Difficulty accepting the virgin birth?

If you're like me, you probably have some difficulty with the concept of the virgin birth recorded in the gospel of Luke. As a piece of religious phraseology, it's unproblematic. (If you grew up hearing about it in church, it may not strike you as particularly odd.) The problem comes in when you actually think about it. 

What does a virgin birth mean? It's not, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms. It's simply an inconceivable combination of terms. (Imagine your daughter coming home with news that she's pregnant, but she's never had sex.) For a virgin to conceive, you would have to have a miracle, an improbable event that cannot be explained in logical terms or described in natural ones. I think that's precisely the conclusion we're supposed to arrive at when we read the Scriptures.

Luke strengthens this position in the way he presents Jesus' genealogy in the second half of Luke 2.

Luke 2:23: "When He began His ministry, Jesus Himself was about thirty years of age, being, as it was supposed, the son of Joseph, the son of Eli."

 Luke 2:38: "[Cainan was] the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God."

If you compare the beginning of the genealogy with the end of it, you find two sons whose birth (or coming into being) are the direct result of God's activity, not the natural order of things. One son of God, Adam, was created out of dust. Another, Jesus, was created out of ... we know not what. But both came into being in the natural world through the supernatural agency of God.

Now, Jews and Muslims do not accept the claim of the New Testament that Jesus was the son of a virgin, any more than they accept the claim that He was the Son of God. However, many go further than this to suggest such a thing could not be, that it is a discreditable claim and represents a low view of God. One Muslim friend told me the standard teaching in Islam is that Christians believe God had sex with Mary.

This viewpoint is as un-Christian as it is un-Jewish and un-Muslim. Numbers 23:19 says, "God is not a man that He should lie." I would add that "God is not a man that He should lie ... with a woman." God is, however, the kind of being who can create a man. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all hold that He did it once in the Garden of Eden. He created Adam, not through human intercourse, but through divine intervention (i.e. a miracle). Christians simply assert that he did the same thing second time when Mary "conceiv[ed] in her womb and [bore] a son ... Jesus" (Luke 1:31).