There are two sets of people, who go terribly astray on the subject of the Virgin Mary, the Rationalists and the Ritualists. The Rationalists, in other words, the Modernists, often say they do not believe in the virgin birth, or that it matters not one way or the other what is believed on the subject.
The Ritualists, in other words the Roman Catholics, exalt the Virgin Mary to be “the mother of God,” to whom worship and prayer are to be made. Further on her behalf a papal decree has falsely set forth that hers was an “immaculate birth,” that is the Virgin Mary was born sinless, and without a trace of the fall.
Both of these positions are blasphemous. Both are born of ignorance of God, an opposition to His Word.
Those who refuse to believe the Virgin Birth throw doubt on Genesis, Isaiah, Matthew, and Luke. They cease to have any right to call themselves Christian men.
Let us see how the Modernists flout Scripture in refusing to believe the virgin birth.
Genesis 3:15. When our first parents fell, the striking prophecy came from the lips of God Himself. “I will put enmity between thee [the serpent, Satan] and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel.” Think of the wonder of this. Moses inscribing on tablets of clay these words in the wilds of the Sinaitic Desert. Who told Moses to write of the women’s seed?
He knew that physiologically no such thing existed in the natural world. He certainly would not have written as he did if he had not been inspired of God to do so—to point out the Virgin Birth so early in the world’s history.
Moses tells us these are the Words of GOD. These modernistic ministers tell us it does not matter what we believe on the subject.
Let us pursue the enquiry a little further.
Isaiah 7:14. “Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign: Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son and shall call His name Immanuel.”
Here seven centuries before the birth of Christ the Virgin Birth is given as a SIGN by the Lord Himself. It does not matter whether we pay attention to the sign or not, says the Modernists. Can there be anything more contemptuous, more blasphemous?
The sign was definite. The Son born of the Virgin was Immanuel (God with us). By this sign is divinely marked out that “God was manifest in flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16); that “the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14).
We come to the New Testament. The beginning of Matthew’s Gospel gives us the account of the Virgin Birth from Joseph’s side; that at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel gives Mary’s side. Both accounts are satisfying. A difficult situation is cleared up with the utmost delicacy and beauty of description.
Joseph’s doubts are cleared up by the angel of the Lord appearing to him in a dream, telling him that what was conceived in the Virgin’s womb was of the Holy Ghost. We are told that “all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying. “Behold [literally THE] virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us” (Matt. 1:23).
This wonderful sign is a matter of indifference to the Modernist. The word of the Lord Himself is a matter he can take notice of or not, as it suits him. Such an attitude betrays the blind unregenerate carnal mind. No Christian can take this attitude, so insulting to God and the Scriptures, and the Saviour of mankind.
In Luke’s Gospel Mary has her difficulty, but with similar delicacy, as is exhibited in the Gospel of Matthew, she is assured that this wonderful honour has been put upon her, that she, the chosen Virgin, should bear a Son, and that He should be called JESUS (Jehovah-Saviour).
It is upon the infallible Word of God that our faith in the great and vital fact of the Virgin Birth is based, and the more we search the Scriptures the more our faith is confirmed.
We turn now to the side of the Ritualist. The Virgin Mary was born with a sinful nature. That she was the subject of the gracious work of the Spirit of God in her soul, there is no doubt. She was indeed a saint and a prepared vessel for this great honour put upon her. Her outburst of praise to God—a veritable mosaic of Old Testament quotations, proving her intimate knowledge of Scripture, in the presence of Elizabeth, the expectant mother of the forerunner of the Messiah, John, the Baptist, is a beautiful testimony to us.
She exclaims, “My spirit has rejoiced in God MY Saviour” (Luke 1:47). Like all who are taught of God she recognised her sinful estate and that she needed a Saviour, and had found One in God Himself. How can such a dogma as the immaculate conception, viz: that the Virgin Mary was born sinless, be promulgated in the face of her own confession of sinnership in the finding of God as Saviour?
The Lord was sinless, though born of a Virgin, who needed a Saviour, as we have seen; He had no sinful father, but the Holy Ghost’s power came upon Mary so that it could be said to her, “That HOLY thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
Adam was created innocent; his descendants are conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity (Ps. 51:5), which simply means that since sin came into the world man’s sad heritage is a sinful nature. The Son of God in His manhood was alone holy. We have a threefold testimony as to this, “Who knew no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21); “Who did no sin” (1 Peter 2:23); “In Him is no sin (1 John 3:5).
Then again how illogical to call the Virgin Mary “the Mother of God.” A mother—a human mother as Mary was—is antecedent to her son. But God is from all eternity to all eternity, without beginning or end. Who can be His mother?
