Truth Unites - Does Fulfilled Prophecy Prove Christianity?

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

In this video I argue that fulfilled prophecy in the Bible concerning the Messiah is a good argument for the truth of Christianity. See my article on Messianic expectation here: https://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/54/54-4/JETS_54-4_749-766_Ortlund.pdf Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Hey everybody, in this video I'm going to lay out an argument for the truth of Christianity from fulfilled biblical prophecy. This argument has a rich history, especially in pre-modern Christians, among pre-modern Christians. But it seems like it's more neglected today. But I think it's a great argument. And I think it has two strengths, simplicity and specificity. So simplicity, when you make arguments like the teleological argument from design or the cosmological argument, God is the first cause, those arguments get really technical in science and philosophy. Even the moral argument gets very technical. Now, this argument can get a little bit complicated, especially when it comes to how to interpret biblical prophecy,

textual criticism issues. You know, it can get, but on the whole, the subject matter seems more available to non-specialists and the basic way of reasoning is pretty intuitive and kind of commonsensical. The basic appeal, you could even see, Jesus's words in John 1429 seem to kind of legitimize the basic nature of the argument. Also, the argument is more specific. So even though it's a simpler argument, it might get you farther because it gets you

to Christianity specifically and not just to theism generally. So I think this argument has great value. The basic idea is that the nature and number of predictions in Scripture, especially concerning the coming of Jesus Christ is best explained on the hypothesis of the supernatural character of Scripture, more so than any other hypothesis. It's better explained by that hypothesis than any other, if I said that right. So at the end of this video, I'll give a few other alternatives of how you could maybe explain this. Here, to express it, here's a statement from Blaze Pascal. If you watched my recent videos, like my one on Divine Hiddenness, you know, I love Blaise Pascal. I'll just quote

once in this video, but he has a lot to say about this. He says, if one man alone had made a book of predictions about Jesus Christ as to the time and the manner, and Jesus Christ had come in conformity to these prophecies, this fact would have infinite weight, but there is much more here. Here is a succession of men during 4,000 years who constantly and without variation come, one after another, to foretell this same event. Here is a whole people who announce it, and who have existed for 4,000 years in order to give corporate, testimony of the assurances which they have and from which they cannot be diverted by whatever threats and persecutions people make against them, this is far more important. So what we want

to try to do here is get a sense of the scope of fulfilled biblical prophecy, just how many there are over such a long span of time, kind of to Pascal's point there, that this is such a huge body of prophecies that all seem to converge upon this one person. It's amazing. Now, I'm just going to focus on biblical prophecies about the Messiah, whom we call Jesus Christ. But I'm not so, but there are other ways you could make this. You could talk about fulfilled prophecies about the coming of Cyrus of Persia or the fall of the Babylonians and all kinds of other things. But let's just focus on the main fulfilled prophecies in scripture, and that's concerning the coming of Christ. I want to emphasize before we dive in, this is a cumulative case. Any one passage could probably be dismissed,

although there are a few passages that are so powerful just by themselves. Talk about those. But on the whole, it's a cumulative case. It's putting it all together. It's really a powerful consideration. Before I dive in, I want to do a book recommendation. This book came in the mail yesterday. It's official release day while I'm recording this, by the time I put out this video, it'll be the next week after.

It's an amazing book. Reforming Criminal Justice, a Christian proposal by Matthew Martins. And I've just been diving in. I haven't finished it yet, but I can just tell already this is going to be an important book. sure I held it up, okay. Buy this book and read it. It's basically from an evangelical Christian standpoint, soundly biblical, just a strong criticism of the American criminal justice system.

And I think it's a very important book. Crossway is so awesome to publish this book. They do so many books that, you know, just are going to be good for the kingdom of God. This is a great book. It's an important one. I think a lot of us need to wrestle with this book. for me it was like putting a spotlight on something I needed to look at that I didn't know much about

before I read this and I needed to think more about it. I really encourage other people to check it out. Fantastic book. Link in the video description. All right, just to start off of the most basic way that I can here, one of the most basic phenomena in human history is religion. Almost all human beings have been religious except for the modern West. And even here, it's still a minority view to not be religious. The biggest religion is Christianity, and the set of books that we associate with Christianity, we call the Bible or Christian Scripture, and this set of texts comes in two basic installments. You've got an older, longer, more narrative, and concrete part, written mainly in Hebrew,

and spanning many, many centuries, and then you've got this shorter, more compact set of texts from the first century written in Greek. And so, again, like, you know, this is kind of like stepping back and seeing the most obvious thing you can see. The Christian scripture comes to us in this basic structure of promise and fulfillment. And that's exceedingly obvious, but sometimes it helps to say the obvious because we're so used to it. We don't think about it. That's actually relatively unique among religions. Most other holy books or scriptures aren't like that.

