When God prophesies to us, He speaks using words that we can understand and we attach our normal definitions to those words. But in real life, God is constantly playing with us in prophecy and it’s a rare day that we see any of His prophecies literally fulfilled. Jesus didn’t “come from” Bethlehem—not in the human meaning of that term. He didn’t literally sprinkle the nations with His Blood, either (Isa. 52). He didn’t ever park Himself on a literal throne in earthly Jerusalem or restore the Davidic line of Jewish kings (Isa. 9). In fact, He wasn’t even a true descendant of David (see Jesus: The Illegitimate Lion of Judah). He was born of a virgin, but ironically the virgin prophecy wasn’t even talking about Jesus, but about a son of the prophet Isaiah (see The Real Immanuel). He wasn’t totally silent before His executioners (Isa. 53). He didn’t establish justice on earth (Isa. 42). He didn’t slay the wicked (Isa. 42). According to Yahweh’s sacrificial laws, He didn’t even qualify as a guilt offering for sins (Isa. 52; seeHow the Cross Broke the Law). Before you can claim that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies that Yahweh gave about Him, you have to play a lot of games with metaphors, exaggeration, and figurative speech. All things that we call “stretching the truth”. Does it bother us that our Gods are so intentionally vague and misleading? Of course it does. But there’s no getting around the fact that this is how They operate. If there’s anything we learn from studying biblical prophecy, it’s that we need to keep a wide open mind. It doesn’t matter how straightforward some prophecy of God sounds to us today—He’s got a very long track record of fulfilling such promises in ways that don’t feel right at all.