THE BIRTH OF BABY JESUS – Lesson 1
Birth of Baby Jesus
By: Frank Tunstall, D. Min.
The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So, the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35-36; John 1:29, 36).
King David is the prophet who foretold the Heavenly Father has a Son (Psalm 2:7). A thousand years after David’s prophecy, the process is both fascinating and mind boggling that brought about the birth of God’s Son and moved Him in flesh and blood into the neighborhood of human need (John 1:14, 29, 36, MSG). The angel Gabriel told Mary, possibly a 15-year-old teenager, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So, the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35; Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23). This included, of course, sending an angel to Joseph, who was engaged to marry Mary. The angel’s mission was to tell Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, because her pregnancy was of God.
The Holy Spirit and DNA
The incarnation of Jesus, defined as God becoming a man, a human being, without question is one of the greatest miracles of all time as this study will illustrate. Jesus is the heir of all things and holds the entire universe together (Hebrews 1:2; John 1:3; Colossians 1:15-17). The modern discovery of DNA arguably will show how it might have happened.
Joseph had “no union with [Mary] until after she gave birth” to Baby Jesus (Matthew 1:5, 18, 20). Mary conceived because of this “overshadowing” that Luke described. It refers to the Holy Spirit hovering over the waters in the creation (Genesis 1:2). In contemporary language it can be pictured as the genetic structure – the DNA supplied by a father in conception. In Baby Jesus’ case, Mary was a virgin. This meant the father’s contribution to Jesus’ DNA had to be miraculously created for Baby Jesus to come into the world both as truly a human being and as God’s Son.
Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), was a German scientist, astronomer, mathematician, and a trained Lutheran theologian. He understood his work as thinking the thoughts of God after Him.
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the term that describes the billions of microscopic-size molecules that hold in their nuclei the instructions an infant must have to develop fully, live healthily, and reproduce. In this sense, DNA is the discovery of the building blocks of life. These directives are found inside every human molecule and are handed down from parents to children. A full set of genes, known as the genome, includes some 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA. Said another way, the DNA formed by the union of a man’s and a woman’s cells contains the commands for a lifetime of orderly growth for their children. If Kepler were living today, he would surely revel thinking about DNA and imagining the thoughts of God after Him. [1] The same is true about the plant and animal world. Even the little microscopic creatures have their DNA.
For Baby Jesus to come into the world as truly a man, it was the role of the Holy Spirit to create His genetic system. Then Baby Jesus could be born without sin, grow up, and move into the neighborhood of Adam’s seed as one of us, sin only excepted. God alone could do it!
As you ponder the grand miracle and mystery of the incarnation of Jesus, let yourself consider the sovereign dominion of the Holy Spirit that was required to make it all happen. When you have absorbed the miraculous power and divine genius God revealed in the incarnation, you will have no trouble believing all the other miracles in the Bible. Yes, Gabriel had it right: “Nothing is impossible with God.”
A person cannot be a Christian without believing in miracles, and the birth of Jesus lives to this day as one of the greatest miracles in human history.
The angel Gabriel made the announcement to Mary and she sought more information, giving Gabriel a lesson in Biology 101: “How will this be since I am a virgin?” (Isaiah 7:14). Gabriel responded with his own lesson in Theology 101: “Nothing is impossible with God!” (Luke 1:34-38).
What an Ahh! moment. Like Mary, we too are to release our impossibilities to the Lord. We can only begin to imagine the power and divine genius required to conceive a child without a sexual union.
Baby Jesus was truly Mary’s flesh-and-blood babe of Bethlehem. He was also King David’s greater Son. At the same time, He was the Heavenly Father’s sinless Son. We honor Jesus as having two natures in one Person, God and Man, with both natures blended so perfectly the Lord did not have a split personality. He is the God-Man and the last Adam. Never again will there be a need for another Adam; Jesus’ death and resurrection settled that. This understanding gives fresh meaning to Paul’s teaching that Jesus Christ is the last Adam, a life-giving Spirit (1 Corinthians 15:45).
At the great rapture of the church the redeemed will rise from their graves. They will have glorified bodies like Jesus manifested at His resurrection, having become the firstfruits of them that slept (1 Corinthians 15:20; 1 Thessalonians 4:17, KJV). This body will be immortal and incorruptible.
Modern science opened the door to consider the what, DNA as the building blocks of life – but not the who, the divine genius who was the first to create DNA and make it work (Colossians 1:15-20; Hebrews 1:3). This process has been true in the birth of billions of babies, generation after generation, millennium after millennium, amid all ethnicities and peoples around the world. It is also true of nature. All creatures have their own DNA, every living creature. This includes every plant, from the largest to the smallest, and the creatures that are microscopic, and yes, the fish of the sea and the birds of the air. The list goes on, and on, and on.
Understanding this illustrates the divine genius behind God’s creation. But this comprehension of what God did, great as it is, remains a far cry greater from modern science having the ability to create the whole of the natural order.
Indeed, if it were possible to get the world’s top 100 scientists into the world’s best equipped lab and give them the assignment to create the building blocks of life that are compressed into each of a person’s invisible billions of cell nuclei, they would surely be like King Nebuchadnezzar’s wise men: “What the king asks is too difficult. No one can reveal it to the king except the gods, and they do not live among men” (Daniel 2:11).
The Babylonian wise men were partly right; they were also very wrong. Not gods, but one God, Jehovah, existing in a Trinity. He held the power and divine genius to accomplish the incarnation of Jesus. The Holy Spirit, the third person in the Trinity, was the power source to make it happen.
The implications are far reaching. God created Adam, then Eve, making each of them compatible as male and female. When Eve gave birth to baby Cain, their first-born child, Eve understood enough to give God the honor. “With the help of the Lord,” she said, “I have brought forth a man” (Genesis 4:1).
Every mother and dad should see the births of their children as gifts from God.
Without question, the incarnation of Jesus is one of the greatest miracles of all time.
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[1] Would you like to know more about DNA? Consider Anne Wanjie’s, The Basics of Genetics: Core Concepts, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2014. To begin learning the history of DNA’s discovery, consider Jenny J. Chen’s DNA and RNA, New York: Cavendish Square Publishing, 2017. You might also consider Beth Swarecki, Genetics 101, Adam’s Media, New York, 2018.
