Twenty-eight years ago this coming August I was ordained to be a full-time evangelist. Since that time I have taught nearly every Sunday of the year from this book – sometimes once, sometimes twice a week – not to mention many more times in private and semi-private Bible studies. That’s a lot of sermons and lessons. In a typical sermon I cite repeatedly the various writers of the Bible as my sources. Yet in all those twenty-eight years I have never had a single sleepless Saturday night fretting because my sources didn’t agree. I’ve never been embarrassed because of inconsistencies. I approach this book every week with confidence, knowing that whether I am reading from Genesis or Galatians, Romans or Revelation, Exodus or Ephesians, my sources – the 40 plus writers of this compilation of 66 books – agree because they were guided by the same Spirit of God.

Dwight David Eisenower, the 34^th President of the United States, said this about the Bible:

"The Bible is endorsed by the ages. Our civilization is built
upon its words. In no other Book is there such a collection
of inspired wisdom, realty and hope."

Woodrow Wilson, the 28^th President of the United States said the following about the Bible:

"There are a good many problems before the American people today, and before me as President, but I expect to find the solution of those problems just in the proportion that I am faithful in the study of the Word of God."

William McKinley, the 25^th President of the United States, said this about the Bible:

Ronald Reagan, the 40^th President of the United States, had this to say about the Bible:

We’re continuing this morning the series we started last Sunday called God’s Word, the Bible: A Most Remarkable Book.

I showed you last time that the Bible is remarkable:

This morning I want to continue along this same line of showing you just how remarkable this book is.

By "unity of message" I mean that though it comes from great diversity in its origins, it maintains a laser sharp focus on its theme, which is the redemption of man through Christ. Let me explain this "unity our of diversity" idea.

The 66 different books of the Bible were written by 40 plus human authors over a span of a millennium and a half (actually, 1,600 years.) The Bible’s first writer, Moses, died about 1450 years before the last writer, John, was born. The writers of the Bible spanned over 60 generations. Not much chance for collusion over that span of time!

Most of these authors were not theologians. Neither were they religious experts.

But this great diversity in the occupations of the authors is not all. There is also great diversity in the locations from which these men wrote.

Different occupations of the authors – different circumstances - the Bible was also written from parts of three continents – Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Moses, the first writer of the Bible would not have understood the writings of John, the last writer because the two men wrote in different languages – Moses in Hebrew and John in Greek. In fact, the Bible was written in three different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

These diverse writers from diverse places, under diverse circumstances, writing in different languages, also wrote on many controversial subjects, including such recognizable hot button issues as:

Yet in all this diversity of the 40 plus Bible writers, when it comes together in the Bible there is a remarkable unity of purpose and message. So unified is the message that those who study the Bible can often clarify difficult passages written by one author by looking at the writings of another Bible writer who wrote on the same subject.

Apologist Josh McDowell tells of an experience he had with a salesman some years ago. He writes in his book, Evidence that Demands a Verdict:

"A representative of the Great Books of the Western World came to my house recruiting salesmen for their series. He spread out the chart of the Great Books of the Western World series. He spent five minutes talking to us about the Great Books of the Western World series and we spent an hour and a half talking to him about the Greatest Book.

"I challenged him to take just 10 of the authors [of his book series – D.R.], all from one walk of life, one generation, one place, one time, one mood, one continent, one language and just one controversial subject….

"Then I asked him: ‘Would they (the authors) agree?’ He paused and then replied, ‘No!’ "What would you have?’ I retorted. Immediately he said, ‘A conglomeration.’

"Two days later," finishes McDowell, "he committed his life to Christ…."

Why all this unity of message in the Bible from such diverse sources? Because this book had a guiding force behind it – inspiration by the Creator of the universe. Speaking of the Scripture, Peter wrote in 2 Peter 1:21: "No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God."

If you don’t believe that, then you explain how such unity can come from such diversity. Or for that matter, find another ancient book anywhere that exhibits the same kind of remarkable characteristic. You won’t be able to do it.

Twenty-eight years ago this coming August I was ordained to be a full-time evangelist. Since that time I have taught nearly every Sunday of the year from this book – sometimes once, sometimes twice a week – not to mention many more times in private and semi-private Bible studies. That’s a lot of sermons and lessons. In a typical sermon I cite repeatedly the various writers of the Bible as my sources. Yet in all those twenty-eight years I have never had a single sleepless Saturday night fretting because my sources didn’t agree. I’ve never been embarrassed because of inconsistencies. I approach this book every week with confidence, knowing that whether I am reading from Genesis or Galatians, Romans or Revelation, Exodus or Ephesians, my sources – the 40 plus writers of this compilation of 66 books – agree because they were guided by the same Spirit of God. This line of reasoning alone, coupled with nearly three decades of my own first hand experience, brings me to conclude that I trust this book to be the Word of God and I will trust it until my dying day.

