In the Gospels, where we naturally look for the complete, because inspired, historical accounts of the person of Christ, more particularly in the Gospel of Luke, where He is displayed specifically as man, we find the fullest evidence of this. “The angel answered and said unto her [the virgin Mary], The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called [the] Son of God” (ch. 1:35). It is evident, therefore, though truly born of a woman, though deriving human nature [humanity] from His mother Mary, there was, even in respect to this, a divine action which distinguished our blessed Lord most signally and strongly from all others from His birth. What Rome has decreed of Mary is most true of Jesus: He, not she, was immaculate in His human nature, and this through the energy of the Holy Spirit, the result of the overshadowing power of the Highest. Hence therefore “that Holy Thing” could be His description from the first. He alone of all men was born “holy,” not made innocent and upright only, like Adam, still less — like Adam’s sons —conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity. He is designated “that Holy Thing,” it will be observed, when the question was not of what was simply divine (which indeed it would be wicked folly to doubt and needless to affirm here), but of what was human. “That holy thing which shall be born [of thee] shall be called the Son of God.”
Matthew had already presented the birth of the Lord suitably to the design of his Gospel. “When as His mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he thought on these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is begotten in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call His name Jesus: for He shall save His people from their sins. Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel, which is, being interpreted, God with us” (ch. 1:18-23). He was thus Messiah-Jehovah, called Jesus consequently (for He should save His people from their sins), the virgin’s Son, Emmanuel, according to prophecy. His humiliation, His rejection by His own people, follows, but, first of all, there is the clearest statement that what was begotten in Mary, what was born of His mother, was of the Holy Spirit. It is wretchedly low and even dangerous ground to say that Jesus was born holy because born of a virgin. He was indeed so born of the virgin, but the holiness of His humanity, though of the very substance of His mother, turned upon the miraculous conception by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus then was not only Son of God from all eternity in virtue of His divine nature, but He was so called also because of the divine energy manifest in His generation as man, and therefore the unparalleled blessedness of His conception and His birth, immeasurable though the humiliation was for Him to take manhood at all. The Babe of Bethlehem, the virgin’s Son, was not born, we may surely say, of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God in the highest sense. It was not merely as we are said to be born again, to see God’s kingdom, which Christ is never — could never be — said to be: In His case it would be altogether derogatory and a denial of His holy humanity, to say nothing of His Deity. If we may so express it, He, the man Christ Jesus, was generated holy. “The Word was made flesh.” God “was manifest in the flesh.” But even the process by which He came into the world, though “by the woman,” was the fruit of God’s power; it was a miracle of the highest rank, differing not in degree merely but in kind from the birth of Isaac, wondrous as it was, or from that of John the Baptist, filled though he were with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb.