Well we are in Hour 13 of our Learn the Bible in 24 Hours, and we're also ... We've crossed
the divide.
In other words, we've been in the Old Testament, admittedly somewhat superficially, but still
with a background we hope is helpful, but now we're moving into the New Testament, and
we have a couple of sessions here that are sort of the bridge.
I thought it'd be useful for us to spend an hour to focus on how sure can we be?
You know we talk glibly that most of us in this audience believe the Bible,
believe Jesus Christ, and that's fine, but how sure are you?
How much are you willing to gamble?
You're gambling your eternity on that in effect.
How sure can we be?
So we're going to focus on that a little bit.
William Thompson, who's known as Lord Kelvin in the scientific community, pointed out that
until we can measure a thing, we really know very little about it.
Well, how do you measure certainty?
How do you measure your degree of confidence that the Bible really is what you believe
it to be?
Let's attack that in a serious way.
If we look at Peter's second letter in the first chapter, he points out that he says,
"For we have not followed cunningly devised fables when we made known unto you the power
and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty."
Now get the picture here.
Peter is in the position of having been an eyewitness to all these fantastic things that
occur in the gospel period.
The transfiguration, the miracles, and so forth, but then a couple verses later he makes
a very strange remark.
He says, "We have also," in other words, in addition to being eyewitnesses, "we also have a more
sure word of prophecy where unto ye would do well to take heed as unto a light that
shineth in a dark place.
Until the day dawn and the daystar arise in your hearts."
This is a strange phrase he uses.
He says you have a more sure word of prophecy.
You have something in your possession that is more certain than having been an eyewitness
like he was.
What does he mean by that?
Well that's what we want to explore.
The prophetic scriptures according to J. Barton Paine which is just 1 categorization of it.
He says there's over 8,000 predictive verses and over almost 2,000 predictions on 700 different
matters, and that's just 1 reckoning.
Clearly, the Bible is more than a few prophecy books.
Prophecy is littered throughout the entire collection of 66 books.
The Old Testament was translated into Greek in 270 BC.
I've mentioned that before, but I want us to anchor on that tonight to recognize that
the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, were translated into Greek 3 centuries before
the Gospel period.
We don't have to worry, for this discussion we'll ignore who actually wrote the books,
when they were actually written.
We're going to say we don't care, we know it was in black and white, in hand in 270 BC
because it was translated into Greek.
Any competent encyclopedia will confirm that for you.
Now these Old Testament scriptures contain over 300 specifications that detail the coming
Messiah, and obviously Jesus Christ fulfilled those.
That's what we're going to head into.
The crucifixion of Christ was not a tragedy.
It was an achievement.
He was deliberately fulfilling literally 300 specifications.
I'll give you some examples.
He was to be born of David's family, that's all through the Old Testament.
He was to be born of a virgin.
There are several places that elude to that.
He would be born in Bethlehem.
He would sojourn in Egypt.
He would live in Galilee, in fact, specifically in Nazareth.
He would be announced by an Elijah like herald of some kind.
His coming would occasion the massacre of Bethlehem's children.
That's mentioned twice in the Old Testament.
He would proclaim a jubilee to the entire world.
His mission would include the gentiles.
That's mentioned in Isaiah several places.
His ministry would be one of healing.
He would teach through the parables, and He would be disbelieved and rejected by the rulers.
That's all laid out in the Psalms and in Isaiah and, in fact, many places.
He would make a triumphal entry into Jerusalem according to Zechariah and the Psalms.
He'd be betrayed by a friend for 30 pieces of silver.
He would be like a smitten shepherd.
He would be given vinegar and gall.
The would cast lots for His garments.
His side would be pierced, and His ... Not a bone would be broken that was specified
in Exodus, in Numbers, and in the Psalms.
He would die among the malefactors.
He ... His dying words were foretold literally.
Psalms 22 reads like it was dictated first person singular as He hung on the cross.
He would be buried by a rich man.
He would rise from the dead on the 3rd day; that's several places in the scripture, and
His resurrection would be followed by the destruction of Jerusalem.
He Himself highlighted that.
And I often point out there are 300 of these kinds of specifications.
Obviously, some of them much more technical. And I thought what we'd do is, we'd go through
each one of them tonight and examine the reference and how it was fulfilled. And you are chuckling
of course because you know I'm kidding.
You know I ... But I am going to suggest that we examine 8 of them as an exercise because
I think the exercise will be useful not just for the 8, but to show you some methodology
that you will, I think will lead to understanding.
Let's take the first of the 8.
In Micah 5:2 ... anyone that gets Christmas cards sees this on it frequently.
In Micah 5:2 we have the passage that Herod's advisors pointed him to when the Magi visit
and asked where he was, where was to be the, the king of the Jews to be born, and they
said in Micah 5:2 it says, "But thou Bethlehem Ephrathah, though thou be little among the
thousands of Judah, yet out of these shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler
in Israel whose goings forth have been from old, from everlasting."
We could actually spend an entire week studying this verse.
There's so much hidden in this verse.
Not just that He's born in Bethlehem, but that He would rule in Israel.
He's never done that yet.
He's going to, whose going forths have been from old, from everlasting, that His preexistence
from the beginning of eternity.
His life didn't start when He became incarnate.
He simply took flesh.
He was incarnate through eternity past, so there's a lot going on here, but all we're
going to focus on for this particular exercise is the location of His birth.
It's in Bethlehem.
Why is it in Bethlehem?
Well, you have to understand the book of Ruth because that links the line of David to the
town of Bethlehem, and that's ... There's lots of reasons why the book is so important.
Well, if you take planet Earth and you zero in to the Middle East, and you zero in on
Israel, and you're just south of Jerusalem, as you keep zeroing in on this, you discover
there is a town called Bethlehem.
It's always been there, and it is, it has had a population of something less than 7000
people throughout most of recorded history. So the question is that I want to
suggest here, with that background, what is the probability of some person selected
at random over the last several thousand years of fulfilling this prophecy?
How many of you in this room know someone who has been born in Bethlehem?
Some of you are thinking.
All your hands should be up.
[laughter] Okay, right.
[laughter] Besides Jesus Christ, do you know ...? Okay.
Well it turns out that you can estimate the probability roughly of somebody, a stranger
being born in Bethlehem?
How would you do that?
Well, you'll take the population of Bethlehem as something less than 10,000 which is reasonable,
and you'll ... Let's ... At any one time in, in history, you'd say the average population
might have been something around the order of a billion, so there's a chance of ...
10 to the 4th divided by 10 to the 9th, in other words, 10, but roughly 1 chance in 10
to the 5th.
You, if you had a random sample of 100,000 people, you have a chance of having 1 that
was born in Bethlehem, if they're all randomly distributed.
Of course they're not, but that a good, that's an approximation.
Okay, let's take another.
You'll see where I'm headed here in a minute.
Another one unrelated to this.
In Zachariah 9:9, we are told by the prophet, "Rejoice greatly oh daughter of Zion.
Shout, oh daughter of Jerusalem.
Behold thy king cometh unto thee.
He is just having salvation lowly, and riding upon an ass upon a colt, the foal of an ass."
And this, of course, is a famous line to us as you study the scripture, especially when
we were in Daniel.
Jesus that one particular time allowed Himself to be presented to Jerusalem as a king riding
the donkey.
He was deliberately fulfilling Zechariah 9:9.
All right.
How many people have presented themselves as a king to Jerusalem riding a donkey?
Well, I know of only one, but that's not a hard thing to do.
You would think that somebody that was presenting him as king could ride a donkey.
Did they?
None that we know of, but if I said the chances of somebody having done that is less than
1 in 100, am I being generous?
I think so.
You could say probably less than 1 in a million because you could probably figure out how
many kings have presented themselves to Jerusalem and figure out which ones didn't ride a donkey
and come down to a much more rare example, but I'll say 1 in 100 just to make this simple.
You'll see where I'm headed.
These will be perfectly adequate.
Let's take the 3rd one of the 8.
We'll go to Zechariah again.
It's an interesting little ... Zechariah is full of these little nuggets tucked away in
various places.
Zechariah 11:12 says, "And I said unto them, if you think good, give me my price, and if
not, forbear.
So they weighed for my price 30 pieces of silver."
Interesting number.
Does that ring familiar somewhere?
Okay, we all know that Jesus Christ was betrayed for 30 pieces of silver.
How many people in the last several thousand years have been betrayed for precisely 30
pieces of silver?
Well, I don't know of any, but there may be a lot that we don't know about.
If I say less than 1 in 1000, and am I being generous?
I think so.
I think so.
Okay, a probability of less than a, is equal to or less than 1 in 1000.
Okay, let's take the 4th one.
It's right, it's the next verse, but it's a little different, so I wanted to separate
some aspects here.
The Lord said unto me, cast it unto the potter: a goodly price that I was prized at
of them. And I took the 30 pieces of silver and cast them to the potter in the house of
the Lord.
Well now this one gets, this one's a little ... it gets a little more complicated.
We're talking ... how many people that were betrayed for 30 pieces of silver had
the money go to a potter, and all this takes place inside the temple in the house
of the Lord, right?
Well, if we go to the scripture, and then Judas which had betrayed him when
he saw that he was condemned, repented of himself and brought again the 30 pieces of
silver to the chief priests and elders saying I have sinned in that I have betrayed the
innocent blood.
They said what's that to us?
see thou to that.
So Judas gets the point.
