Day 9

“The Spirit of the LORD will come upon you in power, and you will prophesy with them...”

—1 SAMUEL 10:6

The Old Testament looks forward to Christ with explicit prophecies about Him made and circulated long in advance of His birth. There are hundreds of prophecies about Christ, apparently covering three hundred and thirty-three different events about His life.

According to Peter Stoner, a mathematician, the chances of just forty-eight of those prophecies coming true in one person is one to ten to the power of two hundred and fifty- three; that is one with two hundred and fifty-three zeros after it. That is an incomprehensible number.

These prophecies were very explicit.

·     Eight hundred years before Christ was born, it names Bethlehem as the town of His birth.

·     Seven hundred years before He was born, it spoke of the nature of His birth: “A virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and His name will be Immanuel which means God with us.”

·     It obliquely named the home town in which He would live: Nazareth.

His death is described by Isaiah with detail long before crucifixion was ever devised as a form of capital punishment by the Phoenicians, and then adopted by the Romans.

These and many more prophecies are powerful evidence of the authenticity of Jesus Christ. We have a better reason for believing that Jesus Christ was born, lived and died than that the Bible said He did. The better reason for believing is that the Bible said that He would long before He did.

If we pick up today’s newspaper and read yesterday’s news, we are not surprised by that. But if we pick up today’s newspaper and read next week’s news and next week it happens exactly as we read this week, we would probably want to meet the editor! Scripture gives us with detailed accuracy the story of Jesus hundreds of years before He was born. That alone must give us confidence in who He is and what He does.

PRAYER: I am grateful, Lord, for your Holy Word that gives us the story of Jesus, even long before it happened. Thank You for all the prophecies, which are fulfilled in your Son, giving us even better reason to believe.

TO REFLECT UPON: Have I considered the absolute divine work of God in bringing to fruition every prophecy of Christ down to the minutest detail?