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EVIDENCE OF GOD: FULFILLED PROPHECY
It is said that more than 97 per cent of all people who have ever lived on earth have believed in God. There must be a good reason for so many people believing that God is the eternal, self-existent vitalizing force of the universe - a personality who has created and who intelligently directs all things; who will finally reward all good and punish all evil.
One good reason for believing in God is prophecy and its fulfillment. We can write a fairly good history of a man's life after he is dead. Extensive research is conducted, books are read, magazines and newspapers are examined, libraries are searched. People are interviewed. Even then the result is likely to contain many errors. To write a history of the life of Franklin D. Roosevelt is now possible - but think what it would have been like for someone to have written a complete history of his life six hundred years before he was born! This is exactly what happened in the case of Christ our Lord.
More than six hundred years before He was born, God guided the writers of the Bible in writing a history of the life of Christ. These Bible writers told that Christ would be born, They told when He would be born, where He would be born, who His parents would be - the lineage from which He came and what kind of person He would be. These Old Testament prophets told hundreds of minute details about the life of Christ - the sermons He would preach, the miracles He would perform, and how He would be treated by the people,
Isaiah Chapter 9, and verse 6 tells us, "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulders; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace". This prophecy is even more remarkable when we realize that Isaiah prophesied more than 750 years before the coming of Christ. Christ was also to come while the Old Testament temple was still standing, "and the Lord whom you seek shall suddenly come to His temple", we are told in Malachi 3:1. Christ did come to earth before the temple was destroyed just as the Old Testament prophets had said.
And out of the hundreds of cities and small villages in the world, the prophets said Christ would be born in 3ethelem, Micah 5:2. Over 700 years later Matthew 2:1 was written to tell is what every little child now knows, "Now Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea". How could the Old Testament writers know all of these things? We relieve it was because God guided and directed them as they wrote.
Christ was to be a descendant of Abraham, Genesis 12:1-3. He was to be from the tribe of Judah, Genesis 49:10. He was to be rejected by His brethren, Zechariah 11:7. Hundreds of other events in the life of Christ were foretold in remarkable detail but these are sufficient to show that the Old Testament prophets wrote a complete history of His life hundreds of years before he was born.
Christ was to die under a judicial sentence and not merely at the hand of a mob, we read in Isaiah 53:8. King David also wrote 1,000 years before Christ that He was to die by crucifixion, Psalm 22:16. The prophet Isaiah in Chapter 53, verse 10 wrote of Christ's resurrection. When we turn to the last chapter of Matthew, we find the story just as Isaiah said in the long ago.
All of these remarkable prophecies of the Old Testament were written hundreds of years before He was born and they came to pass exactly as God had said. Christ has fulfilled every one. He nc4 sits on the throne of His father David at the right hand of God in heaven, Acts 2:32-38. He is Lord of Lords, and King of Kings, not only in heaven, but in the hearts of millions of people on earth who believe and obey Him.
Only God could have directed the men who wrote the Old Testament. No one else could know the future in this way. Only Jesus the Christ the son of the living God is the fulfillment of these prophecies. We believe, and are sure, that He is worthy of our adoration and trust. You can make Him your Savior today by believing and obeying His word.
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