We’re talking about this remarkable book, the Bible. I’ve just shown you that it is remarkable because of its unified message.

The careful student will soon discover that there are hundreds of predictions of future events recorded in the Bible. There are predictions about people, about nations, about great events, and even about worldwide calamities. Some of them are yet to be fulfilled. Others, the majority perhaps, have already been fulfilled so that we may verify them in history.

Fulfilled prophecy is such a broad field of study that I cannot possibly do justice to it in a brief message like this. We could study it every day for weeks and not exhaust what is here. All I can do is help you "shake hands" with the subject and give you my assessment of it along with a few examples and an admonition to check it out further for yourself.

While there are many fascinating fulfilled prophecies we could cite as examples, perhaps the easiest for all of us to grasp would be those that pertained to the Messiah or Christ. Most of us are probably more familiar with the life of Christ than we are with world history.

There are over 300 prophecies in the Bible concerning the life of Christ. Most of them have been fulfilled – many more than would be necessary to illustrate their validity.

I have provided a handout sheet for you this morning that has a listing of 60 such prophecies concerning the life of Christ and their fulfillment. Remember, I said there are over 300. Please take that paper out now and we’ll look at it.

Notice the first category that concerns prophecies about his birth. The first listing is "Born of the seed of woman." Then in the center column, we read where the event was prophesied and in the right hand column we read where it was fulfilled.

The prophecy about Him being "born of the seed of woman" occurs in Genesis 3:15. Here is what it says:

While these words, pronounced by God just before man was driven out of the Garden of Eden, may not be easily recognized for meaning to someone who has not studied the Bible, they are viewed by most who believe the Bible as being the very first prediction of the coming Messiah, or Christ. Notice the prediction that Someone called "her seed" (that is, the seed or offspring of woman) would someday bruise the serpent’s head. Of course the devil is the serpent. Whomever this person was, He would be, in some unique way, the seed (or offspring) of a woman. This prophecy was written by Moses 1500 years before Christ.

Galatians 4:4, written over 1500 years later, in the first century A.D., states the fulfillment:

While some might say that this isn’t a very clear statement of future events (everyone is "born of a woman," right?) later another prophecy was made that helps us better understand its meaning. It’s the second item in the left hand column: "Born of a virgin."

Isaiah 7:14, written 700 years before Christ, says,

The fulfillment of this is in Matthew 1:18-23:

Before man was ever cast out of the Garden of Eden, God predicted that He would send Someone to settle the score with the devil. That Someone would be uniquely the seed (or offspring) of a woman. Later, though Isaiah His prophet, God gave the specific meaning intended: The child would be born of a woman without any sexual relations with a man!

Genesis 22:18 (again, written 1500 years before Christ) makes a prediction that the whole world would be blessed through the seed (or descendant) of Abraham.(2) In the words of God speaking to Abraham, it says,

As time went along this prediction came to be known as a prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of Abraham.

We read the fulfillment in Matthew 1:1:

If you follow the handout list down you’ll see that more specific predictions than these were made. He was to be of the seed of Isaac, Jacob, and David - specific blood lines beneath Abraham’s lineage. Jesus fulfilled them all.

The ninth prophecy on the list predicted the place of the Messiah’s birth. Micah 5:2, written about 700 years before Christ says,

Matthew 2:1 holds the fulfillment:

Drop down now to the section that pertains to Jesus’ crucifixion. Note the specific prophecies about Him:

And on it goes. Please do take the time when you get home to look some of these up. You’ll be amazed at their coordination.

Skeptics over the years have objected to the validity of these prophecies and their fulfillment by alleging that Jesus knew ahead of time what the prophecies were and lived so as to fulfill them – in other words, He used them to script His own life. Of course the fact that skeptics manufacture such an objection is a clear testimony that this coordination between prophecy and fulfillment is a powerful argument for Jesus’ deity. But do the skeptics have a point? Did Jesus deliberately live so as to fulfill these prophecies?

Well, consider this: How does a man advance-engineer his lineage? How does He live so as to be born of a certain bloodline in a certain town? The answer, of course, is that He would have to have lived before He was born - and that is exactly the point.

By the way, the genealogical records to verify Jesus’ lineage existed in Herod’s temple in Jerusalem for nearly 40 years after his death and resurrection and could have been verified or denied by any of His enemies, yet history records no such charge – so it does the skeptic little good to suggest that Matthew’s genealogy was incorrect, either.

Further, as to the possibility that Jesus adjusted His life so as to fulfill these prophecies, once Jesus was arrested, how is it that He could control what abuse the Jews and then the Romans brought upon Him? Didn’t they have power over things once they took Him into custody? If one wants to insist that He engineered these things, then that person would have to admit that He was more than a man.

