Matthew 1:20, commentary and pictures

While Joseph was turning over Mary's condition in his mind and planning to put her away privately, the angel of the Lord came to him in a dream and told him not to fear to take Mary as his wife, because what was conceived in her was of the Holy Ghost and she would bear a son named Jesus.
Joseph is addressed as son of David because he stands in David's royal line, and Matthew traces that legal descent from David through Solomon to Joseph as Mary's husband, while Christ's fleshly descent came through Mary.
That conception was not by Joseph nor by any ordinary human generation or unfaithfulness, but by the power of God through the Holy Spirit uniting deity with humanity.
It fulfilled literally the sign of Isaiah 7:14 that a virgin would conceive and bear a son, marking the personal first advent of the promised Messiah.
This miraculous conception proves He is divine and not merely human, giving Him genuine yet sinless humanity as Son of God and Son of man, which is essential to the gospel and to His work as Redeemer.

Dream and Wording

While he was turning these things over in mind, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and charged him not to fear to take Mary as his wife, because what was conceived in her was of the Holy Ghost. The same message declared that she would bear a son named Jesus, and it belongs to the revealed account of his birth to the Virgin Mary. That conception was not fathered by Joseph, and by it Jesus entered human life born of a woman like his brethren. He was begotten of God through the operation of God's power, the Holy Spirit, and was therefore the Son of God, Deity becoming incarnate by uniting his eternal spirit with humanity in a way beyond human knowledge.

Before that visit Joseph had learned of Mary's condition and had decided to put her away privately rather than expose her to public punishment, but after the angel's message he believed it and married her. Faith likewise requires taking Scripture as the guide when testimony conflicts. He was able to understand the angel's words because he knew and was looking for the fulfillment of the prophecy that a virgin would bear a son called Immanuel, meaning God with us, and this spiritual understanding fitted him to become Mary's husband. He was among those given knowledge of the coming Saviour, whose name was given by the angel before birth, matching the angel's proclamation of glad tidings to men when he was born.

The address thou son of David identifies Joseph with David's family and the royal line connected with Jesus' birth, placing the Holy Ghost conception within the promised line traced through David, Judah, Jacob, and Abraham. The child was from the Holy Ghost, not from unfaithfulness and not by ordinary human fatherhood, and the account affirms his supernatural incarnation as historical truth and not merely a moral lesson. Ghost renders the Greek word pneuma, also rendered spirit, wind, and life, meaning breath or moving air and the vital spirit or principle of life associated with breath.

Joseph was warned in a dream while Mary received an angel's spoken message, a difference in form of divine communication without difference in spiritual rank. Joseph's honored place as Mary's husband does not make him divine or give him power belonging to God.

Davidic Legal Lineage

Matthew presents Joseph as the reputed and legal father of Jesus, and its genealogy traces Joseph's legal descent through the male line from David through Solomon to Joseph. Joseph is named in that genealogy because he is Mary's husband. Under Jewish law Joseph is reckoned as Jesus' legal father while Jesus' physical descent came through Mary, and because Mary was Joseph's wife Joseph was also reckoned as the son of her father and Jesus as Joseph's son.

Matthew gives the royal paternal legal genealogy showing that the throne of David belongs to Jesus, while Luke gives the line through His mother Mary with Joseph named in Mary's place because the record is reckoned through the male line. The paternal legal side in Matthew complements the maternal genealogy, so that the lineage of Jesus is preserved and traceable through Judah and Levi while other tribal genealogies were lost and scattered. Joseph and Mary, the parents of Jesus, were Jews descended from David and belonging to the tribe of Judah, and the earthly lineage runs through the line of promise back to David, Judah, Jacob, and Abraham. The tribe of Judah was held together until Jesus came as Shiloh of Judah, of the tribe of Judah, to whom the gathering of God's people belongs.

