THE MESSIAH. ACCORDING TO BIBLE PROPHECY
by
Tony Alamo
Absolute proof that Jesus is the only way to the Kingdom of Heaven
The Biblical references in this book are from the King James, original Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek versions of the Bible.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. THE CREDENTIALS OF THE MESSIAH
II. PROPHECIES CONCERNING THE LIFE AND MINISTRY OF THE MESSIAH
III. PROPHETIC PARADOXES IN PROPHECIES CONCERNING CHRIST
IV. PROPHECIES CONCERNING THE SUFFERINGS, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION OF THE MESSIAH (CHRIST)
A. PSALM 22
B. ISAIAH 53
V. PROPHECIES DESCRIBING THE MESSIANIC OFFICES OF CHRIST
VI. THE DEITY OF THE MESSIAH (CHRIST) IN BOTH TESTAMENTS
VII. TYPES AND INDIRECT PROPHECIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT FULFILLED IN CHRIST
The Greatest Miracle in Print: the Record of
THE MESSIAH
According to Bible Prophecy
“To HIM give all the prophets witness” (Acts 10:43). “In the volume of the Book it is written of Me” (Psa. 40:7, Heb. 10:7).
INTRODUCTION
THE MOST AMAZING DRAMA ever presented to the mind of man—a drama written in prophecy in the Old Testament and in biography in the four Gospels—is the narrative of Jesus the Christ. One outstanding fact, among many, completely isolates HIM. It is this: that only one man in the history of the world has had explicit details given beforehand of His birth, His life, His death, and His resurrection. These details are in documents which were given to the public centuries before He appeared, and no one challenges, or can challenge the fact that these documents were widely circulated long before His birth. Anyone and everyone can compare for himself the actual records of His life with these old documents and see that they match one another perfectly. The challenge of this indisputable miracle is that it happened concerning only one man in the whole history of the world.1
Let’s focus our attention on the unparalleled wonder of this literary miracle. Think for a moment—who could have pre-written a life of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or any other character hundreds and thousands of years before he was born? Nowhere in any of the literature of the world, secular or religious, can one find a duplicate of the astounding miracle of the pre-written life of Christ. The inspiration for that portrait came from the heavenly gallery, not from the studio of an earthly artist. So amazing is this miracle of the pre-written life of Christ and its perfect fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth that nothing but divine prescience could have foreseen it, and nothing but divine power could accomplish it. As the full evidence is presented here, all thoughtful readers will agree that “the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (II Pet. 1:21).
Four Great Truths Demonstrated by this Fact
With no variations or aberrations between the Old Testament predictions of the coming Messiah and the New Testament fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth, one instinctively leaps to the conclusion that the hand which drew the image in prophecy molded the portrait in history. The inevitable conclusion is fourfold:
(1) It proves that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, for unaided man is neither capable of writing nor fulfilling such a literary wonder.
(2) It proves that the God of the Bible, the only one who knows the end from the beginning, He who alone has the power to fulfill all His Word, is the true and living God.
(3) It demonstrates that the God of the Bible is both all-knowing, able to foretell the future entwined around numberless men who are free moral agents, and all-powerful, able to bring to pass a perfect fulfillment of His Word in the midst of widespread unbelief, ignorance, and rebellion on the part of men.
(4) It demonstrates that Jesus of Nazareth, who so perfectly and completely fulfilled all the Old Testament predictions, is indeed the Messiah, the Savior of the world, the Son of the living God.
Christ is the Center of History
CHRIST is seen to be the center of all history as well as the central theme of the Bible. The Christ of the New Testament is the fruit of the tree of life, is the tree of prophecy, and is true born by the Spirit. Spiritfilled, washed in the blood of Jesus Christianity is the realization of a plan, the first outlines of which were sketched more than 1500 years before Christ’s birth.
