Sermon Tone Analysis

We have made it to the New Testament.

We are going to look at a few verses in the first three chapters in Matthew.

See if you can figure out the link between them.

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Prophecy — One of the many reasons we can have so much confidence in the Holy Scriptures.

We’ve talked before about the qualifications to be a prophet -

must have a 100% success rate in predictions

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These people spoke God’s words and they were written and collected and studied as their Scriptures.

The same Jewish collection of Scriptures, known today as the Hebrew Bible, is the same collection of writings that make up our Old Testament.

No more, no less.

If you are interested in non-canonical books like the apocryphal books and the gnostic gospels we can talk about those as well.

These were the collected words of recognized prophets, who were recognized as prophets, in their lifetime, whose words came true, who earned the respect of the people as true prophets, and whose words continued to come true after their deaths, who all prophesied about a single coming Messiah.

Let’s look at Samuel

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This is what it was like to meet Samuel.

This is the prophet Samuel talking to Saul...

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What about Elijah and Elisha?

Elijah —

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Elisha —

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one of my favorites

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Then of course you have Moses, who God chose to perform miracle after miracle by, and then you have the prophets like David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephania, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

They all spoke prophecies and everyone pointed directly or indirectly to the coming Messiah and to the cross.

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Let me read to you a paragraph from “Evidence That Demands a Verdict” by Josh and Sean McDowell.

They mention that J. Barton Payne lists 191 distinct predictions that were literally fulfilled in Christ.

Floyd Hamilton lists 332, but let’s go with the much smaller list of 191 for arguments sake.

Then they talk about Peter Stoner, who wrote the book “Science Speaks” that “examines the mathematical probabilities that apply to the fulfillment of these predictions.

They note that in the foreword, H. Harold Hartzler, of the American Scientific Affiliation, Goshen College, wrote, “The manuscript for Science Speaks has been carefully reviewed by a committee of the American Scientific Affiliation members and by the Executive Council of the same group and has been found, in general, to be dependable and accurate in regard to the scientific material presented.

The mathematical analysis included is based upon principles of probability which are thoroughly sound and Professor Stoner has applied these principles in a proper and convincing way.”

All that to say, the statistics, I’m about to give you have been reviewed by mathematicians and confirmed to be accurate.

Now before we get started let me put this in perspective for us who live in GA

Texas — 268,597 sq.miles

59,425 — Georgia

65,755 — Florida — 125,180

52,419 — Alabama — 177,599

32,020 — South Carolina — 209,619

53,819 — North Carolina — 263,438

With that said how many prophecies are we going with to say that the prophets made that were fulfilled in Jesus?

191, now let’s just look at 8.

“The Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem.

He would be preceded by a messenger.

He was to enter Jerusalem on a donkey.

He would be betrayed by a friend and his hands and feet pierced.

His betrayer would be given thirty pieces of silver.

The betrayal money would be thrown into the house of God and used to buy a potter’s field.

He would be silent before his accusers.

His hands and feet would be pierced and he would die accounted among criminals.”

“Stoner writes:

We find that the chance that any man might have lived down to the present time and fulfilled all eight prophecies is one in 10^17 (10 to the 17th power.)

That would be one in 100,000,000,000,000,000 [17 zeros after the one.]

In order to help us comprehend the staggering possibility, stoner illustrates it by supposing that we take 10^17 silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas.

They will cover all of the state 2 feet deep.

Now Mark one of the silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state.

Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up one Silver dollar and say that this is the right one.

What chance would he have of getting the right one?

Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote them according to their own wisdom.

Now these prophecies were either given by inspiration of God or the prophets just wrote them as they thought they should be.

In such a case the prophets had just one chance in 10^17 of having them come true in any man, but they all came true in Christ.

This means that the fulfillment of these eight prophecies alone proves that God inspired the writings of these prophecies to a definiteness which lacks only one chance in 10^17 of being absolute.

Stoner then considers a group of 48 of the prophecies and reports:

We find a chance that any one man fulfilled all 48 prophecies to be one in 10^157.

This is really a large number and it represents an extremely small chance.

Let us try to visualize it.

The Silver dollar, which we have been using, is entirely too large.

We must select a smaller object.

The electron is about a small an object as we know of.

It is so small that it will take 2.5 times 10^15 of them laid side-by-side to make a line, single file, 1 inch long.

If we were going to count the electrons in this line 1 inch long, and counted 250 each minute, and if we counted day and night, it would take us 19 million years to count just the 1 inch line of electrons.

If we had a cubic inch of these electrons and we tried to count them it would take us, counting steadily 250 each minute, 19,000,000×19,000,000×19,000,000 years or 6.9×10^21 years.

With this introduction let us go back to our chance of one in 10 to the 157.

Let us suppose that we are 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 has he ever finding the right one?

Such is the chance of any individual fulfilling those 48 prophecies.”

Peter said this to us:

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