Was Christmas foretold?

What would it mean if the Christian story foretells Christmas hundreds of years in advance?

Well, for starters, it might be a good reason to start believing in God. Certainly God in the Old Testament, and Jesus in the New Testament made the argument that to accurately predict future events is prima-facie evidence of supernatural agency, as it requires the ability to see through the corridors of time. So spelling out Christmas before it happens might just be the evidence you’re looking for to take the God question seriously.

And more than just belief in God generally, it might be a good reason to trust that the Christian story isn’t just historically reliable, but that it really is a message from the heavens to humanity, supernaturally inspired with God’s divine fingerprints all over the Christian story.

So there’s that, too.

But beyond the evidential feature, where prophecy gives us reasons to believe, the Christian story foretelling Christmas means the Scriptures are spotlighting this historical event. God wants to get our attention, that something singularly spectacular is taking place at the first noel. A promise long whispered is finally being fulfilled.

One of the threads that ties the incredible diversity of authors and genres coherently together within the Christian story, is the Old Testament’s sketch of the coming messianic king. In the New Testament’s opening, the Christmas story, Jesus takes on that portrait. And the sketch traces right back to the first few pages of the Bible.

In Genesis 3:15, amidst the tragedy of the human fall into sin and the unfolding consequences of a world damaged by evil, God whispers a promise to Eve: that one day one of her descendants would stomp all over evil, defeating the mysterious serpent, but being mortally wounded in the process. And this is just the beginning.

Abraham is promised that his family tree would bring blessings to the nations (Genesis 12:3). David is promised that an everlasting kingdom would emerge from his lineage (2 Samuel 7). Then there is the prophet Isaiah, sometimes called the fifth gospel for wealth of parallels between his prophecies and Jesus’ life. Written some 7 centuries before Jesus, in Isaiah 9, Christmas is foretold with this words:

In the future [GOD] will honour Galilee of the nations, by the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan… For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be  called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Notice a child is born; a son is given. This is one of the clearest hints of the incarnation in the Old Testament, as the human child who is born, this Nazarene, bears titles and names only associated with God. There is even a specific prophecy concerning where this divine child, this messianic king long prophesied, was to be born. In Micah 9:2, written hundreds of years before Jesus, it says:  This is just a small window into how Christmas is foretold in Scripture. But do these prophecies make for a good argument? Well, that depends on how carefully you formulate the argument.

In churches around the world, especially at Christmas and Easter time, you’ll commonly hear how Jesus fulfils hundreds of Old Testament prophecies. And the way the argument is usually developed is to list some of these prophecies, assign probability values to Jesus fulfilling each one, calculate a total, and then show how it strains credulity to accept this happened by chance.

Peter Stoner famously did this with just 8 prophecies in his 1952 publication, Science Speaks, and more recently the mathematician Martin Bittinger did this with 9 prophecies in his 2011 book, The Faith Equation. Both men concluded from the calculus that chance simply is not a reasonable explanation.

Now that may sound like convincing evidence to the already converted, but not all of these prophecies will be persuasive to a sceptical person. Why? Well, because some of them don’t obviously apply to the messiah in their original context, some are more vague in their predictions, some have scant evidence of historical fulfilment, and others could have been intentionally fulfilled by Jesus just to shoehorn his ministry to fit the messianic profile.

Now my goal here is not to burst anyone’s prophetic bubble. Quite the opposite. I think the argument from prophecy is weighty. I’m simply trying to steel man the argument, applying some strict criteria to show that even when you filter out the weaker prophecies, those who are sceptically minded still have to contend with detailed predictions like Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53: passages that speak of crucifixion hundreds of years before it was invented, and describe the Easter story in such stark detail that you have to work hard to ignore how they describe the suffering of Jesus. So the argument from prophecy is worth taking seriously.

But beyond the realm of arguments and evidence, the purpose of prophecy runs deeper. Because of prophecy we can know that God has spoken; that he is intimately involved bringing about His ends for our world; and that he is guiding us all to recognise the magnitude and meaning of the Christmas story. You might say that the same way the star led the magi to come and worship Jesus, the Scriptures serve as another light that leads us to Bethlehem.

Through them we come to see our human predicament: that we are all damaged by evil and need a saviour who can deliver us from our sins and stamp out evil. Through them we come to see our hope: that a new king would arise to shape a better world, ushering the nations into the blessing of God’s eternal kingdom. Through them we come to see the true identity of Jesus: that this humble baby in a dirty feeding trough is everything we have been waiting for.

Christmas was foretold, and its message really is something worth believing, so why not follow the light of the Scriptures, and join with billions around the world, and throughout history, to come and worship Jesus.