IT seems at first sight very strange that the Virgin Mary should answer the Angel Gabriel in the way that she does in Luke 1:3434Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? (Luke 1:34), when he announces to her the nativity of the promised Messiah, Who was to be born of her. Why, it may be asked, should she throw any difficulty in the way? Did it not occur to her that she was about to be married to Joseph, to whom she was betrothed at the time? And this being the case, what hindered her from concluding that the child would be their offspring in the ordinary and natural way?
We are not however, I believe, to view it in this light at all, inasmuch as Mary evidently, understood that He, whom, the Angel described to her in such remarkable terms—the Son of the Highest, the descendant of David—the Xing, whose kingdom was to have no end, was NONE LESS THAN THE MESSIAH HIMSELF, who, she knew through the Prophet Isaiah, was 'to be the promised seed of the woman, to be born of a Virgin, which being the case, she of necessity inferred that she herself was that one, the Virgin foreseen by the prophet. Her inquiry therefore bears upon this. She meant not in reality to throw any difficulty whatever in the way or to insinuate a doubt as to the truth of the promise; but rather to elicit the very answer she got, so that she was by no means surprised when the Angel told her of the supernatural character of the birth of the infant of which she was to be the mother,' that He was to be the Holy One of God, emphatically, and be in a peculiar sense, the Son of the Highest, and not her child in the ordinary way, which she must inevitably have thought had she been less instructed in scripture, less in communion with God than she was.