One of the ways God reveals Himself is by prophecies being made and fulfilled.
One third of the Bible is made up of prophecies.
In the Old Testament, there are over 350 prophecies which Jesus fulfilled through his birth, life, death and resurrection.
These include:
- He would be born in Bethlehem, Micah 5:2;
- He would be born of a virgin, Isaiah 7:14;
- He would be a descendant of David, Isaiah 9:7;
- He would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver, Zechariah 11:12;
- He would be mocked, Psalm 22:7,8;
- He would be crucified, John 3:14;
- He would be pierced, Psalms 22:16;
- He would die with the wicked, yet be buried with the rich, Isaiah 53:9.
For one person, by random chance, to fulfill just 8 prophecies is considered a statistical impossibility.
Josh and Sean McDowell, in their book Evidence That Demands a Verdict, 2017, quote Professor Peter W. Stoner, Chairman of the Departments of Mathematics and Astronomy at Pasadena City College, who stated:
"We find that the chance that any man might have lived down to the present time and fulfilled all eight prophecies is one chance in ten to the seventeenth power - 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000."
The brilliance of prophecies is two-fold:
- prophecies had to be not clear enough so Satan could not figure them out and try stop them, as Herod tried when he killed the babies in Bethlehem;
- yet prophecies had to be clear enough, so that after Jesus rose from the dead, they would confirm that He was, indeed, the Promised Messiah.
After His resurrection, Jesus cited to prophecies as he walked with two disciples on the road to Emmaus:
"And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." Luke 24:27.
Like a wheat field, looking at it from one angle its seems completely random, but turn the corner and look at it from another angle and you see the rows line up.
Jesus said in Matthew 11:25:
"I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them to babes."
Believing in prophecies requires an element of faith, as "without faith it is impossible to please God." Hebrews 11:6.
Some people say, if God exists, why does He use prophecies? Why doesn’t He just reveal Himself beyond a shadow of a doubt?
Well, if He did, it would not only remove your doubts, it would remove your free will! His omnipotence would be overwhelming and your response would be involuntarily!
If He revealed His Presence, in all of His irresistible love, terrifying judgement, unfathomable intelligence, eternal glory, omnipotent power, brighter than a trillion trillion suns - your response, if you didn't melt, would be like the Apostle John in the Book of Revelation "I fell at His feet as dead."
It would be an involuntary response!
But God created us not for involuntary responses, but voluntary ones, because for love to be love it must be voluntary!
God loves everything He created, but we humans are unique in that He has given us a free will with which we can voluntarily choose to love Him back.
But there is one more thing - God is just. And He cannot help it. He is just, which means He has to judge every sin, because if He does not judge a sin, by default, His silence would be giving consent to the sin. It is called the Rule of Tacit Admission.
In a wedding ceremony, the pastor tells the congregation, if you are silent when you hear these wedding vows, you are giving your consent. "Speak now or forever hold your peace."
If there are sins and God is silent and not judging the sins, His silence would be giving consent to the sins. And if God gives consent to one sin one time He denies His just nature, He denies Himself. And 2 Timothy 2:13 declares "He cannot deny Himself."
In mathematical equations, there are constants and variables. In the equation of redemption, the constant is God is just - was, is, and forever will be just. The variable is who takes the judgement, you or a substitute.
Jesus is our substitute. He took the judgement we deserve upon Himself.
So the Gospel is this, God is just, in that He judges every sin; but God is love, in that He provided the Lamb to take the judgement for the sin.
The Lamb is God's way to love you without having to judge you! It is His plan. He came up with it. "The Lamb slain from foundations of the world!" Revelation 13:8.
He can love you for all eternity and you can love Him back without having to worry about being judged by Him because all the judgment you deserve went on Christ, and you are approaching Him through Christ.
"Jesus answered, 'I am the way ... No one comes to the Father except through Me.'" John 14:5-6.
In Genesis 22, Abraham and Isaac were going to the top of Mount Moriah:
"And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?
And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering."
This verse has a double meaning, that Abraham is trusting that God will have a ram up in the bush, but the other meaning is that God provided His only-begotten Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, to be the Lamb of God "who taketh away the sins of the world."
It was a hidden plan. The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:7-8: "The wisdom of God in a mystery ... which God ordained before the world ... Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory."
Jesus declared in Mark 10:45:
"The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."
Charles Wesley wrote the hymn:
"Amazing love! How can it be,
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?"
