Welcome to 2025. Now that last night’s midnight revelry is past and you’re up and rarin’ to get after the great challenges and opportunities that may come your way in the next 12 months, allow me to give you something to think about that I am all but certain has never before entered your mind.
Call it some fresh thinking with which to start the new year, especially if you are not a follower of Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.
What does a guy who lived 2,000 years ago have to do with you living today in the United States of America? A guy, that is, from a remote village in a backwater country, who lived only a little more than three decades, who never wrote a book, never posted a blog, didn’t appear on a podcast or stand for public office.
And a guy who made a living as a carpenter but then suddenly declared that his time had come and so he began preaching to everybody who would listen, which prompted members of his own family to consider him to be insane.
Every one of those statements about Jesus is true. But there is so much more about Him that you either never knew or considered, information that totally alters how we should understand the significance of His life to ours.
Allow me to provide you with an amazing fact about Jesus – much about His life and purpose was prophesied many centuries before He lived by multiple authors of books in the Old Testament of the Bible, as they described the coming Hebrew Messiah.
There are so many of these prophecies about Jesus that the statistical odds of Him perfectly fulfilling each of them is one in 10 to the 17th power, or one in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000! That’s according to mathematics professor Matthew Stoner, as reported by the Moody Bible Institute’s Michael Rydelnik.
To further drive home the unlikelihood of one man named Jesus fulfilling all of the Old Testament prophecies, Rydelnik notes:
The likelihood of this occurring is comparable to covering Texas with 10 to the 17th power silver dollars, marking only one of them, stirring the mass of dollars and then having a blindfolded man randomly pick up the marked silver dollar.
Having Texas blood flowing in my veins, I may be slightly biased in favor of that illustration but it does convey the all-but-impossible reality about Jesus that you have probably never known about, much less considered.
Here are five of the most important of those Old Testament prophecies that Jesus uniquely and solely fulfills, as explained by Rydelnik in a feature he composed as a feature in the Holman CSB edition of the Apologetics Study Bible. Trust me, there are many more in addition to these five prophetic areas:
Messiah’s Birth:
The prophet Micah prophesied that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem: But you, “O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.”
The Ephrathah distinguished the little hamlet in Judea known as Bethlehem from another Bethlehem to the North in Israel. The obscure Judean Bethlehem was what we would today call a “one stop-light town.”
Something else about Messiah’s birth was prophesied in the Old Testament; namely, the fact He would be born of a virgin, as Isaiah wrote at 7:14: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”
Messiah’s Nature:
Isaiah leaves no doubt that the Messiah would be God in human form, as he puts it at verse 9:6 in the book bearing his name. There, Isaiah shared the names by which the Messiah would be known:
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
Messiah’s Life:
You’ve possibly heard of Jesus’ message described as “Good News.” That phrase comes from another passage in Isaiah, verse 61:1, where the Messiah is quoted:
“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.”
But there is something else Isaiah tells us about the life of the Messiah, which is found in Isaiah 53:3 as a prophecy signifying a failure of His mission:
“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
Messiah’s Death:
But what appears to men to be a failure is in fact the greatest successful act of substitutionary atonement ever. Messiah came to be rejected and murdered, shedding His blood as the ultimate sacrifice to cover the sins of those who follow Him as Lord and Savior, as Isaiah prophesied at 53:5-6 in his book:
“But he was pierced for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
That “all we like sheep” was written thousands of years ago, but it might as well have been penned this morning as the sun came up because it refers to me, you, every human being who ever lived.
Messiah’s Resurrection:
He would be crucified and buried in a tomb borrowed from a rich man.
Isaiah and King David knew all about it long before it happened. See Isaiah 53:10-11 where we learn:
“Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush Him; He has put Him to grief; when His soul makes an offering for guilt, He shall see His offspring; He shall prolong His days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.
“Out of the anguish of His soul He shall see and be satisfied; by His knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and He shall bear their iniquities.”
We being humans cannot possibly ever repay the perfect God in Heaven for our refusal to follow His commands. So Jesus paid it for us. That is one big reason Jesus said at John 14:6 that He alone is “the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Messiah’s Return:
And He’s coming back! The Old and the New Testaments are full of prophecies of Jesus’ Second Coming. Rydelnik only briefly covers this angle, so I offer a more extensive listing found on the excellent web resource Got Questions?
“A careful look at Old Testament prophecies shows an underlying assumption of two advents. Micah 5:2 and Isaiah 7:14 predict the first advent. Separately, Isaiah 53:8–9 predicts a suffering and dying Messiah, who will be given life and greatness according to Isaiah 53:11–12. Daniel 9:26 describes the Messiah being killed after His appearance. At the same time, prophets such as Zechariah (Zechariah 12:10) say this same “pierced” Messiah will be seen again by His enemies. So the clues are there.
“Many Old Testament prophecies foretell the ultimate triumph of Christ, which will occur at the second advent. These include statements from the books of Zechariah (Zechariah 9:14–15; 12:10–14; 13:1); Amos (Amos 9:11–15); Jeremiah (Jeremiah 30:18; 32:44; 33:11, 26); and Joel (Joel 3:1); which describe the Messiah coming in triumph to lead Israel into salvation. Note that these are in the context of passages such as Deuteronomy 30:3–5 and so are predictions of the time of Messiah’s final victory.”
So here’s the bottom line: Jesus is both the Son of Man and the Son of God. He died to shed His blood on our behalf. He rose again because He is life and death cannot conquer Him. And He is the only way to spend eternity in Heaven with Him.
So, if you don’t know Jesus as your Savior, make it your first and most important New Year Resolution to do your own research and come to your own conclusion about Him. I know, as hundreds of millions of other human beings just like you and me, how He transforms lives.
God bless and Happy New Year!
Note: This essay first appeared on HillFaith.
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