The Case for Christmas - Did Jesus Uniquely Match the Identity of the Messiah? (part 4 of 4) - 24 December 2006

scripture focus

Hebrews 10:5-10

theme

the love of christmas

summary

the fingerprint evidence justifies our belief that Jesus is the Christ, and serves as an unconditional expression of God's love for us.

Advent is the traditional time of preparation Christians observe that prepares our hearts and minds for the yearly festival celebrating the birth of a child in a stable, two thousand years ago. Over this season of Advent we have been investigating the identity of this child in the manger. Christians believe this child, whose name was Jesus, to be the Christ indicated in the Bible.

If we were to go to that stable this morning, one way of knowing whether Jesus had ever physically been present in that stable, would be to search for fingerprints and then to compare those found to that of Jesus.

Fingerprint evidence has been accepted as a legitimate investigative technique since 1910. It is premised on the assumption that each individual has a unique series of ridges on their fingers. Comparisons of fingerprints with the fingers of suspects are consistent enough to be acceptable in a court of law.

We have no intention of arresting this child in a manger, but there is another kind of evidence which is similar enough to fingerprint evidence for this illustration to be illuminating. We can know with certainty, based on this evidence, that the baby born in that stable two thousand years ago was indeed the Christ, the Saviour provided by God for the world.

The evidence of which I speak is the evidence of fulfilled prophecy. According to Lee Strobel, author of The Case for Christmas,

In the Jewish Scriptures, which Christians call the Old Testament, there are several dozen major prophecies about the coming of the Messiah, whom God would send to redeem his people. In effect, these predictions formed a figurative fingerprint that only the Anointed One would be able to match. This way, the Israelites could rule out any imposters and validate the credentials of the authentic Messiah.

(Just so we don’t get confused, the Greek word for “Messiah” is “Christ”)

Prophecies, of the sort that interest us at this moment, are declarations of events which will happen in the future. Throughout the Old Testament stories are declarations that God would send a person

to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners [...] (Isa. 61:1ff; cf. Lk. 4:18-19)

Was the child in the manger the Christ God would send? If so, so what? Why is this reason to celebrate each year?

To discuss the question of fulfilled prophecies regarding Jesus, Lee Strobel interviewed a man by the name of Louis Lapides, the minister of a church in Sherman Oaks, California. He holds Master of Divinity and Master of Theology degrees; but what makes this man so interesting to this question, is that his spiritual journey began in nominal Judaism. Having discovered that Jesus is the Christ foretold in his Jewish scriptures, he now confidently teaches other Jews about Jesus.

“In Judaism I didn’t feel as if I had a personal relationship with God. I had a lot of beautiful ceremonies and traditions, but he was the distant and detached God of Mount Sinai who said, ‘Here are the rules —you live by them, you’ll be okay; I’ll see you later.’”

In 1969, Lapides encountered a group of Christians on the Sunset Strip of Hollywood, California. His typical defence to Christian evangelists was, “I’m Jewish, I can’t believe in Jesus.” Unfortunately, the evangelist asked him,

“Do you know of the prophecies about the Messiah? [...] Just read the Old Testament and ask the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob —the God of Israel— to show you if Jesus is the Messiah. Because he is your Messiah. He came to the Jewish people initially, and then he was also the Saviour of the world.”

Curiously, Lapides’ Jewish upbringing did not tell him much about the Messiah of his scriptures, and certainly did not discuss the possibility that Jesus might be he. So, Lapides read the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures, and discovered that, indeed, there were many prophecies about a Messiah. For instance, the most significant is recorded in Deuteronomy

God will raise up for you a prophet like [Moses] from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet [...] Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face (Dt 18:15, 34:10).

“The Messiah —someone as great and as respected as Moses but a greater teacher and a greater authority. I grabbed a hold of that and went searching for him.”

The next great Messianic prophecy that Louis Lapides drew Lee Strobel’s attention to was that in Isaiah (53:3-9, 12), a beautifully poetic and specific passage which describes

“The picture of a Messiah who would suffer and die for the sins of Israel and the world —all written more than seven hundred years before Jesus walked the earth.”

Even a cursory glance of the biographies of Jesus reveal that he is the Messiah of Isaiah 53!

Lapides highlighted more than four dozen major predictions made in the Old Testament about the Messiah:

Isaiah revealed the manner of the Messiah birth (of a virgin); Micah pinpointed the place of his birth (Bethlehem); Genesis and Jeremiah specified his ancestry (a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, from the tribe of Judah, the house of David); the Psalms foretold his betrayal, his accusation by false witnesses, his manner of death (pierced in the hands and feet, although crucifixion hadn’t been invented yet), and his resurrection (he would not decay but would ascend on high); and on and on.