How could one person's death pay for all of our sins?
Jesus is divine, and He experience judgement in our place from a dimension we will never comprehend.
2nd Peter 3:8 states: "a day with the Lord is as a thousand years."
Jesus experienced that day on the cross as if it was a thousand years!
An ETERNAL BEING –Jesus, the only-begotten Son of God, – who is INNOCENT, suffering for a FINITE – limited period of time – the day on the cross, is equal to all of us FINITE beings – who are GUILTY sinners, suffering for an ETERNAL period of time.
INFINITY times FINITE equals FINITE times INFINITY.
Another way of putting it is:
An UNLIMITED BEING suffering for a LIMITED period of time is equal to all of us LIMITED BEINGS suffering for an UNLIMITED period of time.
His infinitely positive sacrifice canceled out our infinitely negative sins.
Jesus single-handedly experienced suffering equivalent to the combined eternal damnation that all of us together deserved. And HE IS THE ONLY ONE WHO COULD HAVE DONE IT!
Jesus rose from the dead to prove He was who He said He was.
Then you are filled with the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, who reaches out through you to share the love of God with a lost and hurting world.
The prophecies that were a mystery are now revealed.
"The mystery of Christ, which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit." Ephesians 3:1-5.
"The preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began, But now is made manifest." Romans 16:25-27.
"The mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ: To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church." Ephesians 3:9-12.
"Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints ... which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." Colossians 1:26-27.
"But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world." 1 Corinthians 2:7.
"Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory." 1 Timothy 3:16.
Early believers were almost entirely Jews.
Jews do not “convert” in the sense that they do not have to leave their Jewishness to become believers.
Gentiles are the ones who convert to believing in Jewish scriptures.
For Jews, it is just a decision to believe their own scriptures, that the prophecies regarding the Promised Messiah were fulfilled in Jesus.
Robert Morris Page, 1903-1992, commented on prophecies.
Page was the physicist who invented pulsation radar used for the detection of aircraft. He held 37 patents; served with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., received the U.S. Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award, and the Presidential Certificate of Merit.
Robert Morris Page, the son of a Methodist minister, stated of the over 350 Old Testament prophecies fulfilled by Jesus:
"The authenticity of the writings of the prophets, though the men themselves are human, is established by such things as the prediction of highly significant events far in the future that could be accomplished only through a knowledge obtained from a realm which is not subject to the laws of time as we know them.
One of the great evidences is the long series of prophecies concerning Jesus the Messiah. These prophecies extend hundreds of years prior to the birth of Christ.
They include a vast amount of detail concerning Christ himself, His nature and the things He would do when He came—things which to the natural world, or the scientific world, remain to this day completely inexplicable."
The first prophecy was Genesis 3:15, where God told the serpent Satan,
“And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel."
I John 3:8 explained the fulfillment:
“The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.”
During the reigns of Judah's Kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, 737 B.C. to 696 B.C., the Prophet Micah prophesied, Micah 5:12:
"But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting."
The Gospel of Matthew, 2:4-6, recorded:
"And when King Herod had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.
And they said unto him, in Bethlehem of Judea: for thus it is written by the prophet,
'And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Judea, art not the least among the princes of Judea: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.'"
In the 8th century before Christ, the Prophet Isaiah wrote in Isaiah 7:14:
"Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel - God with us."
The Gospel of Matthew, 1:20-23, related:
"The angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.
And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus - Yeshua - The Lord saves - for he shall save his people from their sins.
... Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying,
'Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.'"
Hebrews 10:7, referencing Psalm 40:7-8, stated:
"Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come — In the volume of the book it is written of Me —To do Your will, O God.’ ”
President John Quincy Adams stated in Newburyport, July 4, 1837:
"Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer's mission upon earth? ...
That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity,
and gave to the world the first irrevocable pledge of the fulfillment of the prophecies announced directly from Heaven at the birth of the Savior and predicted by the greatest of the Hebrew prophets 600 years before."
On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1946, President Truman stated:
"Our ... hopes of future years turn to a little town in the hills of Judea where on a winter's night two thousand years ago the prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled.
Shepherds keeping the watch by night over their flock heard the glad tidings of great joy from the angels of the Lord singing, 'Glory to God in the Highest and on Earth, peace, good will toward men.'"
The Apostle Paul wrote in his Letter to the Galatians, 4:4-5:
"But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as children."
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Thank you for this wonderful post