If I were to ask you what you will be doing tomorrow? How many of you could say for sure what that would be? OK. I see a lot of hands there. How about if I ask you what will you be doing next week? Uh Oh, I’m afraid a few hands went down that time. Well then, what if I ask you what will you be doing next month? Some of your hands went back up but then some of yours hands went down. Then, let me ask you just one more question. What about next year? How many of you can tell me exactly what you will be doing next year? Some of you can, but a lot more of your hands are down by your sides. If I threw in the qualifier, “what you think you will be doing, or what have you planned to do”, then some of those hands that are down will come shooting back up. OK. Now here is the kicker. How many of you could tell me what you will be doing fifty years from now, a hundred, if you could live that long? Well, how about seven hundred years from now? I know you won’t be around, but what about your distant kin-folks? Can you predict what they will be doing? Now, you might say I’m either “off my rocker”, or I’m getting silly, and either one might be right, but I can tell you about someone who made a prediction seven hundred years to his future and not only what he said would come true, but he even predicted the very place that it would all take place! Sounds impossible? But it’s really not.
Turn with me in your Bibles to the Old Testament book of Micah, chapter five, verse two, and read what it says. “Be you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet, out of you shall come forth to Me the One to be Ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.” Now turn over to the first Gospel in the New Testament, Matthew 2:3-6, where the three wise men had come to Jerusalem to speak with King Herod, seeking to know where the Christ child was laid. Matthew tells us that all of Jerusalem was troubled because they didn’t know where He was, so King Herod called forth the chief priests and scribes to inquire of them, and they told him it was written by the prophet that this would happen in Bethlehem, “But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are not the least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you shall come forth a Ruler Who will shepherd My people Israel.”
Here is the deal. When did the prophet Micah live? History tells us that he lived in the eighth century and became a prophet in the year 742 B.C. and ended his prophetic ministry around the year 687 B.C. So, folks, we are talking about an event that was prophesied about 700 years before it ever happened! 700 years! Can you believe it? Yet it happened just like he predicted it would happen and in the exact town that it would happen in, in the little town of Bethlehem! Isaiah became a prophet two years later, in the year 740 B .C. and he also prophesied about not only the birth of Christ, but about his life, death, and resurrection, again about 700 years before it ever happened! And then there was Zechariah, who prophesied around 520 B.C., in Zechariah 9:9 where he said, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey.” This was some 500 years before Christ came! And even John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved”, and the one who wrote the Revelation, also spoke about the place where Jesus was to be born (John 7:42). Folks, if you and I can barely predict what we will be doing and where we will be doing it a year from now, a month from now, or even a week or a day from now, but the prophets predicted hundreds and even thousands of years before Christ came the very thing He would be doing and the exact place where it all took place, don’t you think we ought to listen? What religion, what god, what scriptures can make such predictions but the God of all Creation and the Savior of all mankind?
