It is difficult to even begin to imagine the position that Joseph was in. He is engaged to Mary, and suddenly, she shows up to be pregnant. He knew that the two of them hadn’t been together yet. There is just one explanation that remains… There has been another guy.
Joseph wanted to call it off, to divorce her, although for some reason he decided to go about it quietly. Matthew says that he didn’t want to expose Mary to public disgrace. That seems strange, given that public disgrace was sure to come to her one way or another at this point!
An angel comes to Joseph in a dream and tells him not to worry. No man had been with Mary. It had been the Holy Spirit who had placed this baby within her. He should take her as his wife and they should call the baby Jesus, meaning God with us.
Matthew, as he is writing this account, points out that:
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).
Matthew 1:22-23
But what does that mean? God with us?
I think most people, if you were to ask them, where is God? They might point up into the sky. He is up there…far from us. Away from us. He is not here. He is there.
And, in some fashion, in some way of speaking, that may be true. God is in heaven on his throne. We don’t know precisely, geographically speaking, where heaven is, and we probably can’t even assign a geography to it. It is in the spiritual, heavenly realms, which we don’t precisely even know where that is located, or if you can even assign a location to it.
However, this is different. Even if our idea is that God is there… actually, the news is quite different. Instead of, or maybe better said, in addition to there, God is here. He is here, with us.
God made the decision to come to earth. The Father was still there in the heavenly realms, yet he also came to earth to become a man. The Holy Spirit placed God within Mary and that baby, that was himself God, became a man.
How does that work? I don’t know. I’m not sure that I can explain it precisely, how it could be that God could also become a man. But this is exactly what the scripture said, that Jesus would be given the name Immanuel, meaning God with us. The Holy Spirit came upon Mary, and without a man, a baby was formed. This is God with us.
And yet, that isn’t the end. Even though Jesus returned to be with the Father, God is still with us! As we believe, the Holy Spirit comes to give us a new birth, and the Holy Spirit continues to live within us even today! God is with us even now. God remains with us as we go from one step to the next. He is with us at all times and in every way. God is Immanuel. He is with us.