After he's done his deal, he's betrayed Christ, he's upset about it, he comes back, and
repents and says he's sorry he did it.
He says, "I have sinned and I have betrayed innocent blood."
Now, what, I love that sentence because who had entered into Judas?
Satan.
So by Satan's own words, we declared the innocence of Christ.
I think that's very ... That's an interesting ellipsis there.
But, so he cast down the 30 pieces of silver in the temple, departed, and went out
and hanged himself.
That's all in Matthew 27.
You're familiar with that. But now the chief priests have a problem.
The chief priests took the silver pieces and said it's not lawful to, for to put
them into the treasury because it is the price of blood.
There was a proscription, prohibition of taking blood money and putting it in the temple,
so they got this 30 pieces of silver.
They're not about to give it away.
What'd they do with it?
Well, they had good CPAs on staff there, okay?
[laughter]
They couldn't put it in the treasury, but they could use it to pre-pay expenses.
See in other words they're pre-paying expenses.
They're reducing their anticipated bills, and the reason is because the temple, when
somebody died in the region for whom there were no heirs, no family, the temple had the
problem of dealing with strangers that had died there.
That was an ... Every year there were probably a few.
They, you could make a guess of X numbers each year, and so they had that expense.
There was a potter that had a field that was really cheap that was available, so they took counsel
and they bought with them the potters field to bury strangers in.
It was a low-cost way of anticipating this expense.
It goes on "wherefore that field was called the field of blood unto this day," so that's
in the scripture, Matthew 27.
Now let's go back and look at the precision of this passage in Zechariah 11:13.
The price, 30 pieces of silver.
The location of the transaction is in the house of the Lord, and who ends up with the
money?
The potter who sold the field.
All that is included in that little verse in Zechariah.
So what's the ... If I said probably 1 in 10 million, I could ... I'm going to say 1 in
100,000, and I'm being generous.
That's pretty precise.
Let's take number 5.
"And one shall say unto him what are these wounds in thy hands?
Then he shall answer those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends."
This is a very dear one to me personally.
I went through a phase when I was a teenager where I was memorizing Bible verses, and every
time I came across some reference that was prophetic, I would type the verse on one side
of the card and the reference on the other, and I would always carry a few of these with
me.
I was on a scripture memory kick.
Well I came across this one.
Ooh, there's one.
You know, wounds in the hands.
I typed up the little card, but in the coming week as I went through my cards, I tried,
the more I tried to memorize this the more I stumbled because I realized it didn't make
sense.
One shall say unto him what are these wounds in thine hands?
And then he shall answer those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.
And try as I might, I could not visualize a group of Roman soldiers driving spikes through
his wrists into some 12 x 12s or whatever they were as being in the house of his friends,
and so I was puzzled by that, and I realized I had the wrong mindset here.
In John chapter 20, you remember they, He had appeared to them that, among them
that Sunday night, and Thomas wasn't with them.
During that week they told Thomas, guess who showed up at the prayer meeting last night,
you know, and they told him what happened.
He was very doubtful.
He said, he that as Thomas said unto them, except I shall see in His hands the print
of His nails and put my finger in the print of His nails and thrust my hand into His side,
I will not believe.
Okay.
And then what happens of course, after 8 days, again, His disciples were within.
This time, Thomas was with them.
Then came Jesus.
The doors being shut and stood in the midst and said "Peace be unto you."
And then he said to Thomas, ooh this must have been a blow, "Thomas," he said, "Reach
hither thy finger and behold My hands.
Reach into thy hand and thrust it into My side, and be not faithless, but believing."
"Be not faithless, but believing."
Boy, can you imaging how Thomas must have felt?
First of all, he realized that the Lord had overheard that expression.
See, the Lord doesn't miss a word.
A little child asks, who is feeling a little guilty about something asks their dad this,
"Is God looking?
Does He see everything I do?"
And the Father turns to his child and says "God loves you so much He can't take His eyes
off you."
[laughter]
Thomas answered and said, "My Lord, my God."
I visualize Thomas falling to his knees, and Jesus said, "Thomas because thou has seen
Me, thou hast believed.
Blessed are they that have not seen and believed."
Now when I go back to that verse in Zechariah, you see, it's a whole 'nother thing.
What are these wounds on thy hands?
Those with which I was wounded in the house of My friends.
What wounded Christ was not the spikes.
It was Thomas' unbelief.
Hmm.
Well, getting back to our little analysis here, how many people taken at random have been
wounded in their hands in the house of their friends?
Well, I have no idea, but if I said less than 1 in 1000, am I being generous?
Okay.
Let's take number 6.
He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.
He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before shearers is dumb, so
he opened not his mouth.
We are taking this from Isaiah 53.
You can't go through exercises like this without taking a few from Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22.
