As I work through the Old Testament witness about Jesus’s First Coming for our the 25 Days of Christmas at Alex Southern Baptist Chapel, I’m noticing the same tendency to do too much with the biblical witness. I understand how tempting it is. We want everything to be a direct foretelling about Jesus so we can prove our position in a world that has so many opinions about God, religion, and even Jesus Christ. There is enough evidence there without us adding to it. Today, I simply wanted to offer a brief warning when thinking about prophecy.
At the beginning of my search through the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament, I looked up a list of prophecies fulfilled by Jesus and printed it off. There were a few actual direct and explicit prophecies on this list, but there were also references to parts of the biblical narrative like when Abraham was instructed to sacrifice his son, Isaac. As many parallels as there are between that part of the story and the Gospel, where the Father sacrifices His only begotten Son, it is not an explicit prophecy about Jesus’s incarnation. It doesn’t contain any details about future events in any explicit way. So, perhaps the correct way to say it is to say that it is not a foretelling. It is a foreshadowing, but that’s not perfectly clear until after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. True foretelling must declare events before they happen with enough detail that we can look at them and say, “Yeah! That is a description of this certain event before the event took place!”
So, we will hear that Jesus fulfilled more than 300 prophecies in His incarnation! That is true if we count explicit foretelling, foreshadowing, and apocalyptic imagery. If we only count the explicit and plain foretelling of events, that number is far lower. We should be careful not to do too much with the rest.
With prophecy, less is more. What are the odds that any one person could accurately guess what is going to happen between the United States and a nation that doesn’t yet exist 700 years from today? What are the odds that person could also predict what would happen to a nation before that new nation comes to power, if it ever will? This kind of foresight from one person is impossible. Yet, there was not one but at least four prophets who foretold what would happen on a worldwide scale, including things involving Rome, which wasn’t a superpower yet, leading up to Christ’s birth. It is amazing to me that there is any witness at all that predated Jesus telling us accurately about Him.
They were correct in all their predictions concerning nations like Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Rome right up to the birth of Jesus and even the destruction of the Second Temple. They predicted the destruction of the Second Temple before the Second Temple was even built. They did so explicitly. We don’t have to force images or narrative elements to fit what happened to try to make our religion seem more credible. The biblical prophets, unlike any others, predicted things boldly and with plain language. That’s why people believe. It’s not like people went back and changed the prophecies after Jesus was born so they would fit. We have copies of Old Testament prophets that predate Jesus by up to 300 years. People can’t alter that content to make it fit.
God has provided us with more than sufficient evidence to believe reasonably. When we use other so-called evidence to try to disprove God’s existence or explain away Christ’s significance, we literally have to wrestle the prophets. There is no way they could have been so accurate unless God is, and Jesus is the messiah. Today is the day to stop ignoring the evidence we can see so plainly. Repent and believe the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Tomorrow, we will continue with Day 15 of the 25 Days of Christmas.
Alex Southern Baptist Chapel 
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