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Let's open with the word of prayer.

Father, we thank You for who You are.

We thank You that You have given us this opportunity to gather together, to have Your

Word open to us.

Father, we just pray that You'd open our hearts and lives to Your Word and Your Word

to our lives that in all these things we might grow in grace in the knowledge of our Lord

and Savior.

We thank You, Father, for this privilege that we can enjoy without harassment.

We realize that that's a rare experience indeed.

As most of the last two thousand years and most of the world, most of the body of Christ

has been under persecution.

We thank You that we enjoy these special privileges.

But Father, we would ask that You would help us equip us, strengthen us, and illuminate

specifically what You'd have of each of us in the days that we remain.

As we commit ourselves into Your hands this night, in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Okay.

Well, we are in our 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 the background we hope is helpful.

But now we're moving to the New Testament.

And we have a couple of sessions here that are sort of the bridge.

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 fact.

How sure can we be?

So we're going to focus on that a little bit.

William Thompson, who is 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.

I 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, until you do well to take heed, as unto a light

that shines in a dark place, until the day dawn of the day star 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 Payne, which is just one categorization

of it, he says there's over 8,000 predictive verses on almost 2,000 predictions on 700

different matters.

And that's just one 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

three 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.

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 allude 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 the 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.

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.

He would cast lots for his garments.

His side would be pierced.

Not a bone would be broken that was specified in Exodus, in Numbers and in the Psalms.

He would die among the malefactors.

His dying words were foretold.

Literally Psalm 22 reads like it was dictated for a person singular.

How's he hung on the cross?

He would be buried by a rich man.

He would rise from the dead on the third 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 are 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're chuckling of course because you know I'm kidding you.

But I am going to suggest that we examine eight of them as an exercise because I think

the exercise will be useful not just for the eight but to show you some methodology that

you will I think will lead to understanding.

Let's take the first of the eight.

In Micah 5-2 anyone that takes Christmas cards sees this frequently.

In Micah 5-2 we have the passage that Herod's advisers pointed him to when the Magi visited

and asked where was to be the king of the Jews to be born.

And they said in Micah 5-2 it says, but thou Bethelam Ephritha.

Though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth

unto me, that is to be ruler in Israel, whose going 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 Bethelam, but that he

would rule in Israel.

He's never done that yet, he's going to, whose going forth have been from old from

everlasting.

That his pre-existence 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 Bethelam.

Why is it in Bethelam?

Well, you have to understand the book of Ruth because that links the line of David to

the town of Bethelam.

And there's lots of reasons why the book's so important.

Well, if you take a planet earth and you zero in to the Middle East and you zero in on Israel

and you're near just south of Jerusalem, as you keep zeroing in on this, you discover

there is a town called Bethelam.

It's always been there.

It has had a population of something less than 7,000 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's born born in Bethelam?

Some of you are thinking, all your hands should be up.

Okay, right.

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 Bethelam.

How would you do that?

Well, you'll take the population of Bethelam as something less than 10,000, which is reasonable.

And you'll let's at any one time in history, you'd say the average population might have

been something on the order of a billion.

So there's a chance of 10 to the fourth divided by 10 to the ninth, in other words,

roughly one chance in 10 to the fifth.

If you had a random sample of 100,000 people, you have a chance of having one that was born

in Bethelam, if they're all randomly distributed.

Of course they're not, but 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 Zechariah 9, verse 9, we're told by the prophet, rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion,

shout, O daughter of Jerusalem, behold thy king cometh unto thee.

He is just having salvation, lowly, and riding upon an ass, upon a cold, the full 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.

What is the probability of someone doing this so, 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 them 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

one in a hundred, am I being generous?

I think so.

You could say probably less than one 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 one in a hundred just to make this simple.

You'll see where I'm headed.

These would be perfectly adequate.

Let's take the third one of the eight.

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, verse 12 says, and I said to them, if you think good, give me my price

and if not for mehrer.

So they wait for my price, 30 pieces of silver.

Interesting number.

Does that ring familiar somewhere?

Okay.

We all know that Jesus Christ was betrayed for a 30 piece 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 that might...

There may be a lot that we don't know about.

If I say less than one in a thousand and I'm being...

Am I being generous?

I think so.

I think so.

Okay.

The probability of less than...

It's equal to or less than one in a thousand.

Okay.

Let's take the fourth one.

It's right and 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 under the potter.

A goodly price that I was prized out 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 a little...

It gets a little more complicated.

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

priest and now they're saying, I have sinned in that I betrayed the innocent blood.

They said, what's that to us?

He's out of 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, he says, I've sinned in that I betrayed his...

I love that sentence because who had entered Judas?

Satan.

So by Satan's own words we declare the innocence of Christ.