The genealogy preserves and traces the succession leading to the Son of Mary, establishing His claim to Abraham's material promise, which included the whole world. His human ancestors were subject to the iniquities common to humanity and included sinful people, and He was born in David's line. Unlike Melchizedek, Christ entered the human family by birth, with His human ancestry traced from Adam. He took human nature, was tempted as human beings are, and lived a perfect life.

Conception by Holy Spirit

That which was conceived in Mary was of the Holy Ghost, not from unfaithfulness and not fathered by Joseph as his natural son. It was not by ordinary human conception or by any natural law of ordinary generation, but by miraculous conception through the Holy Ghost. Matthew 1:18-23 makes clear that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary, with Matthew 1:20 identifying the Holy Ghost as the source of what was conceived in her, and Matthew 1:18-25 records this miraculous birth as historical fact declaring His divine origin and not merely a religious idea. This miraculous conception stands against its denial, for the angel told Joseph, a son of David and descendant of David, in a dream not to fear to take Mary as his wife because her child was of the Holy Ghost.

He was begotten of God through the operation of God's power, the Holy Spirit, with the Holy Spirit identified with the power of God as in Luke 1:35, and was therefore the Son of God. By this Deity became incarnate in uniting His eternal spirit with humanity, though how this was done is beyond human knowledge. Mary conceived Jesus through the Holy Ghost without a man's involvement, and the Saviour came through a woman to bring deliverance from sin. Though His holy mother Mary was a virgin, His coming from heaven does not mean He was born from among men in the ordinary way.

He was a real human being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost and born of Mary, with His birth fulfilling the prophecy of a child born for us in Bethlehem of Judea during the reign of Augustus Caesar. Through the Holy Spirit's work He was born of a woman and entered human life like His brethren, as shown when Joseph was told in a dream not to fear taking Mary as his wife because her conception was by the Holy Ghost. His supernatural conception by the Holy Spirit gave Him genuine yet sinless humanity, for His humanity was not unreal or merely apparent, since sin is not essential to human nature. Conceived by the Holy Ghost and not begotten by a human father, He had no inherited sin and did no sin, and though human beings bear the effects of sin from the beginning of life, His salvation as Saviour reaches from life's inception to its end.

His body, conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary, was the body prepared for Him as an adequate atonement for sin, unlike animal sacrifices that could not take sin away, and His birth fulfilled the promise that the woman's seed would bruise the serpent's head. His conception by the Holy Spirit is part of the mystery of the union of the divine and the human in Christ, who is both the Son of God and the Son of man, with His virgin birth essential to the gospel in affirming His divine identity and power and distinguishing the gospel from a merely human system of moral teaching. This miraculous conception and virgin birth is a great miracle and true history and fact of the biblical record, with authentic biblical testimony in Matthew joined by Luke. Its truth as what the Bible declares about Christ is bound up with the truth of Christianity, giving no reason to reject the Bible's truth even though some reject it as incredible, for it presents Jesus' conception by the Holy Ghost as a real miraculous event.

Prophecy Fulfilled Literally

Jesus was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of a virgin in fulfillment of the sign spoken in Isaiah 7:14. That virgin birth was a prophetic sign of His first advent identifying Him as the promised Messiah and the true Messiah. The prophecy that a virgin would conceive and bear a Son and call His name Immanuel was fulfilled in the birth of Jesus by the virgin Mary.

His first advent was a literal, personal event in which an angel told Joseph in a dream that Mary's child was conceived by the Holy Ghost. The birth of Jesus of Nazareth was the literal fulfillment of the prophecy of the virgin conceiving and bearing a son, not merely an allegory. The fulfillment was explicit in prediction and literal in fulfillment like the other prophecies of the life and death of Christ. Virgin means Mary the wife of Joseph in her actual virginity, not any social or spiritual condition, while Judah means the literal tribe of Judah and not the Jewish race, and David means the literal David and not any royal line.

The account of Jesus' birth marks the fulfillment of the Old Testament's Gospel promises. It presents the fulfillment of God's promises to Abraham through the birth of Christ, whose genealogy traces the preserved succession leading to the Son of Mary and establishes His claim to Abraham's material promise which included the whole world. As the fulfillment of Israel's Spirit-shaped institutions, Jesus is the full testimony of God, and only the Spirit who fully knows Christ can give an adequate testimony of Him through Scripture.

