MacArthur on the Virgin Birth

Dr. Walvoord, president of Dallas Theological Seminary, says, "The incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ is the central fact of Christianity. Upon it the whole superstructure of Christian theology depends." The whole essence of Christianity is predicated on the fact that Jesus is God in human flesh, something that is made clear at the very birth of Christ. The virgin birth is an essential doctrine, for if Jesus had a human father, then the Bible is untrustworthy, because the Bible claims He did not have one. And if Jesus was born simply of human parents, there is no way to describe the reason for His supernatural life. His virgin birth, His substitutionary death, His bodily resurrection, and His Second Coming are a package of deity. You cannot isolate those truths, accepting only one and leaving the rest, or accepting them all but one. You must either believe all of those realities that are the manifestation of His deity or you are guilty of being inconsistent, because those truths are inseparably interrelated. And so we must face the question that Jesus posed to the Pharisees again: Whose Son is He? The son of David in humanity, and the Son of God in deity. Both of those are essential to a proper understanding of the incarnation. Jesus is God in a human body. Humanly through the lineage of David He gains the right to rule the world, and from the standpoint of deity He gains the very essence of the nature of God by having been born without a human father through the agency of the Spirit of God Himself.

So Matthew, in writing his Gospel, squarely faces his Jewish readers and the readers of all the ages as he gives them the answer in chapter 1. The genealogy of Jesus tells you that Jesus is David's son, and the birth of Jesus tells you that He is God's Son. Now if the genealogy were all that could be said with reference to His identity, then Christ would have had the legal right to be the King, but He could have never redeemed men. He could have never conquered death, sin, and Satan in hell. To accomplish that, He had to be God, and such became Jesus, the God-Man -- lOO% deity and lOO% humanity.