Fulfilled Prophecy is Unique to the Bible
The fact is that fulfilled prophecy is found in the Bible alone; hence, it presents proof of divine inspiration that is positive, conclusive, and overwhelming. Here is the argument in brief: no man, unaided by divine inspiration, foreknows the future, for it is an impenetrable wall, a true “iron curtain” to all mankind. Only an almighty and all-knowing God can infallibly predict the future. If then, one can find true prophecy with definite fulfillment (as one does in the Bible), with sufficient time intervening between the prediction and the fulfillment and with explicit details in the prediction to assure the prophecies are not clever guesses, then the case is perfect and unanswerable. Remember, there were 400 years between the last of the Messianic predictions of the Old Testament and their fulfillment in the Christ of the Gospels.2 Many prophecies are, of course, much older than 400 B.C. During a period of 1100 years, from the age of Moses (1500 B.C.) to that of Malachi (400 B.C.), a succession of prophets arose, Messianic prediction took form, and all of these prophets testified of the Messiah who was to come, as well as the prophecies of Christ to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and many others thereafter, up to the time of Moses.
So minute and so voluminous are these Old Testament predictions, and so complete is their fulfillment in the New Testament, that there would be no honest infidel in the world were Messianic prophecy studied. Nor would there be any doubting disciples if this fact of prediction and fulfillment were fully understood. The sad fact is, we have yet to meet the first honest skeptic or critic who has carefully studied the prophecies which center in Christ. Here indeed is “God’s Rock of Ages, faith’s unshakable standing place.”
“Prophecy” is God’s Own Method of Proving His Truth
The teachings of the Bible are so profoundly opposite from all other religions, and so all-important—telling us that man’s eternal destiny, for salvation or doom, depends on his acceptance of the Christ and His commandments in the Bible (KJV and original texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Hellenic Greek, which is the Greek written and spoken by the Jews)—that we have the right to know whether the Bible is or is not a heavenly decree, the absolute and final Word of God, and whether its message is fully authorized by the Almighty. If God has given a revelation of His will in the Bible, there can be no doubt that in some unmistakable way He will show men that the Bible is indeed His revealed will. The way He has chosen to show men that the Bible is His Word is a way that all men of average intelligence can understand. That way is through the giving and the fulfillment of specific, detailed prophecies. It is His divine seal, letting all men know that He has spoken. This seal can never be counterfeited. It is affixed to the truth to which it attests, for His foreknowledge of the actions of free and intelligent agents, men, is not only one of the most incomprehensible attributes of Deity, it is exclusively a divine perfection.
In challenging the false gods of Isaiah’s time, the true God said, “Produce your cause…bring forth your strong reasons…show us what shall happen…declare us things for to come. Show the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods” (Isa. 41:21-23).
There are false faiths like Mohammedanism and Buddhism that have tried to prop up their claims on pretended miracles, but neither these nor any other religion in the history of the world, except the Bible, have ever ventured to frame prophecies.
It is the peculiar glory of the Almighty, the all-knowing God, who is “the Lord, the Creator” (Isa. 40:28) to declare “new things…before they spring forth” (Isa. 42:9). He will not give that glory to another, for as He stated, “I am the LORD: that is My name: and My glory will I not give to another” (Isa. 42:8). The true God alone foreknows and foretells the future. He has chosen to confine His foretelling to the pages of Scripture.3 Though there are many other subjects of divine prophecy in the Bible, such as the Jews, the Gentile nations that surrounded Israel, the ancient cities, the church, and the last days, the divine perfections of foreknowledge and fulfillment can be better seen in the realm of prophecies concerning Christ than in any other sphere.
Here is the clear statement that shows God alone, in the Bible alone, gave true prophecies: “I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like Me, DECLARING THE END FROM THE BEGINNING, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, MY COUNSEL SHALL STAND, AND I WILL DO ALL MY PLEASURE” (Isa. 46:9-10). (The statement by God that He alone can give and fulfill prophecy, which can only be found in the Bible, is restated many times in the Bible. See Isa. 45:1-7, II Tim. 3:16, II Pet. 1:19-21, Deut. 18:21-22, Isa. 41:21-23, Jer. 28:9, and John 13:19.)