The coming of Christ was miraculous and fittingly announced by angels. The angel of the Lord delivering God's message to man is one of many such records showing that angels occupy no insignificant part in God's work in the earth, for their occupation toward this earth is ministering for those who shall be heirs of salvation. An angel gave the Saviour's name before He was born, matching the angel's proclamation of glad tidings to men when He was born.

Divinity and Humanity

The miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost and virgin birth prove Jesus is divine, the divine Saviour of men, not merely the highest type of man with more divinity in degree or quantity but the same in quality as other men. To deny the miraculous conception and birth is higher criticism and subtle infidelity that robs Jesus of His divinity and turns great talent and influence against Christianity. Belief in the virgin birth is an essential doctrine of the gospel, part of divine revelation to be accepted in its entirety and a prerequisite for admission to the fellowship of evangelical churches, so that to deny it shakes the faith of hearers and places the denier outside Christian ranks with a humanistic and rationalistic religious fellowship. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of Mary as the divine-human Son from conception, rather than first becoming divine during His human life, and this divine nature from conception sets Him apart from His human parents and cannot be explained as a result of evolution.

He is divine in His person with essential deity and not only divine in His mission, which makes Him an adequate Redeemer for a lost race and keeps Him free from liability to mistakes of judgment in learning, thinking, morals, and religion as a child and as an adult. Jesus Christ, the foundation of the Christian system, was miraculously conceived and not begotten by any natural law of ordinary generation, and to deny this miraculous conception and birth denies His divinity and reduces Him to merely human and fallible like other men, even liable to mistakes in intellectual, moral, and religious processes. Faith in the miraculous birth belongs with faith in a fully divine Bible, answering the two great questions of a divine Bible and a divine Saviour. Doubt beginning here is the time of danger and must be put down and crushed out at first, because doubting the inspiration of the sacred writers leads on to doubting their inspiration beyond other men, then the infallible inspiration of Jesus, then His miraculous work and character, and finally to general unbelief.

His origin is more than that of a good or perfected human being, for He was begotten of the Holy Ghost, distinguishing Him from a mere man and identifying Him as more than a merely human Christ. His conception was supernatural, not the result of ordinary human generation, and the angel's telling Joseph not to fear to take Mary as his wife confirms the divine origin of the conception. His conception by the Holy Spirit is part of the mystery of the union of the divine and the human in Christ, who is both the Son of God and the Son of man, and His virgin birth is essential to the gospel and affirms His divine identity and power, distinguishing the gospel from a merely human system of moral teaching. His conception by the Virgin Mary is presented as a fact of Scripture and a foundational Christian belief, not a teaching that can be set aside to suit changing beliefs without changing the faith, and denying it is part of a wider rejection of the Bible's miracles and of Christ. The account presents His divine origin as historical fact and His supernatural incarnation as historical truth, not merely a religious idea or moral lesson, in that He is not Joseph's natural son but was conceived in Mary by the Holy Ghost. Joseph is identified as a son of David and told in a dream not to fear taking Mary as his wife.

Believing and Applying

The Gospel testimony that Jesus was born of a virgin stands on the same ground and with the same credibility as the testimony to his miracles, his resurrection, his teaching, his sinless life, and his historical existence. The truth of Matthew's account of the birth of Jesus, joined by Luke's account in the third Gospel, decides the credibility, reliability, and competence of Matthew and Luke as historians. If in telling so delicate and important a matter involving the most sacred matters of human life they were gullible, ignorant, given to romance, easily deceived, or ready to invent and deceive others, they commit a gross and historically unpardonable blunder or crime and can no longer be regarded as historians.

