THE modernist is wont to sneer at those who believe in the Virgin Birth of Christ. One reason which he gives is that "the evidence is very slight, resting at best on two or three passages of Scripture." As though for the Spirit of God to say a thing once should not he sufficient! Trumbull calls attention to the fact that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth "looms into view at at least seven points in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments." His handling of the subject is vital and sheds new light on familiar Scriptures.

NOTHING less than "a lamb without spot and blemish" was sufficient to make atonement for the sins of Israel under the Old Testament Dispensation. Only that kind of lamb could adequately be a type of the One Whom His forerunner finally introduced to his generation and to all generations as "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." One reason why God's wrath was kindled against Israel in the days of the prophet Malachi was because they were offering spotted and blemished lambs for sacrifice.

When ye offer the blind for sacrifice, is it no evil? and when ye offer the lame and sick, is it no evil? offer it now unto thy governor: will he be pleased with thee? or will he accept thy person? saith the Lord of hosts (Mai. 1:8).

This same sin of Malachi's day is all too prevalent in our own, for when men deny the virgin birth of our Lord they make Him the son of a human father, which would mean that He had original sin in Him, and hence could not have been in God's sight a spotless lamb, nor that Lamb Who could take away the sin of the world. The Pharisees of our Lord's day once pointed the finger of scorn at Him, saying, "We be not born of fornication," intimating, as the context in John's Gospel seems very clearly to show, that they believed that He was, and brought down upon themselves His condemnation, "Ye are of your father, the devil." It was a terrible rebuke to them for denying the virgin birth — but it was God's own truth.

It is commonly said in this day in which this great fundamental doctrine is so largely denied that the Scriptures as a whole have very little to say about the virgin birth, and that Paul particularly is silent. But the truth is that this wondrous doctrine looms up into view at at least seven points in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. God Himself predicted it in the first promise, the prophet Isaiah enlarged upon it, the prophet Jeremiah described it as a wondrous "new thing," two Gospel writers record the fulfilment of the prophecies of it, and the Apostle Paul twice refers to it.

THE first message of Divine redemption, the "primeval promise," we call the Protevangelium, where God in His last interview with man in Eden said: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her Seed; He shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel." It was a marvelous promise, but poor Eve did not fully grasp its significance, for when Cain was born she said, "I have gotten a man, even Jehovah!" Thus Rotherham and the Companion Bible give the literal translation of Genesis 4:1. Eve thought that the wonderful promise was to be immediately fulfilled, and she was not able to distinguish between the meaning of "seed" and "son." The verb in Genesis 3:15 is singular masculine, which shows that the word for seed, zer'a, is to be taken as singular, and that it means the Christ Who was to be in a peculiar way the Seed, not of the man, but of the woman. Upon this foundation promise and truth the rest of the Scriptures are built, and because the Modernist rejects this basal, fundamental truth he is making Scripture a human book, since it cannot be understood except upon a true interpretation of the Protevangelium, God's prediction four thousand years be forehand of the virgin birth.

ONE day when unbelieving King Ahaz and his military engineers were holding a conference "at the end of the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field" (Isa. 7:3), evidently planning how to conserve the water supply of Jerusalem during the expected siege by the kings of Syria and Israel (Isa. 7:1), the prophet Isaiah suddenly appears, full of assurance that God will help if the king will only trust in. him and not carry out his contemplated alliance with Assyria. The king with hypocritical piety declares that he will net "tempt Jehovah," and then the prophet, declaring that the whole apostate, house of David is a weariness to God (Isa. 7:13), goes on to say that the Lord Himself will give a sign, and this it is: "A virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (Isa. 7:14). Volumes have been written in an effort to show that there was a double reference here, to some immediate event in which a girl who was then a virgin but about to be married would soon conceive and bear a child, and that from this immediate fulfilment the prophecy leaps forward to the birth of our Lord. But to apply this prophecy to the birth of a child through the ordinary course of nature would discredit it as a prophecy of the later miracle of the miraculous birth of our Lord. Such careful Bible students as the late Drs. A. B. Simpson and C. I. Scofield point out that the prophet has turned from the unbelieving king personally to address the whole "house of David" (v. 13), and was giving "a continuing prophecy addressed to the Davidic family," which at once accounts for the "instant assent of Mary" at the annunciation by Gabriel (Luke 1:38).

This prophecy of the incarnation seven hundred and fifty years before its fulfilment was the most marvelous sign ever given to Israel and to the human race at large, unless it be the resurrection itself.