Here is the clear statement that shows God alone, in the Bible alone, gave true prophecies: “I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like Me, DECLARING THE END FROM THE BEGINNING, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, MY COUNSEL SHALL STAND, AND I WILL DO ALL MY PLEASURE” (Isa. 46:9-10). (The statement by God that He alone can give and fulfill prophecy, which can only be found in the Bible, is restated many times in the Bible. See Isa. 45:1-7, II Tim. 3:16, II Pet. 1:19-21, Deut. 18:21-22, Isa. 41:21-23, Jer. 28:9, and John 13:19.)
Note the tremendous force of this fact: To declare a thing shall come to pass long before it is in being, and to bring it to pass, this or nothing is the work of God.
“Chance Fulfillment” of Prophecy is Ruled Out
Desperate atheists and other unbelievers, seeking a way to circumvent the fact of fulfilled prophecy and its connotations, have argued that the fulfillments of Old Testament prophecy in the New Testament were “accidental,” “chance,” or “coincidental.” But when a number of details are given, the “chance fulfillment” of prophecy is ruled out. One writer says, “It is conceivable that a prediction, uttered at a venture, and expressing what, in a general way, may happen to result, may seem like a genuine prophecy. But only let the prophecy give several DETAILS of time, place, and accompanying incidents, and it is evident that the possibility of a ‘chance fulfillment,’ by a ‘fortuitous concurrence of events,’ will become extremely desperate—yea, altogether impossible.” The prophecies of heathen antiquity always took good care to confine their predictions to one or two particulars and to express them in the most general and ambiguous terms. Throughout all history, except for the prophecies of Scripture, there is not a single instance of a prediction, expressed in unequivocal language and descending any minute detail, which bears the slightest claim to being fulfilled. Suppose that there were only fifty prophecies in the Old Testament (instead of hundreds) concerning the first advent of Christ, giving details of the coming Messiah. All meet in the person of Jesus. The probability of “chance fulfillment” as calculated by mathematicians using the theory of probabilities is less than one in 1,125,000,000,000,000. If you add only two more elements to these fifty prophecies, and fix the TIME and the PLACE at which they must happen, the immense improbability that they will take place by chance exceeds all the power of numbers to express (or the mind of man to grasp). This is enough, one would think, to dismiss all pleas for chance from unbelievers, giving them no opportunity to escape from the evidence of prophecy.
Let it be further observed that many of the prophecies about the Messiah are of such a nature that only God could fulfill them, such as His virgin birth, His sinless and holy perfection, His resurrection, and His ascension. Only GOD could cause Jesus to be born of a virgin or be raised from the dead.
THE COMING MESSIAH
IN THE OLD TESTAMENT there is a definite, clear, and continuous teaching that the “Messiah will come.” Dozens of times we read such promises as “Behold, thy King cometh unto thee” (Zech. 9:9), “The Lord God will come” (Isa. 40:10), “The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple” (Mal. 3:1), and “The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet from the midst of thee” (Deut. 18:15). Isaiah told of the “rod out of the stem of Jesse” (Isa. 11:1) on whom the Lord would lay the iniquity of us all (Isa. 53:6). Prophets and seers of old often spoke of the time when “the desire of all nations” would come (Hag. 2:7, also Gen. 3:15, 49:10, Num. 24:17, Psa. 2:6, 118:26, Isa. 35:4, 62:11, Jer. 23:5-6).
Christ’s Coming is The Central Theme of the Bible
The coming of Christ, including His birth, perfection, work, teachings, sufferings, death and resurrection, promised in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New, is the grand central theme of the Bible. Christ is the bond that ties the two Testaments together. The Old Testament is revealed in the New, the New Testament is concealed in the Old.
