AP

Luke 1:45   [Elizabeth … filled with the Holy Spirit …  exclaimed:] “… … Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfil his promises to her!”

As soon as Mary discovered she was pregnant, there were some people who would have had to have been told even before the ‘lump’ was evident: Joseph, her betrothed, probably her parents, and several close relatives and friends (knowing what teenagers are like!).

She and Joseph had been told by the Holy Spirit what the true back-story was, but everyone else would have had to believe what the young couple told them – an ‘impossible’ fiction!  Because Elizabeth had had a similar experience of God’s miraculous intervention in her life, she was the most likely to have believed Mary’s explanation from the beginning, but I can only imagine what it would have been like for Mary and Joseph having to face all the ‘tut-tut’s and eye-rolling.

In this situation, Elizabeth’s genuine ‘blessing’ would have meant so much to young Mary.  It was a true blessing because she held fast to her ‘believing the Lord would fulfil his promise’ in spite of all the external ‘evidence’ to the contrary.  “Now I ask you, ‘How could Mary claim to be a ‘virgin’ while she’s carrying a child in her womb?  Wasn’t she paying attention in her biology lessons at school?’”

We have something to learn from this today.  We live in an age and culture when ‘scientific’ scepticism is rife.  “How can you believe in a ‘virgin birth’ in this age of medical know-how?  How could you believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the ‘empty tomb’, when it is a medical fact that the dead can’t come back to life?  How can you believe what God declared, that he ‘spoke’ the whole Universe, and all it contains, into existence in the space of six days while ‘scientists’ are so confident about their (unproven and unprovable) theory of evolution?”.  (I want to just note here that I am convinced, personally, about ‘Six-Day Creation’ on scientific grounds as much as because God makes this very clear in Genesis 1.)

It is just as true today that “blessed is she[/he] who has believed” that what God declares in his inspired, infallible Word is true, regardless of how much a sceptical world might snigger at us, and how much we might be criticised for failing to go along with established cultural norms.

– Bruce Christian