Then the angel said
to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and
bring forth a Son, and shall call His name Jesus. … Then
Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?” And the angel answered and said to her, “The
Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow
you”. – Luke 1:30-31,34-35a
This is
known in Catholicism as the Immaculate Conception. I find this very hard to reflect upon this
event by this term ever since Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris miraculously
caught a deflected pass in the waning seconds of their 1972 playoff game
against the Oakland Raiders and ran it in for a touchdown. This play became known as the Immaculate
Reception and the terms sound so much alike that I can’t hear the term without
seeing a replay of that play in my mind.
(1972 was also the year the Miami Dolphins went undefeated and won the
Super Bowl and I was a Dolphins fan when I was a kid of 12 at that time.)
If we look
at what this means biologically, it means that Jesus had DNA that combined Mary’s
and God’s. I have to believe that God’s
was perfect. The sequence would have
been without fault, a perfect creation.
Mary’s would have been imperfect, as is all of ours. It would have contained the sin disease that
we have all inherited from Adam and Eve.
I do not see how this could be different unless God healed her and made
her perfect before the conception. But I
do not see where this is indicated in Scripture.
The
importance of this for me is to realize that Jesus felt that nature inside
which calls away from God because it was a part of His genetics. When we read in Hebrews 4:15 that “we do not have a
high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who
has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet He did not sin,”
we can realize that this is indeed true.
I used to brush the tempting portion of this verse off in my thoughts since
Jesus was God. In my reasoning, there
was no real way He could effectively know the deep sometimes overwhelming pull
inside of all that I am against all that I know and hope. I mean, He was God and that type of
temptation couldn’t exist. But that is
error in thinking and reasoning. Since
He had a part of Mary in Him, He most definitely felt the sin nature. It was within His DNA.
I am
confident in how Satan attacks man. He
watches us very closely and then creates every effectual way for the world to
be presented so that it does not look like sin and is sharply pointed and
focused on that one area we are most likely to sin in or obviously haven’t
given God authority over. Knowing that,
I can only reason that Satan attacked Jesus all the time in every way looking
for that weakness. If only he could get
Jesus to commit a single sin, he wins. I
can only naturally assume the attack was way more intense than words can
describe.
“Yet He did not sin.” The perfection of God is more than the sin
nature. Where God is the authority and
rules, sin does not live. Jesus did not
sin. This means His Godly DNA was more
than his human DNA. Inside of every
saved Christian is the Spirit of God.
This same Spirit is able to be more than our human DNA if only we give
up ourselves and let that Spirit rule our lives. It is more and we can live in its
perfection. We can let its perfection
live through us. It is a constant battle
and we will have to choose decidedly over and over that our single desire is to
live however and wherever that Spirit directs us. This doesn’t mean we won’t sweat drops of
blood in anxiety as Jesus Himself did.
We will. But we must also trust
God’s direction for us, as He did.
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