The Average Bible Reader Can Understand
The most ordinary reader may examine the old, curious predictions of the Messiah’s person and work found in the Old Testament, follow the gradual progress of these revelations from Genesis to Malachi, and trace the prophecies as they descend into more and more specific and minute details, until at last the full figure of the coming One stands out. Then, with this image clearly fixed in his mind’s eye, he may turn to the New Testament and, beginning with Matthew, see how the historic personage, Jesus of Nazareth, corresponds and coincides in every particular with the prophetic personage depicted by the prophets. There is not one difference, yet there could have been no collusion or contact between the prophets of the Old Testament and the narrators of the New Testament. Observe that I have not gone out of the Bible. I have simply compared two pictures, one which is in the Old Testament of a mysterious Christ. He is mysterious to those who are carnal, but the mystery is solved when a person becomes born again of the Spirit, then seeks the Lord with all their heart by their studying the Word of God, the Bible. When we become born again of the Spirit, we are able, by the Holy Spirit, to decipher all of the mysteries of not only the Old Testament but the New. They all become very clear. The New Testament Christ fulfilled all the Old Testament prophecies of Himself, but again, the carnal mind deciphers none of this. The facts of the Bible are mysteriously obscured from the carnal mind. The spiritual soul and mind is able to decipher everything from the Lord.4 Christ was the very incarnation of the entire Godhead. His incarnation, His presence here on earth, and the entire New Testament testifies to His fulfilled deity and work in and through His church, His body, His bride, the New Jerusalem. Jesus is the Messiah! It is easy for the born-of-the-Spirit Christian, who is washed in the blood of Jesus, to conclude that the prophecies of the Old Testament and the fulfillment of them in the New Testament are one and the same, Jesus, His body, His bride, the New Jerusalem, the church.
A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE PROPHECIES
Let us briefly trace a few of the outstanding similarities in correspondences between Old Testament prediction and New Testament fulfillment. The work of redemption was to be accomplished by one person who was the central figure in both Testaments, the promised Messiah. As the “Seed of the woman,” He was to bruise Satan’s head (Gen. 3:15 with Gal. 4:4). As the Seed of Abraham (Gen. 22:18 with Gal. 3:16) and the Seed of David (Psa. 132:11, Jer. 23:5 with Acts 13:23), He was to come from the tribe of Judah (Gen. 49:10 with Heb. 7:14).
He was to come at a specified time (Gen. 49:10, Dan. 9:24-25 with Gal. 4:4) and be born of a virgin (Isa. 7:14 with Matt. 1:18-23; also Luke 1:27, 35), in Bethlehem of Judaea (Micah 5:2 with Matt. 2:1, Luke 2:4-6). Great persons were to visit and adore Him (Psa. 72:10 with Matt. 2:1, 11). Through the rage of a jealous king, innocent children were to be slaughtered (Jer. 31:15 with Matt. 2:16-18).
He was to be preceded by a forerunner, John the Baptist, before entering His public ministry (Isa. 40:3, Mal. 3:1 with Matt. 3:1-3 and Luke 1:17)
He was to be a prophet like Moses (Deut. 18:18 with Acts 3:20-22) and have a special anointing of the Holy Spirit (Psa. 45:7, Isa. 11:2-4, 61:1-3 with John 3:34-36, Matt. 3:16-17; Luke 4:15-19, 43). He was to be a priest after the order of Melchisedec (Psa. 110:4 with Heb. 5:5-10). As the “Servant of the Lord,” He was to be a faithful and patient redeemer, for the Gentiles as well as the Jews (Gen. 17:5, Isa. 42:1, 6 with Matt. 12:18, 21).
His ministry was to begin in Galilee (Isa. 9:1-2 with Matt. 4:12-17, 23); later, He was to enter Jerusalem (Zech. 9:9 with Matt. 21:1-10) to bring salvation. He was to enter the temple (Hag. 2:7, 9, Mal. 3:1-2 with Matt. 21:12, I Cor. 3:16-17, 6:19, II Cor. 6:16-18, Eph. 2:18-22, Rev. 3:20).
