Excerpt from Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler of “Who Made God?”. (Grand Rapids, Michigan : Zondervan,2003)
There are many lines of evidence that the Bible is God’s Word, but one of the most important evidences of the Bible’s supernatural nature is its ability to make clear, repeated predictions about the distant future. The Old Testament has nearly two hundred predictions about the coming of Christ that were made hundreds of years in advance. Just a small sampling shows that they predicted with complete accuracy that they Messiah would be born :
- Of a woman (Genesis 3:15)
- Of the line of Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3, 22:18)
- Through the tribe of Judah (Genesis 49:10)
- As a son of David (2 Samuel 7:12-13)
- In the city of Bethlehem (Micah 5:2)
- Of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14)
- And suffer and die for our sins (Isaiah 53) at about A.D.33 (Daniel 9:24-26)
- And rise from the dead (Psalm 16:11, 2:7-8)
Even Bible critics admit all these prophecies were given two hundred to several hundred years before the time of Christ, which eliminates any guessing or reading the trends of the times. Further, these prophecies are both detailed and specific (unlike “predictions” of those of Nostradamus). They give the very ancestry (David), place (Bethlehem) and times (Daniel 9) of Christ’s coming. No other religious book offers anything that can compare with these supernatural predictions.
