Saturday after Gaudete, The Third Sunday in Advent
Posted on December 21, 2019 by under
Scripture: St. Luke 1:26-38 (NKJV)
1:26 Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, 27 to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And having come in, the angel said to her, “Rejoice, highly favored one, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women!”
29 But when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and considered what manner of greeting this was. 30 Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name Jesus. 32 He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. 33 And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there will be no end.”
34 Then Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?”
35 And the angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God. 36 Now indeed, Elizabeth your relative has also conceived a son in her old age; and this is now the sixth month for her who was called barren. 37 For with God nothing will be impossible.”
38 Then Mary said, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
Devotion
Back in Genesis chapter 3 God promised that sin and the devil would be crushed by the seed of a woman. He says to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel” (Gen. 3:15). This prophecy is fulfilled in today’s text from Luke. The Savior—the Lord Jesus Christ—entered the world not through the natural union of a man and a woman, but through the woman alone—and this by the miracle of the Holy Spirit. Thus, the Christ is the only man ever to be born without the seed of a man. It was foretold from the beginning that the Savior would be the Son of a virgin. That miraculous conception has now taken place, which is the doom of sin and the devil.
Martin Luther writes on Genesis 3, “It is as if [God] were saying: ‘Through the woman you, Satan, set upon and seduced the man, so that through sin you might be their head and master. But I, in turn, shall lie in wait for you by means of the same instrument. I shall snatch away the woman, and from her I shall produce a Seed, and that Seed will crush your head’” (Luther’s Works, vol. 1, p.193). The Christ is that Seed of the woman, He has defeated sin and death for all time, and He is coming again to judge the living and the dead. All who believe in Him on that day will be saved.
We pray: Lord, we beseech Thee, give ear to our prayers and lighten the darkness of our hearts by Thy gracious visitation; through Jesus Christ. Amen.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