They are so rich with these things, but here He is.
He was afflicted.
Oppressed, afflicted.
He opened not His mouth.
Made no defense, so the question is, how many prisoners accused of a capital crime, a death
penalty situation, make no defense even though they're innocent?
There may have been some in history frankly.
There are apparently I think on the record some people who may have been killed inappropriately,
but made no defense, but if I say less than 1 in 1000, am I being generous?
I think so, I think so.
Okay, let's take another one while we're in 53 here, Isaiah 53.
He made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death because he had done
no violence.
Neither was any deceit in his mouth, so the question is, how many people died among the
wicked and yet were buried with the rich that were not attorneys?
[laughter]
Mm-hmm.
I'm sorry, I just ... I've learned over the years of speaking that you can unite any audience
by picking on the attorneys a little bit.
[laughter]
But I didn't mean to be irreverent here.
How many people died among the wicked?
You recognize the intrinsic contradiction within that verse?
Well, if I say less than 1 in 1000, am I being generous?
Surely.
Okay, let's take 1 more, number 8, the last of the bunch.
We'll take 1 from Psalm 22.
For dogs have compassed me, the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me, and they pierced
my hands and my feet.
This is remarkable by the way, because the official form of capital punishment in Israel
was stoning.
This was written 700 years before crucifixion was invented.
It was invented by the Persians and then widely adopted by the Romans. So how many prisoners
taken at random have died by having their hands and feet pierced?
Obviously a lot of people.
Millions were crucified by the Romans, but if I said 1, less than 1 in 10,000, am I being
generous?
I think so.
Okay, so what I've done here ... We've concatenated a list of prophecies, born in Bethlehem,
king on a donkey, 30 pieces of silver, temple potter and all that business, wounds in the
hands, no defense though innocent, died with the wicked yet grave with the rich, and crucified.
Now the question is okay, if those are the probabilities of each one of these individually,
what's the probability of a particular person having fulfilled all 8 of them?
Well that's a dilemma because now we're dealing with composite probabilities, and for the
purpose of this discussion, we'll assume that these things are randomly distributed.
Let's talk about ... Let me give you a little tutorial on composite probabilities.
Let's imagine in this audience that we have 60% of you are men and 40% are women, and
suppose we blindfolded someone and had him pick one of you at random in some, under some
conditions that would make it equally likely to be any of you, what would be the chance
if he reached out and touched one of you that it was a female?
Well, how would you analyze?
Well, if 60% are male and 40% are female, he's got a probability of 40% or probability
of 0.4 that he encountered a female.
Are you with me so far?
Okay.
Let me give you a different example.
Let's assume that half, that 60% of you, are right handed and 40% are left handed.
Let's assume for this discussion that those are randomly distributed independent of sex.
They're just ... We've got right and left handed people in a 60:40 ratio.
What's the probability that someone selected randomly would be left handed?
Again, it would be 40%.
Are you with me so far?
Here's the point I'm trying to make.
What's the probability, assuming these attributes were randomly distributed, of somebody getting
a left handed female?
Well, what you do is you take the one distribution and you take the other distribution and you
combine those 2 distributions, right?
And the ones that met both conditions would be the product of those 2 probabilities, in
other words, 0.4 x 0.4.
0.16.
In other words, if, if 40% of you are female and 40% are left handed, the combination would
be there'd be 16% of you would be a good estimate of the probability of being a left-handed
female.
Are you with me?
In other words, what I'm trying to get across, a simple way of getting an estimate here is
simply to take the product of the ... probabilities.
Okay, having said all that, probability of 0.16.
Let's take a look at these 8 prophecies.
I've made them in powers of 10s, so multiplying them just becomes a question of adding up
the zeros, so you tend to ... Thousand is 10 to the 3rd, and, and 100 is 10 to the 2nd,
so 100,000 is 10 to the 5th. 2 + 3.
Are you with me?
So all you need to do is add up the zeros.
The probability of 1 person fitting all these things would be 1 chance in 10 to the 28th,
but I need to work out the total people that lived, so I take the 100, I'm going to
assume 100 billion population as a guess.
So if I take the combined probability as 10 to the 28th divided by 10 to the 11th, I now
have still a very large number.
A number by 10 to the 17th.
Now if we were in a statistics class in graduate school or whatever, and I was going to try
to get across to you what I mean by 1 chance in 100, what do I mean by that?
Well, the way I'd demonstrate that is I might get a bucket.
I would put in that 100 silver dollars.
I'd take 1 of them and mark it with some lipstick or nail polish or something, and I'd mix them
all up, and the chance of my reaching in there and picking 1 at random is 1 chance in 100
of getting the one I marked.
You with me?
That's a way of demonstrating what I mean by that ... That's a stochastic
statement, and most people are not familiar with dealing with that, so that's ... That's
... Okay.
