"And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (Luke 1:35).

In these words the angel Gabriel discloses the great secret of the incarnation. He said it would be through the Holy Spirit's coming upon and overshadowing Mary in His mighty presence. Thus by this divine energy the promised Child would be conceived.

When the Holy Spirit formed the body of Jesus He did a new thing in the earth, and this thing is a mystery (1 Timothy 3:16). It is by the creative act of the Holy Spirit that our Lord received His human body (Hebrews 10:5). It was by the creative act of the Holy Spirit that "the Word was made flesh" (John 1:14), took part of human nature (Hebrews 2:14), and was made of a woman (Galatians 4:4). Only this much is revealed, and there we must stop. We shall never be able to understand apart from faith, with our finite minds, how the Son of God could, and did become man.

The Child to be born shall be a Holy Thing. This remarkable expression denotes the singularity and consequent sanctity of this birth and the peculiar holiness of the Child. He is holy in every way, without any flaw or imperfection; holy, not only as God, which He is essentially and infinitely, but also holy in His human nature; holy as having no sin within, free from sin in every sense.

It has been very significantly said: "It was necessary to the scheme of human redemption, by the Redeemer's offering Himself up as an expiatory sacrifice, that the manner of our Lord's conception should be such, that He should in no degree partake of the natural pollution of the fallen race for whose guilt He came to atone, nor be included in the general condemnation of Adam's progeny. In order to reverse the universal sentence passed upon mankind, and to purge their universal corruption, a Redeemer was to be found, pure of every stain of inbred and contracted guilt. And since every person, produced in the ordinary course of generation, could not but be of this contaminated race, the purity, requisite to the efficacy of the Redeemer's atonement, made it necessary that the manner of His conception should be supernatural. Without the miraculous conception it could not have been true, as John asserts, that 'the Word was made flesh,' and the atonement of the Redeemer would have been inadequate and ineffectual."

The Child shall be called the Son of God. The Person which is to be born of the virgin is to be called the Son of God. As to His deity Jesus Christ could not be born of the virgin; as to His humanity He was born of her. As to His deity He had no beginning. He was that Word, which was in the beginning (from eternity) with God, and which was God (John 1:1). He was God manifest in flesh (enfleshed and became manifest in human nature) and tabernacling among men (John 1:14). As to His humanity, Jesus Christ had a body formed by the Holy Spirit of the substance of the virgin Mary; hence, He had a real, not a fantastical body. In this mysterious incarnation there was a supernatural union of the divine and human natures, of deity and humanity. The man Christ Jesus is the Son of God.

—Gospel Herald