A lot of yall in this group have read the Lee Strobel books such as The Case for Christ, The Case for the Creator, Cross Examination, etc. Well, recently I read Cross Examination. It's a short book, sort of a cliff's notes (52 pages) about the evidence behind Jesus actually being our Savior. In one part of the book Strobel argues that Jesus was merely a man who coincidentally fulfilled all the prophecies. Here's what we know. In the old testament there are 48 prophecies telling of the coming of the Messiah. I won't list them but if you want to see the 48 just type it in on google. Jesus, by the way, fulfilled every single one of the prophecies. Going further, a mathematician named Peter W. Stoner did the math and figured out that the probability of a person coincidentally fulfilling JUST 8 of the prophecies was one chance in ONE HUNDRED MILLION BILLION. You read that number correctly. If you had that many silver dollars they would cover the entire state of Texas to a depth of two feet! So if one of those silver dollars was marked and you dropped a man blindfolded in the middle of the state somewhere and told him to pick up one silver dollar and check to see if it was the marked coin, that would be the odds. One hundred million billion is millions of times greater than the total number of people who've ever walked the planet! And folks, that's just fulfilling 8 of the prophecies. So, how great is the number to fulfill all 48? One chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion to the 4th power. So you see, the evidence speaks for itself. When I saw those numbers I was blown away. I hope you were too. But, here's one simple number. Our Savior, is the only One in history to ever rise up from the grave. The only One to conquer death. All those other guys...they're all dead. The old testament laid out the credentials the Messiah had to have, and our Lord is the only One in all of history to meet all the criteria.
Acts 3:18 (New King James Version)
18 But those things which God foretold by the mouth of all His prophets, that the Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled.
-waino
4 comments:
Stuff like that is good ammo for discussions with non-believers. It might seem dumb to some but that stuff is what some people need to here. I like that
these kinds of things absolutely fire me up. the Bible is backed by awesome stats like these that scientists have been trying to disprove for hundreds of years......good luck scientists.
Here's a reference for some of the stuff you're talking about, Adam: http://www.squidoo.com/messianicprophecy. It has a couple of videos of Lee Strobel talking about messianic prophecy and a list of Old- and New-testament references. Thanks for the Monday-morning lift!
the Bible is the most statistically accurate book from it's claims as opposed to anything written in history books.
I know many of us have baseball backgrounds and 'stats' are a huge part of life with that circle as we all know.
I have read all of Stroebel's books as well and love his testimony and works. Like Blake said, some of these stats are great ammo and some see it as mangled statistics.
Good stuff
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