To reject them as competent and credible witnesses to the birth of Jesus on those grounds discredits their reliability and competence at every other point, so that faith cannot be pinned to them anywhere else. Cutting out the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke that relate the virgin birth while claiming to keep the rest of the Gospels, the deity of Jesus, his office as Saviour, and his bodily resurrection is bad logic and flagrant inconsistency. An individual may hold that divided position for a time, but no continuous succession of men and no large school of thought projecting its life into the future can maintain it, and in the long run the choice forces rejection of the rest of their record along with Mark and the others.

To deny the miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost and virgin birth is higher criticism and subtle infidelity that robs Jesus of his divinity and turns great talent and influence against Christianity. Denial of the virgin birth belongs with a wider rejection of the Bible's miracles and of Christ, since Matthew 1:18-25 presents Mary's conception through the Holy Ghost and not by ordinary human means as foundational Christian teaching. Belief in this miraculous conception in Mary by the Holy Ghost is a test of faith in the Bible itself. The virgin birth is settled truth demanding definite belief, proving the authenticity of the Scriptures of truth and the real deity of Christ, so that to desire more evidence before forming a definite opinion is doubt and unbelief, and no one seeking to enter the Christian ministry should doubt it.

Belief in the virgin birth is an essential doctrine of the gospel, part of divine revelation to be accepted in its entirety, and a prerequisite for admission to the fellowship of evangelical churches. To deny it shakes the faith of hearers and places the denier outside Christian ranks with a humanistic and rationalistic religious fellowship, for it seriously impugns the gospel and is not a trifling error but unfits a man to preach. Such doubt must be met not with silent approval but with caution and warning and with fasting and prayer, and false new teaching denying the virgin birth must be opposed and rejected even when taught by men of kindly lives and great influence, since the virgin birth belongs together with the miracles of Christ and his resurrection among the old landmarks of Christian faith to be held with loyalty. Doubt beginning with the miraculous birth is the time of danger and must be put down and crushed out at first, because doubting the inspiration of the sacred writers leads on to doubting their inspiration beyond other men, then the infallible inspiration of Jesus, then the miraculous work and character of Christ, and finally to general unbelief, reducing him to merely human and liable to mistakes of judgment in intellectual, moral, and religious processes.

The account in Matthew is genuine and not a fabricated legend, for the angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him Mary's child had been conceived through the Holy Spirit, contrary to the claim that Jesus was born to Joseph and Mary in ordinary wedlock or by ordinary human conception. Similar features in later Buddhist birth legends are later additions influenced by the Christian birth story, not its source. Those called Nazaraeans accepted that Jesus was born of a virgin by the Holy Ghost and regarded Christ as the Messiah with something of a divine nature, while otherwise keeping the rites and ceremonies of the Mosaic law, whereas the controversy rejects this biblical teaching of conception by the work of the Holy Ghost.

The angel's visit confirmed Mary's account and convinced Joseph of her spotless purity, for before this confirmation he had decided to put her away privately rather than expose her to public punishment. Her testimony alone would not have established so unique a claim, which could have been used to conceal guilt and avoid the danger of stoning. God therefore sent the angel to Joseph in a dream to confirm that Mary was innocent and that the child conceived in her was from the Holy Ghost, telling him not to fear taking her as his wife, and this divine confirmation allowed Mary to stand without shame before Joseph and beyond him, with her purity honored. Although he had decided not to marry her after learning of her condition, he married her, showing he believed the angel's words, and faith likewise requires taking Scripture as the guide when testimony conflicts.

The angel of the Lord delivering a message from God to man in this verse is one of many such records showing that angels occupy no insignificant part in the work of God in the earth, for their occupation toward this earth is ministering for those who shall be heirs of salvation. The record to which the verse belongs assures believers in Christ that the promises to Abraham are for his spiritual seed, for natural descent from Abraham or David was privilege and opportunity but did not by itself guarantee heirship, and through faith believers share Abraham's promised inheritance of the world and become joint heirs with Christ in the throne of David. Christ's birth into a human family in this account shows that God wants to save families, which will be reunited in the new earth as Christ's family, joined not by fleshly ties but by his blood.