Some skeptics say that because of the remarkably accurate fulfillment of these prophecies, it just proves that they were written after the time of Jesus and thus, were written to match the record of His life.

Sorry, but that cannot be. Even if a skeptic does not agree with the commonly accepted date of 450 B.C. for the completion of the Old Testament Scriptures which contained these predictions, he still has a huge problem. You see, the Septuagint version, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament was completed in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus who lived between 285 and 246 B.C. So it is obvious that if you have a translation of a text that predates Christ by at least 250 years, then you also have a text before that date from which it was translated.

No, Jesus did not script His life so as to live according to these prophecies. That would be beyond the ability of mortal man. Neither were these predictions written after the fact.

Well then maybe these fulfillments are just a series of random coincidences. Could that be the case?

Referring to the science of probability that is commonly used by insurance companies to predict the likelihood of having to pay out in accidents and by weather centers to predict the likelihood of certain weather patterns, Josh McDowell in Evidence that Demands a Verdict wrote the following in response to the "coincidence" objection:

"The following probabilities are taken from Peter Stoner in Science Speaks (Moody Press, 1963)(3) to show that coincidence [pertaining to predictions made about Christ – D.R.] is ruled out by the science of probability. Stoner says that by using the modern science of probability in reference to eight prophecies…, ‘we find that the chance any man might have lived down to the present time and fulfilled all eight prophecies is 1 in 10¹⁷.’ That would be 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. [1 quintillion – D.R.] In order to help us comprehend this staggering probability, Stoner illustrates it by supposing that ‘we take 10¹⁷ silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They will cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one of these 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 in their own wisdom.’"

Stoner then considered the probability that 48 such prophecies could all come true by chance or coincidence in the same man and found it to be one in 10¹⁵⁷. That’s one in 10 with 157 zeroes behind it. He remarked that an illustration using silver dollars to show the magnitude of such a number wouldn’t work because the silver dollars would be too large. He suggested that rather than use silver dollars we might use sub-atomic electrons as an illustration. Here is what he said:

"Let us make a solid ball of electrons, extending in all directions from the earth to the distance of six billion light-years. Have we used up our 10¹⁵⁷ electrons? No, we have made such a small hole in the mass that we cannot see it." He went on in his attempt to describe the number 10¹⁵⁷ power but I have to confess, my mind winked out. Once he finally illustrated it, though, he suggested sending our man out to find one special electron by chance that we had pre-marked. This, he said, would be the likelihood of 48 such prophecies as we have here being fulfilled by chance or coincidence.

And how many prophecies about Christ are there? Not 48 but over 300! It is a virtual impossibility that Jesus could have fulfilled all of those 300 prophecies by chance. And if the other objections we mentioned (engineering His life to fit, writing the prophecies after the fact, etc.) are also unlikely then there is only one explanation left. He fulfilled them by miracle – and that, my friends, is a function deity.

And keep in mind that we’ve only considered that prophecies pertaining to Jesus. There are many others pertaining to all kinds of issues throughout the Bible. In the category of prophecies about places, Stoner did the calculations for just a few, including Tyre, Samaria, Gaza and Ashkelon, Jerico, Jerusalem, Palestine, Moab, Ammon, Edom, and Babylon.(4)

All the prophecies concerning these places along with the many others happened by chance? You’d have to be missing some parts to conclude that! This Bible is indeed a very remarkable book! There simply is no other accounting for it.

This morning we’ve seen that the Bible is remarkable in its unity, that is, that though it came from 40 plus men from greatly differing backgrounds, occupations, times, circumstances, and geographic areas, it exhibits a remarkably unified message. One writer said, "There is no collision even though there could not have been any collusion."

We’ve also seen that it is remarkable because of its fulfilled prophecy, and in that we haven’t even scratched the surface in looking at the evidence.

What is this book, the Bible? I believe it is the very word of God. No other explanation suffices.

"But wait, there’s more!"

Actually, I do have more to present to you, but not today. Lord willing, we’ll continue to consider this remarkable book in the coming weeks.

Footnotes: Please use your back button to return to your place.

1. http://www.nationalbible.org/atb/atbcomm01.htm
2. See Galatians 3:16
3. Peter Stoner’s book is now online at:
http://www.geocities.com/stonerdon/science_speaks.html
4. Stoner also mentioned these in his book.

Dave Redick is Minister of the Hwy 20 Church of Christ in Sweet Home, Oregon and Editor of The Preacher's Study. He may be reached at pstudysupport@comcast.net.

Copyright © 1996-2008 by The Preacher's Study. Permission is granted to subscribers to use this document in total or in sermon preparation in the context of the local congregation only. Publishing it in a book, on the Internet, or anyplace beyond the local congregation is prohibited.

All Scripture quotations and references are from the New American Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

[Archive]    [Home]   [Comments]   [Search]