be like?”

One of the 8 answers that McDowell proposed was, “If God became a man we would expect Him to have an unusual entrance into this life.” In Isaiah 7:14, we see this prophecy: “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.” Before, people questioned whether there was really a prophecy because there was a time that the only Old Testament Hebrew text we have had was the Masoretic text, which a group of scribes complied around A.D. 500. That’s 500 years after Christ. So, these critics are accusing that it was not really a prophecy but something written after the fact. But, in 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd discovered ancient scrolls of the Old Testament in a cave near the Dead Sea. These scrolls were dated 550 to 900 years earlier. As in, at least 50 to 400 years before Christ! Among the scrolls found was a complete scroll of Isaiah. Thus, this proves that there’s really a prophecy about the miraculous virgin birth of our Lord Jesus.

And, of course, the virgin birth itself is an unusual entrance. Dr. John MacArthur, Jr., wrote, “Those who deny the virgin birth argue that it is biologically impossible. They're right! It was also biologically impossible to create Adam from dirt, but God did it. It was also biologically impossible to create Eve from the side of Adam, but God did that, too.” (From his study guide, Is the Bible Reliable?) There were attempts to discredit the virgin birth of Christ. Early rabbis accused that Jesus was actually the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier. If you remember, in the movie The Nativity, the Roman soldier angle was one of the questions raised by the father of Mary when she announced that she is pregnant. But a Jewish skeptic himself countered this allegation. “There would be no object in making such a claim unless the Christian original genealogy made some claim that the birth of Jesus was not normal.” In other words, the accusation is actually proof of the fact that the early Christians taught that Jesus was born of a virgin.

Brethren, our Lord Jesus is God who became man!