So what I want now, what I need to do to demonstrate this probability that we're talking about
here is I need a bucket that will hold 10 to the 17th silver dollars.
That turns out to be a pretty big bucket.
That's a lot of silver dollars.
In fact, if I wanted a bucket of 10 to the 17th silver dollars, I'd need to take the
state of Texas and fill it with silver dollars, and it'll end up being about 2 feet deep.
That's 10 to the 17th silver dollars, so what I would do then is pick one of
you, blindfold you, and put you into a situation where you have an equal likelihood of being
exposed to any particular ... I mixed them up in such a way and route you in such a
way that you have an equal chance of getting any one of those silver dollars.
You're going to reach down there with your blindfold on and pick one.
The chance that you got the one we marked is 1 chance in 10 to the 17th.
Does that get it across?
So you with me so far?
You recognize that?
It's a way of demonstrating just how unlikely that is, but we're not through.
I said we had 300 ... prophecies to deal with.
We took 8 of them.
Let's assume I take another 8, so I have 16 all together.
To spare you the time, we're not going to actually pick up another 8, but if we did,
the 8 that I would add would be more technical, more precise, less likely.
I'm going to assume for this simple analysis that the next 8 are no less likely than the
ones I've already picked.
That's a very generous assumption, obviously.
So I've got 300 to choose from.
The next 8 would be more specific, that is less likely than the previous one, but I'm
going to assume no decrease in likelihood.
I'm just going to add 8 of an equivalent kind, so now I have 10 to the 28th times 10 to the
28th.
We add the exponents, so that's 1 chance in 10 to the 56th, but again, I subtract out
my 10 to the 11th population over that time.
So I now have 10 to the 45th.
Okay?
So now I want ... I need a bucket of silver dollars that'll hold 10 to the 45th silver
dollars.
That's a lot of silver dollars.
Let me give you a feeling for how many that is?
How big a bucket do I need?
I need to make a ball of silver dollars that is 30 times the radius of the Earth to the
sun.
Can you imagine?
You can't imagine that many, and 30 times.
30 times the distance to the Earth to the sun, a ball of silver dollars.
Now in this case, we'll get our volunteer that's going to pick.
And we've marked one of these and mixed them all up.
I've got one of you blindfolded and in a space suit, and sent them out there under conditions
that would make it equally likely to be exposed to any of them, and you reach into it, and
if you pick the one that we marked, that's 1 chance in 10 to the 45th.
So I'm going to do this one more time because, you say this is getting a little ridiculous
Chuck.
This time instead of doubling, I'll just triple.
I'll go from 16, I'll go to 48.
Bear in mind, I've got 300 to choose from, but I'm going to reach in a little further and
I'm going to again assume there's no decrease in likelihoods.
Actually, I can find prophecies there that are so rare they stand on their own in terms
of this kind of analysis, but let's just assume that the next ... that the rest of them, to make
up 48, have, are no less likely than the first 8 we pick.
That's 10 to the 28th multiplied by itself 6 times, 10 to the 168th, and now I have to
subtract my 10 to the 11th out of there, so that's 10 to the 157th.
That's a pretty big number.
[laughter]
How big is it?
Well, the first problem I've got, the silver dollars won't work.
They're way too big.
I need something small.
I need the smallest thing you can imagine.
What is the smallest thing you can imagine?
An atom, huh?
How's that?
It may surprise you to learn that there are estimates of the number of atoms in our galaxy.
I want to make a ball of every atom in our galaxy.
It turns out there's a commonly accepted estimate among scientists of about 10 to the 66th atoms
in our galaxy.
Well, that means if I make a ball of every atom, if I'm going to consider them as my
sample, that's ... I'm way short of what I need.
I need 10 to the 157th.
Okay, so I'll make such a ball for each atom in the universe.
So now I've got 10 to the 66th x 10 to the 66th.
Well, that's 10 to the 132nd.
I'm still far short of 10 to the 157th.
Okay.
I've got a ball for every atom in the universe consisting of as many atoms as there are in
the universe.
I'm going to imagine that crazy exercise happening every second since the universe began.
Well, that's about 10 to the 17th seconds if you do the math, and now I'm still only
10 to the 149th.
I've made a ball of atoms equal to all the atoms in the universe.
I'm going to do that for each atom in the universe, and I'm going to do that whole silly
thing every second for 16 billion years.
Is that a big number?
I am still short of my 157.
In fact, I'm short by over 100 million to 1.
So you said, now you say, okay, this is pretty silly.
What?
What?
What's your point?
Here's my point.
I am more convinced that Jesus Christ was the Messiah of Israel than I ... I'm more
convinced of that than of any other fact in my command.
I'm more convinced of His identity than I am my own.
Now, I have no reason to doubt my identity.
