Every Old Testament prophecy finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. He is the promised Messiah!
Every Old Testament prophecy finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. He is the promised Messiah!
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What is one of the best “proofs” that Jesus was truly the Messiah?
Well, hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada, and it’s a question that sparks a lot of lively conversation around this time of year as we begin the Christmas season. I’m sure you’ve got friends who are kind-hearted skeptics. They’re not about to badmouth Jesus; after all, they firmly believe he was a good moral teacher. They don’t even really have many bad things to say about the Christian faith. But they are not about to say that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, the Messiah who had come into the world to save lost sinners like themselves. Well, I know that when I have immersed myself in these sorts of conversations, especially with friends who are Jewish, I like to point to the prophecies in the Holy Scriptures – the Old Testament – which talk about the coming Messiah. And, hey, maybe you’ve found yourself wondering about this. I mean, could Jesus really fulfill every one of those specific promises? Let’s just look at a few.
Numbers 24:17 says that the Messiah will come through the line of Jacob. Jeremiah 23 gets more specific: the Messiah will come through the line of King David. From Micah 5:2, we know that the Messiah would be born into the tribe of Judah and in the town of Bethlehem. And from Isaiah 7:14, we’re told that this Messiah would be born of a virgin. Psalm 72 says that he would be worshipped by shepherds coming from the desert and that foreign kings would present gifts to him. Even after Jesus was born, Jeremiah 31 prophesies that there would be a great slaughter of infants because of his birth. Now, when you look at all these prophecies collectively – and, I mean, we’re only talking about a few here – it’s astonishing. Because they all find fulfillment in one person, Jesus, the Christ. I mean, think of the unlikelihood of every one of those prophecies being fulfilled in a single individual.
And so, we can assume that this was no hoax. No single person could possibly shape himself into the Messiah, especially since he would have had to finagle all of this before he was born. And with this, I hope you can see why I believe that those amazing Old Testament prophecies are a great way to get people thinking. And most of them were written hundreds of years apart. Yet they all converge at a single point in time and in the life of a single individual. And that’s no hoax. You know, I think you would agree that this would make a fascinating discussion with the kind-hearted skeptics you know. And to help you with that, I want to give you Lee Strobel’s book “The Case for Christmas.” In it, Lee talks about the astronomical odds of all 48 Old Testament predictions about the Messiah being fulfilled in one person. The probability of just eight prophecies being fulfilled is one chance in one hundred million billion. In other words, there is no way someone could “accidentally” fulfill all 48 predictions – meaning that the one who did must be the real deal, the promised Messiah.
Here at Joni and Friends, we want to help you get the people you know engaged with the real person behind the Christmas story, so go to joniradio.org today and request your free copy of Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christmas.” Supplies are limited, and that means you’ll have to visit joniradio.org today to ask for your gift. Again, the book is free from the team here at Joni and Friends. Because we want to get the word out to those who do not know Jesus Christ that the baby in the manger is, indeed, the true Messiah. So see you later at joniradio.org.
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