Fulfillment Of Prophecy Research Paper

Religion 120 has taught me something more than just the meaning of religion. I would argue that I will be taking away more knowledge from this class than any other class I have taken so far in my college career. The learning path Professor Robert takes has benefited me throughout the semester. The learning path I took persuaded me to open my mind and absorb and understand the ideas of other individuals. After I opened my mind up and read all of the content we were assigned in class, along with listened to my classmates and professor Robert’s take on religion, I was able to picture religion as something other than just the physical place of worship and discussions taken place there. When most individuals think of religion they think about going to church and not much else. Religion is so much more than just the physical place and the individuals leading the practice. Religion has the potential to help guide you in life, along with giving you a sense of meaning in this big world. Religion has the power to help you connect with individuals like yourself,

Isaianic prophecy aside it is also clear that Matthew above the other three evangelists presents Jesus as the fulfilment of the law, a new Moses. The structure of the book into five sections is intended to help the Jewish readers identify Jesus as an antecedent of Moses. Jesus is according to some scholars a type of Moses bringing about a new exodus and a new Israel. More explicitly however, Matthew portrays Jesus as the only man to have fulfilled the law in its entirety as well as the messianic fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy through the many formula quotations (3:15; 5:17-48;12:17-21; 13:35; 21:5, 16, 42; 22:44; 23:39; 26:31; 27:9, 35, 46).

Jewish tradition passed down the oral and written story of Messianic prophecies for generations. To provide the correlation between the anticipated Messiah and the fulfillment through Jesus, Matthew affirmed prophecies throughout the birth story with two significant fulfillments—Abraham’s promised seed [offspring] and the virgin birth.

The prophets are difficult to interpret mainly due to misunderstandings about their function and form (Fee/Stuart p182). Most dictionaries define the word “prophecy”as ‘foretelling or prediction of what is to come. Using the prophets in this way is highly discerning, for less than 2% of OT prophecy is messianic; less than 5% describes the new covenant age and less than 1% concerns future events (Fee/Stuart p182). The prophets usually announced the immediate future of Judah, Israel and the surrounding nations, rather than our future. Those events were forthcoming for them but past for us (Fee/Stuart p182). The primary function of prophets as a spokesperson was to speak for God to their own contemporaries. Of the hundreds of prophets in

Understanding that Matthew makes the point, the Jesus is the fulfillment of all the promise in the Old Testament. Matthew use Old Testament scriptures to point to Christ as the promised Messiah to the Jewish people. Matthew uses the Old Testament Scriptures of Isaiah to point to Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the covenant with God.

* No unconditional prophecy has been unfilled. The time (Daniel 9), city (Micah 5:2), and nature (Isaiah 7:14) were foretold in the Old Testament about Jesus’ birth.

As a person throughly studies the Words of God found in the Bible, one would find that there are many topics and doctrines contained within. One of the major doctrines or teachings found in Scripture is prophecy. Around 28 percent of the Bible is classified as prophecy. The men who wrote these prophecies did not write based off what they thought would happen. Neither did they write them after the events that were predicted took place as some critics of the Bible would claim. These men were inspired by an omnipotent, omniscient God Who knew the events that would take place in the world. After all, “Prophecy is written foreknowledge of the omniscience of our omnipotent God”

The people of the Old Testament period had to understand also the several promises and prophecies made by the prophets. They had to identify the Messiah who had to come through promises and prophecies with regard to Genesis to Malachy. In fact, all of the prophets talked about the gospel. For instance, the prophet Isaiah spent enough amount time in addressing the gospel in his writings, and they even call his writings the gospel in the Old Testament. In Isaiah chapter 53, the prophet provided a very good description of the Christ.

My faith has been very important to me and my family since my birth. I was baptized at Broad Street United Methodist Church by Rev. Mark Ale on January 17, 1993. The reason my faith has played such a vital role for me is mainly due to my Mom’s United Methodist influence. After my Dad began to live on his own he grew distant and stopped going to Church until he married my Mom, and she told him that a condition of being married to her was that they would go to either her Church or his Church every week. When I stated Kindergarten my parents and I were attending Holy Name Roman Catholic Church each week and decided to raise me as a Catholic, so I was brought into the Catholic Church not missing any sacraments due to my valid United Methodist

In the Bible God uses prophesies to foretell or proclaim His message. Almost every book in the Bible holds some kind of prophecy. A prophecy will have two purposes; the initial meaning which will shortly happen after the prophesy and the longer fulfillment. Because of the two-in-one purpose, when we read the biblical prophecy today, it is important to take into consideration how the intended audience took it. When we look at prophecies in this context it keeps us from mistaking the prophesies as something that will happen

Specifically, God promised the coming of a messiah who would redeem His people from sin and deliver them from the Gentile aggressors. Moreover, God promised a forerunner, who would announce Jesus’ coming in the dessert (Isa. 40:3-5). In addition, God sent the angel Gabriel to announce to John’s father that his wife Elizabeth would bear a son, and his name would be John (Luke 1:11).

For my part of the project, I made connections between the messianic covenant and the passages from Jonah and Isaiah. In the story of Jonah, Jonah was engulfed by a whale for three days and nights, prefiguring the death and burial of Jesus. Jonah is able to come out of the whale, pointing forward towards Christ's resurrection. Jonah is also thrown overboard to save the lives of the sailors, becoming their scapegoat. In the same way, Christ is able to save us from sin by sacrificing himself.

There are many people who are unaware of the Ten Commandments and Sermon on the Mount, the differences and similarities they share. I will present the information for both. The information presented with give insight on what they contain and who was responsible for the teachings. The 10 Commandments were given to Moses by God to teach the people. The Sermon on the Mount was spoken word by Jesus, given to his disciples. God was not seen when giving the commandments to the people, whereas, Jesus was seen by the people and performed miracles. With these two differences we see the changes over the years since the first set of commandments were given. The 10 commandments were seen as way to teach people the things that should not be done. The Sermon

The primary focus of each of the three quests for the historical Jesus, endeavors a series of approach to challenge the legitimacy of the Synoptic Gospels as an unreliable resource to study Jesus existence; even more, to question the NT portrayal of Jesus veracity, through an intellectual group of scholars applying other ancient book in their research into what is known as today “the Quest of the Historical Jesus.” Unlike the first century Christians, “It was widely assumed that the Jesus presented in the Bible was the man who lived and died—and rose—in Palestine in the first century.”1

"The New Testament gospels are a twisted tale of political intrigue and religious power plays with stakes destined to shape the future of the world’s largest religion." (p.81) our New Testament gospels contain historical material, the theological editing is a factor that the discerning reader must constantly keep in mind." (pg.139). The gospel of Matthew implies that Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled with the amazing virgin birth of Jesus but the original text carries no meaning because it really had no meaning of importance in the text