351 Prophecies

Luke 24:44-47

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Did Jesus actually, really, truly, physically walk out of the grave on Easter morning? Did he actually rise from the dead? Is that believable? Well let’s just look at what Jesus says, this is the night of Easter, he’s met and talked with two disciples on this road to a town called a Emmaus. They’ve gone back and said, we saw Jesus alive and they’re in a locked room. And all of a sudden Jesus appears to them. He says, peace be with you. This is from Luke, chapter 24. He’s doing all this to prove that he’s actually alive. He’s letting them physically see and touch him, holes in his hands. They give him a piece of fish. He eats that to show that he was really alive and they weren’t even completely convinced right away. They still didn’t believe it because of joy and amazement.

And I wasn’t there and you weren’t there, I didn’t get to touch Jesus. So how can I be sure, how can your friends be sure that he’s really alive? Well, Jesus does the same thing with the disciples he needs to do with us. We don’t need to touch and see him because he says,

He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.(Luke 24:44-47)

So, Jesus, if they’re physically present with him, still points them back to the scriptures and how everything that was said, that he said, and that the scripture said was fulfilled, we see this over and over. One of the first times Jesus goes and presents himself in a synagogue and starts teaching, he reads about how the spirit of the Lord was on him to proclaim good news, to proclaim freedom for the captives, to give recovery of sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, and then he set down the scroll of Isaiah and he said, this has been fulfilled in your hearing.

He came to fulfill all of those Old Testament scriptures. It’s all connected, so if we can believe those, we can believe that he rose from the dead, but it wasn’t just those few prophecies in Isaiah was it? We hear about in the Psalms how it’s spoken about the Messiah, how he says that he would be forsaken by God, his hands and his feet would be pierced. They would gamble for his clothing. In the book of Isaiah, we see Jesus led like a lamb to the slaughter, cursed by God bearing our sin, buried in a rich man’s tomb. All of that happened. Moses said he would destroy the devil, that he would be the perfect sacrifice. David said that he would have a descendant who would rule forever, and Jesus came to do that in Psalm 16 it says he would actually rise from the dead. Zechariah says Jesus would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey. He’d be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. He will not be abandoned to the grave again, Psalm 16. So how many, how many prophecies did Jesus fulfill? Different scholars have looked at the Old Testament in different ways. And I found at least one where they had come up with 351 Old Testament prophecies that are fulfilled in Christ.

What kind of odds are there in somebody randomly coming into this world and fulfilling all of those prophecies in one person? Well, statistically, it’s it’s just out of this world incredible. There was a mathematician and you may have heard these kind of illustrations before, but mathematics and astronomy professor Peter Stoner made the statement that the chances of just eight of these prophecies coming true by sheer chance is one in ten to the seventeenth power, so one with seventeen zeros behind it.

Imagine if there were sixteen prophecies randomly fulfilled by one person. It would have odds like ten to the forty fifth power. If you took that many silver dollars, one with forty five zeros behind it and you pushed all those silver dollars together into into a ball, then that mass of silver dollars would fill the entire solar system and then you’d be asking one person at random to draw one of those silver dollars and pick correctly. Those are the odds of just sixteen prophecies coming true.

Now imagine if forty eight predictions came true randomly in one person that would be like locating one electron in an entire universe composed of electrons. It’s just impossible. And we have Jesus who came into this world and fulfilled all of the prophecies of scripture. You can trust who he is and what he’s done. And it’s not that he just counted up prophecies and decided I’m going to live my life in this way because there were things that he could have never chosen for himself. He had no control over things like when and where he was born or where he would be buried. He didn’t just do this so people would believe in the Messiah.

So you can trust that Jesus has risen from the dead because he himself predicted it and it happened. You don’t just predict your death and resurrection and then it happens and you can trust the other three hundred plus prophecies of the scripture. And that’s where Jesus points us to trust in him, to his word.