Ask Mr Bible

A Diamond in a Clay Vessel

What really happened during that night of all nights in the Judean hills some 2000 years ago?

Two illustrations may prove helpful:

• The diamond/clay vessel illustration:
A perfect, priceless, and incredibly beautiful diamond is placed within a plain and lowly clay vessel.  One day, for a brief moment, a tiny hole appears in the container, resulting in the immediate outpouring of a dazzling beam of glory which temporarily blinds those who happen to see it.  This is, of course, exactly what happened in Luke 2 (Christ’s birth) and Matthew 17 (His transfiguration).

Note: 
1. The placing of the diamond:
“God was manifest in the flesh (1 Tim. 3:16)
Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same (Heb. 2:14).

2. The appearing of the hole:
“And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (Mt. 17:1, 2).

A case could be made here that, in all the universe, the strongest object ever created by God was the earthly body of Jesus!  Ponder this amazing thought: for 34 years this vessel of clay actually contained and confined the resplendent glory of Almighty God Himself, only allowing for one brief moment a tiny ray to escape, which temporarily blinded Peter, James, and John!

• The Rolls Royce/ox wagon illustration:
The owner of a $175,000 Rolls Royce ‘Gray Ghost’ automobile is suddenly and mysteriously transported in ‘twilight zone’ fashion to Earth’s most remote area where the residents are still in the stone age.  After recovering from the initial shock, the man notices their only means of transportation involves the hitching of oxen to crude wooden carts or wagons.  Sitting in his Rolls, surrounded by luxury, the owner soon realizes there are two courses of action open to him.

1. He can place the auto in gear and, using its awesome power, literally leave those simple natives in the dust.

2. He can keep the motor running, ease the auto in neutral, and allow his magnificent machine to be pulled by a lowly oxen.

After some thought, the second option is decided upon.  But why?  For some reason, he feels a strong desire to know these people.  He wants to travel at their pace, learn their language, experience their pain, and to befriend as many as possible!  This is exactly what Jesus did when He came to our God-rejecting planet, carrying with Him all the glorious attributes of His Divine nature.  He then clothed Himself in human flesh, agreeing to eat our food, drink our water, speak our language, and die for our sins!

Is the Virgin Birth Still Considered a Miracle?  In view of cloning?

The following response comes from Dr. Charles Detwiler, Biology Professor at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA.

“Human beings will soon be able to cause a human egg cell with a somatic cell nucleus taken from another person to develop to full adulthood.  This adult will be a “clone” of the original adult from whom the somatic cell nucleus was taken.  If this sort of process is experimentally feasible, must we still view the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ as being dependent on a miracle?  Wouldn’t a slight alteration have occurred in the womb of Mary that would allow one of her ova to commence development and to produce the body of our Lord?”

Parthenogenesis, the development of unfertilized eggs to adulthood, is known to occur albeit rarely in the animal kingdom.  The main problem in viewing Christ’s birth in this way, is that the offspring of this process are invariably female in gender unless the maternal parent is able to store sperm within her body.  Scripture explicitly states (Luke 1:34) that Mary was a virgin—that she had not had a sexual relationship with any man.  It also states (Matt. 1:25) that she had no such union until after the birth of Christ.  If, therefore, it is not possible for a human sperm cell to have been within the virgin Mary’s body, and if Jesus was genetically and therefore biologically a male, clonal descent from his mother is simply not possible.  There is only one possibility left.

The maternal contribution of Mary must have received sufficient genetic information to have produced a normal male body for our Savior to inhabit.  This required the presence of biological information that simply could not have resided within Mary’s own genetic information.  Scripture clearly indicates that this information did not find its source in the body of Joseph or any other human male alive at the time.  The conception of Christ must have been, as always assumed in Christian teaching, a miracle.  Jesus Christ’s body could not have been a clone of anyone present on earth at the time.  Rather, in some miraculous way, the Holy Spirit of God, produced within the body of His precious “daughter” a deposit of information sufficient to generate, biologically, “the son of Abraham, and the son of David.”  And in a still higher miracle that same Holy Spirit infused that body with His own Being, such that our Savior was entirely, the son of Abraham, the son of David, and the son of God.

When we consider the soul of man, genetic cloning contains its own mysteries that biologists will not by their technical methods account for or explain.  But the conception of our Lord is a miracle of biological and theological proportions vastly beyond the scope and possibility both of cloning technology and normal conception of mortal human beings.  Could it have been the greatest miracle ever to have come from the hand of Almighty God?