Isaiah 53, 700 B.C: Historical Evidence of the Divine Omniscience.

[Nishant Xavier]

In Case for Christ, Lee Strobel recounts how Louis Lapides, who was a Devout Jew prior to reading Isaiah 53, reacted upon reading it. He was amazed! He ended up becoming a Christian. Messianic Prophecies have led Millions to Christ over the Centuries. They will show Atheism to be false.

Astreja, that cannot be because the only thing this prophecy requires to have happened is the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ under Pontius Pilate, a fact virtually universally admitted, even by Atheists and Liberals. The quote from John Dominic Crossan was to establish that. Even Cornelius Tacitus, the distinguished official biographer of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, frankly says that Christ was killed under their governor Pilate.

Here is the Excerpt from Case for Christ on Isaiah 53 and Lapides:

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though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.... For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. Isaiah 53:3-9, 12 Instantly Lapides recognized the portrait: this was Jesus of Nazareth! Now he was beginning to understand the paintings he had seen in the Catholic churches he had passed as a child: the suffering Jesus, the crucified Jesus, the Jesus who he now realized had been "pierced for our transgressions" as he "bore the sin of many." As Jews in the Old Testament sought to atone for their sins through a system of animal sacrifices, here was Jesus, the ultimate sacrificial lamb of God, who paid for sin once and for all. Here was the personification of God's plan of redemption. So breathtaking was this discovery that Lapides could only come to one conclusion: it was a fraud! He believed that Christians had rewritten the Old Testament and twisted Isaiah's words to make it sound as if the prophet had been foreshadowing Jesus. Lapides set out to expose the deception. "I asked my stepmother to send me a Jewish Bible so I could check it out myself," he told me. "She did, and guess what? I found that it said the same thing! Now I really had to deal with it."

 THE JEWISHNESS OF JESUS Over and over Lapides would come upon prophecies in the Old Testament-more than four dozen major predictions in all. Isaiah revealed the manner of the Messiah's birth (of a virgin); Micah pinpointed the place of his birth (Bethlehem); Genesis and Jeremiah specified his ancestry (a descendent of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, from the tribe of Judah, the house of David); the Psalms foretold his betrayal, his accusation by false witnesses, his manner of death (pierced in the hands and feet, although crucifixion hadn't been invented yet), and his resurrection (he would not decay but would ascend on high); and on and on . Each one chipped away at Lapides' skepticism until he was finally willing to take a drastic step. "I decided to open the New Testament and just read the first page," he said. "With trepidation I slowly turned to Matthew as I looked up to heaven, waiting for the lightning bolt to strike!" Matthew's initial words leaped off the page: "A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham ..." Lapides' eyes widened as he recalled the moment he first read that sentence. "I thought, Wow! Son of Abraham, son of David-it was all fitting together! I went to the birth narratives and thought, Look at this! Matthew is quoting from Isaiah 7:14: 'The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son.' And then I saw him quoting from the prophet Jeremiah. I sat there thinking, You know, this is about Jewish people. Where do the Gentiles come in? What's going on here? "I couldn't put it down. I read through the rest of the gospels, and I realized this wasn't a handbook for the American Nazi Party; it was an interaction between Jesus and the Jewish community. I got to the book of Acts and-this was incredible! - they were trying to figure out how the Jews could bring the story of Jesus to the Gentiles. Talk about role reversal!" So convincing were the fulfilled prophecies that Lapides started telling people that he thought Jesus was the Messiah.

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