Examining the Virgin Birth (Selected Scriptures)

• I’d like to invite you to take your Bible this  morning as we look together at the birth of   Christ. We’re going to consider several passages  and so just have it ready. You can follow along   as we go from place to place and consider  the meaning of the birth of Jesus Christ. History has revealed some interesting births,  some amazing births, some miraculous births.
• In   the Old Testament and New Testament, some rather  spectacular men were born in rather spectacular   fashion. I think, for example, of the birth  of Isaac, born to nearly 100-year-old barren   parents who were laughing at the thought that  a barren wife could give birth at that age,   and Isaac became the fulfillment of the  Abrahamic covenant in its first great step.
• I think of the amazing birth of Samson. The  wife of Manoah was barren. Her womb, by God’s   omnipotent hand, was opened up to give birth  to a child who could turn a lion inside out,   who could kill a thousand men  with the jawbone of an ass,   and who could pull by his own strength an  entire temple down from its top to bottom.
• I think of the birth of Samuel to the  barren Hannah whose womb the Lord had shut,   and in providence God opened her womb and she gave  birth to that unique prophet, priest, and anointer   of kings, one of the great men of all time,  Samuel. I think of the birth of John the Baptist   to Zechariah, a humble priest, and to Elizabeth,  who was called barren, but in old age by a miracle   of God was given a child who turned out to be the  greatest man who had ever lived up until his time.
• Miracle births. So shocked and unbelieving  was Zechariah at the thought of Elizabeth   bearing a son that God took away his ability to  speak, and he had to endure her entire pregnancy   without being able to tell anybody that at last  his wife would have a child. Miracle births. There have been also in history some astounding  births – not miraculous but nonetheless amazing.
• In the 1930’s, there was the birth of the Dionne  quintuplets and received international attention,   five children born at one time to the same mother.  More recently we have had further quintuplets,   and in 1973 in Colorado were born the Stanek  sextuplets, six babies. But there has never   been as unusual a birth in the human world, the  non-miraculous world, as that of little Louise   Brown, 5 pounds 12 ounces, born to John and Leslie  Brown of Lancashire England on July 25th, 1978.
• Oh, God has miraculously reversed barrenness  in the past. God has opened closed wombs,   God has even allowed man to give birth to  multiple children, but for the first time   God permitted a baby to be born which  was conceived outside the human body.   Little Louise Brown was the test tube baby.