It’s why we celebrate
By Ruth Schenk | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Nobody has changed the world the way Jesus changed the world. Nobody.
His arrival was surprising. There was little fanfare for the Son of God. No crown. No throne. No grand ceremony or proclamation.
Serenaded by angels, worshiped by shepherds and wise men, Jesus was born to simple parents who were young, poor and uneducated. His nursery was a small barn or cave, His bed a handmade trough that held food for animals. It hardly had the makings of a birth that would radically change the world.
But it was a radical moment, the arrival of Immanuel, “God with us.”
Hardly anyone noticed. In this unfathomable mystery, God sent His son to a dusty little village called Bethlehem to show His love and His determination to redeem mankind. From the moment He was born to the moment He would die on a Roman cross, the clock was ticking.
God’s love went the distance.
“For every promise, God was in control from His throne in heaven,” said Southeast Senior Minister Dave Stone. “But Christmas was different. When God kept His promise that first Christmas, He left his throne, became human and was laid in a manger. The birth of Jesus changes everything because God showed us just how far
He will go to keep His promises. He will travel the distance from heaven to earth.”
Details of how that night would unfold were told in more than 300 prophecies in the Old Testament. The likelihood of that happening without a plan is mind boggling.Years ago a math professor named Peter Stoner calculated the probability of one man fulfilling eight of the 300 prophecies about Jesus and published his research in
“Science Speaks: Scientific Proof of the Accuracy of Prophecy and the Bible.” He found that the odds of one person fulfilling just eight prophecies was 1 in 1017 or 10 followed by 17 zeroes. That’s 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000.
The number is so enormous that he explained the odds this way: If someone scattered 1017 silver dollars across the entire surface of the state of Texas, which has an area of 268,581 square miles, they would be two feet deep. If someone marked one silver dollar and threw it in the mass of coins and asked a blindfolded man to
find that marked silver dollar, the chances of him finding it would be about the same as the prophets would have had of writing just eight of the more than 300 prophecies written about Jesus in the Old Testament and having them fulfilled by one man.
But Jesus’ birth unfolded exactly as prophets said it would in the Old Testament.
- Seven hundred years before the birth of Jesus, the Old Testament prophet Micah predicted the arrival of Jesus (Micah 5:2).
- David described how Jesus would die 1,000 years before the crucifixion and 800 years before that form of punishment was invented. (Psalm 22:16).
- Daniel gave specific details about a future leader of the world, who would come some 500 years later (Daniel 9:25).
According to Dr. John Ankerberg, author of 92 books on apologetics, Jesus had 456 characteristics that identified him as the Messiah. He fulfilled all of them and more. The list is not so pretty for the newborn king, the Son of God.
He had to be born in the small town of Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), be hated without cause (Isaiah 49:7), rejected (Isaiah 53:2), plotted against (Psalm 2:1-2), betrayed by a friend (Psalm 41:9), betrayed for 30 pieces of silver (Zechariah 1:13), forsaken (Zechariah 13:7), slapped on His face (Micah 5:1), spat on (Isaiah 50:6), mocked
(Psalm 22:7-8), beaten (Isaiah 50:6) and thirsty as he died on the cross (Psalm 22:15).
Jesus fulfilled all of them and more.
Jesus’ birth was so significant that it became the center of the world timeline. Everywhere people use B.C. to mean “before Christ” and A.D. for “anno Domini,” which is Latin for “in the year of our Lord.”
Jesus’ birth also changed the Roman world.
In one of his letters, Roman Governor Plinius Secundus wrote that Christians loved “the truth at any cost.” Although he was ordered to torture and execute them for refusing to curse Jesus, he was continually amazed and impressed with their firm commitments “not to do any wicked deeds, never to commit any fraud, theft or
adultery.”
Historian Philip Schaff described the overwhelming influence that Jesus had on subsequent history and culture of the world.
“This Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed and Napoleon; without science. … He shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and scholars combined; without the eloquence of schools, He spoke such words of life as were never spoken
before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of orator or poet; without writing a single line, He set more pens in motion and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art and songs of praise than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times.”
And Jesus’ arrival changed individual lives.
Lew Wallace, a famous Civil War general and literary genius, was a known atheist. For two years, Wallace studied in the leading libraries of Europe and America, seeking information that would forever destroy Christianity. While writing the second chapter of a book outlining his arguments, he suddenly found himself on his knees
crying out to Jesus, “My Lord and my God.”
When confronted by solid indisputable evidence, he no longer could deny that Jesus was the son of God. Later, Wallace wrote the book “Ben-Hur,” one of the greatest English novels ever written concerning the time of Christ.
Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “I search in vain in history to find one similar to Jesus Christ, or anything which can approach the Gospel. Nations pass away, thrones crumble, but the church remains.”