I think that's an interesting ellipsis there.

But so he cast down the 30 pieces of silver, the temple departed and went out and hanged

himself.

That's all Matthew 27.

You're familiar with that.

But now the chief priest have a problem.

The priest took the silver pieces and said it's not lawful for it to put them into the

treasury because it is the price of blood.

There was a proscription, a prohibition of taking blood money and putting the temple.

So they got this 30 pieces of silver and they're about to give it away.

What do they do with it?

Well they had good CPAs on staff there.

They couldn't put it in the treasury but they could use it to prepay expenses.

See in other words they're prepaying expenses, they're reducing their anticipated payables.

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 every year there's probably a few.

You can 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 bought with them the potter's 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 1113, the price

of 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 price?

If I said probably one in 10 million, I'm going to say one in 100,000 and I'm being

generous.

That's pretty precise.

Let's take number five.

And one shall say unto him, what are these wounds in that hands?

Then he shall answer those of 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.

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 and I was on a scripture memory kick.

Well, I came across this and there's one, you know, wounds in the hands.

I typed up the little card.

But the coming week as I went through my cards, I tried to memorize this, the more I stumbled

because I realized it didn't make sense.

Once I'll say unto him, what are these wounds in nine 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 wrist into some 12 by 12s or whatever they were as being in the house of his friends.

And so I was puzzled by that.

I realized I had the wrong mindset here.

In John chapter 20, you remember that he had appeared to him that among them that Sunday

night and Thomas wasn't with him.

During that week, they told Thomas, guess who showed up the prayer meeting last night?

You know, and they told what happened.

He was very doubtful.

He said, he that is 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 in his side, I will

not believe.

Okay.

And then what happens, of course, that after eight 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, oh, this must have been a blow.

Thomas, he said, reach out of thy finger and behold my hands.

Reach out of thy hand and thrust it into my side and be not faithless but believing.

Be not faithless but believing.

Boy, can you imagine 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 who was feeling a little guilty about something else his dad is, is God looking?

Does he see everything I do?

The father turned to the child and says, God loves you so much he can't take his eyes off you.

Well, Thomas answered and said to my Lord and my God, I visualize Thomas falling to his knees.

Then Jesus said to them, be Thomas because thou has seen me, thou has 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 other thing.

What are these wounds and hands?

Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.

What wounded Christ was not the spikes.

He was Thomas' unbelief.

Well getting back to their little analysis, 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 say less than one in a thousand, am I being generous?

Okay, let's take number six.

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 his hearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.

We're taking this from Isaiah 53.

He can't go through exercises like this without taking a few from Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22.

They're so rich with these things.

But here he is.

He was afflicted, oppressed and 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 one in a thousand, 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 a wicked and with the rich in his death because he had

done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

The question is how many people died among the wicked and yet were buried with the rich

that were not attorneys?

I'm sorry, I just, I've learned over the years of speaking that you could unite any

audience by picking on the attorneys a little bit.

But I didn't mean to be a reverend here.

How many people died among the wicked?

You recognize the intrinsic contradiction within that verse.

Well, if I say less than one in a thousand, am I being generous?

Surely.

Okay, let's take one more.

Number eight, the last of the bunch.

We'll take one from Psalm 22.

For dogs have encompassed 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 less than one in 10,000, am I being generous?

I think so.

Okay.

What I've done here, we've concatenated a list of prophecies.

Born in Bethlehem, King Anadonki, 30 pieces of silver, temple potter, and all that business,

wounds in the hands, no defense, the innocent, died with the wicked, did 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 eight 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.

That would be the chance, if he reached out and touched one of you, that it was a female.

Well how generally?

Well if 60% are male and 40% female, he's got a probability of 40% or probability of 0.4

that he encountered a female.

You left me so far.

Okay.

Let me give you a different example.

Let's assume 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.

We 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%.

You're 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

would combine those two distributions.

You're right.

And the ones that met both conditions would be the product of those two probabilities.

In other words, 0.4 times 0.4, 0.16.

In other words, if 40% of you are female and 40% are left-handed, the combination would

be there, 16% of you would be a good estimate of the probability of being a left-handed

female.

Are you with me?

In other words, I'm trying to get across.

A simple way of getting an estimate here is simply take the product of the probabilities.

Okay.

I said all that, probably 0.16.

Let's take a look at these eight prophecies.

I've made them in powers of 10, so multiplying them just becomes a question of adding up

the zeros.

So you attend to thousands, 10 to the third, and a hundred, 10 to the second, so 100,000

is 10 to the fifth.

2 plus 3, you're with me?

So all I need to do is add up the zeros.

The probability of one person fitting all these things would be one chance in 10 to the

28th, but I need to work out the total people that live.

