The Cradle Of Christian Truth: Apostles’ Creed (Part 8)—Conceived by the Holy Spirit, Born of the Virgin Mary

by on March 25, 2025 | Comment

One of the flavors of the day in movies and television seems to be the reboot. You take an old story and retell it in a new way. Or you take an old character and reset the storyline, setting aside the previous tellings and installments so that you can start over. Not long ago, commercials were released for a movie based on Disney World’s Haunted Mansion ride. The trouble is that I remembered watching that movie already. I thought it was not that long ago that I saw that movie, but when I looked it up, it turns out the first movie came out twenty years ago. That realization was a real shock to the system. Ben-Hur got remade. There have been three franchises attempting a story about Spider Man, four franchises about Batman, James Bond got rebooted, and comedies get remade all the time.

We seemingly have a sense that the same story needs to be repeated, presumably on the premise that the story can be told better or to better affect. Often times, people prefer the original, hating it when their favorite embodiment of a particular story is victim to some tinkering. On the other hand, sometimes a story needs a hard reset. It needs to begin again because the first outworking went wonky or perhaps the ending was poorly executed.

The point is that the Bible includes a rebooted storyline, one we should all agree needed a reset. That story began with Adam. Adam was created good and upright with the commission to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. More specifically, he should have continued in righteousness to expand the garden that God made for him across the world. He should have exercised dominion as a holy king over creation under God’s direct relation. Instead, he ruined the world by sinning and introducing death for us all.

We needed a new Adam, a final Adam, the last Adam, who would take up the mission that God gave to our first father but who would succeed where he failed, even reversing all the ruin that the first Adam brought. We need a reboot to the story that Adam spearheaded.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is that reboot. Christ came as the new head of God’s people to roll back all the destruction Adam subjected the world to, to pay for the sin that all his people have committed in the wake of the fall, and to bring life into a world plagued by death. Jesus Christ has taken over the role that Adam was meant to play, but we should all agree that his version of the story vastly outweighs what happened in light of Adam’s work.

As we work through the Apostles’ Creed, we come to the phrases, “. . .conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary. . .” In our last study, we took up the doctrine of Christ’s two natures, that the one divine person subsists in the divine nature and in his human nature. We could explore the same point from these phrases. Namely, the Holy Spirit’s conception of Christ marks his divinity as one who comes directly from God because he is God. On the other hand, that he was truly born of the virgin Mary underscores how he took his true humanity from her. He did not just appear to be born. He was truly born in the normal ways apart from the nature of his conception, entering into a true human experience.

As we have already covered that ground and want to make progress in understanding new implications and applications from the Creed, we can simply note here how we have a sort of repetition of the same idea that Jesus Christ is “his only begotten Son, our Lord.” Jesus Christ was and is truly God and truly man.

These phrases about Christ’s conception and entry into this world also mark another set of ideas, especially as we consider the texts that ground our doctrine of the person of Christ and when we think about the reasons why the virgin birth was necessary. Our main point is that Christ succeeded where Adam failed, to secure new creation life for his people.

Re-creation

In Luke 1’s account of how the virgin birth came to be, we find the conversation between Mary and the angel Gabriel wherein he explained to her that God had chosen her to be the mother of the Messiah. Protestants have come to develop a sensitivity about Mary because of her role in Roman Catholic thought. Certainly, she was a sinner who needed a Savior. Thankfully also, God chose her to play an amazing role in the history of redemption, namely giving birth to God the Son and being the source of his human nature.

Despite the liberal attempts to deny that the Bible teaches the virgin birth, this conversation makes that truth pretty clear. Gabriel explains what will happen in verses 30–33, specifically noting: “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.” Mary’s response identifies the issue she saw as problematic: “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” She recognized that virginity was an obstacle in the normal course of having a baby. Gabriel’s answer seems to confirm that her hesitation was correct, but that God had ways around that issue: “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.” Notice he did not say, “Well, you’ll marry Joseph soon.” He said, “The Holy Spirit will bring divine power to bear on this situation so that your child is noticeably the Son of God.”

We should pause to grab hold of the wider significance of this conversation. On the obvious level, Jesus’ birth from the virgin Mary fulfills the Old Testament prophecies of the coming Messiah. It clarifies some of the tension points about the Messiah on the one hand, and how God will directly save his people on the other. God the Son is coming as the Messiah to save his people.

