Daily Bible Reading 10th March 2026 // Luke 1:26-38
26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, 27 to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. 28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!” 29 But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. 30 And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. 31 And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
34 And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
35 And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. 36 And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. 37 For nothing will be impossible with God.” 38 And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
But there is something else that the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ means to tell us, and it is this: the fact of His birth being totally different from that of any other man proclaims that in this birth God was doing a new thing. A new humanity was being called into existence by the grace of God, which means a decisive break with the old humanity. This is the point that Matthew, for example, in his gospel, seems to be making when he suggests that the story he is telling is that of the second Adam. In Genesis 1:2, 'the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters', and here, Mary is told that she will be with child of the Holy Spirit (35). The power of the Highest overshadowing her symbolised the act of new creation. The old humanity, in spite of its glory and promise, had come to grief, and now the new humanity, signifying a complete break with the old, and a new beginning, was to be ushered in.
But more still: the nature of that new humanity, that new creation, is Christ Himself, living in man. It is not only 'God manifest in the flesh', as Paul puts it in 1 Timothy 3:16, but God manifest in our flesh, living in us, made flesh in us. 'Christ liveth in me', cries Paul in Galatians 2:20, as he cries with exultation in Colossians 1:27, 'Christ in you, the hope of glory'. This is the significance of the virgin birth and of the Christmas message, and this is the ground of our rejoicing.