The Virgin Birth and Human Sexuality

00:00:00.000 | Phil, a listener from Oakville, Ontario, writes in to ask this.

00:00:09.320 | Pastor John, regarding the theological significance of Christ's virgin birth, if God saw it fit

00:00:15.440 | and right for His Son to be born of a virgin woman without the intervention of a man, what

00:00:19.680 | does this say about human sexuality?

00:00:23.300 | This is a totally surprising question to me, and I'm excited about it because the end of

00:00:28.540 | my answer has a surprising twist, so hang on, hang around for another four or five minutes.

00:00:33.200 | Let me read the text because the text really matters here.

00:00:36.560 | So it's Luke 1, 26 and 31 to 35.

00:00:39.720 | Gabriel was sent from God to a virgin, betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, and said,

00:00:47.560 | "Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus."

00:00:52.160 | Now verse 32, "He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord

00:00:57.480 | God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of

00:01:01.600 | Jacob forever and of his kingdom.

00:01:03.960 | There will be no end.

00:01:04.960 | And Mary said to the angel, 'How will this be, since I am a virgin?'"

00:01:12.280 | No sex, right?

00:01:13.680 | And here's the answer, verse 35, "The angel said to her, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon

00:01:20.600 | you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

00:01:26.360 | Therefore the child to be born will be called the Son of God."

00:01:32.160 | He'll be called holy, the Son of God.

00:01:35.480 | Now the explicit connection made by the angel is that God chose to bring Jesus into the

00:01:42.760 | world through a virgin because he wanted to make a statement about the uniqueness of his

00:01:49.640 | sonship.

00:01:51.120 | "I come to you a virgin, the Holy Spirit will come to you, the power of the Most High

00:01:58.200 | will overshadow you, therefore," that's the key word, "therefore," this is why I'm doing

00:02:03.800 | it this way, "therefore the child will be called the Son of God."

00:02:10.280 | And the point was not sexual relations with Joseph were defective or evil.

00:02:16.240 | The point was that this child was not going to be an ordinary child.

00:02:20.440 | He would have a human nature from Mary, but he would also have a divine nature from God.

00:02:28.520 | The point was not that the birth was clean because there was no sexual intercourse, the

00:02:35.280 | point was that the birth was supernatural because there was no human father.

00:02:40.680 | So beware, I'll say this now to the person who asked the question, beware of inferring

00:02:46.600 | lessons from texts that are not written to give those lessons.

00:02:52.280 | There is no intent on Luke's part or the angel's part to teach about the value of human sexual

00:03:00.440 | relations.

00:03:02.400 | To realize what that is, you have to go to places where that's the point of the text.

00:03:09.040 | So you go to a place like 1 Corinthians 7, 2, it goes like this, "Each man should have

00:03:14.760 | his own wife, and each woman her own husband.

00:03:19.440 | The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights," that means sexual relations, "and

00:03:26.320 | likewise the wife to her husband."

00:03:28.640 | Give him sexual relations.

00:03:30.680 | "For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does, and likewise

00:03:35.880 | the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

00:03:39.920 | Do not deprive one another from sexual relations, except perhaps by agreement for a limited

00:03:46.600 | time that you may devote yourselves to prayer, but then come together again so that Satan

00:03:52.760 | may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control."

00:03:56.520 | Now here is a clear teaching about sexual intercourse.

00:04:01.280 | It belongs in marriage, it should be relatively frequent, and its purpose is not just for

00:04:06.640 | having babies.

00:04:07.920 | Those three things are clearly implied in that text.

00:04:11.480 | One of the highest things that could be said about sexual relations is that it is the becoming

00:04:18.960 | of one flesh in marriage on the analogy of Christ becoming one with his church.

00:04:26.000 | Ephesians 5 goes like this, "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and

00:04:31.760 | gave himself for her."

00:04:34.120 | And then verse 31, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast

00:04:37.760 | to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."

00:04:41.960 | That happens in sexual intercourse, and a profound and beautiful, glorious thing that

00:04:47.960 | belongs in marriage happens, a one flesh union expressed in sexual union.

00:04:55.920 | Here's the surprising upshot.

00:04:58.160 | The virgin birth was designed by God to bring the Son of God into the world so that he could

00:05:07.880 | die for his bride, the church, and thus ransom his bride so that husbands would know how

00:05:17.480 | to make sexual relations with their wives the climax of their portrayal of Christ in

00:05:24.160 | the church.

00:05:26.560 | In other words, the virgin birth really does have something to do with sexual relations.

00:05:31.400 | It wasn't written with that in view, but when you take all of redemptive history into

00:05:37.720 | account and say, "Okay, what does the virgin birth say?"

00:05:41.440 | It says, "We now have in the world a God-man."

00:05:45.840 | Why do we have him?

00:05:47.280 | That there might be an atonement for sin.

00:05:50.440 | Whose sin?

00:05:51.440 | The sin of the church.

00:05:53.040 | To what end?

00:05:54.120 | That the church might belong to her beloved husband, Jesus Christ.

00:05:59.240 | And what does that have to do with human marriage?

00:06:02.680 | It gives the portrayal of what human marriage means.

00:06:06.800 | What does human marriage mean?

00:06:08.080 | It means a man and a woman cleaving to one another and coming to union of flesh in sexual

00:06:16.280 | intercourse as a way of displaying the intensity of the love and covenant relationship between

00:06:23.160 | Christ and his church, which was made possible by the virgin birth.

00:06:28.000 | Therefore, all the positive places in the Bible that speak of the beauty and the rightness

00:06:34.560 | of sexual pleasures in marriage are possible because there was a virgin birth.

00:06:43.200 | Thank you, Pastor John.

00:06:44.200 | And tomorrow, we will look again at Christmas, and this time more broadly, and ask Charlie

00:06:48.800 | Brown's million-dollar question, "Can anyone tell me what Christmas is all about?"

00:06:53.360 | Thank you for listening to this podcast.

00:06:55.320 | Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org and visit us online at DesiringGod.org

00:07:01.520 | to find thousands of books and articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper, all free

00:07:05.640 | of charge.

00:07:06.640 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:07:07.640 | Thanks for listening.

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The Virgin Birth and Human Sexuality

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