You think of like the Quran, for example, given to one person at one time and one place. And so the fact that the Bible is kind of extended over time and its incredible diversity of literary genre, all kinds of different authors, there's many benefits to that. But one of them is you can see certain hopes and expectations unfolding. And it's not a bad way to understand the Old Testament as basically a book about hope. It's a story that is unfinished. And one way to put it all together is its forward-looking expectations. for this person who's going to come who's going to set the world right, to whom we call the Messiah.

Now, I'm going to draw in tracing this out. I'm going to draw from a great book by Walt Kaiser. I'll put up on the screen. I highly recommend that book if you want to overview of this topic. I'm also going to put up this great book by Stephen Dempster. He argues that the entire Old Testament can be summed up in terms of expectations for land and offspring, or as he puts it, dominion and dynasty. Let's trace this out just really briefly in this video.

So at the very beginning of the Bible in Genesis 3, right when humanity first falls into evil, they're immediately given a promise, what we call the proto-evangelium or the first gospel, although it's spoken to this dark evil power there, the serpent, who is sometimes interpreted as Satan. And basically he said that one of the women's offspring shall crush his head. And then when you finish the proto-history of Genesis 1 through 11, you have the calling of Abraham, where the story of Israel starts. So Genesis 1 through 11 is a big picture, then you slow down with Genesis 12, and you're really into the narrative.

And this is where you have this promise that all of the nations of the earth will be blessed through Abraham's offspring. So there's the election of Israel, but the particular is for the universal. Israel is elected for the sake of the rest of the world. So basically, right there at the beginning of the Bible, you have this sense of hope. You have this sense of expectation, but it's very broad. Something is going to come to defeat evil and bring blessing through the nation of Israel, but we don't know much about that yet.

You keep reading, you get to Genesis 49. This is after the story of Joseph and the famine in Egypt, where Jacob, or Israel, who is Abraham's grandson is giving blessings to his 12 children, who will become the 12 tribes of Israel, and he gets to Judah, and he references this scepter and the obedience of peoples. And then later on in the book of Numbers, the prophet Belam also talks about a scepter coming out of Israel that will crush other nations. Now we're skipping over some other potential passages here and we're not going to get too deep in the weeds here in terms of how to interpret prophecies. That's very complicated. You know, there's this thing of dual fulfillment that sometimes comes in and things like this.

But just to make one extremely basic observation right here at the start of Scripture early on, you have this hope for a royal figure. that is a king who will come out of Israel, particularly from the tribe of Judah, and the other nations will submit to his dominion, basically. That's what the scepter imagery is doing here, and this reference to ruling over the other nations. So then you're reading further, you're going into books like judges, where you see God's people sort of languishing for their lack of godly leadership, and this hope keeps popping up. For example, at the climactic moment of the prayer of Hannah, who was Samuel's mother at the beginning of the book of First Samuel, there's this reference to God giving strength to his king. Now, this is before the Israelite

monarchy is established. So you're thinking, who's the king? Finally, when you do have the monarchy established, so Samuel anoints Saul, Saul doesn't work out very well, so the next king is David. David is the king par excellence against whom all subsequent kings will be measured. And David is given a promise that his kingdom will last forever. So we call this the Davidic covenant. Almost immediately, things start unraveling. So his son Solomon, this is Israel at its highest point, kind of the golden era of Israelite history with Solomon. He builds the temple. But he starts to wander from the Lord in the later parts of his life. And from the beginning of the book of kings, where Solomon first becomes the king, to the end of the book of kings, you go from the best time in

Israel's history to the worst. It just spirals down into division and decline and devastation. You end up with the devastation of the Babylonian exile, where the temple and the city of Jerusalem are in a rubble, and it looks like all hope is over. People are wondering if, you know, God has permanently rejected his people and so forth. And yet all throughout this time, and even as the prophets look out before and beyond the Babylonian exile, this hope for a coming. Davidic king keeps popping up all over the place. So you have the prophet Jeremiah using this metaphor of a branch growing out of a tree, the tree being the Davidic line, and this branch will be named the Lord our righteousness. The Lord is our righteousness, and he'll bring salvation to God's

people. When Ezekiel is talking about the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah being reunified, he talks about them dwelling together forever under this Davidic king. Now you've got lots of passages like this for here and for much of what follows. I'm just going to give representative examples. I'm not going to go through every text, but I'll try to put up other passages so you can look into this more if you want. Here are some five key Psalms that you could look at and then some other prophetic passages. All of these are talking about this hope for a coming Davidic king. Now, this gets so fascinating. I hope you can tell how how interesting this is.

