“These things happened so that scripture would be fulfilled” (John 19:36).
Recently I was reading the story of a young astronomer, David Block, who was drawn to the idea of a personal Creator by the elegance, beauty and immensity of the universe. He became a Christian through the influence of friends who encouraged him to read the New Testament. He was intrigued by the fact that “Jesus had fulfilled all the messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures (where the Messiah would be born, how he was to die, and much else besides). . . . I knew that I had found him and that all I had to do was respond to his free offer of grace.”
Fulfilled prophecy is one of the convincing evidences that the Bible is God’s word. The predictions about Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, are remarkably precise. The New Testament frequently refers to prophecies written five hundred to a thousand years before the time of Jesus. He fulfilled them in detail.
Paul Little wrote, “One cannot deny the force of fulfilled prophecy as evidence of divine guidance. Furthermore, there are prophecies which could not possibly have been schemed and written after the events predicted.”
The apostle John was an eyewitness to fulfilled prophecy. He knew his Bible and he knew what was taking place before his eyes (John 19:35). He brought the two together when he wrote his gospel. In his account of our Lord’s crucifixion, he called attention to four details which he says were predicted in the Hebrew Bible: the soldiers gambling for Jesus’ clothes, the wine vinegar they gave him, the fact that his bones were not broken, and the fact that his body was pierced by nails and a spear.
In John 19:31-34 we may read how the executioners wanted to hasten the deaths of those who were being crucified with Jesus. They broke their legs so that they could not put their weight on them as they hung dying. In Jesus’ case, however, they found him already dead. To make sure, one of the soldiers thrust his spear into Jesus’ side, from which flowed blood and water. They did not break the bones in his legs! This fulfilled a prophecy found in Psalm 34:20, “He protects all his bones, not one of them will be broken.” John quotes this in John 19:36.
This is significant because the lamb in the Hebrew Passover ritual was to be roasted, eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, and the people were commanded not to break any of its bones (Numbers 9:12, Exodus 12:46). John the Baptist had declared that Jesus is the Lamb of God (John 1:29). Paul wrote that Jesus Christ is our Passover Lamb who has been sacrificed for us (1 Corinthians 5:7). In his death on the cross, Jesus fulfilled the deeper meaning of the Jewish Passover sacrifice in exquisite detail.
John said he was writing these details of prophecy and fulfillment to help us believe in Jesus (John 19:35). These facts of history and scripture support and validate the claims of the Christian gospel. Read the gospel of John as if for the first time. John wrote, “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).
Pastor Randy Faulkner