Christ: The Fulfillment of Prophecy

“He willingly submitted to death” (Is 53:12).

“He bore the sin of many and interceded for the rebels” (Is 53:12).

“You may not break any of its bones” (Ex 12:46).

“He protects all his bones; not one of them is broken” (Ps 34:20).

“They will look at me whom they pierced” (Zch 12:10).

“He was assigned a grave with the wicked, but he was with a rich man at his death, because he had done no violence and had not spoken deceitfully” (Is 53:9).

“For you will not abandon me to Sheol; you will not allow your faithful one to see decay” (Ps 16:10).

“You ascended to the heights, taking away captives; you received gifts from people, even from the rebellious, so that the LORD God might dwell there” (Ps 68:18).

“This is the declaration of my LORD to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool’” (Ps 110:1).

I said to him, “About whom did I read?”

He replied, “Well, you obviously read of the life and ministry and suffering and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”

I said, “Is there any question in your mind about that?”

He answered, “No, that could refer to no one else.”

I replied, “Well then, I would want you to understand that all of the Scriptures I just read to you are taken from the Old Testament, which was completed some four hundred years before Jesus was born. No critic, no atheist, no agnostic has ever once claimed that any one of those writings was written after his birth. In fact, they were translated from Hebrew into Greek in Alexandria some 150 years before he was born. If this is merely a book written by men, would you please explain to me how these words were written?”

He said, “I haven’t the faintest idea.” He was completely nonplussed. He had never heard those things before in his life. Indeed they cannot be explained by any purely humanistic presuppositions.

It is noteworthy that in no other religious writings in the world do we find any specific predictive prophecies like we find in the Scripture. You will find no predictive prophecies whatsoever in the writings of Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, Lao-Tse, or Hinduism. Yet in the Scripture there are well over two thousand prophecies, most of which have already been fulfilled.

They are so specific in nature that they burn all the bridges behind them. If they are not fulfilled, it leaves no room for excuse. How can these be explained? Of all the attacks that have ever been made upon the Scripture, there has never been one book written by a skeptic to disprove the prophecies of the Scripture. Though the Bible has been attacked at every other place, the one place where God rests his inspiration is that the things he foretells come infallibly to pass.

The Bible prophecies are altogether unexpected! I know of no one ever prophesying that any other human being would rise from the dead and ascend into heaven. That is exceedingly improbable. The chance of it happening by coincidence is incalculable. No, the Bible is not merely a book written by men; it is a book written by God through men, and the heart of its prophetic message is Jesus Christ.