PROPHECY records the place of our Lord's nativity (Micah 5:2), and of his rearing (Matt. 2:23), and of his preaching (Hag. 2:7; Mai. 3:1), but we are not very often reminded that it also records even the place of his conception, for in Jeremiah 31:22 we read: "Jehovah hath created a new thing in the earth: a woman shall encompass a man." That this stupendous "new thing" — this something unprecedented, this event out of the ordinary course of nature touching One Who IS at once God and man, and Whose like never existed before— took place in Hebron, in Judah, is the conviction of Jamieson, Fausset and Brown in comparing Luke 1:39 with Joshua 21:11; and it is claimed that the words "in the land" are a better translation than "in the earth," as both the Authorized and the Revised Versions have it. "The land" is a frequent Bible phrase to describe the home of the Chosen. People. Not all commentators are agreed that this passage is a prediction of the virgin birth, but it was the view of Augustine and almost unanimously of the Church Fathers. Jeremiah is giving as a reason why the exiled should desire to return to their own country, the fact that Christ was to be conceived there. The word "created" implies the putting forth of divine power such as might have been properly fulfilled in the statements in. Luke 1:35 and Hebrews 10:5. And the Hebrew word for "man" here means "a mighty one." It is the word used in Zechariah 13:7 to describe Christ as Jehovah's "fellow." Wonderful prediction indeed –that a woman was about to encompass Jehovah's fellow!

THE next prophecy of the virgin birth was made six hundred years later, and this time by the mouth of an angel, and just before fulfilment. "When Mary tells out her pure-minded astonishment," as Bergin expresses it in an article on this subject in the Believers' Magazine of April, 1907, "the angel unfolds how Jehovah will create the new thing." "The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee: wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God" (Luke 1:35). This would have been impossible except that "with God nothing shall be impossible," as the angel tells Mary, and as God wants us also to believe today. The New Testament begins with a great procession of "begats." They start with "Abraham begat Isaac" and end with "Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary." With the ending of this genealogy Matthew brings out a striking contrast, going on to say that "The begetting" of Jesus Christ was after a different fashion, but unfortunately all the translations begin Matthew 1:18 thus, "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise." But the word in the Greek is "gennesis," and is as accurately and literally to be translated "begetting" as "birth." The Companion Bible renders the verse thus: "The begetting, then, of Jesus Christ was on this wise (for after his mother was espoused to Joseph, she was found with child) of the Holy Spirit." Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, in Whom the house of David headed up, was different in His begetting from all other kings of Israel. In Luke is revealed that Mary is to be, without marriage, the mother of the prophesied Seed, and in Matthew 1:18-25 is revealed the fact that Joseph's fears that his betrothed had sinned were utterly groundless, and that she needed not to be put away, but on the contrary he was about to be honored in having as his wife the mother of Immanuel, "God with us," the woman who was the means by which God became manifest in the flesh!;

PAUL is the greatest interpreter of our blessed Christianity, which is nothing less than Christ Himself. But Paul, say the Modernists, never mentions the virgin birth, and therefore Paul did not believe it! Let us see:

In Galatians 4:4 Paul says, "When the fulness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman." Says the writer already quoted in the Believers' Magazine: "Notwithstanding the fact that this form of expression is found referring to ordinary generation — (see Job 14:1), 'Man that is born of woman,' yet remembering that it is not Paul's usual way of writing (see Romans 1:3), 'born of the seed of David,' and that the prediction of God given in Eden, in the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah, was well known to him; that he was cognizant of the marvelous fulfilment of them as recorded in the Gospels, it can scarcely be denied with fairness of exposition that we have here a designed allusion to the virgin birth of our blessed Lord."

"Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in child-bearing if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety," so reads I Timothy 2:14-15 in the Authorized Version. The Revised Version reads, "she shall be saved through her child-bearing," but in a footnote it says, "or, the childbearing."

It is difficult to think that Paul is speaking here only of woman fulfilling her proper destiny. Woman was given the promise of safe delivery in child-birth in Eden, and it was a promise spoken as well to all generations of women and without any condition of godliness. Paul is drawing a marvelous contrast here; he is showing that even though sin did originate with "the woman" rather than the man, deliverance from sin came through "the woman" rather than the man, for it was her Seed in a very peculiar sense Who became the Deliverer. Evidently he was referring to that wonderful child-bearing of the virgin birth.

There is the finest of scholarship to bear out this interpretation, including Bishop Ellicott himself.

There are many who are questioning today the wonderful truths here considered. Is it not the sin of refusing to entertain any adequate conception of the "exceeding sinfulness of sin" that makes men reject the truth of the virgin birth and lead others to do so? We can set before ourselves no richer meditation for this Christmas time than the meaning of the incarnation — how God planned in past eternity to save mankind from sin through One Who should be born without the slightest taint of sin. Who was even before His birth "that holy thing" in the womb of the virgin, and Who was brought forth and laid in swaddling clothes in the manger at Bethlehem whence He carried to the Cross a sinless life to be accepted there by His Father God as the substitutionary Atoner for a race of sinners. It was there on Calvary that the sinless Seed of the woman bruised the serpent's head. Hallelujah!