The reason to believe God's reason

In Scripture, the great demonstration, and the objective proof, that the Bible is exactly what it says it is, and truly is God’s Word, is fulfilled prophecy.

God guarantees in Malachi 3:6, “For I am the LORD, I change not.” That verse is echoed in Hebrews 13:8: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.”

 “I know people use that verse and say, ‘See, God never changes and therefore anything He did in the past He’ll do in the future,’ ” said Jordan in his Christmas eve study. “That verse is not designed to teach you that the Bible is not to be studied dispensationally.

“Paul says, ‘And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord.’ The idea in Malachi is God’s saying, ‘If I told you I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it! You can count on it! I’m not going to change. If I’ve given you my word about something, I’ll do it; you don’t have to worry about it.’

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“That issue of the preservation of the nation Israel is really, in the Bible, the issue of God telling you He’s going to do something and then doing it.

“Some 100 years ago a mathematician wrote a book about statistical probability and said, ‘If you had eight specific things that identified someone and those eight things, independently given, came to pass, you would have a probability of 10 to the 28^th power.’

“The idea is that is a statistical certainty that we use to prove that people are guilty in a court of law by DNA and fingerprints. The probability gets to be so large that it’s conclusive and doesn’t make a lot of sense not to believe it.

“He said that if you had eight specific identifiers independently given that were authenticated to take place in one person’s life, that would be a probability of 10 to the 28^th power. If you had 16, it was like 10 to the 149^th power. Anything beyond that it was absolutely foolish and illogical not to believe it was true.

“This is exactly the kind of apologetic that God uses. If you go to theology school and read the books about apologetics, there are all kind of different ways to prove that there’s a God and all that kind of stuff, and there’s like six or seven different philosophical ways (ontology) where you’re demonstrating it, but when God wants to demonstrate you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that, ‘I am God,’ He uses fulfilled prophecy.

“In the Book of Isaiah, chapters 40-48, you have a description (it’s really a polemic) by God against the false religions Israel has gotten involved in and He’s arguing to Israel how foolish it is to believe in the false religion and not to believe Him.

“He just sort of gets in the face of the false religions in Isaiah 41: [21] Produce your cause, saith the LORD; bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob.
[22] Let them bring them forth, and shew us what shall happen: let them shew the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them; or declare us things for to come.
[23] Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold it together.

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“Never think that God doesn’t want you to reason. In the first chapter of Isaiah He says, ‘Come now and let us reason together.’

“Just recently I had someone say to me, ‘Well, you know, you’re a man of faith and I’m a man of reason.’ I laughed at him and he said, ‘What are you laughing about?’ and I said, ‘That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. If you think you’re a person of reason and you think I’m a person of faith, really you’re the guy who’s taking a blind leap in the dark. I don’t take a blind leap in the dark. I have mathematical, statistical, scientific evidence that what I believe is true. What have you got? You got opinions, which are like two arm pits. Everybody’s got them, and they’re not very attractive at that.’

“What God says is, ‘I want you to sit down and think, and when you do, here’s what you find out.’ Here’s what He says to them in verse 24: ‘Behold, ye are of nothing, and your work of nought: an abomination is he that chooseth you.’

“That’s a pretty strong statement but it’s true. That’s the verdict. It’s the verdict on them (‘ye are of nothing’), on their work (it’s ‘of naught’) and on the worshippers that follow them (they are ‘an abomination’). So it’s the whole bunch of you who are zippo.

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“The next verse says, ‘I have raised up one from the north, and he shall come: from the rising of the sun shall he call upon my name: and he shall come upon princes as upon morter, and as the potter treadeth clay.’

“Isaiah 42:9 says, ‘Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them.’  Chapter 43:9 says, ‘Let all the nations be gathered together, and let the people be assembled: who among them can declare this, and shew us former things? let them bring forth their witnesses, that they may be justified: or let them hear, and say, It is truth.’

“You see, God says, ‘I can tell you what’s going to happen. Can anybody else?’ Now, there are a lot of people who try. Everybody used to know who Nostradamus was and the lady in the tabloids, Jeanne Dixon. Then you’ve got the Psychic Network and Madame Blavatsky and all that.

“The problem is there are no specifics involved in any of that stuff. When you think about the idea of fulfilled prophecy, the great thing in the Scripture, and that’s what Joel’s talking about, is God is going to do exactly what He said He was going to do and that’s bring the nation Israel back.

“One of the great things that demonstrates the validity even of that truth is the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Nothing in all of history is as clear as a demonstrable proof of the truthfulness of God’s Word as the coming of the Messiah.

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“I have a little book in my library from the 1930s about ‘333 prophecies fulfilled in the coming of the Messiah.’ Now, any time someone gives you a number like 333, my first question is, ‘Well, why wasn’t it 331 or 337?’

“Somebody picked a number and listed it. You don’t need that many but it is fascinating how many there actually are. In that book the author makes the point, ‘How do you take one piece of mail and get it to come to the specific house?’

“The way you do it is you have some eliminators where you eliminate a lot of options. First, you get the right country, so when you pick the U.S. you’ve eliminated about 181 other countries in the world. Then you get the right state, right city, right street, right housing unit number, and then you need to get the right person.

“You can narrow the thing down to the place where you know exactly who it is. Well, God does that with the Lord Jesus Christ.

“Think of what He does. In Genesis, He says the Messiah’s going to be ‘the seed of the woman.’ Right there He eliminated half of the human race because of male and female. Then He says He’s going to be the seed of Abraham. One nation out of all the nations in the earth. See how He narrows it?

“But then when He says it’s going to be the seed of Abraham, it’s not going to be just any seed of Abraham. Abraham had a whole bunch of kids. Remember that? First he had Ismael, then Isaac. After Sarah died he got married again and had a bunch more kids. A lot of folks forget that.

“Well, God said it’s not going to Ismael and that other clan; it’s going to be Isaac. He narrowed it down again. Isaac’s got two kids, Esau and Jacob. He said of those two it will only be Jacob’s. Then Jacob has 12 tribes that come out of him, and God said of those 12 it’s only going to be the tribe of Judah.

“Then He says out of that tribe of Judah, it’s not going to be just anybody. As Isaiah 11:1 says, ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.’

“Jesse is a descendant of Judah but now it’s going to be not just anybody out of Judah, it’s going to have to be somebody who descends from the family of Jesse. Jesse had a whole bunch of boys and it was only David who got chosen out of them.

“That’s why Matthew 1:1 says, ‘The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.’

“If you look at Psalm 132:11, it says, ‘The LORD hath sworn in truth unto David; he will not turn from it; Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne.’

“The messiah is going to sit upon the throne, but when He does, it’s going to be the fruit of David’s body that He sits in. That’s why He’s called ‘the lion of the tribe of Judah,’ because that’s what David is.”