According to the gospel of Matthew, these verses are all prophecies about Jesus:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)
…out of Egypt I called my son. (Hosea 11:1)
Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zechariah 9:9)
But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days. (Micah 5:2)
However, these verses are not prophecies about Jesus:
He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted. (Isaiah 7:15-16)
The more they were called, the more they went away; they kept sacrificing to the Baals and burning offerings to idols. (Hosea 11:2)
I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace to the nations; his rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. (Zechariah 9:10)
…and he shall deliver us from the Assyrian when he comes into our land and treads within our border. (Micah 5:6)
How does he know? Simple: by taking the verses completely out of context and fitting them to whatever he wants in his narrative. For all we know, the author of Matthew was writing his gospel around these “prophecies” to artificially bolster his case for Jesus being the Messiah!
If you’re willing to take passages out of their original context, you can make pretty much anything sound prophetic. For instance, I think I can make a case that Shakespeare was the greatest prophet of his generation. Take this bit from The Tempest:
As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.
Was Shakespeare predicting the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford? Sure looks like it to me! How about this from Richard III?
Now is the winter of our discontent
To think that, in the 1600s, Shakespeare could predict the Democrats’ anger at the inauguration of President Trump! Here’s a good one from Hamlet:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
How could Shakespeare, writing before the modern telescope, predict the discoveries of modern cosmology? Clearly he was a sage beyond compare!
This is why Christian apologists fail when they claim that “no mere man could have fulfilled all of these prophecies.” Of course not! They’re not all about the same man.
sleeping in sundays 