And Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour, and we're working our way through the book of Matthew right now, one little tiny chunk at a time in 10 minute increments every weekday.

And where do the part now, it gets a little bit awkward because it's about how a baby was conceived and the questions about babies being conceived can be weird

Especially when there's a cultural issue with virginity that had so much more to do with just virginal, biblical, ethical, ancient near- eastern notions of

purity, but it had to do with contractual obligations, it had to do with family standing in society, it had to do with family standing in society it had to do with

relationships between families and in the community and it has to do with the

genealogical lineage of people who are connected to ancient promises that they believe are

still going to come true. So there is so much at stake when it comes to the

question of how Jesus was conceived just from the perspective of Mary and Joseph and their immediate family.

Then we step back even further from that and we consider how much is at stake in the grand theological narrative of God's

Redemptive Plan and whether Jesus really does tick all the boxes or not and we

realize wow there's even bigger questions in play right here.

That is before we even get into the set of questions that come with the Virgin Birth about,

well, how did that happen and skeptics looking in from the outside and saying that doesn't

seem very likely and frankly they have a point it is very very unlikely that there would be

any kind of virgin birth ever but here we have all this other stuff around it that causes me to think well

sort of looks like there was a virgin birth here so we got a long ways to go on these questions

about the conception and birth of Jesus. Mary's role in that, Joseph's role in

that, but we left off yesterday with a question I was about to ask about some of the language

surrounding the word virgin. There's a language issue here that

makes things a little bit tricky as well. Isaiah 714, a very famous verse

predicting the arrival of the Messiah says therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign.

The Virgin will be with child and will give birth to his son and will call him Emmanuel.

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