The Foretelling, part two

 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and call him Immanuel. ~Isaiah 7:14

                                                                  



Advent Blog; Day 3

I suppose I want to deal with the notion of prophecy in one fell swoop. I cant (and, in all likelihood, wont) get through a whole series on Christmas without referring to it again but I do want to side step having to deal with as many prophecies as I can.
 I find it simply stunning the way that the life of Jesus ties together so many prophesies from the Old Testament. The ones that he doesn't fulfil, the new testament indicates clearly that he will yet do so.

In doing some researching of this subject I came across a skeptics forum where much was suggested to the effect of accusing the disciples, writers of the gospels and even Jesus himself of contriving to fulfil as many as possible, to do a patch up job of asserting his messiahship.

I maintain that anyone able to conceive of such a story that would take in all these prophecies, and would contrive to fulfil them by getting crucified (in the case of Christ) when there was no profit in it for them (forgive the pun) other than to live austere lives, getting persecuted and ultimately, for many of them, being martyred for a faith that they knew to be a fabrication, borders on a place beyond insanity. When I review the character of Jesus throughout, when I hear his wisdom and compassion and when I hear Isaiah 53

 he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

 

I quite simply wonder at it. These words, written down, hundreds of years before Jesus was born, make sense of it all. It would be a work of mad genius simply to decipher all these prophecies in a way that works, let alone to fulfil them. I once heard a speaker say that the chances of Jesus fulfilling all the prophecies he did is the equivalent, in chance terms, of a man walking blindfolded  into a Texas that is filled almost knee deep with coins throughout and picking, out of all those coins, on the first try, a pre-marked coin. It sounds fanciful doesn't it? I cant back up the statistics, I have no wish to. What if it were not a billion to one? What if it were out of a million coins, would that not be impressive? What if it were ten thousand?, what if it were one thousand, (I think we are on fairly safe ground now). If it were 500/1 you would still be pretty well impressed. These things were given as signs. Jesus made it clear that to hardened unbelievers even resurrection from the dead would not be enough. The secret is they don't WANT to believe. But to those of us who have ears to hear, Jesus was born to a virgin, in the time and place decided before hand and predicted in the scriptures. For...

 to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the greatness of his government and peace
there will be no end.

Isaiah 9:6-7

Do you have any idea what it means for a Jew to say a son will be called "Mighty God" and "Everlasting Father"?  Yet hundreds of years before anyone was called "Christian", in Jewish scriptures, it's there.