Phil, a listener from Oakville, Ontario, writes in to ask this. Pastor John, regarding the theological significance of Christ's virgin birth, if God saw it fit and right for His Son to be born of a virgin woman without the intervention of a man, what does this say about human sexuality?

This is a totally surprising question to me, and I'm excited about it because the end of my answer has a surprising twist, so hang on, hang around for another four or five minutes. Let me read the text because the text really matters here. So it's Luke 1, 26 and 31 to 35.

Gabriel was sent from God to a virgin, betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, and said, "Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus." Now verse 32, "He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom.

There will be no end. And Mary said to the angel, 'How will this be, since I am a virgin?'" No sex, right? And here's the answer, verse 35, "The angel said to her, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

Therefore the child to be born will be called the Son of God." He'll be called holy, the Son of God. Now the explicit connection made by the angel is that God chose to bring Jesus into the world through a virgin because he wanted to make a statement about the uniqueness of his sonship.

"I come to you a virgin, the Holy Spirit will come to you, the power of the Most High will overshadow you, therefore," that's the key word, "therefore," this is why I'm doing it this way, "therefore the child will be called the Son of God." And the point was not sexual relations with Joseph were defective or evil.

The point was that this child was not going to be an ordinary child. He would have a human nature from Mary, but he would also have a divine nature from God. The point was not that the birth was clean because there was no sexual intercourse, the point was that the birth was supernatural because there was no human father.

So beware, I'll say this now to the person who asked the question, beware of inferring lessons from texts that are not written to give those lessons. There is no intent on Luke's part or the angel's part to teach about the value of human sexual relations. To realize what that is, you have to go to places where that's the point of the text.

So you go to a place like 1 Corinthians 7, 2, it goes like this, "Each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights," that means sexual relations, "and likewise the wife to her husband." Give him sexual relations.

"For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does, and likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another from sexual relations, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time that you may devote yourselves to prayer, but then come together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control." Now here is a clear teaching about sexual intercourse.

It belongs in marriage, it should be relatively frequent, and its purpose is not just for having babies. Those three things are clearly implied in that text. One of the highest things that could be said about sexual relations is that it is the becoming of one flesh in marriage on the analogy of Christ becoming one with his church.

Ephesians 5 goes like this, "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her." And then verse 31, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." That happens in sexual intercourse, and a profound and beautiful, glorious thing that belongs in marriage happens, a one flesh union expressed in sexual union.

Here's the surprising upshot. The virgin birth was designed by God to bring the Son of God into the world so that he could die for his bride, the church, and thus ransom his bride so that husbands would know how to make sexual relations with their wives the climax of their portrayal of Christ in the church.

In other words, the virgin birth really does have something to do with sexual relations. It wasn't written with that in view, but when you take all of redemptive history into account and say, "Okay, what does the virgin birth say?" It says, "We now have in the world a God-man." Why do we have him?

That there might be an atonement for sin. Whose sin? The sin of the church. To what end? That the church might belong to her beloved husband, Jesus Christ. And what does that have to do with human marriage? It gives the portrayal of what human marriage means. What does human marriage mean?

It means a man and a woman cleaving to one another and coming to union of flesh in sexual intercourse as a way of displaying the intensity of the love and covenant relationship between Christ and his church, which was made possible by the virgin birth. Therefore, all the positive places in the Bible that speak of the beauty and the rightness of sexual pleasures in marriage are possible because there was a virgin birth.

Thank you, Pastor John. And tomorrow, we will look again at Christmas, and this time more broadly, and ask Charlie Brown's million-dollar question, "Can anyone tell me what Christmas is all about?" Thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org and visit us online at DesiringGod.org to find thousands of books and articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper, all free of charge.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.