<p>1:32 <i>He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God shall give to him the throne of his ancestor David</i>- Again we note the future tenses, precluding any personal pre-existence of the Lord. &quot;He shall be great&quot; is what Zacharias had just been told in :15. The response of Mary and Zacharias is clearly compared and contrasted; and the illiterate teenage girl comes out presented as a far stronger believer than the legally obedient Zacharias. Mary's Biblical mind for she alludes to Scripture with such felicity would have figured that God had to be the Father of the Davidic seed; and a woman in David's line, just like herself, had to be the mother. But how that was to come about was of course a challenge to her faith.</p>