An Easter Reflection 2024
Speaking prophetically of John the Baptist, Malachi closes the Old Testament with these words:
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.
Malachi 4:5-6
What followed was 400 years of prophetic silence from Heaven, a time in which the nation of Israel descended into social and political chaos with deep chasms of fragmentation amongst the religious elite and the common man.
Into this suffocating spiritual darkness one starry night in northern Galilee the angel Gabriel appeared to a teenage girl named Miriam with a message that would change the course of human history.
Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.And having come in, the angel said to her, “Rejoice, highly favoured one, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women!”
But when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and considered what manner of greeting this was.Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour 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 1:26-33
Amazed, Miriam questioned Gabriel as to how this could be seeing as how she was a virgin. Here is Gabriel’s answer:
The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Highest will overshadow you, also that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God
Luke 1:35b
The biology of human reproduction is such that the female ovary gives up an ovum (egg) which lands in the fallopian tube where it is fertilized by a male sperm cell. The fertilized ovum then moves down the fallopian tube to be implanted on the wall of the uterus (womb). Fertilization, otherwise known as conception does not occur in the womb, but in the fallopian tube. There is a very good reason why Luke and Matthew chose to use the less common Greek word “gaster” when referring to Miriam’s womb, and that reason is simply that Miriam did not contribute an ovum in this process. What was conceived in her womb (not her fallopian tube) is referred to as the Holy One and the Son of God. Any biological contribution from Miriam would have rendered the conception anything but Holy because her DNA was sin tainted by means of her humanity. What was formed in her womb was entirely of God and therefore Holy. The baby that formed and grew in Miriams womb was absolutely human in every way while at the same time being the eternally pre-existing Adonai (LORD) of the Old Testament. Mankind will ponder endlessly how such a thing is possible, but a living reality it was.
As the baby grew in Miriam’s womb it developed little bones and in those bones was the usual marrow and from that marrow formed the blood products that flowed through his arteries and veins. In human reproduction, these blood products are a result of the combination of the DNA of both the mother and the father and the child is born with a sin problem because sin is passed from one generation to the next via the blood. But in the case of Miriam, this was not so. Because she did not contribute any sin contaminated DNA to the conception, the blood that formed in the body of this child was pure and undefiled by sin.
The natural question that may be raised is; Wouldn’t Miriam’s blood interact with the growing baby to provide nutrients, oxygen, etc? The answer, of course, lies in the fact that the placenta forms a barrier to that happening. Miriam’s blood flowed to the placenta and yielded up all those elements necessary to the welfare of the developing baby which were then transported via the umbilical cord to the baby’s circulatory system, but importantly, her blood and the baby’s blood never intermingled. The blood that circulated in the arteries and veins of He who was the Holy One, the Son of God remained pure and undefiled by human DNA.
In due course of time this God-man baby was born in a cave with a cattle feed trough for a crib. He grew and prospered until at the age of 30 when He commenced a three year public ministry of teaching, healing, casting out demons and performing miracles until at last He offered Himself to His Father through the eternal Spirit as a sacrifice for the sins of humanity, sins He did not carry in His body but for which He willingly became so that the righteous demands of God could be met, and they were, in Him. His perfect blood, his undefiled, pure blood was shed on that cruel Roman cross on Golgotha’s hill and he was buried in a borrowed tomb.
He paid a debt He did not owe because I owed a debt I could not pay
If this were the end of the story, it would still be breathtakingly amazing, but it is far from the end of the story. No, after three days in the tomb He got up in the orbit of His own omnipotence, He rose victorious over death, hell and the grave and ascended back to His Father in Heaven where He entered the eternal Throne room of God and sprinkled His pure, undefiled blood on the mercy seat, not seven times as the High Priest had to do in the Tabernacle on the Day of Atonement, but once, then He sat down at the right hand of the Father who exclaimed that He was completely satisfied. Perfect justice collided with abundant grace in the body of the Lord Jesus Christ and the sin question was forever settled in Heaven.
The veil is torn, the gates opened wide and whosoever will may come. His perfect blood has paid the price for the debt we all owed but couldn’t pay, and now:
If you shall confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.
Romans 10:9