We look first at the words of explanation of the unbelieving world.

Number one: the Jewish Talmud says that Jesus was born of an illicit affair
 between a dissolute Roman soldier named Panthera,
 and a woman of the gutter named Mary. 
 That is their explanation of the coming of our Lord into the world.
  Mary is a dissolute of the dregs of humanity
 and Jesus is an illegitimate of an unspeakably vile Roman soldier;
 that is one explanation. 

 Another explanation is found in the pseudoscientists. 
 In the biological world there are fungi and algae
 who propagate by unfertilized spores and eggs,
 and so they say that the Virgin Mary, 
in one of those unusual aberrations in science, 
conceived by self-fertilization.  
To place Mary in the category with algae and fungi is unthinkable to us.

 Then there are those pseudo-intellectuals 
who look back into Greek and Roman classical history,
 and they point out that in those mythological tales, say, 
Hercules;  Jove, the god, transformed himself into the likeness
 of the husband of Alcmene, and Hercules was born.
Or again, Alexander the Great;
 his mother was in a temple and the god transformed himself into a serpent
 and Alexander the Great was born. 
 Or Augustus Caesar; his mother fell asleep in the temple of Apollo
 and the god ravished her, and Augustus Caesar was born.
  So they likened the birth of our Lord 
to those same mythological categories,
 trying to explain the birth of the great of the ancient world.

Then, of course, we have the modern rejection of the incarnation of our Lord:
 the liberal theologian.  
For example, in 1892 Adolph Harnack, a great German liberal scholar,
 said he did not believe in miracles; 
therefore, he did not believe in the incarnation of God in Christ Jesus.  
He does not believe in the virgin birth.  
In 1900 Professor [Friedrich] Loofs stated, and I quote him, 
“I think it the duty of truthfulness to state openly that the virgin birth 
arose out of false, fabulous tradition.”  
In 1927 Emil Brunner said that the story of the virgin birth is just an attempt 
by the early church to explain in biological fashion the incarnation of Christ.  
In the 1940s, Rudolph Bultmann, over there in Germany says the New Testament is full of myths,
 and the virgin birth is an attempt on the part of the first Christians 
to express what they felt about the Lord. 
 Then today, from one side of the theological world to the other, 
they say that the story of the virgin birth is not a fact, but a teaching story.  
Thus the unbelieving, liberal, theological world discounts universally
 the marvelous miracle of the intervention of God and the birth of our Lord 
from the womb of a virgin girl [Matthew 1:20-25].

When we turn aside from those who discount, and disbelieve, 
and disown the wonder of the birth of our Lord, 
and we look at the stories in the Bible; 
the account of our Savior in the Word of God, 
ah, what a difference!  
What a difference!  

How beautiful, how incomparably precious. 
 I think of the Apostles’ Creed, which is recited by so many churches,
 and it would be wonderful to recite it here.  
That Apostles’ Creed goes back to the days of the apostles themselves.  
Do you remember it?

I believe in God,
The Father Almighty
Maker of heaven and earth.
And in Jesus Christ
His only begotten Son our Lord.
Conceived by the Holy Spirit,
And born of the Virgin Mary.

That is the gospel truth, and it is beautiful and it is appropriate.
  Jesus, God’s Son, born of a virgin, our Savior. 
 And that is in keeping with that great stream of prophecy
 throughout the millennia and the millennia here in the Word of the Lord;
 a Child, a Child, a Child!