There are in the Roman Catholic hierarchy men of acute intellect and great scholarship, and yet this blasphemous and illogical title is given to a sinful woman, who needed a Saviour.
Again, as to making the Virgin Mary the object of worship, and the one to whom prayer is to be made. Only God should be worshipped. To worship the creature is blasphemous. To say that the Virgin Mary’s heart being tender and compassionate, she should be approached to intercede with her Son, and soften His heart, is indeed strange, and an insult to her, as it is a blasphemous libel upon her Son.
When our Lord was on earth, did not the sinful and distressed, the sick and the diseased, come direct to Him? Never one was rebuffed. Never once do we read of their asking His mother to intercede for them. The Lord never refused any supplicant. “And great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them ALL” (Mark 12:15). Does not 1 Timothy 2:5, at one stroke sweep away the intercessor and saints of the Romish system, when it says definitely, “There is… ONE Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus; who gave Himself a ransom for all” (1 Tim. 2:5-6). The Virgin Mary did not give herself a ransom, but our Lord did, and He, who did that, may well be trusted in the matter of approach to Him, and not to any intermediary. Such an attitude puts more honour on the Virgin than approaching her, as if her qualities of tenderness and compassion were superior to His, and that He needed intercession to soften His heart and persuade Him to be compassionate.
Surely such a system as gives “a big Virgin and a little Christ” could not exist, if the Scriptures were read and studied.
Let us see the place Scripture gives to the Virgin Mary. Reading the Scriptures in the knowledge of the lengths of unscriptural adulation to which Ritualism has gone in regard to the Virgin Mary, it looks as if this tendency was foreseen. Quietly, and none the less effectively, the Virgin Mary is given rightful honour, but no more. She is indeed “blessed among women.”
The angel tells her she is “highly favoured” (Luke 1:28). Could any woman have a higher favour than to be the mother of our Lord according to the flesh? “Blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:28), is the salutation of the angel. “Blessed” she certainly was. Note, it does not say “Most blessed.” The language is restrained. No room for Mariolatry there.
There is a beautiful scene depicted in Luke 2:25-35. Simeon “just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel” went by the Spirit into the Temple. At that very time “the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do after the custom of the law,” thereupon Simeon took the wondrous child into his arms, and blessed God, and turning to “Joseph and His mother … blessed them.”
The word “blessed” is used in two senses. Simeon blessed God in the sense of the creature worshipping the Creator, the worship that man can give rightly alone to God, and which God alone can rightly receive.
But there is another sense in which the word, blessed, can be used. We read in Scripture, “Without all contradiction the less is blessed of the better” (Heb. 7:7). We read that “Jacob blessed Pharaoh” (Gen. 47:10)—he, the man who knew God was morally greater than a heathen monarch, though he might be the mightiest in the world at that time.
Now note Simeon blessed Joseph and Mary. He did not bless the Child with them. That would have been altogether wrong. “The less is blessed of the better.” The Lord was not “the less” nor was Simeon “the better” and he knew that the Child was God’s salvation, the Lord’s Christ. Surely Mariolatry is rebuked in a scene like this.
Mark 15:40. “There were also women looking on afar off; among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome.” Here we find the Virgin Mary’s name is second to Mary Magdalene’s first. Further she is not described as the mother of our Lord, but of James and Joses. and Salome (see Mark 6:3). The Romish Church denies that the Virgin Mary had other children than our Lord, but Scripture states it plainly. The supernatural did not set aside the natural.
Matthew 27:56. “Among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s children.” Again, the Virgin Mary is named second to Mary Magdalene, and said to be the mother of James and Joses, and not of our Lord.
Matthew 28:1. “In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. “The other Mary” is most probably “the mother of our Lord.” She is put second again to Mary Magdalene, and we can identify her as being “the other Mary.”
John 19:25. “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus (1) His mother and (2) His mother’s sister, (3) Mary the wife of Cleophas, and (4) Mary Magdalene.” Here the Virgin Mary is put first, but simply one of four, but described as “His mother.”
John 20:11. “But Mary [Magdalene] stood without at the sepulchre weeping”—“Jesus says to her, Mary” (v. 16). It is remarkable that it was Mary Magdalene, and not the Virgin Mary, that had the supreme honour of welcoming her risen Lord, as He made Himself known as the Good Shepherd that called His sheep by names—“Mary” and became the bearer of the wonderful message to the disciples, “I ascend to My Father and your Father: and to My God and your God” (v. 17).
Acts 1:14. “These all continued with one accord in praise and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brethren.” Here “the women” are mentioned first, then “Mary the mother of Jesus and with His brethren.” The fact that the Lord’s brethren according to the flesh are mentioned will account for “the mother of Jesus,” being the description used.