PROVING THAT JESUS IS THE REAL CHRIST OF CHRISTMAS
December 22, 2013
INTRODUCTION:
1.) Christmas is the season when we celebrate the birth of Christ.
2.) The question I want us to ask this morning is how do we know that Jesus is truly the authentic Christ we celebrate at Christmas?
3.) That may seem like a strange question for us to ask this morning, but do we know for sure that Jesus is truly the Christ or Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament Scriptures?
A.) To us, that question might seem strange, but to the Jewish people of the first century they had to know without a shadow of doubt that Jesus was truly the Christ before they would worship Him.
aa.) In fact even to this day the Jewish people can look at Jesus, and accept him on at least some level as a great one from God, but they fail to recognize that He is in fact the Promised Messiah of God.
B.) Our Scriptures contain four Gospel accounts.
ba.) The reason for four different accounts of the Gospel narrative is that each writer has a specific audience he was writing to, and a purpose for his account.
C.) Today I want us to look specifically at the Gospel of Matthew because Matthew was writing to a Jewish audience with the purpose of convincing them from the Old Testament Scriptures that Jesus is the promised Messiah.
4.) Today, I want to take a quick survey through Messianic prophecies in the first few chapters of the book of Matthew by which Matthew used fulfilled prophecies to prove to the Jews that Jesus is the Christ.
A.) Really the entire book of Matthew is filled with Messianic prophecies proving from the Old Testament Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ.
B.) Though the entire book deals with such prophecies, I want today, to just focus on those prophecies dealing with the message of Christmas.
I. GENEALOGICAL RECORDS SHOWED HE MET THE FAMILY LINE THROUGH WHOM THE MESSIAH WAS TO COME.
1.) This family tree is traced back to Abraham.
A.) God had specifically prophesied to Abram that he would be the father of a great nation and the entire world would be blessed through One of his family line.
2.) God later extended this prophecy through the generations after him of Isaac, Jacob(Israel) and through Judah.
A.) Everything went fine until the line of Judah.
B.) Judah’s line messed up with sinful rebellion against God.
ba.) God had to put two of Judah’s sons to death because of their wickedness.
bb.) Even Judah himself had messed up sinfully before God.
C.) Because of time, I am not going to go into all the details but as a result of the chain of events that occurred, a child was born to Judah out of wedlock.
ca.) Because of that, the child Judah would father though he was of the line of the Messiah would be excluded from the temple and full fellowship with the people of God.
cb.) Not only that, but several generations after him would also be excluded because of Judah’s sin.
cba.) (cf. Deut. 23;2)
cc.) At this point in Jewish history God’s prophecy of Gen. 49:10 that the sceptre would not depart from the line of Judah seemed almost ridiculous.
cd.) How could this come to fulfillment if the next ten generations of the line of Judah were outside of fellowship in the temple of God?
cda.)I want us to see this in the genealogy of Matthew 1.
3.) Matthew began his genealogy genealogy of Christ with King David.
A.) Matt.1:1
B.) Certainly David was the greatest and most significant person in the line of Judah to this point.
C.) More importantly though verses 3-6 Matthew showed us that God could still deal with that earlier generational separation.
ca.) If you count the names in Matt.1, you will find that David was the tenth generation from Judah, and therefore the first line of that family since Judah who could go to the temple of God.
cb.) For Matthew’s Jewish audience, this detail we might overlook gave credentials from both prophecy and the family tree, to show that genealogically speaking, it was possible for Jesus to be the prophesied Messiah.
cc.) As the first in the family after Judah with the rights to go to the temple of God and full fellowship with the people of God, in some ways David was the new patriarch starting again the line of the Messiah.
II. OLD TESTAMENT PROPHECY HAD DECLARED THAT THE MESSIAH WOULD BEBORN OF A VIRGIN AND BE CALLED THE CHILD OF GOD.
1.) This came from a prophecy by Isaiah 750 years before the birth of Christ.
A.) We looked at this a few weeks ago, but to refresh us on it we go back to Is. 7:14
B.) To recall the scene, God challenged the wicked King Ahaz to put his trust in god instead of the kings of neighbouring countries for victory.
ba.) God challenged Ahaz to ask for a sign as large as the heavens themselves.
bb.) The wicked king refused to ask God, because he had neither faith in nor love for God.
bc.) God himself chose to give a sign and it was going to be an incredible one.
bba.) The sign was that a virgin would conceive, and the child within her would be called Immanuel: God with us.
bbb.) A few weeks ago we looked at other details of this account from Luke.
bbc.)Matthew just tells us that she was pregnant with the Holy Spirit of God.
2.) Many of the Jews there did not get it, but when Jesus died, a Roman soldier had come to realize that Jesus was in fact the Son of God.
A.) Matt. 27:54
III. MATTHEW SPEAKS OF THE MAGI BEING LED BY A STAR.
-- Matt. 2:1-2
1.) The Magi were led by a star.
A.) They spoke of a special star given by God to point out the Messiah.
2.) Jewish minds were naturally taken back to Old Testament prophecy.
A.) Num. 24:17
B.) The reference was to the Messiah himself as this star ,
C.) Yet Scripture reveals it was not just this prophecy that had brought these Magi to find Jesus, but an actual physical star.
D.) There are many who feel the prophecy of Num. 24:17 was to be a prophecy with a double fulfillment.
da.) Just as Jesus himself is the Star that was to come it is very possible that God had also provided this physical star as a secondary
fulfillment to that passage of Scripture.
E.) Burton Coffman’s commentary quotes a man Kepler. According to him” there was a conjunction of the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars within the constellation Pisces (the fish), beginning in 7 B.C. and culminating in 6 B.C.
ea.) This particular constellation, Pisces, was held by ancient astrologers to represent Israel; therefore, this remarkable conjunction is at
least worthy of notice. It is not hard to see in this a possible fulfillment of Numbers 24:17 concerning the star that should rise out of Jacob!
