Matthew 1:18-20
Good News Translation (GNT)
This was
how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. His mother Mary was engaged to
Joseph, but before they were married, she found out that she was going to have
a baby by the Holy Spirit. Joseph was a man who always did what was right,
but he did not want to disgrace Mary publicly; so he made plans to break the
engagement privately. While he was thinking about this, an angel of
the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, descendant of David, do
not be afraid to take Mary to be your wife. For it is by the Holy Spirit that
she has conceived.
Joseph loved Mary. She had gone to visit her cousin and had
stayed there for at least three months. Now on her return she was obviously
pregnant. He asked her how it happened. She gave him a very unbelievable story about
how an angel had told her she would have a baby by the Holy Spirit. She told
him, furthermore, that she had been absolutely faithful to him. God had put the
baby inside of her. In Joseph’s eyes, as it would be in the world’s eyes, it
was obvious that Mary had had some relation with a man. The contemporary
experts openly accused Christ as being the child of fornication.
According to Roman law, Joseph could and should divorce Mary. According to
Levitical law, she should be stoned to death. But Joseph loved Mary, so he was
going to try and not embarrass her. He would separate from her quietly, and she
could stay with her parents until the baby was born. Mary’s parents could take
the baby as their own, and she would then still be marriageable or whatever
else she wanted to do with her life.
This expert opinion reminds me of an exhibit I saw in Yellowstone
National Park that pointed to a mountainside that had a large number of fossil
trees, many of them vertical. A sign gave the expert explanation of how it had
happened: “Across the valley rise the slopes of Specimen Ridge, but the forest
you see there today is only the latest chapter in a remarkable story. Buried
within the volcanic rocks that compose the mountain are twenty-seven distinct
layers of fossil forest that flourished 50 million years ago. Sporadic volcanic
eruptions occurring over a period of about 20 thousand years buried many
successive forests under blankets of ash and volcanic debris. Groundwater
seeping through the silica-rich volcanic debris fossilized the buried
vegetation. Movements of the earth’s crust and erosion have revealed the layers
of buried forests at several localities in the park.”
I had several friends, experts or self-proclaimed experts,
point out to me that it was obvious that one could count the rings on these
petrified trees and it must have taken at least 20,000 years for these various
forests to have been buried in succession, so the earth as we know it must have
been around for at least 20,000 years. I’m no expert, and I certainly wasn’t
about to argue with them.
Then on May 18, 1980, Mt St Helens erupted under the
observation of the world’s greatest experts. The original Spirit Lake on its
slope was destroyed with ash but an even larger new Spirit Lake was formed. A
vast layer of trees that had been killed by the eruption floated over the
surface of the lake. Over the succeeding 20 years or so these floating logs
became water logged and sank. Many of them settled vertically in the water,
with their roots hanging down. Geologists recognized that had another eruption
or series of eruptions filled the new lake with ash, it would have produced the
same type of exhibit as Specimen Ridge. And 20 years is vastly different from
20,000. Some geologists pointed this out to the National Park Service. They
removed the now embarrassing signs at the exhibit.
In similar fashion, the visit of the angel to Joseph in a
dream, convinced him in spite of the opinion of experts that Mary’s story was
correct and he must marry Mary and raise Jesus as his own son.
Thank You, Lord, for sometimes stepping in and nixing our
expertly reasoned misconceptions. Help us to review them as graciously as did
Joseph.
