1 Peter 1:10–20
“The prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired about this salvation; they inquired by the Spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory.”
When people ask you for evidence for the Living God, what do you tell them? Surely, there is a great mound of evidence pointing towards the God of Abraham being the One True God, Jesus Christ being His Only Begotten Son, and the Spirit being the Comforter. One of the strongest evidences, in my personal opinion, is the fulfilled prophecy. For no other book, no other writer, has been able to accurately predict the future as the Bible has. People may say that Nostradamus had some merit as a prophet, but something like eighty percent of his prophecies were false, and the other twenty percent so ambiguous that they would be imputed to any number of events. However, the Bible’s prophecies are exceedingly specific, down to the word, down to the letter and phrasing, and were fulfilled. The book of Isaiah was written around 740 BC and 686 BC, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, before the practice of crucifixion was even invented, but specific prophecies about the death of the Messiah were cataloged there. Psalm 22 was written right around 1,000 BC, and look at how many specific word for word prophecies it contains! Christ Himself quotes this Psalm as He is hanging upon the cross, saying “Eloi, eloi lama sabachthani!” He knew these prophecies were about Him, and He claimed the role of suffering servant as depicted throughout the Old Testament. I have heard that the Jews have changed the meaning of Isaiah 53 to be an allegorical passage about the general suffering of the Nation of Israel. However, this used to be a Messianic prophecy for hundreds of years, until the time of Christ, the early church, and they changed it!
Ask a question. If the Bible was not composed in the mind of an omniscient God, then how could many books, over the span of 1,500 years, that all were fulfilled in one man, then how did this great cacophony of works all line up? If it was all written by random Jews trying to start a religion, then how did they all get their stories to line up, to be fulfilled word for word, when none of these Jews even knew each other? Believing that the Bible has more than one inspirer, believing that the Lord did not have a hand in this great work, is simply outlandish and frankly unbelievable! If I remember the numbers correctly, and I’m sure I do, the chances of all these prophecies being fulfilled in Christ would be the same odds as filling the planet earth with dimes, painting one red, blindfolding someone, and asking them to pick the red one on the first try. The odds of this, the specific numbers, is 1 in 10²⁸. That’s 10 with 28 zeros behind it, a number so huge that we don’t even have a name for it! ‘Well, some might say, the Scriptures aren’t really as old as they’re purported to be. Why, the oldest copy of Isaiah we have is from 200 BC, found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.’
Suppose we take only the prophecies found in this scroll. There would still be astronomically high odds for all of these being fulfilled in Christ in the manner that they were. And they, at the very latest, were written over 200 years before His birth. Of course, I reject the hypothesis that this is when Isaiah was written, it was written sometime 700 years BC, but that was merely as an example. So we see, the fulfilled prophecy of the Old Testament, and even of the New Testament, is a wonderful evidentiary tool for the existence of God. For these men, who wrote down these things, would have no idea what they were writing, and the odds of them guessing correctly and them all being fulfilled in Christ is numerically impossible. Sure, there is the law of infinite probability, but the prophecies were written down once, they did not keep guessing until they hit upon the right ones that worked. That isn’t quite how prophecy works. No other religion has any prophecies that come close to the magnitude of the Christian prophecies, in fact, no other religion has any prophecies that have been fulfilled accurately. Do not be fooled, the Bible certainly is the inerrant Word of the Lord, and, while it may seem to be circular logic, it proves itself to be true. What I mean by this may seem to be circular logic is this: some Christians, without doing the proper research, claim that the Bible is true because it says it is true. By that logic, they also would have to accept the Koran as authoritative, or perhaps whatever the Aztecs believed, or the Roman gods, or the Greek pantheon of gods as true. No, the Bible is true, and proves it through fulfilled prophecy. It is a proof in itself, but also outside of itself.
Think about this a little bit. Every Christian is commanded to always be ready to have an answer, to always be ready with the proofs for the Resurrection of our Lord. The strongest proof for the Lord, naturally, is creation, but that does not prove the Christian God is true, it simply proves that a god is true. This must be followed up with the proof for the Resurrection, among this prophetic proof and the historical evidence surrounding the events of Christ’s life. These things fascinate me, the evidences surrounding the Lord, for to look about you, you know that there is an Almighty God, that is undeniable, but to know that there is an Almighty God who has given His life so that we might have eternal salvation, to worship and praise Him throughout all of eternity is truly awesome! How incredible is our Lord!
