Is Christianity true (the Bible)?

This blog is part of my series titled “Is Christianity true?” The series addresses four common objections to the truthfulness of the Christian worldview, namely concerns about: (1) the trustworthiness of the Bible; (2) the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection; (3) the compatibility of faith in God with modern science; and (4) the incompatibility of Christian truth claims with those of other worldviews.

IS THE BIBLE TRUSTWORTHY? NEW TESTAMENT FULFILLMENT OF OLD TESTAMENT PROPHECY (PART 1)

According to the Bible, Jesus perfectly fulfilled dozens of Old Testament prophecies that were recorded hundreds of years before His incarnation. Given the number of different prophets and the time span separating them from the predicted events, this fact is amazing and points to the truth of the biblical accounts. 

Mathematicians have estimated the probability of these many different prophecies being fulfilled in one person, and it is close to the square root of zero! The New Testament writers saw Jesus’ fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy as proof of His identity as the Jewish Messiah and Savior of the world.

Before considering numerous prophecies that point toward a future Messiah, consider this important fact: scholars from across the worldview spectrum overwhelmingly agree that these utterances were recorded hundreds of years before the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Recognizing the uncanny linkage between these prophecies and Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, some skeptics assert that this connection is some sort of Christian conspiracy to validate claims about Jesus. Given the enormous time gap, however, this is a weak argument. To be charitable, perhaps they have not considered the evidence! 

This is not a case of Christians looking backward and reading messianic interpretations into these Scriptures.

For centuries, Jewish scholars considered these prophetic Scripture passages to be messianic. This is not a case of Christians looking backward and reading messianic interpretations into these Scriptures. Jewish religious leaders and scholars of the day and down through the centuries also interpreted them as messianic. 

In fact, there are many more messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures that were fulfilled in Jesus Christ than are discussed in this blog series. In addition to the many direct prophecies concerning the Messiah, there are also many stories in Israel’s history that parallel the messianic narrative. These include Abraham obeying God’s command to offer up his son as a sacrifice and Moses obeying God’s command to lead the Israelites out of bondage to their Egyptian slave masters. 

In parallel to the former, Jesus, the Son of God, was offered as a sacrifice for the sin of humankind. In parallel to the latter, Jesus delivered humankind from the bondage to sin through His substitutionary atonement on the cross. The direct prophecies, together with the parallel historical accounts, support the assertion that the metanarrative of the entire Bible is Jesus Christ. Many of these prophecies would have made little or no sense to the prophets uttering them or to their contemporaries hearing them. They would have seemed obscure at the time they were delivered. Only in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus do they make sense. 

This observation supports the contention that the New Testament is concealed in the Old Testament, which in turn is revealed in the New Testament. We could characterize the various messianic prophecies as a jigsaw puzzle inspired by God that make sense only when we stand back from viewing individual pieces of the puzzle and take in the whole work. These prophecies were fulfilled exclusively in Jesus Christ. Their fulfillment supports the thesis that the writing of the Bible, unlike any other book in history, was supernaturally inspired by God. The following blogs document a small portion of the prophecies concerning the future Messiah. 

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