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Atheist Tuesday: The Prophetic Apologetic

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When all else fails in trying to convince an unbeliever of the veracity of the Bible, point to the prophecies: There are nearly 300 prophecies  about the Messiah that Jesus fulfills in the bible.

Mathematician Peter Stoner, in his book, Science Speaks, did the math. The odds of Jesus fulfilling just 8 of the 300 prophecies written about the Messiah are incredible. There is just one chance in 10 to the 28th power that this could happen. That looks like this:

1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!!!

“But could Jesus have merely fulfilled these prophecies by accident?” Lee Strobel asked in The Case for Christ. “Could it be that he’s just one of many throughout history who have coincidentally fit the prophetic fingerprint?”

Put it this way: Take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 silver dollars and spread them out across the State of Texas. That would cover the land to a depth of two feet. Now mark one silver dollar with an X and have a blind man walk the entire state, bend down and pick up one coin. What would be the odds of him choosing the marked coin? Those are the same odds that anybody in history could have fulfilled just 8 of those prophecies.

Dr. Stoner estimated that the probability of fulfilling 48 prophecies was one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.

That is, one chance in trillion to the 13th power.

That’s equal to the number of miniscule atoms in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, billion universes the size of our universe.

“The odds alone say it would be impossible for anyone to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies. Yet Jesus—and only Jesus throughout all of history—managed to do it,” says  Louis Lapides a Jewish convert to Christ.

This was taken from a sermon based on Matthew 4:13-17 that I preached four times last weekend. You can listen to it or watch it by clicking here.

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