Isaiah 7:14 Coffee Mug
“But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah..."
$17.31
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ISAIAH 7:14
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and will call his name Immanuel.” (ASV)
Isaiah 7:14, written more than seven centuries before Jesus, promises that “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (‘God-with-us’).” Its twin markers—a miraculous conception to a woman who had not yet known a man and a child whose very identity embodies God’s presence—are so specific and humanly implausible that the odds of anyone fulfilling them by chance are vanishingly small. When statisticians have tried to quantify messianic prophecies, they assign probabilities to discrete factors (e.g., one chance in 10^3 – 10^4 that any given birth would involve an unmarried virgin, and similar odds that the child would historically be acclaimed “God-with-us”). Combine Isaiah 7:14 with other clear predictions like Micah 5:2, and the composite probability plunges toward the famous 1-in-10^17 range calculated by mathematician Peter Stoner for just eight messianic prophecies. In conversation, the verse therefore functions like a spotlight on Jesus’ nativity: it invites listeners to weigh whether such a precise, unlikely promise could converge on one historical figure apart from God’s deliberate fulfillment in Christ.