So I take the 100 billion, I'm going to assume 100 billion population as a guess.

So if I take the combined probabilities, 10 to the 28th divide by 10 to the 11th, I now

have a 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 one chance in 100.

What do I mean by that?

Well, the way I demonstrate that is I might get a bucket.

I would put in that bucket 100 silver dollars.

I'd take one 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 one at random is one chance in 100

of getting the one in mark.

You have to be, that's a way of demonstrating what I mean by that stochastic, that's a stochastic

statement most people are not familiar with dealing with that.

So 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 want a bucket of 10 to the 17th silver dollars, I need to take the state

of Texas, the state of Texas and fill it with silver dollars, and it'll end up being about

two feet deep.

That's 10 to the 17th silver dollars.

And 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 mix 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 when you're going to reach down there with your blindfold and

pick one, the chance that you got the one we marked is one chance in 10 to the 17th.

Does that get it across?

So you've witnessed 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 do with.

We took eight of them.

Let's assume I take another eight, so I have 16 altogether.

To spare you the time, we're not going to actually pick up another eight, but if we did,

the eight that I would add would be more technical, more precise, less likely.

I'm going to assume, for this simple analysis, that the next eight are no less likely than

the ones I've already picked.

That's a very generous assumption, obviously.

So I've got 300 choose from.

The next eight would be more specific, that is less likely than the previous ones, but

I'm going to assume no decrease in likelihood.

I'm just going to add eight of an equivalent kind.

So now I have 10 to the 28th times 10 to the 28th.

We add the exponents, so that's one 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.

So now 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 that?

You can't imagine that many.

And 30 times.

30 times the distance of the earth is 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 mix them all up.

I get one of you blindfolded and in a spacesuit and send them out there under conditions that

would make it equally likely to be exposed to any of them.

And you reach in and if you pick the one that we marked, that's one chance in 10 to

45th.

So I'm going to do this one more time because I say this is getting a little ridiculous,

Chuck.

This time I'm instead of doubling, I'll just triple.

I'll go from 16, I'll go to 48.

Remember, I've got 300 to choose from, but I'm going to reach 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.

Let's just assume that the rest of them, to make up 48, have are no less likely than

the first eight we pick.

Well, that's 10 to the 28th multiplied by itself six times, it's 10 to 168.

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.

How big is it?

Well, the first problem I've got is that super dollars won't work.

They're way too big.

I need something small.

I don't 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 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, 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 times 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

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 150th to 49th.

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.

That a big number?

I am still short of my 157th.

In fact, I'm short by over 100 million to one.

You say, now you say, okay, this is pretty silly.

What's your point?

Here's my point.

I am more convinced that Jesus Christ was the Messiah of Israel than I am more convinced

of that than I am 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 so, and incidentally, we've only dealt with 48 of 300.

So you get some idea why some of those estimates aren't that critical.

You follow me?

If I can make them even looser, you're still, you know, you're out beyond the realm of

reasonable doubt, beyond the realm of reasonable doubt.

And incidentally, in going through this little exercise, I've missed the most amazing ones.

Use detailed genealogy.

You can do an analysis of the genealogy of Jesus Christ and be astonished at the precision

of issues that are tucked in that genealogy.

I won't do it now because we'll do that when we get into a Luke and so forth about the

virgin birth and all of that.

And the daughter is Zalaphahad and the blood curse, Pranhaa, 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 one 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 made rasic 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 that'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 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.

And so this is the precision here is astonishing.

Now 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.

That's what 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, can try all kinds of castles for Abraham.

The famine in Genesis 50.

They finally get them down to Egypt and all the rest.

When you get down to Egypt, the destruction of the male line by the Pharaohs was an attempt.

But of course one was secreted out as you all know the story of Moses and so on.

Pharaohs, even after Pharaoh finally, after the death of the firstborn, all that, he finally

lets them go, but then he repents of that and goes after them to try to wipe out the nation.

Pharaohs 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 Raphaeum, these

corrupt tribes within the land of Canaan.

That's why God told Joshua to wipe out every man, woman, 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.

And we find all kinds of attacks on David's line.

Joharim kills all his brothers, but he misses one.

The Arabians slew all, but hazzariah.

Hephalia, the queen kills all, but Joash is spared.

There's always a plot where some servant hides the baby and saves the day, you know,

but the attacks again and again.

As a king, he has a kai as a soldier, so is it with Isaiah 36 and 38.

We get to the book of Esther, the whole plot line of Haman was to wipe out all the Jews

in Persia.

That was satanic in its 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.

Those think there are 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.

He's fierce for her.

But God sends an angel in the end of the story.

Herod attempts to wipe him out.

When he gets the vision from the magi, I realize that there's a pretender out there.

