Chapter 2 · The promises
Written hundreds of years before the cross.
If God is real, has he ever spoken? The Bible says he made promises, some of them centuries ahead. One is a short poem, Isaiah 52:13–53:12, about a “servant” of God who is rejected, suffers, and dies for other people's wrongs. Here's the heart of it:
He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
Now line the poem up with what happened to Jesus, some 700 years later:
Tap a match to see it happen.
One poem, five matches, all in the last days of one man's life. But was it really about him? Here's the strongest objection.
The prophet Isaiah, who preached in Jerusalem in the 700s BC. The New Testament treats the whole book as his: John quotes Isaiah 53 and Isaiah 6 side by side and says, “Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus' glory.” Old Testament scholar John Oswalt makes the same case in his major commentary on Isaiah. And the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah holds all 66 chapters as one book, copied more than a century before Jesus was born.
John 12:38–41