The weight of evidence for Jesus fulfilling the prophecies of the Messiah is very strong. Yet, of course, there are challenges that must be recognised and addressed. Thankfully, Lapides deals with them in a very accessible manner.

1. The Argument of Coincidence: Is it possible that Jesus merely fulfilled the prophecies by accident?

“Not a chance. The odds are so astronomical that they rule that out [...] The odds alone say it would be impossible for anyone to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies. Yet Jesus —and only Jesus throughout all of history— managed to do it.”

[text :: “the odds are 1 to 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000"]

Indeed, mathematician Peter W. Stoner agrees, when “he estimated that the probability of fulfilling forty-eight prophecies was one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.”

The chance, then, of fulfilling all the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah are just too great to be random. Jesus’ fulfilling of those prophecies is no chance occurrence.

2. The Argument of An Altered Gospel: Isn’t it probable that the gospel writers fabricated details to make it appear that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies?

There are two points available to counter such an argument: When the teachings about Jesus were being circulated, then written down —which, as we discovered in the first part of this series, can be demonstrated to have occurred within two years of Jesus’ death— there certainly existed people still living who were also eyewitnesses but not followers, and they could easily have ruined the credibility of the early Christians. Indeed, many Jewish leaders of the time would have taken every opportunity to discredit the Christian testimony about Jesus. But, as Lapides points out,

“Even though the Jewish Talmud refers to Jesus in derogatory ways, it never once makes the claim that the fulfilment of prophecies was falsified. Not one time.”

The second point to counter the Altered Gospel argument is a question: Why would the gospel writers fabricate such details as Jesus’ divinity, then be willing to suffer persecution, imprisonment, and even death for such beliefs? No, there is no credibility to this argument against Jesus’ fulfilment of prophecy; no one needed to contrive such false details.

3. The Argument of Intentional Fulfilment: Knowing the Old Testament prophecies, couldn’t Jesus have arranged to appear to fulfil them?

“For a few of the prophecies, yes, that’s certainly conceivable. but there are many others for which this just wouldn’t have been possible.”

He draws Strobel’s attention to the offer of 30 pieces of silver for Judas’ betrayal, the place of Jesus’ birth, the soldiers gambling for his clothing, etc. How could Jesus control such details over which he, nor his followers, could have any control? How could Jesus arrange his resurrection? How could he arrange when he was born?

“When you interpret Daniel 9:24-26, it foretells that the Messiah would appear a certain length of time after King Artaxerxes I issued a decree for the Jewish people to go from Persia to rebuild the walls in Jerusalem. That puts the anticipated appearance of the Messiah at the exact moment in history when Jesus showed up. Certainly that’s nothing he could have prearranged.”

Of course, there will always be arguments against why we should believe that Jesus is who he said that he was: That he was the Son of God. I understand these hesitations because to believe that Jesus is the Christ is challenging, confronting and changing our whole perspective on our life. But Christmas, is just such a season, each year, when we take the time to reconsider the values and believes that we live by. If a reasonable case is made for why we should change something about our life, then Christmas is a likely time for such to be brought to our attention.

We explored four different types of evidence for the identity of the child in the manger: 1) The Eyewitness Evidence (Can the biographies of Jesus be trusted?); 2) The Scientific Evidence (Does Archaeology Confirm or Contradict Jesus' Biographies?); 3) The Profile Evidence (Did Jesus fulfill the attributes of God?); and, today, 4) The Fingerprint Evidence (Did Jesus uniquely match the identity of the Messiah?). In each case, we discovered that the biographies are credible and that there is overwhelming support for taking Jesus at his word.

What does this mean to us? It begs us to ask the question, “Why? Why would God bother to contrive such a scenario?” The fact is that God did so simply because he loves us, and he provided checks and balances so that their was no way that we could escape that fact. We can turn our back on the evidence, but that will, in no way, diminish the intensity of God’s love for us. That is the meaning of Christmas and the reason that this festival persists in being celebrated around the world every year.

How can we respond to the meaning of Christmas? The first thing that we can do is to make sure that we celebrate this festival with all the enthusiasm that it engenders. And we can make sure to keep our hearts and minds focussed on recognising and thanking God for his love, which has been revealed to us so conclusively in the birth of Jesus in the manger so many years ago. Finally, we can also open our hearts and minds to receiving this love into our life and being transformed into the beautiful creation that he intended us to be.

sermon delivered by Ian Forest-Jones
at Hurstville Church of Christ
on Sunday, 24 December 2006 at 10am
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