A prophecy is when someone tells us what will happen in the future. In the Bible it means, at the time the verse was written, God was telling people what would happen in their future.
The Bible has around 1,817 prophecies.
Prophecies are a very important thing to pay attention to because if someone claims to know the future but ends up being wrong, then they are liars and should not be trusted. So, if we want to know if we can trust the God of the Bible we have to know if His prophecies came true or not.
In other words, prophecies are important because when they come true, they give us proof that God is who He says He is. And it also proves that the Bible is the Word of God.
What’s interesting about the prophecies in the Bible is that they have all either come true already, just as God said they would, or the time has not yet come for them to happen. But I want you to look into this for yourself as well; you shouldn’t just take my word for it, because when you study the prophecies for yourself it will help your own personal faith in God to grow.
So, to help you get started with this, we are going to look at the book of Isaiah, which was written between 739 and 681 B.C., and read one of the most famous passages of prophecy in the Bible: Isaiah 53.
As you read Isaiah 53, think about these two questions:
Number 1: What is this chapter saying will happen?
Number 2: Did this prophecy come true already?
Isaiah 53 (NIV)
Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
Now let’s answer our questions
Question #1: What is this chapter saying will happen?
This chapter is saying that God will send someone who has never done anything wrong and that this person would be punished and killed in order to pay for all of the things we have done wrong.
Question #2: Did this prophecy come true already?
Well, it’s pretty obvious that every single verse in this chapter is very specifically describing Jesus. So, yes it has come true already.
The thing that makes this chapter a prophecy is that Jesus was born around the year 4 BC but the book of Isaiah was written between 739 and 681 BC. So, this means that more than 600 years before Jesus was born, God told Isaiah that Jesus would be born. Also, the majority of the book of Isaiah in written on one of the 7 original Dead Sea Scrolls which were discovered in a cave in Qumran. This scroll is dated to be from the year 125 BC which means there is a physical copy of this prophecy in existence today which was written 121 years before Jesus was born.
In other words, Isaiah chapter 53 is a prophecy which tells us that Jesus will be born and will pay for all of our sins. And, as we know, this prophecy definitely came true.
This series of blog posts titled, “Holding on to Reason”, is named after Amanda’s favorite C.S. Lewis quote: “Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”