I've got a birth certificate, I know my parentage, etc.
There's nothing, there's no little gimmick here, and yet I also realize I know, I could
not attach this kind of certainty to any other fact I know of.
And incidentally, we've only dealt with 48 of 300, so you get some idea of why some of
those estimates aren't that critical.
You follow me?
If I can make it even looser, you're still, you're out in beyond the realm of reasonable
doubt, beyond the realm of reasonable doubt, and incidentally, in going through through
this little exercise, I've missed the most amazing ones.
You can do an analysis of the genealogy of Jesus Christ and be astonished at the precision
of issues that are tucked into that genealogy.
I won't do it now because we'll do that when we get into Luke and so forth about the virgin
birth and all of that and the daughters of Zelophehad and the blood curse pronounced
on Jeconiah and so on.
The specific identification prediction of the precise day that the Messiah would present
Himself as king to Jerusalem that which we encountered in Daniel chapter 9, take that
1 prophecy alone, and it is equivalent to everything we've done so far, that one alone.
Astonishing precision, and there's a whole bunch of Old Testament Midrashic
prophecies and other ones.
What we're dealing here with is what I call the scarlet thread.
It starts with God's declaration of war on Satan in the book of Genesis in which God
indicates to Adam and Eve that His plan of redemption will involve the human race.
This is not going to be a super angel, it's not going to be some other thing.
It's going to involve a man, but it's going to be a perfect man.
In fact, it's going to involve a nation being called.
We find that out in Genesis 12 and following.
Abraham was called, and so it's not, it's not going to come from the human race, it's
going to come from a specific subset of that, namely the nation Israel.
In fact, within that, it's going to come from a particular tribe, the tribe of Jacob, and
within that, it's going to be from the family of David, so this is ... the
precision here is astonishing.
One of the interesting things to discover is as God progressively focuses on His plan
of redemption, as He reveals the details of His plan throughout the scripture, that gives
Satan an opportunity to try to thwart it.
You can study your Bible from cover to cover from the point of view of Satan's attempt
to thwart the plan of God.
As God reveals another little glimmer of insight, it allows Satan to focus more.
When God announces that it's going to come from the human race, that allows Satan the
opportunity to try to corrupt the human race, and that's led to the hybrids and all that
weird stuff going on in Genesis 6 and subsequently.
When God calls Abraham in Genesis 12 and following, now Satan can focus on the descendants of
Abraham to try to thwart it. And Satan attacks all kinds of, contrives all kinds of hassles
for Abraham.
The famine in Genesis 50 that finally gets them down to Egypt and all the rest.
When they get down to Egypt, the destruction of the male line by the Pharaohs was an attempt,
but, of course, 1 was secreted out as you all know. The story of Moses and so on.
Pharaoh's, even after Pharaoh, finally after the death of the firstborn, he finally lets
them go, but then he repents of that and goes after them to try to wipe out the nation.
Pharaoh's pursuit.
Each one of these things is Satan's attempt to somehow thwart God's plan.
When God tells Abraham that his people will return to Canaan after 400 years, that gave
Satan 400 years to lay down a minefield by again using the Nephilim, the Rephaim,
these corrupt tribes within the land of Canaan.
That's why God told Joshua to wipe out every man, woman, and child of certain tribes.
He had a gene pool problem, but then in 2 Samuel 7 when God goes even further and says
it's going to come not only out of Abraham and out of Judah and so forth, it's going to
be out of the family of David.
That allows Satan to focus on the family of David.
We find all kinds of attacks on David's line.
Jehoram kills all his brothers, but he misses one.
The Arabians slew all but Ahazariah.
Athaliah, the queen, kills all, but Joash is spared.
There is always a plot where some servant hides a baby and saves the day, you know,
but, the attacks again and again.
King Hezekiah is assaulted in Isaiah 36 and 38.
We get to the book of Esther, the whole plotline of Haman was to wipe out all the Jews in Persia.
That was Satanic in it's root because he's trying to thwart the plan of God.
If Haman had succeeded, there would have not been a temple, there would not have been a
redeemer.
There were major, very cosmic issues underlying each one of these.
When you get to the New Testament, it doesn't change.
Joseph finds his betrothed is pregnant, and he fears for her, but God sends an angel
and you know the story.
Herod attempts to wipe them out when he gets the vision from the magi and realizes that
there's a pretender out there.
He slaughters all the children 2 years and younger.
That was all predicted in the scripture, and he does that.
He attempts to do that.
When Jesus opens his ministry at Nazareth, they try to throw Him off a cliff.
He slips away.
In the gospel period there are 2 storms at sea, and those storms should not be underestimated.
Those ships and those storms were manned by professional seamen who knew those waters.
Several of them were in a business partnership together in fishing.
They knew what they were doing.