You know, whatever else you, I remember Carl Bart saying one time, as long as you're biblical, you'll not be boring. He was talking about preaching, but I think that applies to theology as well. The Bible is anything but boring. It's so fascinating if you read it as a story. So the complexity of this starts growing because initially you think this coming Davidic figure is just a king, but then you start to realize, ah, there's these other hopes, and it starts to merge with that.

So from early on, God's people also anticipated a prophet like Moses who would speak God's words to them from Deuteronomy 18. There's also a hope for a coming priest from 1 Samuel 235. Now, just a brief note on this, not to dive into this too much, but some people see this as just the restoration of the line of Aaron through Zadok and his sons, who was one of the high priests, ZAD, OK. If you want to explore this further, you can see the Walt Kaiser book on pages 213 to 215, but suffice to say for now, it seems like it's more than just Zadok, because he's referenced as a faithful priest doing the mind and heart of God,

and it's an eternal role. So it looks like this has a messianic referent ultimately. And so what you have is you start to see, oh, this Davidic king isn't just a king, because these various roles start to converge together. So the Davidic king and this priest, you start to see, oh, that's the same person. For example, like in Psalm 110, you have this king priest, and he's ruling with a sceptor in verse two, but then in verse four, he's an eternal priest. And you can see, I'll put up some other passages where you can see that priestly hope and

kingly hope converging. Jeremiah 33 is one of the great ones. Jeremiah 33 is one of the most fascinating passages of all the Old Testament for seeing these different hopes and expectations converging. Now, in terms of the Davidic king being the prophet of Deuteronomy 18, I'm not aware that that's explicitly made as a point of connection in the Old Testament, though you could say it's implicit in the prophetic responsibilities of spreading the knowledge of God throughout the earth that are given to this Davidic figure in passages like what I'll put up here from Isaiah, but that connection is certainly made in the New Testament more

explicitly in Peter's speech in Acts 3. So the point is this, that as you're going throughout the Old Testament, this very generic hope starts to sort of crystallize and specify more and more and more. So it goes from just a generic offspring hope to a royal hope, and then from a royal hope to a Davidic hope, specifically, and then from a Davidic hope to a messianic hope. The word Messiah means anointed one. And the three offices in the life of Israel that were anointed were prophet, priest, and king. So you get the sense, oh, this person that we're waiting for is not just the king. He's also a prophet and a priest. Now here's where it gets really interesting. As this messianic hope continues to unfold, it intersects with the entire range of Old Testament eschatology. So eschatology

just means the last things or the hope for what is ahead. And Old Testament eschatology then is this sense of anticipation and looking ahead. And basically, think of it like this. If you had like 25 different streams all flowing separately, and then over time they gradually all merge into this one huge roaring river. And that's what you have. Everything collapses and converges on this one person. And there's this expectation for this one person who's going to fulfill all of God's

promises. So just to see some of these connection points, Psalm 72, I'll just give us one example. This is a really important Psalm. It's a royal Psalm about the Davidic king, but you see towards the end that the promise of blessing to all the nations in Abraham becomes channeled through this Davidic ruler. And now you're saying, oh, okay, so the Abrahamic covenant of Genesis 12 and the Davidic covenant of 2nd Samuel 7 are linked at the hip. And then you find those kinds of connections with all these other promises, the Davidic King is the one through whom you'll have the return to the land, the reunification and peace of God's people, the multiplication of offspring, the cessation of sacrifice, deliverance from foreign powers, many of the things we could say. Basically, everything converges on this

one figure that the entire Old Testament is looking forward to. Now again, the question that will emerge from all of this is, that's a lot of information. What is just, generating all of this? I mean, is there anything to that? And then when you see Jesus coming and you start to see the amazing ways he fulfills so much, this is the question. But before we get to that, just to finish this off a little bit, one of the ways you can see that you can put the entire Old Testament story together through this lens of hope in this coming Messiah is that the Old Testament narrative will highlight the continuation of the Davidic line at crucial junctures. So if you're reading through the Old Testament, there will be some things that are puzzling, but then when you keep that in mind,

