Christ- The Messiah?

The world has questioned Christ's authority many times. Is He God, is he not?
The Jews, for the most part, have denied his authority.
Islam calls Him a great prophet, but not the Savior.
Did this world reject its' Savior?

First, I will question the Jewish belief that the Messiah has yet to come...

The Old Testament has hundreds of prophecies concerning the Messiah. Many of them are found in the books of Isiah, Psalms, and Jeremiah. There are others scattered throughout the other books of the Old Testament though, such as in Micah.

Here are a few of those prophecies:
Isaiah 7:14
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Isaiah 53:6
We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Micah 5:2
"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."

There are hundreds more.

George Heron, a French mathematician, calculated that the odds of one man fulfilling only 40 of those hundreds of prophecies are 1 in 10 to the power of 157. That is a 1 followed by 157 zeros. Compare it to this; your odds on winning the state lottery are 14 followed by 6 zeros.

The Messiah, therefore, is one of a kind.

Jesus Christ, however, fulfills more than just 40 prophecies, he fulfills all of the hundreds of them.

Christ was born a virgin. (Isaiah 7:14)
Christ would be killed. (Isaiah 53:8)
Christ was born in Bethlehem. (Micah 5:2)
Christ was counted among criminals. (Isaiah 53:12)
Christ was resurrected. (Psalm 16:8-10)
The list goes on and on...

From the Jewish standpoint, Christ fulfilled every single Old Testament prophecy about the Messiah. Of course, many people argue Christ was not born of a Virgin and there is no physical proof of His resurection.
There is one prophecy, however, that cannot be denied.

Daniel 9
25 "Know and understand this: From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven 'sevens,' and sixty-two 'sevens.' It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the sixty-two 'sevens,' the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. 27 He will confirm a covenant with many for one 'seven.' In the middle of the 'seven' he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on a wing of the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him."

Here, we see that the Messiah will come to Jerusalem.
Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem occured 173,880 days (483 times the Hebrew 360 day year) after Artaxerxes' decree was given in 445 B.C. (as recorded in Nehemiah 2:1-20) to rebuild Jerusalem. This was the first time that Jesus allowed anyone to proclaim him as "King." Note, the Hebrew word for "week" is "shavua" and literally means "seven." Therefore, in Hebrew, the idea of 70 weeks is "seventy sevens." The meaning of the word "weeks" was used in reference to both days and YEARS. Many scholars, both Christian and non-Christian, agree that the "weeks" here refers to years, which adds up to 483.

It's almost eerie that Christ comes to Jerusalem 483 years later, to the exact day, in accoradnce with the prophecy made by Daniel and the records found in Nehemiah concerning the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
Considering the prophecies, I think the Jews missed their Messiah.


Now, for those of you who are neither Jewish nor Christian, here's more reasons on why Christ is the Messiah and God.

1. The prophecies made in the OT, which were written hundreds of years before Christ, point to Christ as the Messiah. From a historical standpoint, considering the accuracy of the Bible with world events that occured at different times, the fact that Christ fulfills all of the prophecies from the Old Testament is nearly impossible. But He does! It's eerie, borderline weird that human beings from the Old Testament prophesied things about the Messiah that Christ fulfilled.

2. Historically speaking, the Bible has recorded events about wars, etc that are backed up by other secular sources. If this is true, is it so hard to believe that maybe the Bible is right on Christ being the Messiah as well.

3. "Luke 23:44
It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining."
This occured in the last three hours of Christ's life, at least according to the Bible, but did it really happen?
According to Phlegon, a Greek author from Caria, it did. Writing a chronology soon after 137 A.D., Phlegon reported that in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad (i.e. 33 A.D.) there was "the greatest eclipse of the sun" and that "it became night in the sixth hour of the day [i.e., noon] so that stars even appeared in the heavens. There was a great earthquake in Bithynia, and many things were overturned in Nicaea."
That is non-biblical attestation by a Greek author to the darkness that occured in the final hours of Jesus life. Even though Phlegon writes the dakness off as an eclipse...we know it was not an eclipse.
Because in AD 221, however, Julius Africanus proved that it couldn't have been an eclipse that covered the sun, due to the time.


Of course, there are hundreds upon hundreds of reasons why we know Christ is the Messiah, and these are just a few.

After studying information like this, I don't see how anyone could deny the authority of Jesus Christ, the Messiah.

In Christ,
Hackett