Most people can generally agree that one of the most outlandish, eccentric, unusual, and yet compellingly profound things about Christianity is its Old Testament prophesies, which foretell—with often an uncanny and incredible degree of precision—about a coming messianic figure, whom we now identify as Jesus Christ.
What’s interesting is that all of these prophecies were told more than 400 years before Jesus’ birth, and in fact, some prophecies were told more than 2,000 years before his birth. These rather peculiar promises of a coming messiah started as oral tradition, as far back as the time of Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:15), and were later written down in what became known as the Pentateuch, which the Hebrew people possessed since the time of Moses and the Exodus out of Egypt. The rest of these prophesies were written down during the completion of the Jewish scriptures (The Old Testament), which were largely written during the Israelite exiles in 700-500 BCE.
The Jewish people were acutely aware that God was promising to send a messianic figure who would come directly from the seed of Abraham, their own people group. They knew what to expect. However, what’s so astonishing is that, as a whole, these prophecies are hardly ambiguous generalities; rather, they are staggeringly detailed and remarkably specific pronouncements about this Messiah.
Practically speaking, that’s pretty significant because having prophecies that are specific can be a double-edged sword. For example, if the prophecies are really specific, that means they can be easily overturned if proven wrong. However, if the prophecies are really specific, that also means they can be easily verified if proved true.
Having prophecies that are more or less ‘ambiguous generalities’ doesn’t really help anyone, because there would be no way of actually ‘proving it’ one way or another. You could argue from subjectivity more than objectivity—from eccentric interpretations than concrete observations. As such, prophecies like we find in Scripture can’t fall as easily into unclear, subjective interpretations precisely because they have such specific and concrete details. This makes it much easier to verify or refute because you can simply use the criterion: “It either happened or it did not.”
So what are these prophesies? And do they give us enough reason to trust that they are true?
Here are a handful:
Scripture tells us that the coming Messiah would be…
- …born of a virgin (Isa. 7:14)
- …from the line of Abraham (Gen. 22:18)
- …a descendent of Judah (Gen. 49:10)
- …from the household of David (Jer. 23:5)
He would be…
- …born in Bethlehem (Mic. 5:2)
- …presented with gifts at his birth (Ps. 72:10)
- …then forced to flee an evil king who would want to kill all the children in the region of Bethlehem (Jer. 31:5)
- …he’d be exiled to Egypt as a kid and return home to Israel from there (Hos. 11:1)
He would claim to be ‘God with us’ (Isa. 7:14)
He would function as…
- …a prophet (Deut. 18:18)
- …a priest (Ps. 110:4)
- …a king (Ps. 2:6)
He would…
- …be a teacher of parables (Ps. 78:2)
- …be preceded by a messenger crying out in the wilderness (Isa. 40:3)
- …begin his ministry in Galilee (Isa. 9:1)
- …perform many miracles (Isa. 35:6)
- …enter Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey (Zech. 9:9)
And then, there are more than 20 prophecies that get fulfilled in his life in ONE day:
On the day of his death, this messiah would be…
- …betrayed by a friend (Ps. 41:9)
- …sold for 30 pieces of silver (Zech. 11:12)
- …and that silver would be thrown into God’s house and be used to buy a potter’s field (Zech. 11:13)
In the hours before his death…
- …he’d be abandoned by his friends (Zech. 13:7)
- …be accused by false witnesses (Ps. 35:11)
- …stand silent before his accusers when they taunted him (Isa. 53:7)
- …be wounded and bruised (Isa. 50:6)
- …mocked (Ps. 22:7)
- …be beaten and spat upon (Isa. 50:6)
- …have his garments be split up and be gambled for (Ps. 22:18)
- …physically stagger under the weight of his affliction (Ps. 109:24)
At his death, he would…
- …have his hands and feet pierced (Ps. 22:16)
- …be executed together with criminals (Isa. 53:12)
- …experience great thirst (Ps. 69:21)
- …pray for his persecutors (Isa. 53:12)
- …have his side pierced (Zech. 12:10)
- …despite great physical travail, not one of his bones would be broken (Ps. 34:20)
- …he would die at midday, and during the hour of his death, darkness would miraculously descend upon the earth (Amos 8:9)
- …he would then be buried in a rich man’s tomb (Isa. 53:9)
- …after which, he would be resurrected to God the Father’s right hand and pour out gifts on his followers (Ps. 16:10; 68:18)
According to the Gospel accounts, all of these prophecies in the New Testament were fulfilled in Jesus’ life–whether the disciples realized that at the time or not.
Convinced yet? Probably not, but that’s ok.
If you’re a thoughtful person (which you probably are), you might already be thinking, “Well, maybe some of these things are just coincidences.” Mathematicians say that the odds of all these things randomly coalescing on any one person are 10157, which is 10, followed by 157 zeros after it, and a whole lot of commas in between. To put that in perspective, 1016 would be like covering the entire state of Texas in silver dollars two feet deep, painting one of them red, and having a blind man pick the marked coin on his first chance. Mathematicians generally agree that, statistically, any odds beyond 1 in 1050 have a zero probability of ever happening, which has been named Borel’s Law.†‡
With the prophesies about Jesus, we’re talking 10157, which is Borel’s Law times itself, and some change (like, multiplying it by another 10,000,000).
