“who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary”

By far the longest section of the Apostles’ Creed has to do with Jesus. We already saw that the four words Jesus, Christ, Son, Lord, identified the true Jesus as a true man, who was the Anointed Prophet, Priest, and King, as the Second Person of the Trinity, and as our sovereign, ruling King. But now comes a large section in which the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus are spelt out. Why does the Creed take so much time to spell out these historical facts?

The answer is that these are essential to the gospel. A Jesus who didn’t suffer and die is not the saving Jesus. A Jesus who didn’t rise is not the saving Jesus. A Jesus who didn’t ascend is not the saving Jesus. And a Jesus who was not conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary is not the biblical Jesus. Any distortion in the origin, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus distorts what and who we mean by the words Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord.

So why is it important to say that He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some professing Christians began saying that the virgin birth is exactly the kind of doctrine we should dispense with if we want to make Christianity practical, relevant and palatable. Surely modern people know that a virgin birth is impossible.

Well, if impossible means, cannot happen through the normal and average course of physical laws, then the virgin birth is impossible. But, by those same standards, then so is the existence of the universe, or the appearance of life on this planet. These things shouldn’t be here, but they are. People who deny the existence of miracles stand refuted by their own existence.

The miraculous is God’s temporary suspension of normal courses of birth and life and healing and even death, for an exceptional work. It’s an exception to how things normally happen. Now to God, there really is no such thing as a miracle. God’s works are His works, none are more or less difficult to Him, since He is omnipotent. But from our perspective, God doing the work of a spontaneous creation in someone’s womb is exceptional, and marvelous.

What does the Bible mean when it says “conceived by the Holy Spirit”. Here some have come up with weird aberrant ideas of sexual union here between God and Mary, those who say that seem to need an elementary lesson in what virgin means. Instead, we read Gabriel saying to Joseph:

“Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.” (Matt. 1:20)

When Mary asks how she will give birth to Messiah when she is a virgin, Gabriel tells her:

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God.” (Lk. 1:35)

By the way, Scripture has no place for the teaching of the perpetual virginity of Mary. After the virgin birth of Jesus, Joseph and Mary had several sons and daughters. Nor does the Bible teach the doctrine that Mary herself was born without sin. No, Mary speaks specifically of needing a Saviour in her own song in Luke 1.

More than that we are not told. But we understand the meaning. God was going to create in Mary’s womb, not something superhuman, but the human cells and 23 chromosomes that would unite with Mary’s cells and chromosomes and a life would be conceived in her womb. But at the very moment that this human life was created in her womb, the Eternal Son, the Second person of the Trinity, the Logos, united it to Himself. He added to himself the human nature that was now growing in Mary’s womb, so that the human body, soul and spirit of the man who would be named Jesus was added to Himself. But not two persons: one Person, whom you can correctly call Jesus, or the Christ, or the Son of God, or Lord, who has a human nature and a divine nature.

Why is the virgin birth essential to the gospel?

• First, it shows that He is truly a man. Jesus was not an angel, or a spirit appearing amongst us. To be our substitute, he has to be part of our family. He must fit somewhere on the massive human family tree. To be born means he is one of us, and therefore, He can stand in for any of us.
• Second, the virgin birth shows He is more than a man. He is not less, but He is definitely more. The conception by the Holy Spirit alerts us to the fact that Jesus is not merely a good man that God fills, or a wise man that God selects. Jesus is a man whose Father truly is God.
• Third, the virgin birth shows He was a sinless man. The virgin birth keeps Jesus human, but separates Him from an inherited sin nature. Like begets like, and a sinful human father begets after his kind. The Holy Spirit cannot create sin or corruption, and what He created in Mary’s womb was sinless.
• Fourth, the virgin birth shows he is the only Messiah. Here is a dilemma that no Jewish person knew how to solve. During the exile, God judged the penultimate king of Judah, Jeconiah, by saying this of him:

“Thus says the LORD: ‘Write this man down as childless, A man who shall not prosper in his days; For none of his descendants shall prosper, Sitting on the throne of David, And ruling anymore in Judah.’” (Jer. 22:30)

Here was the problem: God promised Messiah through the royal line of David. But now God had just cursed that very line. Any descendant of Jeconiah both had the legal right to sit on David’s throne, but a biological curse to prevent him from doing so.

In our study on the life of David, we read the two genealogies of Jesus. The one is his legal, adoptive genealogy through Joseph, found in Matthew. The other is His biological genealogy through Mary, recorded in Luke. On Joseph’s line, Jesus is descended from David through Solomon and through Jeconiah. Jesus has the legal right to sit on the throne. He would get the curse as well, but he is not actually a child of Joseph, and so not a descendant of Jeconiah, and so doesn’t get the curse.