F.) When our scientific world has recorded such an event, it further helps to verify that something spectacular happened in the skies of
that ancient world which helped to point these magi to seek out the Christ.
3.)Ultimately it was not a star, but the word of God that directed these Magi to the Christ.
A.) Matt. 2:4-6
B.) Matthew is quoting directly from Micah 5:2
ba.) Micah had prophesied these words about 700 years before Christ.
bb.)Micah had made the prophecy even more specific because there were two towns by the name of Bethlehem.
bc.)The accuracy of this prophecy was incredible considering the number of years before the fulfillment that it was actually prophesied.
IV. MATTHEW SPEAKS OF THE MESSIAH BEING CALLED FROM EGYPT.
-- Matt. 2:13-15
1.) Matthew is quoting from the Old Testament prophet Hosea.
A.) Hos. 11:1
B.) Again another prophet from the same time frame around 740-720 BC.
C.) The family of Jesus had to go to Egypt for a time, but it is even more remarkable that God actually called Him to come from Egypt.
ca.) Matt. 2:19-20
2.) Not only did the Messiah come from Egypt, but he went to Galilee.
A.) Joseph was going to move his family to Judea, but an angel of the Lord directed Joseph otherwise.
aa.) Matt.2:23
B.) Jesus himself speaking from heaven to the man who would become the apostle Paul said I am Jesus of Nazareth, or Jesus the Nazarene.
ba.) Acts 22:8
V. MATTHEW SPEAKS OF THE SLAUGHTER OF INFANTS AS PROOF THAT JESUS IS THE MESSIAH.
-- Matt. 2:16-18 (Quoting from Jeremiah 31:15)
1.) Prophecy had an immediate fulfillment in the time of Jeremiah.
A.) Jeremiah was writing between 626 & 586BC.
B.) The immediate context of this passage was those of the southern kingdom going off in bondage to Babylon.
C.) The route they were taking would have taken them directly by the grave of Rachel, and so she was described as mourning over the
children as they went off into captivity.
2.) Jeremiah’s prophecy had its ultimate fulfillment in the slaughter of innocent children during the first two years of Jesus’ earthly life.
A.) Josephus in his history of the Jews does not mention of this slaughter, but perhaps that is not that surprising when you consider that Bethlehem was such a small and insignificant town.
aa.) In fact, Bethlehem and the surrounding areas were small enough that it might have only been at the most a few hundred infants that had been killed.
B.) “The first non-Christian reference to the massacre is recorded four centuries later by Macrobius (c.395-423), who writes in his Saturnalia:"When he [emperor Augustus] heard that among the boys in Syria under two years old whom Herod, king of the Jews, had ordered to kill, his own son was also killed, he said: it is better to be Herod's pig, than his son."
(--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_the_Innocents )
C.) Certainly this part of the Christmas accounts that we avoid reading, or at least preaching on in sermons about Christmas.
ca.) Today, I want us to see this aspect of the Christmas account, not because it is something great to remember, but because it was
part of the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, and by it Matthew gives credibility to Jesus as being the promised Messiah or Christ.
CONCLUSION:
1.) This morning, we have looked at just a handful of prophecies that Matthew addressed from the Old Testament looking at the message of Christmas.
A.) Certainly if we were to look more at the book of Matthew we would see the entire book is filled with the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies.
2.) There are 456 prophecies in the Old Testament Scriptures that testify about the Christ. How likely is it that one man could fulfill all of these prophecies given by many individuals over several hundred years?
A.) According to (http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/radio034.htm) Professor Emeritus of Science at Westmont College, Peter Stoner,
has calculated the probability of one man fulfilling the major prophecies made concerning the Messiah. The estimates were worked out by twelve different classes representing some 600 university students.
aa.) After examining only eight different prophecies (Idem, 106), they conservatively estimated that the chance of one man fulfilling all eight prophecies was one in 10^17.
aaa.) To illustrate how large the number 10^17 IS (a figure with 17 zeros), Stoner gave this illustration :
If you mark one of ten tickets, and place all the tickets in a hat, and thoroughly stir them, and then ask a blindfolded man to draw one, his chance of getting the right ticket is one in ten. Suppose that we take 10^17 silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They'll cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up one silver dollar and say that this is the right one. What chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would've had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote them in their own wisdom (Idem, 106-107).
ab.)If you bring the number of prophecies to 48 being fulfilled in just one person the odds are 10^157.
aba.) How large is the number one in 10^157? 10^157 contains 157 zeros! Stoner gives an illustration of this number using electrons. Electrons are very small objects. They're smaller than atoms. It would take 2.5 TIMES 10^15 of them, laid side by side, to make one inch. Even if we counted 250 of these electrons each minute, and counted day and night, it would still take 19 million years just to count a line of electrons one-inch long (Stoner, op. cit, 109).
With this introduction, let's go back to our chance of one in 10^157. Let's suppose that we're taking this number of electrons, marking one, and thoroughly stirring it into the whole mass, then blindfolding a man and letting him try to find the right one. What chance has he of finding the right one?
abb.) When you imagine odds like that against one person meeting all those prophecies for a mere 48 prophecies, imagine what the number would be for the entire 456 old Testament prophecies concerning the Christ.
B.) Jesus fulfilled not merely 8 or 48 prophecies, but the entire 456 prophecies concerning the who the Messiah would be.
C.) As we come into this Christmas season, may we rejoice that God has so solidly proven from prophecy that Jesus is the Christ, our Messiah.