His zeal for the Lord is spoken of in both Testaments (Psa. 69:9 with John 2:15-17). His manner of teaching was to be by parables (Psa. 78:2 with Matt. 13:34-35), and His ministry was to be characterized by miracles (Isa. 35:5-6 with Matt. 11:4-5, John 11:47). He was to be rejected by His brethren (Psa. 69:8, Isa. 53:3 with John 1:11, 7:5), to be a “stone of stumbling” to the Jews and a “rock of offence” (Isa. 8:14 with Rom. 9:32-33, I Pet. 2:7-8).
He was to be hated without a cause (Psa. 22:6-20, Isa. Ch. 53, Zech. 12:10, Psa. 69:4, Isa. 49:7 with John 15:18-25, Matt. 2:13, 26:67-68, 27:28-44, Mark 8:31, Luke 4:28-29, 23:5, 10-11, John 8:37, Ch. 19), rejected by the rulers (Psa. 118:22 with Matt. 21:42-46, John 7:48-53), betrayed by a friend (Psa. 41:9 with John 13:18, 21), forsaken by His disciples (Zech. 13:7 with Matt. 26:31-56) and sold for thirty pieces of silver (Zech. 11:12 with Matt. 26:15). The price paid for Him was to be given for the potter’s field (Zech. 11:13 with Matt. 27:7). He was to be smitten on the cheek (Micah 5:1 with Matt. 27:30), spat on (Isa. 50:6 with Matt. 27:30), mocked (Psa. 22:7-8 with Matt. 27:28-31, 39-44), and beaten (Isa. 50:6 with Matt. 26:67, 27:26, 30).5
His death by crucifixion is given in detail in Psalm 22, and the meaning of His death, as a substitutionary atonement for our sins, is given in Isaiah 53. His hands and His feet were to be pierced (Psa. 22:16, Zech. 12:10 with John 19:18, 37, 20:25), yet not a bone of Him was to be broken (Ex. 12:46, Psa. 34:20 with John 19:33-36). He was to suffer thirst (Psa. 22:15 with John 19:28) and be given vinegar to drink (Psa. 69:21 with Matt. 27:34), and He was to be numbered with the transgressors (Isa. 53:12 with Matt. 27:38).
His body was to be buried with the rich in His death (Isa. 53:9 with Matt. 27:57-60), but was not to see corruption (Psa. 16:10 with Acts 2:31).
He was to be raised from the dead (Psa. 16:10 with Matt. Ch. 28, Mark Ch. 16, Luke Ch. 24, John Ch. 20 and Acts 13:33) and ascend to the right hand of God (Psa. 68:18 with Luke 24:51, Acts 1:9; also, Psa. 110:1 with Heb. 1:3).
This bare sketch of Old Testament Messianic prophecy with its New Testament fulfillment is, of course, far from complete; it is merely suggestive, though we have covered many of the main points. Remember, there are actually hundreds of predictions concerning the coming Messiah in the Old Testament!
THE MESSIAH WHO HAS COME
Christ’s Testimony to the Fact that He Fulfilled Old Testament Prophecy
Not only was the life of Christ pre-written in the Old Testament, but Jesus the Christ of the New Testament knew it, and fully witnessed to that fact in the New Testament. This is a miracle in itself, one which finds no parallel in the literature of the world. No other person of history—Caesar, Gladstone, Shakespeare, or any other—ever dreamed of saying of the Bible or of any other book, “Search the Scriptures; for...they are they which testify of Me” (John 5:39), as our Lord did. Nor has any false Christ ever appealed to fulfilled prophecy to vindicate his claims.6
The born-of-the-Spirit Christian must face this vast truth. Born-of-the-Spirit Christians are the one and only manifestation of Christ, true salvation, work of God, and presence of God in the world. God has always renounced the so-called “old religions” because they actually are old heresies. Being a born-of-the-Spirit, saved person is the only proper and true way for a human to enter Heaven and stay out of Hell and the lake of fire.
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