They knew those waters.
They were terrified.
I'm going to suggest to you that those storms weren't normal storms, and I suggest there's
also something else, but when Jesus calms them it says He rebuked the sea.
No, I think they were Satanic in origin personally.
And, of course, the ultimate strategy was the cross, and there's a summary of all of
this in Revelation chapter 12 which we will touch on when we get there, but the key point
I want to get across is Satan is not through yet.
He's not through yet.
He knows that there is a prerequisite condition to the 2nd coming of Jesus Christ, and that's
for the nation of Israel to repent and to petition His return. And that's why he is after the
believing Jews.
The Jews that have accepted Christ are marked by Satan as targets.
8,000, 8,300 predictive verses according to one category.
1800 predictions on 700 different matters.
The Bible is prophecy.
There are no other equivalents on the planet Earth.
The Islam's Koran does not stand up under scholastic scrutiny in a lot of ways, but
it certainly does not hang it's reputation on it's ability to predict the future.
It can't even get it's own historical facts straight.
The Hindu's Vita, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon.
None of these ... All these religious books have no concept of hyperspaces that we now
know exist.
The Bible does.
None of these have the audacity to hang their credibility on their ability to lay out history
before it happens.
Nostradamus' Centuries was an ambiguous thing.
Occultic mediums, channelers, new age spirit guides, what have you.
None of them hold a candle to what the Bible has said all along.
These specifications are filled.
He would be born of a virgin, and He was.
He would be born in Bethlehem, and He was.
He would be taken into Egypt according to Hosea 11:1, and He was according to Matthew
2.
In fact, when you go to Ethiopia, it's kind of interesting.
You find those episodes of Mary and Joseph and the child visiting the temple that was
set up in the Tana Kirkos Island back in those days.
He would heal the sick and make people whole according to Isaiah 53, and He did according
to Matthew 8.
He would be crucified according to Psalm 22 and many other passages, and He was in Matthew
27.
He would die for our sins according to Isaiah 53, and indeed He did as is all through the
New Testament.
He would be raised from the dead the scripture predicts, and indeed He was.
Besides the Messianic prophecies, the other thing that I want to establish some sensitivity
on your part for is the major prophetic themes that occur through the scripture.
Not just Israel ... Jesus, but also Israel.
The nation Israel.
It's origin, it's ups, it's downs, and it's destiny is all laid out in advance, and the
attack by the world on the Abrahamic covenant, God's covenant of the land to Israel is the
world's attempt to thwart, it's Satan's attempt to thwart that prophecy, but he that keepeth
Israel will neither slumber nor sleep, the scripture assures us, but it will be troubling
times there.
The city of Jerusalem, the entire world going to war against Jerusalem; that's coming.
The city of Babylon is destined for a dramatic destruction that it has never seen, and it
is becoming ... It is beginning to get rebuilt.
It has a destiny according to the scripture of emerging as a major power center on the
planet Earth.
We are going to watch that in front of our eyes, and you are going to find many, many
Bible-believing people caught by surprise because of their lack of recognizing the precision
of God's word.
Russia is going to invade the Middle East, and God is going to intervene in that invasion
in a very dramatic way.
Russia and her allies are all detailed there.
The technology of the weapons is all detailed there.
The rise of China as a superpower, probably the dominant fact of the next few decades
in front of us is the emergence of China as a, not only an economic giant, but as a military
giant with major, major concerns over the Middle East.
China and Europe are desperate for energy, for oil.
We want it too, but we have alternatives, they don't, so they are on a collision course.
Europe and China are on a collision course over the Middle Eastern oil.
Watch that be ... That's going to be an increasingly important subject forthcoming.
I even heard talk that Babylon may, the UN may move to Babylon, planting itself right
in the middle of the oil patch for lots of good reasons.
They've obviously got to do something; it's a mess right now.
The rise of Europe as a super state.
Recognized by many prophecy buffs for some of the right reasons and some of the wrong
reasons.
The rise of the Antichrist I don't think will be from Europe.
He'll be from the Middle East.
He'll be from Assyria.
Scripture makes that pretty clear I think.
And while all this is going, the Bible talks about a one-world Christian pseudo religion,
a pseudo Christian religion.
Ecumenical religion.
It's not the new age.
Some people figure it's the new age.
No, it's going to be a Christ replacement kind of thing.
Anticristos in the Greek means a pseudochrist, a false Christ.
And while all this is going on there's going to be a, attempts to establish a global government.
You know, you read these things in the Bible and it sounds like you're cribbing from today's
newspaper. And, of course, while all this is going on, there'll be a rise of the occult
in ways that we can't even imagine.
So that leads to the challenge that I've made several times in this study.
I want you ... If you accept what I put on the screen, you flunk this course.
I want you to challenge this preposterous statement.
