Day 23 of Lent :: Against all Odds

“This was to fulfill the word 
of Isaiah the prophet.”
(John 12:38)

There has never been another human to walk the earth like Jesus. Even centuries before He was born, prophecies were spoken about Him. In fact, there are more than 300 messianic prophecies found throughout the pages of Scripture. There has never been another human on earth to which this has been the case.

A number years ago, Peter Stoner wrote a book entitled Science Speaks.1 In it, Stoner proceeds to select eight of the best known prophecies about the Messiah and calculates the odds of their accidental fulfillment in one person as being 1 in 1017.

Imagine filling the State of Texas knee deep in silver dollars. Include in this huge number one silver dollar with a black check mark on it. Then, turn a blindfolded person loose in this sea of silver dollars. The odds that the first coin he would pick up would be the one with the black check mark are the same as eight prophecies being fulfilled accidentally in the life of Jesus.

Or to put it a slightly different way, according to the laws of chance, it would require 200-billion earths, populated with 4-billion people each, to come up with one person whose life could fulfill 100 accurate prophecies without any errors in sequence. Yet the Scriptures record not 100, but over 300 prophecies that were fulfilled in Christ’s first coming alone.2

Reflection: Some eight hundred years prior to Jesus, the Prophet Isaiah described the death of Jesus in great detail. Slowly, read it, imagine it, and allow it to begin to sink into the depths of your soul. As you go throughout the day, reflect on it. This week, commit this passage to memory.

He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him…
(Isaiah 53:2-5)

 

 

1 Peter W. Stoner and Robert C. Newman, Science Speaks: Scientific Proof of the Accuracy of 
Prophecy and the Bible.
2 Dr. Charles Ryrie.