Jesus The Christ Is The Fulfillment Of The Old Testament

Mathematical Verification Through The Science Of Probability That Jesus Has Fulfilled All Of The Old Testament Prophecies Concerning His Coming...

 

There are hundreds of fulfilled prophecies in the Old Testament relating to Jesus being Christ (at least 456). What are the chances that one man (Who was born and died where and when the prophets said He would be) could fulfill them all to become the Saviour of the world?

In the late sixties, a man named Peter Stoner who was Professor Emeritus of Science at Westmont College in Santa Barbara California, calculated the probability of one man fulfilling the major prophecies made concerning the Christ. The estimates were worked out by himself and twelve different classes under his supervision representing some 600 university students.

The students carefully weighed all the factors, discussed each prophecy at length, and examined the various circumstances which might indicate that men had conspired together to fulfill a particular prophecy. They made their estimates conservative enough so that there was finally unanimous agreement even among the most skeptical students.

However Professor Stoner then took their estimates, and made them even more conservative. He also encouraged other skeptics or scientists to make their own estimates to see if his conclusions were more than fair. Finally, he submitted his figures for review to a committee of the American Scientific Affiliation. Upon examination, they verified that his calculations were dependable and accurate in regard to the scientific material presented.

After examining only eight different prophecies, they conservatively estimated that the chance of one man fulfilling all eight prophecies was one in 10¹⁷ (100,000,000,000,000,000).

To illustrate how large the number 10¹⁷ IS (a figure with 17 zeros), Stoner gave this illustration :

If you mark one of ten tickets, and place all the tickets in a hat, and thoroughly stir them, and then ask a blindfolded man to draw one, his chance of getting the right ticket is one in ten. Suppose that we take 10¹⁷ silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They'll cover all of the whole state two feet deep.

Now mark one of these silver dollars and stash it at a random location somewhere in the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel within Texas as far as he wishes in any direction, but he must pick up just one silver dollar and say that this is the one. What chance would he have of getting the right one?

Just the same chance that the prophets would've had of writing eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man.

But, of course, there are many more than eight prophecies. In another calculation, Stoner used 48 prophecies (even though he could have used 456 or possibly more), and arrived at the still extremely conservative estimate that the probability of 48 prophecies being fulfilled in one person is the incredible number of one in 10¹⁵⁷.

How large is the number one in 10¹⁵⁷? 10¹⁵⁷ contains 157 zeros!

Just for fun, I'll reproduce it here: 1 chance in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Stoner gives an illustration of this number using electrons. Electrons are very small objects. They're smaller than atoms. It would take more than 2.5 TIMES 1,000,000,000,000,000 of them, laid side by side, to make one inch. Even if we counted 250 of these electrons each minute, and counted day and night, it would still take 19 million years just to count a line of electrons one-inch long. 

With this introduction, let's go back to our chance of one in 10¹⁵⁷. Let's suppose that we're taking this number of electrons, marking one, and thoroughly stirring it into the whole mass, then blindfolding a man and letting him try to find the right one. What chance does he have of finding the one that's marked?

This is the result from considering a mere 48 prophecies. Obviously, the probability that over 450 prophecies would be fulfilled in one man by chance is vastly smaller. Once one goes past one chance in 10⁵⁰, the probabilities are so small that it is all but impossible to think that they will ever occur.

As Stoner concludes in his book (Science Speaks, Chicago: Moody Press, 1969), "Any man who rejects Christ as the Son of God is rejecting a fact, proved perhaps more absolutely than any other fact in the world." (Stoner, op. cit., 112)

God so thoroughly vindicated Jesus Christ that even mathematicians and statisticians, who were without faith, had to acknowledge that it is scientifically impossible to deny that Jesus is the Christ.

†IC XC†

†NI KA†