One podunk town EVERYBODY agrees on

“Where Christ came from was He already was," explains Jordan. "He didn’t have to be created. In the womb of Mary, God created a body in which He placed the life of His Son.

"The verse says, ‘But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law.’ At the EXACT moment; this was a pre-planned event.

“When God sent forth His Son, He sent Him to a specific place. Micah 5:1-2 says, [1] Now gather thyself in troops, O daughter of troops: he hath laid siege against us: they shall smite the judge of Israel with a rod upon the cheek.
[2] But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.

“Micah lived 700 years before the birth of Christ. Seven centuries, longer than our country’s been in existence, before Christ’s birth, Micah writes this.

“He prophesies to the nation Israel, who were facing enemies coming in and taking them, invading their land. They were facing economic collapse, political upheaval, political corruption. You talk about a Middle East problem.

“You go 2,500 years back to Micah’s day and the same kind of conflict going on in the Middle East today was going on then and the goal of all the Gentile nations around Israel at that time was to destroy Israel. In the face of that, Micah prophesies to his people.

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“Bethlehem was a small, little, insignificant town. In fact, there were two Bethlehems in Israel at that time. That’s why he says it’s Bethlehem Ephratah. That’s like saying the name of the city and the county in which it resides. What God picked out was the itty-bitty one. The only claim to fame this town ever had was that a little shepherd boy named David was born there and that little shepherd boy became the king.

“Notice verse 2 says ‘yet out of thee shall he come forth.’ When Paul writes in Galatians, ‘God sent forth his son,’ that’s a reference back to this verse in Micah where he says it’s out of Bethlehem that He shall come forth.

“The verse says He is ‘to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.’ You see the ‘goings’ is plural? He had more than one going. It says He had 'been from of old.’ Now, if you’re old, you’re ancient. That’s talking about how long you’ve been around. It’s a reference to time.

“The verse ends telling you He’s ‘from everlasting.’ Everlasting is not time because time doesn’t last forever. You can go back to a place where time began, in the beginning. In the beginning of what? Of time in creation. The beginning of that continuum in which we live. Time and space.

“In the beginning God created, but this one that’s going to come forth in time comes out of eternity. This isn’t a human; this is God stepping out of eternity into time, into the clothing of our humanity. You see, that makes Him kind of unique. It makes Him a little different.

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“In Matthew 2 we’re told that when Herod the king ‘gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.
[5] And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet.’

“He went out and got all the rabbinical scholars, brought them in and said, ‘Where’s the Messiah going to be born?’ and they said, ‘That’s easy! In Bethlehem of Judaea, for thus it is written by the prophet, and thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.’

“Now that’s a bunch of religious tomfoolery right there. Look at what they say—‘thou Bethlehem art not the least.’ Micah said, ‘You are the least.’

“These guys, they don’t want their king to be born in a little, insignificant, podunk place out yonder. They say, ‘You’re not!’ They actually changed God’s Word.

“You better watch preachers, religious scholars, because they’ll take God’s Word and twist it to make themselves look like the winner. That’s why you better look at the verses yourself. Don’t let somebody take a verse out of its context and stick it on a wall, or stick it in a book, and then impose another meaning to it. That’s what these birds did! But they got the town right. That’s because 700 years before, Micah had said it’s going to be Bethlehem.

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“Think about what’s happening here. Here’s a bunch of rabbinical scholars, the leaders of the nation Israel, who have no interest in Jesus Christ at all. When He shows up they’re going to hate Him and cry, ‘Crucify him, away with him, we’ll not have this man reign over us.’ And yet here they are, unsuspectingly, unknowingly, being the No. 1 witness to the fact He is who He says He is!

“One of the great proofs that God’s Word is true and that Jesus Christ is exactly who He says He is, is the accurate, exact fulfillment of predictive prophecy. If you can predict something down to the exact place, in the exact time, and 700 years later it takes place, you know what the world says? ‘Well, then it wasn’t written 700 years before; must have been written after the fact and just made to look like that.’

“Do you know you can have absolute historic certainty that cannot be argued with successfully in that one verse right there in Micah 5:2. Micah wrote 700 years before Christ.

"Somebody says, ‘Well, that’s just your guess.’ But I know this, according to every historian, I don’t care if they’re saved or lost, Christian or atheist, I don’t care who they are, the general understanding of all of history is that in about 250 B.C., the Jewish Bible was translated into the Greek language into the book that’s called the Septuagint. That Greek translation of the Bible contained the Book of Micah and contained that verse in Micah exactly as it is in your Bible.

“Every historical source you could find to document the historicity of the Book of Micah guarantees you that at least 250 years before Christ, and more probably 700 years before . . . but let’s just say you don’t want to believe anything Christians say. Okay, let’s take what the world says. What does the scholarship of the University of Chicago say? It says that 250 years before, minimum, and gives the exact same town. Now, do you SEE how improbable that was?”

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This is just a quick little aside, but it’s only a few verses later in Micah 5 that we are given the prophetic identification of the Antichrist as “the Assyrian.”

Micah writes in verses 5-6, [5] And this man shall be the peace, when the Assyrian shall come into our land: and when he shall tread in our palaces, then shall we raise against him seven shepherds, and eight principal men.
[6] And they shall waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land of Nimrod in the entrances thereof: thus shall he deliver us from the Assyrian, when he cometh into our land, and when he treadeth within our borders.