Christmas Prophecies

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Miracle Meal by Jenna

Cereal Night / Christmas Party

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Lets get it started Christmas edition.

Intro

As you can all see by walking around downtown, going into any store, or just by looking around the church, Christmas season is finally here. Its hard to believe but in just a few weeks yall will be halfway done with your school year, Which also means that we are about halfway done with our small group year for youth group. Generally around Christmas time we spend time looking at the birth of Jesus, and remind ourselves why we are celebrating this time of year, and this year we will do that, but I want to do it a little bit differently. This year instead of just reading through the story of Luke, I want to look back farther at the prophecies from the Old Testament that showed us that Jesus was coming.

What is a Prophecy?

First I want to discuss a little bit about what is a Prophecy and what is a Prophet.

Prophecy simply means the foretelling or prediction of what is to come.

So now that we know what a prophecy is, how many Prophecies do you think are in the Old Testament.

Pull out phones for quiz on screen

There are 1239 Prophecies just in the Old Testament.

Now out of those 1239 Prophecies, how many do you think were about Jesus coming to save us from our sins?

more than 300

Jesus fulfilled more than 300 prophesies that were made hundreds and thousands of years before He was born. Now thats pretty astounding and difficult to accomplish. So lets just look at the probability that Jesus would fulfill 8 of the prophecies, is 1 in 10 octillion. Which when written out looks like this 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That is a 1 followed by 28 zeros.

So that is a really really really big number, And if yall remember much about my story, math is not my strong suit. So Im going to borrow an illustration from a guy named Louis Giglio to help us understand how truly big this number is.

How long ago was 1 million seconds? 12 days ago

How long ago was 1 billion seconds? 33 years ago

How long ago was 1 trillion seconds? 29679 BC

So that only went to 1 trillion because the calculators wouldnt go past that amount, and I certainly was not going to do that math on my own. and 10 Octillion is 10 billion times larger than 1 trillion. So the likely hood of getting just 8 of these prophesies right is taking a ping pong ball writing your name on it, then filling up the entire earth with ping pong balls, and correctly picking the ping pong ball with your name on it? And that is only if Jesus had fulfilled 8 prophecies but he fulfilled over 300.

What prophecies did Jesus fulfil?

So lets take a look at a couple of the Prophecies that Jesus actually fulfilled.

First that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem.

Micah 5:2 NIV

“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.”

So we can see here that in the Old Testament Micah tells us that out of Bethlehem will come the ruler of Israel.

We can see that this prophecy was fulfilled

Matthew 2:4–6 NIV

When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written: “ ‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.’”

Now the impressive part of this is that Mary and Joseph did not actually live in Bethlehem, so there had to be something that happened to bring them there. Which we see happened in Luke 2:1-3

Luke 2:1–3 NIV

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register.

So not only does the Bible tell us that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, but it also tells us that there will be someone born just before him to proclaim that the Messiah is coming.

Malachi 3:1 NIV

“I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty.

Here we can see that there will be someone to prepare the way for the Messiah, this person ends up being John the Baptist.

Mark 1:2–4 NIV

as it is written in Isaiah the prophet: “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way”— “a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’ ” And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

So we can see here that John the Baptist came before Jesus but was preaching the same message that Jesus would eventually preach. That we must be born again through repentance to have your sins forgiven.

The last of the prophecies that we will look at today, is the fact that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. Now this in and of itself is a pretty difficult prophecy to get right, because anyone who would have said it most likely would have been laughed out of the room, because of the fact that this is not humanly possible for a woman to have a child and be a virgin but we see it in Isaiah 7:14

Isaiah 7:14 NIV

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Now I know this is a long time ago but I’m still pretty sure that they knew where baby’s came from at this point of time, so Isaiah probably got some pretty strange looks.

However we see this prophecy coming true in Luke.

Luke 1:28–34 NIV

The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

So we can see here that even Mary was very confused because she understood that this was not humanly possible since she was still a virgin. However if we continue in that passage the Angel explains that the Holy Spirit will come upon her and she will give birth through the power of God.

Now these are just three of the prophecies that were made about the birth of Jesus and we will discuss a few more next week, but just from those three you can imagine how unlikely it would be that one person fill all of these prophecies. What does this mean for me?

How does this apply?

Or you may be wondering, awesome thats some interesting stuff. Or you may be thinking I hate math and this is the most boring thing ever. But what can we learn from it.

We can see that we can trust the prophecies that God has given us about the future. If God can fulfill all the prophecies about the birth of Jesus and make the extremely unlikely happen, then we can trust that God can do the same thing in our lives too. Even when it seems unlikely, or confusing or we dont know what is going to happen next we can trust that God is still in control.