Prophecies About Jesus
Advent 2023
Can you believe it’s advent season already?!? This year has flown by! Last year I didn’t do an advent study, so this year I wanted to pause our normal study to take some time to think about the birth and life of Christ. In particular, this study will look at a few of the many prophecies that were fulfilled in Jesus. We will focus on four topics:
Why do I want to focus on prophecies about Jesus during the advent season?
The Old Testament has more than 300 prophesies about the Messiah who would come to save us. Studies have indicated that the chance of one person fulfilling just 8 of these prophecies is 1 in 1017. To visualize this, people usually tell this story. Imagine that you have 1017 silver dollars. This is enough to cover the state of Texas up to 2 feet deep. You mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly so that the marked silver dollar ends up randomly placed somewhere in the state. Then, take a blindfolded person and place them in the state. They can travel as far as they want, but eventually, they will need to select one single silver dollar. The chance of the person selecting the marked silver dollar is 1 in 1017. Highly unlikely, if not impossible.
If we believe that Jesus truly is the Messiah who was prophesied, then Jesus has to be the one who fulfills all of the prophecies about the Messiah in the Old Testament. If Jesus fulfilled only some of the prophecies, or none of the prophecies, then he is not the Messiah that everyone was waiting for.
In this series, we will look at only a handful of prophecies—10 each week. We could do much more than that, but that would be overwhelming for me and for you! Incredibly, Jesus not only fulfilled 8 prophecies—he fulfilled them all! This can only be the work of God. And that’s what we want to celebrate in this advent series. I hope you’ll join me!