Still, a reasonable objection might be, “Well, maybe the Gospel accounts have been doctored up to confirm these prophecies.” For example, maybe a couple early Christians read the book of Zechariah, where the Messiah would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver, and decided, “Let’s make up a story about how Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, then bought a field with that same money to go hang himself.”‡
To be sure, they certainly could have made up stories like that, I won’t deny that. And they might have been able to get away with a few things like that, too. However, most of these prophecies were simply out of their control, and therefore, would have been easy to refute by others if they actually didn’t happen.‡
In fact, early Jewish and Roman leaders had all the motivation in the world to refute these things, too. They hated Jesus and the movement he was starting. The Jews hated him because he was destabilizing their religious structure from within. The Romans hated him because he exclusively claimed to be God, which Caesar took offense to. The Jews or Romans could have claimed, “Jesus was not born in Bethlehem. He never grew up in Nazareth. We never gave Judas 30 pieces of silver for his life. We did break his bones. We crucified him alone. We didn’t gamble for his clothes.” They could have made any of those sorts of claims. But nobody ever made those claims because those claims simply weren’t true, and could have easily been refuted.‡
Still, you might object, “Well, the early church just destroyed all the accounts of Jesus that conflicted against the story they wanted to create themselves.” This is a great objection, too. However, it assumes that only the early Christians had all the information surrounding Jesus’ life, and that the unbelieving Jews and Romans were completely out of the picture. That presumption fails because Jesus’ life and teachings was witnessed by Jews, for he was one himself and ministered mostly to them anyways. Some believed and some did not. The information about Jesus’ life, sayings, and death were all heard, seen, experienced by people who came from both ends of the faith-spectrum. Meaning, if the believing group tried to invent something about Jesus, the unbelieving group could have easily refuted it because they witnessed it, too.‡
But you might be thinking, “Well, the majority, ‘believing,’ Christian group of Jews simply overruled the minority, ‘unbelieving,’ group of Jews, and this is why the ‘better’ or ‘doctored’ story triumphs in the narrative.” That’s a great thought, too, however, it’s presumes that the early Christian groups were in fact majority, or that they possessed some kind of controlling power—which simply is historically inaccurate. The early Christian church didn’t have any type of majority influence or political power or social sway until over 300 years after Jesus’ time. In the first three centuries after Jesus’ life, Christianity’s enemies vastly outnumbered its followers, and it was the enemies who had the majority, power, or sway—not the church. Yet, even though the enemies of Christianity had all the power, no one person ever came forward to challenge the validity of these eyewitness accounts about Jesus’ own life, teachings, death, and resurrection.‡
It just doesn’t stack up that the early church’s ‘prophecy-fulfilling’ narrative was doctored or won out over the ‘actual’ stories about Jesus in history.
Plus, to conclude, one must also ask another legitimate question, too:
“Why would early Christians die for what they *knew* to be lie?”
People certainly can die for something they personally believe is true, even if it is objectively false. But it would seem harder to die for something that you know is false. If you were making something up that you know is a lie, there would have to be a motive for doing so.
Yet, if you have a motive, dying for it would effectively forfeit what you were motivated to get all along. If you die for something you know to be a lie, at that point, your motive for lying won’t be ever become actualized anyways (because you’ll be dead). So why invent a lie…out of a motivation to get something… and then be willing to die… therefore, effectively prohibiting yourself from getting what you were motived by anyways? In other words, if there is a motive, then dying for the lie wouldn’t help your motive; it would end it.
Nevertheless, let’s just entertain the possibility that early Christians did, in fact, choose to die for lying about the things about Jesus’ life that made him a perfect match for all these Old Testament prophesies.
What was their motive? What did they gain as a result?
Power, prestige, activism, or to escape harm? They certainly didn’t get power or prestige. In fact, many lost their homes, jobs, and property. They had no political activist agenda, because Jesus never did. They simply trusted the testimony of Jesus that he alone was God and the Savior for all men, which was a threat to Caesar. They certainly didn’t escape harm, either—many were tortured, killed, and/or burned alive for Roman parties. There was no ‘gain’ in sight, except to prove their faith in Jesus—taking Jesus at his word about what he said about himself.‡
I love what philosopher Blaise Paschal says:
“Witnesses who are willing to have their throats cut become believable.”
Let’s remember, the early church was not a group of ‘Navy Seal-esque men’ who were striving to not cave for what they knew to be a lie. It was a bunch of uneducated fisherman and many other ordinary people. It was not because they all somehow mustered up the mental and emotional fortitude to keep them from admitting it was a sham of their own creation.
No, rather, and more naturally so, they just believed it to be true.
The prophesies of the Old Testament pointed to a very specific type of Savior… and fortunately, we received a type of Savior who fulfilled these prophesies in every specific type of way.
Footnotes:
† Emile Borel, Probabilities and Life
‡ This post was largely taken from J.D. Greear’s sermon transcript, “God’s Miraculous Love Letter” (Isaiah 52-53), The Whole Story, #21. June 12, 2016. You can find the audio and transcript to his message here. Wherever there is a “‡” marking, it generally denotes that I took the main idea from his sermon and tweaked it with my own words.
