Luke 1:34-37 :

Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, seeing I am a virgin?”

The angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore also the holy one who is born from you will be called the Son of God. Behold, Elizabeth, your relative, also has conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For everything spoken by God is possible.”

Here we have the first person to question the virgin birth. When we don’t understand something, it’s OK to ask God. Just because we don’t understand doesn’t make us faithless. Gabriel explains to Mary that the Holy Spirit will be the Father of her child. This is more supernatural history and one of the many popular things to deny about what the Bible says. Obviously, the God who made the world can cause there to be a virgin birth and we are able to believe this because God has made it clear to us.

The angel explains to Mary that she is not the only one to whom a miracle is occurring. I think this helps Mary to remember that this kind of activity is not unusual for God. Finally, notice the last thing Gabriel says here: “For everything spoken by God is possible.” This is where Western culture has departed from its former way. Slowly, we have begun to think that it is possible for God to make a mistake when He speaks. We start by not believing that God spoke the world into existence the way He said He did, and we continue as we don’t believe that God spoke a virgin birth into existence, and ultimately we deny that God would speak and raise the dead. Just think of all of the things that the Bible says clearly that our culture is challenging and you can see that we are failing to believe that everything spoken by God is not only possible, but must happen.

We are not to believe in all supernatural stories. We are to believe the word of God and He can do anything, including the supernatural by the power of His word.

I want to draw your attention to some of the detail that Dr. Luke provides here. He tells us that this message came to Mary when Elizabeth was six months pregnant. He also tells us that Elizabeth was a relative which informs us that John the Baptist and Jesus were closely related. The angel tells us another important thing. He refers to John the Baptist as a conceived “son.” It’s hard to call “a thing” someone’s son without intending to refer to it as a person. This is one more evidence that, in Heaven, a person starts being a person at conception.