Many believers neglect to study the Old Testament because they find it confusing or because they assume that it is less important to the Christian faith than the New Testament. We cannot understand Jesus or His gospel without a proper grounding in the Old Testament Scriptures. Thus, we need to read and study the whole counsel of God. Let us not neglect the study of either testament. Unique among all books ever written, the Bible accurately foretells specific events in detail many years, sometimes centuries, before they occur. Approximately 2,500 prophecies appear in the pages of the Bible, about 2,000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter—no errors. (The remaining 500 or so reach into the future and may be seen unfolding as days go by.) Since the probability of any one of these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance averages less than one in ten (figured very conservatively) and since the prophecies are for the most part independent of one another, the odds for all these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance without error is less than one in 102000 (that is 1 with 2,000 zeros written after it)! God is not the only one, however, who uses forecasts of future events to get people’s attention. Satan does, too. Through clairvoyants (such as Jeanne Dixon and Edgar Cayce), mediums, spiritists, and others come remarkable predictions, though rarely with more than about 60 percent accuracy, never with total accuracy. Messages from Satan, furthermore, fail to match the details of Bible prophecies, nor do they include a call to repentance. The acid test for identifying a prophet of God is recorded by Moses in Deuteronomy 18:21-22. According to this Bible passage (and others), God’s prophets, as distinct from Satan’s spokesmen, are 100 percent accurate in their predictions. There is no room for error. The New Testament indicates that what happened at the cross and on it was what the prophets had predicted would happen long before. Details of Jesus’ life and death were written in divine prophecy hundreds of years before He was born in Bethlehem. Throughout the Gospels, this amazing truth is emphasized. As Jesus and His apostles left the upper room for the Garden of Gethsemane, He said to them, “You will all fall away because it is written, ‘I will strike down the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered’” (Mark 14:27). After Judas’ betrayal, Jesus rebuked Peter for drawing his sword and cutting off the ear of Malchus and said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. . . How then will the Scriptures be fulfilled, which say that it must happen this way?” (Matthew 26:52–54). On the cross Jesus waited until He saw that “all things had already been accomplished” before He uttered His only physical request, “I am thirsty” (John 19:28). Later, the spear was thrust into Jesus’ side, and blood and water came out. We read, “For these things came to pass to fulfill the Scripture, ‘Not a bone of Him shall be broken.’ And again, another Scripture says, ‘They shall look on Him whom they pierced’” (John 19:36, 37). The angel who was at the tomb on the morning of the resurrection said, “. . . Remember how He spoke to you while He was still in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rises again” (Luke 24:6, 7). When Jesus met with the apostles and disciples Sunday evening, the same day He arose from the dead, He said to them, These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. . . . Thus, it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:44–47). In Jesus’ affirmation to those Sunday night witnesses, He referred to all three divisions of the Hebrew Old Testament—the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms —as He described the prophecies that had been fulfilled in Him. It has been said that if one reads any part of the Bible and does not see Jesus in it, he should go back and reread it, for he has missed something very important! In Peter’s first gospel sermon on the Day of Pentecost, he declared that Jesus had been delivered into the hands of godless men to be put to death “by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). In his second sermon in Acts, Peter covered in one sweeping sentence the prophecies of the whole Old Testament, saying that Jesus’ sufferings on the cross fulfilled all that had been prophesied: “But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled” (Acts 3:18).
