10. Mary’s anticipation of the Saviour

Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there will be no end. (Luke 1:30–33 NKJV)

Luke the historian

Where did Luke get this information? Perhaps from Mary herself in later years when she was cared for by the apostle John. The record is in remarkable detail. We discover that the visitor is an angel whose name is Gabriel. He is often referred to as an archangel but the Bible does not describe him as such. (In fact, we have added quite lot of speculative information to the behaviour of the angels at the Nativity. Did you know that there is no record of their ‘singing’?) Gabriel describes himself as the angel who constantly stands in attendance upon God himself, waiting in his presence to fulfil his will. We first meet Gabriel in the book of Daniel where he brings messages to Daniel from heaven’s court. Later generations of Jewish teachers added a complicated hierarchy of angels and provided names for some of them too. Such extra-biblical information often filters into our minds and needs to be guarded against.

And having come in, the angel said to her, “Rejoice, highly favored one, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women!” (Luke 1:28 NKJV)

What can this young woman have made of this greeting? Gabriel describes her as ‘endued with grace’. Our translators have added the ‘highly’ measurement but she is a receiver of special grace and is God-blessed. She makes no answer to his greeting.

We may presume that she was a devout young woman but nothing can have prepared her for this visitation. She must have been terrified. It seems Mary had no prior warning of events in the hill country of Judaea where Gabriel had made an earlier visit. The Quakers used to emphasise the truth that God always speaks to our condition. That being the case we should not hurry past the next few words of the angel. Keep in mind too that he is almost certainly speaking to a teenager in her mid-teen years. If  her knowledge of Gabriel from the book of Daniel came to mind she may have had some sense that Gabriel had brought a message from God, but she can have had no inkling of what the message might be.

Gabriel speaks to allay her fears and speaks his message. She will conceive and give birth to a son. She is to call him Jesus. There were probably many little boys running about the streets of Nazareth names Jesus/Joshua. Joshua was one of the nation’s great heroes. The man who succeeded Moses as the leader of God’s people brought the people into their inheritance. Moses brought them out, Joshua brought them in. Was this an indication of Jesus’ future? Was he to be a military leader? Later Gabriel visited Joseph in his dreams and told him that the reason for the name was that he would ‘save his people from their sins’. So perhaps he is to be a freedom fighter? He was to be called Jesus but he was to bear another title too. Now the revelation comes in full force. He will be called the Son of the Highest. She was to be the virgin mother by whom God would enter the human family. And he would reign as David’s rightful heir, and his reign would be forever!  

The word of his grace

Next we have a detailed account of a miracle. I suspect that Luke being a medical man would have had particular interest in this part of the conversation.

Then Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?” (Luke 1:34 NKJV)

She was betrothed to Joseph but they were not yet married. How can this be?

I don’t want to subject this passage to any kind of clinical dissection  but there is a pattern here that is a useful road-map to our own journey into the realms of ‘how can this be?’

 And the angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God. (Luke 1:35 NKJV)

The simple answer is God! There is no human explanation that adequately explains the biological impossibility. This is not a miracle of the order that others have experienced. Sarah and Rachel were infertile and in answer to prayer God healed the mal-function. He restored a non-working function and the result was the birth of a child. But this is not a Sarah/Rachel type of miracle. Those miracles were a restoration of normal working order. This miracle would cut across all normal function and the result would be not a repair but a creation. It required divine power – dunamis, enabling power. The Holy Spirit would visit her and divine dunamis would overshadow her. All human frailty and human inability would be by-passed. God himself would accomplish this miracle.

Gabriel went on to encourage Mary’s faith with the news of her kinswoman Elizabeth’s pregnancy. It was a  lesser miracle, a miracle of repair, but it was an indication that God was already on the move. And then Gabriel added a telling sentence. The ASV renders it…

For no word from God shall be void of power. (Luke 1:37 ASV)

Other versions tend to say simply that ‘with God nothing is impossible’. That is certainly true but it is not what Gabriel said. Most of the other versions seem not to have noticed that there is a word that has escaped their notice. The Bible Greek word rhema implies an uttered word. What Gabriel declared was an important truth. Potentially, when God ‘speaks’ it changes everything because no word from God is void of power. If we were to translate it literally it would say something like…

because without powerlessness from God every word

To express that in the positive form…

Every word that comes from God has power.

So here we have the messenger of God bringing a word from God expressly to this young woman, and that word from God comes with its own power source.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.  (Isa 55:11 ASV)

We can see now the significance of Mary’s response.

Then Mary said, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word (rhema).” And the angel departed from her. (Luke 1:38 NKJV)

A word of caution

This ‘word from God’  is not a self-chosen word or a verse we happen to have found in our Bibles. This is a word that comes directly from God. This is a word that carries grace/enabling power with it, but it was still necessary for Mary to receive it. Faith, says the apostle Paul, comes by hearing, and hearing by the word (rhema) of God. Christ says ‘man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ That is not a call to Bible-believism. It is a declaration that when God speaks to us and we know that his word has been specifically addressed to us, then that word – being received brings power with it to accomplish what God has said.  The word must come from his mouth to mine!

Surely this is one of the greatest records of faith in the scripture. A young woman receives, believes this unbelievable word and believes it because she knows it has come from God. She has no more questions. She has comprehended one of the greatest of mysteries. God’s word spoken to me and taken into my ‘mouth’ has within it the power to accomplish all that God intended.  

What is God saying to you in these days? Will you believe it, will you receive it?

So now, brethren, I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified. (Acts 20:32 NKJV)