they come more into focus. One example would be the genealogical ending of the book of Ruth, where if you're reading the book of Ruth, you might say, this is a beautiful story, but I'm not necessarily seeing why it's in the scripture in terms of how it connects to the broader story. Then you get to this genealogy that it ends with, and you see the last word of the book. And you realize, this isn't just about Ruth. Everything God did for Ruth and her marriage to Boaz and all of this is for the sake of the broader story because she is the great grandmother of David. Similarly, with the survival of Jehoiachin at the conclusion of Kings and Jeremiah, it feels kind of anticlimactic at the book and the book of kings. You're thinking, you've just had this

massive tragedy of the exile, and this is it. You know, this is how the whole book ends. But Jehoia Chin is the last Davidic ruler before the disruption of the Judaic monarchy that happens at the exile. The exile looked like, you know, the end of the story to some people. And so that's what all these post-exilic books are doing, trying to say, no, the story keeps going. But here with this conclusion, and the survival of Jehoiachin, the author is kind of winking at you and saying, you know, don't lose hope. Even though the temple is lying in ruins, the Davidic dynasty is still intact, so there's hope that endures. And then in the post-exilic books like Zechariah, like the night visions of Sechariah and other places, you find the appointment of Zerububable has huge prominence.

And again, you might wonder what's the significance of that? Well, Zerubable was the great-grandson of Jeholychin. He's the Davidic royal figure. And so the biblical writers are constantly signaling to us that amidst the ebb and flow of Israel's history. And even during the exile and on the other side of the exile, God is preserving the Davidic line. This, you know, this coming offspring from David is still coming, you know. As you kind of aggregate these passages, let me share five characteristics of what the

rule of this Davidic king will be like that I've kind of compiled as I've just scoured through the Old Testament. This is all coming out of an article I wrote a long time ago. I'll link to that too. First, the Davidic king's rule is universal. It's from sea to sea. It's all over the earth. It has no limit. Nothing escapes his dominion. Second, it is everlasting. It shall last forever. It shall never come to an end. Third, God's enemies are subdued and destroyed during his rule. God is defeating evil through this Davidic king. Fourth, God's people are delivered and protected during his rule. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is Isaiah 42-3, a bruised read. He Will break. The Puritan Richard Sibbs wrote a whole book about that, just about the gentleness of Christ.

But there's so much about this. I couldn't. I don't know how much I haven't done my slides yet. I don't know how many of these I can fit on the slide. Fifth, the saving knowledge of God is spread to all the nations of the earth during his rule. I'll put up some verses to that effect. So I'm just trying to give us a sense of kind of what this hope is. Like what did the prophets think was going to happen when this figure arrives? Well, of course, when the New Testament comes along, Jesus is identified as the Davidic king. You see this in the angel Gabriel's announcement to Mary and Luke 1. You could even see this as kind of bracketing the New Testament as a whole with the reference to the son of David in Matthew 1-1, the first verse of the New Testament,

and then all the way at the end of the New Testament, the reference to Christ as the root and descendant of David, the bright morning star. So that's just to give us this sort of sketch, not exhaustive and kind of a quick drive-by. But that's to give us a sketch of this Old Testament hope for a Messiah. The question is, how do we explain that level of detail? Think about it like this. Jesus Christ is arguably the most influential human being who's ever lived. So the astonishing fact here is that humanity's most significant member, arguably, seems to have been anticipated. He seems to have been expected and hoped for in this particular context for long periods of time pretty consistently in some of the basic details. So then you're saying, how do we explain this? Now, someone might say,

I mention three possible explanations you might say. One thing you could say is that it's just a coincidence. But the reason this is hard is because of the range and specificity of these prophecies. For example, Isaiah 53, you could go to some random person on the street and read these verses and then say, who is this talking about? And they'll probably say Jesus, because this is as rich and detailed an atonement theology as you find anywhere, including in the New Testament. Micah, Chapter 5, even tells you the location of the birth of the Messiah. Daniel 9 even tells you the time frame, and it connects it with the cessation of sacrifices.

