Merry Christmas From John Piper

Three things I would like to show you:

First, an article from John Piper, where he addresses the question, "Is It Sinful to Be Pregnant Before Marriage?" which includes this quote:

That there would be a stigma that attaches to pregnancy outside of marriage is, I think, a good thing.

Second, this picture:

Mary, Joseph, and a donkey. Image source.

Third, this excerpt from a post I wrote in 2014, It wasn't like that for Mary. Maybe it's never like that.

Mary had agreed to all this, telling the angel, "I am the Lord's servant." But how on earth could God do this to her? God was making her into the kind of woman she had always judged.

"Doesn't God know," she wondered, "that people would judge me, and they'd be right! It's right to judge a girl who gets pregnant. We put people into categories, pure or impure, and we do it because God commanded it.

"How can this be?" she had asked the angel. How could God make her into a symbol of something dirty? She had done nothing wrong. She was just trying her best to follow God.

People would never listen. They already know that it's automatically sinful to be unmarried and pregnant. But it wasn't like that.