Furthermore, the imagery of how the Holy Spirit will effect this virgin conception is meant to remind us of the original creation narrative. Whereas here in conceiving God the Son in Mary’s womb, the Spirit comes upon and overshadows, Genesis 1:1–2 says: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (emphasis added). There is a similarity of the Spirit’s action here; both use a kind of bird-like imagery to depict how the Spirit worked in creation and the birth of Christ.1 The connection we need to see is that just as the Spirit set the stage for the first Adam to enact his role on the stage of creation, the Spirit is setting the stage for God the Son to come as the last Adam to bring about new creation. Jesus is the author of re-creation, by coming to reboot the first creation with the story of a faithful Adam.

Representation

To explore the connection of the Spirit’s role in conceiving the Son in the virgin’s womb with Christ as the new Adam, and the need for new creation, let us meditate on Romans 5:16–19:

And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

There is a parallel running between Adam and Christ, contrasting the results of the work each of them performed. Adam’s work brought judgment and condemnation upon all humanity because his sin made us all sinners and introduced death into the human experience. We have explained this traditionally by saying that Adam represented us in the covenant that God made with him.

Consider this concept through international sports. Every other year, we watch some form of the Olympic games. When the Americans compete in any of the events, we talk about it as if “we won” or “we lost” depending on the outcome of their attempt. If they obtain the medal, their victory applies to the people of the whole nation. If they come dead last, their defeat belongs to us all. Those athletes represent us on the field of competition.

In the first covenant at creation, Adam represented the entire human race, with the potential to secure an everlasting enjoyment of confirmed righteousness in the expanding garden kingdom had he just killed the serpent, casting that demonic herald out of the garden. Instead, he succumbed to the temptation to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Since he represented us, in that first sin, we all sinned and were left condemned.

That is one reason why God the Son had to come born of a virgin. The Savior could not have descended from Adam because all whom Adam represented became sinners in his defeat. That reason stands behind Westminster Shorter Catechism 16: “Did all mankind fall in Adam’s first transgression? The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity; all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him, in his first transgression” (emphasis added). Thankfully, Jesus Christ did not come from Adam by ordinary generation. The virgin birth secured a break from the line of Adam’s original sin. Christ’s representation of his people provides a new record in place of the old Adam’s failure.

Righteousness

There is a finer point to put on this whole discussion. God created humanity in his image so that we would reflect him into creation. We were meant to bear his likeness at the creaturely level in order to manifest his goodness and splendor into the world. Being made in the image of God to reflect God’s character explains why Adam needed to obey God and demonstrate his righteousness in that first covenant.

In other words, creation demands a faithful Adam. In order to exist in fullest fellowship with God in everlasting communion, our representative had to render perfect obedience. The next lines of the Creed turn to consider Christ’s sufferings to pay the penalty for our sin. As we think about his virgin birth, we think about his faithful life. Reformed theology has tended to talk about this category as Christ’s active obedience. Namely, he actively rendered the sort of obedience that the first Adam was supposed to give at creation. By living the perfect life, Christ earned our citizenship in heaven and kickstarted the new creation.

So, not only Christ’s death, but also Christ’s life matters at an eternal level. He came in our nature to live a true human life because we needed someone to overturn the first Adam’s disobedience with a record of perfect obedience. By his righteousness, Jesus has performed all that was required of us under the law, earning for us the right to eat from the tree of life in the new creation. This tells us why, to answer an old question, Jesus could not just show up in human nature and immediately die in our place. He had more work to do than that.

The best reboot of any story is how Jesus Christ has recapitulated the history of failure told across the centuries, beginning with the first Adam, continuing through Israel, running all the way down to you and me. Every person descending from Adam by ordinary generation has failed to measure up to what was originally demanded of us, to be God’s faithful representatives on earth. But the last Adam, descending from Mary as the seed of the woman promised since the fall, coming from God as the Father’s eternal Son, has demonstrated full righteousness, showing God’s immense love for us in doing for us what we were supposed to do to show our love for him. He kept our end of the bargain in our place, showing that he is the faithful God providing everything we need to have everlasting communion with him.

Note

  1. Ben Myers, The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism, Christian Essentials (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 43.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

You can find the whole series here.

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