Luke 1:34 ESV
And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?
Psalm 37:5 NASB95
Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
When Gabriel announced to Mary that she was going to give birth to the Messiah, she had to know what kind of price she was going to pay as a result of being the mother of the Christ. For one, her reputation would be destroyed in the eyes of most the rest of her life. All except the followers of Jesus would always think of her as being an immoral woman. Secondly, she had no guarantee from Gabriel that Joseph would understand that she was pregnant as a result of the power of the Holy Spirit. Just like every other girl in her culture, her marriage with Joseph was an arranged one that she had probably been aware of since she was a little girl. She had likely known Joseph all of her life, and all of her dreams and hopes as a young woman were at stake. One of the most impressive things about Mary’s response to the angel was that she didn’t ask the question “why.” Why did it have to happen this way? Why does this have to cost so much? When things happen to us that hurt, many of us ask the question why, but Mary never did. She was totally yielded to the will of God regardless of the cost.
The question that Mary did ask was “how” in light of the fact that she was a virgin. Many times in our walk of faith, it is the question “how” that causes us to stumble. Even though we commit issues to the Lord we then often torment ourselves by trying to figure out how God is going to accomplish it. In Psalm 37:5, we are told to commit our situations to the Lord and to trust Him, and He will “do it.” Having done that, how many times have you struggled in your reasoning, even losing sleep trying to figure out “how” God is going to do it? Israel had a lot of enemies in the land of promise they had to contend with, like the Canaanites, the Jebusites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, the Hittites, and the Amorites, but I believe one of the strongest enemies that we have to contend with it if we are going to live in the land of abundant life Christ came to give us are the Ittites. The Ittites are a killer to the life of faith. Trying to figure out how God is going to do “it” can keep you in a place of worry and anxiety instead of spiritual rest. God is not obligated to explain to us how He is going to do “it.” We must be content, resting in the fact that He knows exactly how He will do it, and He is big enough to bring “it” to pass. To walk in the Spirit, you have to beware of the “hows” and the “Ittites.”