The Address that Identifies the Messiah

Today more than six  and a half billion people live on earth. You can send any one of them a letter, but first you must specify his or her address. Only then are postal services around the world able to find any person anywhere. For instance, while we lived in the Netherlands our address was:

Van de Weghe family

Westeinde 8

Oud Alblas

The Netherlands

Each line adds specific information about where a person can be found. The country specified one certain nation out of more than 200 countries. The city identified one particular area in that country, a small village of about 2,250 inhabitants. Next the street address pinpointed the name of the street and the number of the house on that street. Lastly the family’s name cut through any confusion with any others at that address and  it verified that the address is indeed correct.

This simple example shows that, with only a few clues, it is possible to locate any particular person anywhere in the world, even among billions of people.

Like this postal address, the Old Testament is a specific identifier, telling where, when and how to find the Messiah, the Christ. These address lines are the Messianic prophecies, specific passages written hundreds of years before the Messiah was born, each one foretelling details about His birth, His family, His ministry, His betrayal and trial, and His death and burial.

Jesus of Nazareth fit this Old Testament “profile” of the Messiah so well, that New Testament writers (especially and most explicitly Matthew) used prophecy as central evidence to prove His divine identity. As A. T. Pierson put it, the Old Testament writers added “feature after feature and touch after touch and tint after tint, until what was at first a drawing without color, a mere outline or profile, comes at last to be a perfect portrait with the very hues of living flesh.” [1]

☼ Exhibit #3: Jesus Fulfilled All Messianic Prophecies

In Biblical context a prophecy means the forth telling of truth in the future, present or past. A Messianic prophecy thus foretells the profile or the characteristics of the Messiah.

There are hundreds of prophecies about the Messiah in the Old Testament. Counts range from 100 [2] to 191 [3] to “nearly 300” [4] and to even 456 passages of Scripture labeled Messianic according to ancient Jewish writings.[5] These are found all through the Old Testament from Genesis through Malachi, however the most significant ones are found in Psalms and Isaiah. 

Not all prophecies are clear and some can be interpreted to describe either one event seen in the text, or to predict exclusively the coming Messiah, or even both. I would like to encourage you not to accept a text as a Messianic prophecy just because others claim it is. Challenge it. Read the relevant Old Testament passage for yourself and draw your own conclusions about how to interpret this text. If you are unconvinced, just remove this prophecy from your list and look at the next one. There are so many prophecies that you can afford to be selective.  The remaining prophecies will still identify Jesus as the Messiah, and the evidence is still overwhelming and statistically significant. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, so let us examine a number of the prophecies in more detail:

Table 20- 1 : Selection of Old Testament Prophecies about the Messiah

 

Back to: Jesus' miracles
(1) Exhibit #3: Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophecies	(2)  Prophecies about Jesus' birth
(3) Prophecies about Jesus' ministry and death	(4) Psalm 22 as Messianic prophecy
(5) Isaiah 53 as Messianic prophecy	(6) Probabilities and objections
	Jump to: Did the Resurrection really Happen?