Graham: "Since He was conceived not by natural means, but by the Holy Spirit, He stands as the one man who came forth pure from the hand of God."
Billy Graham believed in inherited guilt.
Jesus Christ was the supreme manifestation of God. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).
He was no ordinary man. Several hundred years before He was born, Isaiah, the prophet, said, “Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son” (Isa. 7:14). No other man in all history could say that his mother was a virgin.
The Scriptures teach that He did not have a human father; if He had, He would have inherited the sins and infirmities that all men have, since “that which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6).
Since He was conceived not by natural means, but by the Holy Spirit, He stands as the one man who came forth pure from the hand of God.
He could stand before His fellow men and ask, “Which of you can truthfully accuse me of one single sin?” (John 8:46, The Living Bible). He was the only man since Adam who could say, “I am pure.”
If we honestly probe our minds, we have to admit that there are mysteries about the incarnation that none of us can ever understand. In fact, Paul speaks of God, manifest in the flesh, as a “mystery” (1 Tim. 3:16).
Billy Graham, How To Be Born Again (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1989).
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