On the other hand, he is a descendant of David through Mary’s line. When you put them together in the virgin birth you get the only man on earth who could be a physical descendant of David, and a legal heir to David’s throne, but yet not inherit the curse of Jeconiah because he was born of a virgin and adopted by Joseph.

Truly man, truly God, truly sinless, and truly Messiah. This is what’s at stake, and what we are defending when we confess that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.

The next phrase in the creed tells us that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified. That might seem odd to say that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate. Why is this included?

On the one hand, this line anchors Jesus to historical events. The sufferings of Christ were historical, and so this creed contains the name of a provincial prefect appointed by the emperor Tiberius. Pontius Pilate’s name is found in ancient historians like Josephus and Philo, as well as his name being on some coins, and on a stone that was found Caesarea Maritima. The creed locates Jesus in recorded history.

But there is more going on here than history. The idea of the Son of God suffering would have bothered a lot of people.

To understand this, we have to remember that the world that the early church lived in was a Greek world, shaped by Greek philosophy. One of the ideas that the Greeks had was this: if there is a perfect God, then He cannot change. Perfection can’t get worse and still be perfect, and perfection can’t get better, because it is already perfect. So perfection cannot change. But to the Greeks, suffering was change. A suffering person is experiencing change: pain, injury, harm, unhappiness. That person is definitely experiencing something less than perfection. If you suffer, something is being done to you that you don’t want, and your state is changing, from happy to unhappy.

Therefore, to the Greeks, there was one thing that God can’t do, and that is suffer.

And actually, in Christian theology, we say something similar when we say God is impassible. He does not experience pain, suffering, appetites or even what some people call feelings. He has affections, and joy, and perfect desires, but He does not experience fluctuations, nor is He a victim of suffering. God’s creation doesn’t modify God.

But here in the creed, we are told Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate. They did that deliberately. They wanted us to understand that when God the Son took to Himself human nature, then the Person who was God and Man actually suffered. Yes, according to His divine nature, He was unchanging and unable to change. According to His human nature, He was able to grow, learn, and suffer.

But when Jesus was tried, beaten, scourged, mocked, spat upon, and finally crucified, it was not just a human nature. Natures can’t be beaten, whipped or crucified. Persons can. And it was the person of Jesus, whom we have seen is fully man, true Messiah, true God, and our Lord, He suffered.

When He rose from the dead, Jesus told the disciples on the road to Emmaus:

“Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?” (Lk. 24:26)

Hebrews 5:8 tells us:

“though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.”

And it is in the book on Christians’ suffering, 1 Peter, that most often tells us Jesus suffered for us. He suffered for us, both leaving us an example, and being sympathetic to us in our sufferings.

But Jesus wasn’t just tortured and set free as if there is something meritorious about pain. No, Jesus died. Why did He die?

This goes back to the Garden. God told Adam and Eve that the day they struck out for independence, they would surely die. Why? Because they were made to be reflectors and transmitters of God’s life. We bring God’s life and light and love to the world. We were meant to turn the entire world into a Garden of Eden. But in striking out for independence, we got death.

Death is both the natural result of sin, like a flower turning away from the sun, and death is also God’s penalty on sin: like cutting out and killing a cancerous growth.

Death is both what sin does to us, and what sin earns for us.

Satan thought that there was only one layer to creation: obedience brings life, and sin brings death. But there was actually a deeper layer. The deeper layer was this: you can reverse the process. If there was a man who didn’t deserve death or earn death, he would not be in debt to God. He would actually have a credit balance of life.

Also, if you killed him, the grave would reject Him, because He hadn’t earned death.

He could actually take the debt of death that others have, die and thereby pay off that debt, but then because of His own sinlessness, come back again from the dead.

This is what the Bible teaches Jesus was doing on the cross. Of course it was so complex, that the Bible has to give us multiple images so we can understand, like multiple camera angles to really understand a scene. It calls His death forgiveness, which is this idea of releasing debt. It calls His death redemption, which is the idea of paying for someone in bondage and freeing them. It calls it reconciliation, which is the idea of enemies laying down their arms and finding peace. It calls His death justifying, which is the idea of a courtroom, where a judge declares a man innocent. It calls His death a substitute, which is the image of one taking the place of another.

And perhaps greatest of all, it calls His death propitiation. This is the image of God’s justice being satisfied, the penalty fully paid, retribution fully exacted. He did that because in those three hours, Jesus experienced the essence of what death truly is for spiritual beings. It is not just the separation of body and soul. Death is banishment from the presence of God, it is being at the receiving end of God’s anger, and being separated from love and life and goodness. Hell is a place of banishment, forsakenness and forgottenness.

He experienced infinite death, being an infinite person in a finite space of time. We are finite beings, which is why we experience eternal death over an infinite space of time. But Jesus experienced the death that is ours.

In this way, God outwitted Satan, by using the death of the One who is Life, to defeat death. Paul calls this the hidden wisdom of God:

“which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” (1 Cor. 2:7-8)