But, you know, this is amazing. So the 77s here, just a brief note on Daniel 9, this is one of the most amazing passages. This is often interpreted as 70 times. of seven years, that is 490 years. And from the decree of Artaxerxes, which is referenced in Ezra 7, to restore Jerusalem, which took place in 458 BC, if you add on 490 years, that gets to right around 33 AD, when near the time Jesus was crucified, most people think it was either 30 or 33. Now, look, there are some ambiguities in how to interpret Daniel 9, and there are some alternative of views on certainly the details of that. I don't want to act like this is all neat and tidy and

obvious, but still, this is pretty impressive, especially when you put all these passages together. It's really hard to just see it all as a coincidence. The question just arises, where did this hope come from? Why did they have this expectation? Another possibility is people could say, well, it was textual interpolations. So in other words, people came in later and added these details later to the passages. But if you just, you know, even if you go in and you take the most liberal view possible of textual criticism of the Old Testament, most of these passages are not in dispute at all. And certainly, it's not in dispute that they are, they come from before the time of Christ. Okay. So like Daniel, for example, to go to Daniel 9, some people want to date the book of

Daniel a lot later. They want to say rather than the 6th century BC, when it's traditionally dated, put it earlier, sometimes the second century BC. But the thing is, no one dates it, or maybe it's the fifth century that it's dated. I think it's the sixth. But anyway, people want to put it a lot later, but no one puts it after Christ came, you know? So no matter how liberal of you, you take of textual criticism, you can't just dismiss all these passages like that. The other possibility is someone could say this was intentional fulfillment. So they could say, well, Jesus came along, he knew of these passages, and so he acted in ways so as to fulfill what these expectations were, or it was claimed by others later that Jesus acted in these ways because

they knew of these prophecies and that kind of thing. There's a number of problems with this. One of them is ability, you know. Some of these things Jesus just couldn't do, like choose the location of his birth in Micah 5. The other problem would be motive. You'd have to say, why would Jesus want to do this? Can you imagine Jesus plotting and saying, I know, I'll trick everyone into thinking that I'm the Messiah, that way I can get crucified for it? It's like, you know, why would anyone want to do that? We know how the story of the Messiah ended. Okay, here's how Peter Craft puts it. If you were to calculate the probability of any one person fulfilling sheerly by chance, all the Old Testament messianic prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, it would be as astronomical as winning the lottery

every day for a century. Even if Jesus deliberately tried to fulfill the prophecies, no mere man could have the power to arrange the time, place, events, and circumstances of his birth, or events after his death. So it seems that the most, because I can't think of any other alternative, really, categorically than those three, and then this one, that the most plausible explanation for Old Testament prophecy about Jesus is that those prophecies are of supernatural character. meaning they contain legitimate future predictions because they were in some sense inspired by God. And if that is the case, that goes a long way to promoting and suggesting the truth of Christianity. What do you think? Do you think the argument works? I've just given the most brief canvas of it here,

not really a full technical overview, but I think it's one that's worth really wrestling with, and I kind of like how human it is, and it just puts it right out there for you. I guess I could put it like just as a question. If someone doesn't believe that there's any kind of valid supernatural prophecies like this, how do you explain the Old Testament? I mean, why did they have this specific hope that seems in so many of the, I mean, first of all, just where did that come from? You know, what is generating this hope?

And second of all, how does it seem to be fulfilled so precisely in this person who just so happens to be the most influential. human being who's ever lived, arguably. The largest and most diverse religion is founded in his name, which just so happens to have done a lot of good for the world. Honestly, the more I look at it, it seems pretty compelling. And I say that as someone who's a Christian, primarily just not a personal experience, but I look at the evidences and I say, this is helpful to me, and I hope it could be helpful to others to consider. Let me know what you think in the comments. If you're willing to subscribe to my channel, like the video, promote it, that kind of stuff. Always appreciate that.

it really does help. And the next video I have coming out, I have a couple things coming out, dialogue with Eric Ybarra. I'm going to put that out in several installments. My next one I'm going to record. That I really enjoy talking with Eric. I'm going to talk about Protestant Catholic agreements. But then I'm going to put out a video on the debate between C.S. Lewis and Elizabeth Anscome, famous philosopher, lots of Lewis's critical biographers say that he abandoned apologetics after that debate because they say he just got demolished in the debate. And I think they just hugely exaggerate in order to try to discredit Lewis. And so I want to make a case defending Lewis saying, no, he didn't get demolished in the debate, not even Anscone thought that,

and he didn't abandon apologetics. That's actually a really interesting little historical episode to talk about that. So that'll be the next video that comes out a week after this one. Thanks for watching everybody. See you next time.