He slaughters all the children two 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, he tries to throw him off a cliff.

He slips away.

In the gospel, there are two storms at sea, and those storms should not be underestimated.

Those ships in 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.

I went, Jesus comes and it says, He rebuked the sea.

No, I think there was satanic in their 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'll 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 of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and that's

for the nation is it will repent and a petition is returned.

And that's why he's after the believing Jews.

The Jews that have accepted Christ are marked by Satan as targets.

8,300 predictive verses, according to one category.

1,800 predictions on 700 different matters.

The Bible is prophecy.

There are no other equivalents on the planet earth.

The Islam's Quran does not stand up under scholastic scrutiny in a lot of ways, but it

certainly does not hang its reputation on its ability to predict the future.

It can't even get its 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 sentries, those ambiguous things, occultic mediums, channelers, new age spirit

guides, what have you.

None of them.

The candle with the Bible has said all along.

These specifications are filled.

He would be a born of a virgin, and he was.

He'd be born in Bethlehem, and he was.

He'd be taken into Egypt, according to Hosea 11.

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 town of Kirkus

Island back in those days.

He would heal the sick and make people hold 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 it was all through

the New Testament.

He would be raised from the dead, the Scripture predicts, and indeed he was.

Beside the messianic prophecies, the other thing that I want to establish some sensitivity

on your part, is the major prophetic themes that occur through the Scripture.

Not just Israel, not just Jesus, but also Israel, the nation Israel.

It's origin, it's ups, it's downs, and it's destiny.

It's all laid out in advance.

And the attack by the world on the Abrahamic covenant, God's covenant of the land to Israel,

the world's attempt to thwart, Satan's attempt to thwart that prophecy.

But he that keep of Israel in either Columbus or sleep, the Scripture assures us, but it

will be troubled at 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's

beginning to get rebuilt.

It has a destiny according to the Scripture of emerging as a major power center on the

planet Earth.

We're going to watch that in front of our eyes and you're 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 is a superpower, probably the dominant fact of the next few decades

in front of us is the emergence of China as not only an economic giant but as a military

giant.

With major and 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're 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've even heard talk that the UN may move to Babylon, planning itself right in the middle

of the oil patch for lots of good reasons.

They 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.

The 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.

Accumetical 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.

Antichristos in the Greek means a pseudo-Christ, a false Christ.

And while all this is going on, there's going to be attempts to establish a global government.

You know, you read these things in the Bible, 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 the scores.

I want you to challenge this preposter 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 one of those 300 prophecies that were fulfilled in Christ's first coming,

there are at least seven for each one of those of a second coming and things related to it.

Now, how do you challenge this rather audacious statement?

You need to do two things if you're going to be a competent steward.

One, is you got to find out what the Bible says.

Not what Chuck Misler says or whoever your favorite teacher might be.

No, no.

Find out what the Bible says for yourself.

I believe God will reveal things to you that no one else has seen yet.

There's prophecies of that effect in my mind.

That's part A, part B of the assignment.

Find out what's going on and you won't know the 10 o'clock news.

You got to find out what's going on in Israel, Jerusalem, in Russia, Europe, China, and our

country and so forth.

We try to monitor 10 strategic trends, probably more in the dozen now, we're going to add

a few, as we've been monitoring these trends for a better part of it more than a decade

through various intelligence sources we have and are trying to continue to cultivate.

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.

Little one page, we call it E-News, and no cost to you if you sign up on it, give us your

email address and we'll send you a little one page every week of what's happened this

week that's biblically relevant and the links on the internet that are following that development

company.

Most of them are not Christian things, they're an intelligent source of different kinds.

And just the fact that's on the internet doesn't make it reliable.

We try to highlight the ones that are reliable, they're tracking the particular development

of the instrument, whether it's in Jerusalem or China or whatever.

Every week, again, there'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 the prophecy emphasis is just, we treat it not so much as 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 get plunged into the gospels and the rest, that'll be the following session.

We're going to take a look at how do 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.

There's authors that made millions by publishing blasphemous novels.

But where do we get the New Testament?

How do we know it's real?

Who decided what makes up the books?

We're going to try to talk about that.

But more importantly, we're going to show you a way to prove to yourself its authenticity.

It may surprise you.

It'll be a fun session.

But the main thing is we've just finished, I sort of feel 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 seeing, to where you're really beginning

to get a relationship with its 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 found comfortable.

That's not the issue at all.

The issue is your personal relationship with him personally.

And that's the whole ball game.

And hopefully this is all a means to an end.

The more you know what the Bible, the more you'll know about him, and the more you know

about him, the more you realize who he is, and he'll become a moment by moment personal

resource to you.

So that's it for this session.

Let's close with the 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 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.

They 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.