Non-Catholics claim that the Immaculate Conception is not in Scripture, so many Christians unfortunately reject this fundamental teaching.
No Bible verse explicitly states that Mary was conceived without sin. Instead, as St. John Paul II pointed out in his work Redemptoris Mater, the Immaculate Conception is prophesied throughout the Old Testament.
In his book Behold Your Mother: A Biblical and Historical Defense of the Marian Doctrines, Tim Staples walks through five of the six revelations and fulfillments in the Gospel of Luke that are derived from the Old Testament and depict the sinless Mother of God.
Staples explains how Mary as the beginning of the new creation is a Scriptural sign that she was conceived without sin. Mary’s “yes” or fiat to God in Luke 1:28 made her the first Christian and the beginning of new creation. Tim Staples explains this concept further:
In the order of grace, Jesus is the inaugurator, the source—indeed, Jesus Christ is the New Covenant. But in the order of time, as the grace of Christ is actually communicated to the world—”the salvific economy of God’s revelation”—Mary was the first human person to experience the redemption of Christ in her person. This grace, the grace of the New Covenant, was incarnate in Mary before the Incarnation—from the moment of her conception—and it was perfected in her through her declaration of faith and obedience.
Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were the beginning of the old creation and were also born without original sin, but when they rejected God, they became enslaved to sin. Since Mary is the beginning of the new creation, it would follow that she was also born without sin and that her yes to God made her the Blessed Mother.
To learn additional evidence for the Immaculate Conception, check out Tim Staples’s Behold Your Mother, sold here.
