Yesterday we spoke of the faithfulness of God as a promise keeper. Genesis 3:15 was only His first word on the coming Messiah. Many of our favorite Scriptures of the season are fulfillments of specific prophecies about His coming. Four times in Matthew 2, the author speaks of events that came to pass to fulfill the words of the prophets. Our passage in chapter 1 is a reference to a fifth prophecy fulfilled. In these two chapters alone, we read of five prophecies fulfilled at Jesus birth. Can this really be? Is it possible that specific predictions could be made and then fulfilled in one man, Jesus?

In an interview with Norman Geisler for The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel asks him about prophecy. Geisler, with references to specific prophecies about Christ’s crucifixion says, “So here you have incredible predictions that were literally fulfilled in the life of one man, even though he had no control over most of them. For instance, he couldn’t have arranged his ancestry, the timing of his birth, and so on. These prophecies were written two hundred to four hundred years in advance. No other book in the world has this.”¹⁰ Earlier in the interview, Geisler notes, “According to Barton Payne’s Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy, there are 191 predictions in the Old Testament about the coming of Christ, including his ancestry, the city in which he would be born, that he would be born of a virgin, precisely the time in history when he would die, and so on.”¹¹ Geisler later concludes, “Mathematics has shown that there’s absolutely no way they could have been fulfilled by mere chance.”¹²

We’ve already paused in wonder at the change that transpires between conception and birth. We’ve reviewed that Jesus was born of a virgin. That prophecy is in Isaiah 7:14, Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. Matthew 1:22 and 23 say, All of this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” – which means, “God with us.” Ponder anew the miracle of this birth: predicted hundreds of years before it happened, predicted that the baby would be born of a virgin. He developed in His mother’s womb just like any other baby from a single cell to a fully formed human. Only God could do it, and only God would do it. We should kneel in awe.
 

Jay W. Hill