I'm suggesting that we are being plunged into a period of time about which the Bible says
more than it does about any other period of time in history including the time that Jesus
walked the shores of Galilee or climbed the mountains of Judea.
Now that's an audacious statement because the Bible has a lot to say about the gospel
period obviously, but I'm going to suggest to you that it even says even more about what's
coming.
For every, for every one of those 300 prophecies that were fulfilled in Christ's first coming,
there are at least 7 for each one of those of His 2nd coming and things related to it.
Now how do you challenge this rather audacious statement?
You need to do 2 things if you are going to be a competent steward.
One is you've got to find out what the Bible says.
Not what Chuck Missler says or whoever your favorite teacher might be.
No, no, find out what the Bible says for yourself.
I believe God with reveal things to you that no one else has seen yet.
There are prophecies to that effect in my mind.
That's part A. Part B of the assignment, find out what's going on, and you won't on the
10 o'clock news.
You gotta find out what's going on in Israel and Jerusalem.
In Russia, Europe, China, and our country and so forth.
And we try to monitor 10 strategic trends.
Probably more than a dozen now.
We're going to add a few.
As we ... We've been monitoring these trends for the better part of more than a decade
through various intelligence sources we have and are trying to continue to cultivate, and
we publish these in forms of briefing packages on each one, but even more to the point, we
publish a little newsletter.
It's free on the internet.
A little 1 pager.
We call it e-news, no cost to you if you sign up.
Give us your e-mail address and we'll send you a little 1 page every week of what's happened
this week that's Biblically relevant and the links on the internet that are following that
development competently.
Most of them are not Christian things.
They're intelligence sources of different kinds, and just the fact it's on the internet
doesn't make it reliable.
We try to highlight the ones that are reliable that are tracking the particular development
we're interested in whether it's in Jerusalem or China or whatever.
Every week you'll get ... It's no charge.
This is just something we do, and our attempt, because we're trying to get you to
be a prophecy buff, not really.
That's not the point.
We want to continually make you aware that this book is what it claims to be.
It's a living word, and this, the prophecy emphasis is just ... We treat
it not so much ... We're not trying to predict the future.
We're using it as an apologetic.
It's a demonstration that God means what He says and says what He means, and He authenticates
Himself several ways, but prophecy is one of them.
We're going to show you some others in the next session. So one of the things that we're
going to undertake in the next session is we're going to explore a little bit about
the New Testament.
We've finished the Old Testament.
That's sort of behind us now as far as our project's concerned.
In the next session we're going to move into a look at the New Testament, but before we
plunge into the Gospels and the rest, that'll be the following session, we're going to take
a look at how did we get the New Testament.
There's a lot of nonsense floating around about the Gnostic gospels, and there are all
kinds of people that are attacking the legitimacy of the New Testament, and they do it for money.
It's great merchandising.
Authors have made millions by publishing blasphemous novels.
But where did we get the New Testament?
How do we know it's real?
Who decided what makes up the books, and we're going to try to talk about that,
but more importantly, we're going to show you a way to prove to yourself it's authenticity,
and it may surprise you.
It'll be a fun session, but the main thing as we've just finished, ... we've
finished a unit now with the Old Testament behind us.
One of the things I'm hoping has already started to happen, and I certainly hope it'll happen
before we're through is a transition taking place from being a serious student, taking
notes and understanding the book that we're saying to where you're really beginning to
get a relationship with it's author, with the Lord Jesus Christ because he's alive today.
And the reason we're doing this is for you to develop a personal relationship.
It doesn't matter what church you go to.
It doesn't matter what denominational affiliations you've found comfortable.
That's not the issue at all.
The issue is your personal relationship with Him personally, and that's where, that's the
whole ball game.
And hopefully this is all a means to an end.
The more you know about the Bible, the more you'll know about Him, and the more you know
about Him, the more you'll realize who He is, and He'll become a moment by moment
personal resource to you, so.
So that's it for this session.
Let's close with a word of prayer.
Father, we just thank You for the confidence that we can have in Your word.
We thank You Father that You've gone to such extremes to communicate Yourself to us and
to communicate to us Your plan of redemption to extricate us from the predicament that
we find ourselves in.
We thank You Father that You've provided a destiny for us that's too fantastic for us
to possibly deserve or to earn our way to, yet rather Father, You have paid the full
price for that destiny on our behalf.
We just pray Father, that through Your Holy Spirit You would continue to illuminate Your
word, that we might more fully appreciate what You have done and what You are doing
and what You will do.
But above all these things Father, we pray that You'd help each of us to grow in grace
and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that we each might thus become
more pleasing in Your sight, that we each might become better stewards of the opportunities
that You've placed before us.
As we commit ourselves into Your hands without any reservation, in the name of Yeshua, our
Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Amen.
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