To
start you must realize that Jesus fulfilled a lot of prophecies. You may see different numbers different
places but it appears that He satisfied more than 300 prophecies. That is a lot. If Jesus was able to fulfill all of these
Messianic prophecies, this would add incredible weight to not only the
authenticity of God’s Word but also that Jesus was perhaps who He claimed to
be.
Let’s
look at a few of these prophecies so that you can get a feel for what Messiah
had to accomplish.
1.
Micah 5:2 - "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the
clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old, from ancient times." (Jesus was born in Bethlehem.)
2.
Malachi 3:1 - "See, I will send a messenger, who will prepare the way
before me..." (Thus the Messiah was
required to have someone go before Him to prepare the way. This was fulfilled by John the Baptist.)
3.
Zechariah 9:9 - "Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and
having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a
donkey." (At what is called the
Triumphal Entry, Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey.)
4.
Zechariah 13:6 - "If someone asks him, 'What are these wounds on your
body?' (or wounds between your hands) he will answer, 'The wounds I was given
at the house of my friends.'" (Think
of this one as a prophecy stating that Jesus would be wounded in His hands and
betrayed by one of His friends - Judas)
5. Zechariah
11:12 - "I told them, 'If you think it best, give me my pay; but if not,
keep it.' So they paid me thirty pieces
of silver." (Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver exactly)
6.
Zechariah 11:13 - "And the LORD said to me, 'Throw it to the potter' - the
handsome price at which they priced me!
So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of
the LORD to the potter." (It turns
out that Judas later threw the silver into the house of the LORD. The chief priests then used the money to buy
a potter's field.)
7.
Isaiah 53:7 - "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his
mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her
shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth." (At His trial, even though He was guiltless,
He said nothing to defend himself.)
8. Psalm
22:16 - "Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evil men has encircled me,
they have pierced my hands and my feet."
(Jesus was crucified with nails being driven through his hands and
feet.)
For a more complete list, visit http://www.accordingtothescriptures.org/prophecy/353prophecies.html
These
are obviously not easy prophecies to fulfill especially the ones that would be outside
of your control. Remember, even if you
did pull off these few examples, you would still have more than 300 extras to
concern yourself with. It is
incredible! Jesus did it though.
Have
you ever contemplated the odds of one man fulfilling these prophecies? In short, it is incomprehensible. Dr. Peter Stoner tried to determine these
odds and he reported his findings in his book Science Speaks. He estimated
the odds of Jesus fulfilling just the eight prophecies given above.
To
get the details behind how he came up with the numbers, check out the book or
go to http://www.sciencespeaks.net/. The figure for this probability is astounding
– 1 out of 1017! Allow me to
type out that figure so that you can visualize it: 1 out of
100,000,000,000,000,000. How you pronounce this number is beyond me. To help you comprehend how large of a number
this is, here is the illustration that Dr. Stoner gave in his book.
“Suppose that we take 1017 silver dollars and lay them on
the face of Texas. They will cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one
of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state.
Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he
must pick up one silver dollar and say that it is the right one. What chance
would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets
would have had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true
in any one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote using
their own wisdom.”
Remember,
this is only for the fulfillment of eight prophecies out of three hundred plus
prophecies. Read chapter three in
Stoner's book at http://www.sciencespeaks.net/
and read as he tries to illustrate the chances of Jesus fulfilling sixteen and
then forty-eight prophecies. Believe me,
it is astonishing! (Please note: At the
end of chapter three, Stoner uses the assumption that the earth is six billion
years old to help visualize the chances of Jesus' fulfillment of prophecy. This is an unbiblical and unscientific age
for the earth. Consequently, it causes
an error in his work. However, this
error is not critical to the accuracy of his illustration.)
As a
side note, many have claimed that these prophecies were snuck into Scripture
after Jesus' life. As you have seen, it
would be quite a feat to fulfill so many prophecies. Thus, what if people from the early church
added to the prophet's writings and then went around claiming that Jesus must
be the Messiah? This would be
disastrous! Look at it this way. What would the early church have to gain if
they added weight to Jesus being the Son of God if they knew it wasn't
true? They would accomplish
nothing. However, hopefully you are not
satisfied with this answer. There is a
far better one.
The
Dead Sea Scrolls, known as one of the greatest archeological finds of the 20th
century, were found in an Israeli cave in the mid 1900s. The cave contained ancient manuscripts
including biblical scrolls. The Isaiah
Scroll, for example, contains nearly the entire book of Isaiah. It has been dated at about 125 B.C. (125
years before Christ's birth). It turned
out that the prophecies were in there.
In fact, you can go to http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/
to digitally view the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Look at the Isaiah Scroll and go to chapter 53:7 and you will see the
prophecy we discussed above.
Consequently, the Dead Sea Scrolls greatly supported the Bible and its
message.
We
are now faced with two options. Since
Jesus fulfilled all of these prophecies against all odds, He must either have
been a really lucky individual who can be ignored, or He was the only One who
could fulfill the prophecies and consequently is who He claimed to be - the Son
of God and Messiah. As you have seen,
number one is virtually impossible. What
about option two? Well the prophecies
said that Jesus would be our Savior.
Jesus even claimed it Himself.
What reason is there to not believe that Jesus is our Lord and
Redeemer? He died to save us. We must surrender our lives to Him. We would not be putting our faith in another
random historical figure, but in the One who God foretold about through His
prophets.
Not
only do these facts concerning Jesus' fulfillment of prophecy answer the
all-important question of "Was Jesus who He claimed to be?" but also
adds more evidence that the Bible was truly inspired by God and that its words
are critically important. The
fulfillment of Biblical prophecy continues to support God's Word. Don't you think that you should read it?
No comments:
Post a Comment