At Christmastime, we Christians often read the story about the angel Gabriel coming to Mary and telling her about the conception of Jesus in her womb. “Then Mary said to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I do not know a man?’” (Luke 1:34). We know, of course, the rest of the story.
Think, though, about what’s implied in this account. That is, think about the kind of reality expressed here. In the secular world, a world of only “atoms and the void” (to quote someone from 2300 years ago, showing this idea is not brand new), the story here could not be possible. An angel? A supernatural being from another part of the cosmos? No way. Even worse, because the secular worldview limits the speed that anything can travel to 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light—an angel coming back and forth between heaven and earth, which could be thousands of light years apart, is another impossibility.
And long before anything like modern medicine, a virgin, conceiving, and knowing beforehand the child will be a male? Come on! These things just don’t happen in a materialist universe.
Which means, what? Of course, the worldview that the Bible depicts, though encompassing “atoms and void,” is not just limited to it, but is grander, deeper, richer, and much more multi-layered than what your high school science books teach. And, considering the promise to us, the supernatural promise to us, that because of the birth, then life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son” (1 John 5:11) —we can rejoice that the God who created this world created it much deeper, richer, and mysterious than what science alone reveals.
