Micah’s Prophecy

“But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel,whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.”

Let’s stop and think about this for a minute. What this verse is saying here, is that Micah accurately predicted the birth of Jesus 700 years before it happened. If this is true, then I think we would have to agree that the Scriptures are inspired by God – who else can predict the future.

In chapter 1 Micah predicted the destruction of Samaria, which happened. As we just saw in verse 10, Micah also predicted the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon, which would not happen for over 100 years, but did in fact happen. Skeptics reject these as true predictions saying that they were added later, after these event had already happened.

However, no such objections can be made about this prophecy of Jesus’ birth. There are copies of Micah that clearly were in existence before the time of Christ. But that does not silence the critics. Instead, they say Jesus intentionally lived his life in such a way to fulfill this prediction, fooling everyone into thinking that he was the Messiah, when he really wasn’t. However, this fails because Jesus could not control where he was born – babies don’t tell moms where they’d like to be born!

But maybe Jesus was just a man, who was born in Bethlehem, and claimed to be the Messiah. The only problem with this is the Scriptures are full of prophecies about the coming Savior, that no one could intentionally or coincidentally fulfill them all.

There were also prophecies about the way the Savior would die.  Psalm 22 tells us he would be crucified and Zechariah 12:10 says his side would be pierced in his death.  Jesus could intentionally get himself killed, but he had no control over how he would die or what would happen during his death.  These are just a few of the prophecies over which Jesus had no control (i.e. Is. 53:12; 9, etc.), yet he fulfilled them all.

It you were to just take 8 of the prophecies about Jesus, the odds of one man fulfilling all of them is 10 to the 17^th power – that’s one chance in one hundred million billion.  That’s the equivalent of taking silver dollars and covering the state of Texas two-feet deep. Then marking one of the coins, blindfolding a person, dropping them in the middle of the state, where they begin to wander around and the first coin the bend over to pick up is the marked coin.[1]