Excerpt from the New Identity Theft: The Odds of Yeshua being the Messiah

Dear Friends,

I have spent the last week rewriting Identity Theft. Why would I do that? Very simple, we want to take what was a teaching book for Believers and turn it into an outreach tool for Israelis. Several weeks ago “A”, a young father in our congregation who works in hi-tech, came to me and asked, “When are you going to translate Identity Theft into Hebrew? It is the best outreach book for Jewish people that I have ever seen.”

While I think he is exaggerating a bit, I do believe God will use it. Just a few weeks after it was published I did receive a note from an Israeli living in the U.S. that shortly after reading Identity Theft he made a commitment to the Messiah. That was more than two years ago and he is still going strong.

So with that in mind, we decided to rewrite it changing the main character from an American Jew, David, to an Israeli, Tal. In addition we added much more Messianic prophecy and showed how Yeshua fulfilled this. I wanted to share an excerpt with you from the new book in English. 

“But Tal, we can prove that Yeshua is the Messiah based on the prophecies. Earlier we used historical science to conclude that Yeshua rose from the dead. Now we can use mathematical science to see that Yeshua must be the Messiah. In 1957 Professor Peter W. Stoner wrote a book called Science Speaks. In it he sought to find out the mathematical probability of Yeshua fulfilling just eight of the dozens of prophecies.

“His research was simple. Take one issue like blue eyes. One out of six people have blue eyes. Then take something else, people over two meters (6’ 6”) tall. The odds of being over two are meters are about one in a thousand. How many of those one in six are over two meters tall? Suddenly the odds decrease to one in six thousand. Then you add another variable—how many of those blue-eyed, two-meter-tall people are women! The odds of being a blue-eye women at least two meters tall are closer to one in sixty thousand. Now, one more—how many of these women live in Ashkelon? Maybe one? Maybe none.

So we took just four variables and concluded that it is possible there is not one person in the world who fulfills just those four! Yeshua fulfilled not four prophecies, but over 300![1]

“Professor Stoner took just eight of these prophecies. He used 12 different classes of students over time to determine the odds of each prophecy being fulfilled. He then merged the odds and did the math. He concluded…brace yourself…that for one man to fulfill just eight of these prophecies, the chances are 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.[2] Considering there are only 7,000,000,000 people on earth, it would be impossible for more than one person to fulfill just those eight prophecies—and highly unlikely that even one could fulfill them, unless there was some intelligent being—God!—designing everything for His purposes.”

“Given these odds, it is stunning that not every scientist is a believer. This is amazing,” I said.

“I agree Tal. It proves that at the heart of the atheist is not science, but arrogance against God. They refuse to believe not because it goes against science, but because it offends their intelligence.

“Professor Stone concluded that, ‘Any man who rejects the Messiah as the Son of God is rejecting a fact proved perhaps more absolutely than any other fact in the world.’[3] He goes on to give an astounding analogy:

Let us try to visualize this chance. If you mark one of ten tickets, and place all of the tickets in a hat, and thoroughly stir them, and then ask a blindfolded man to draw one, his chance of getting the right ticket is one in ten. Suppose 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 using 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 1017 of having them come true in any man, but they all came true in Christ.

“So Yeshua must be the Messiah!” I concluded.

[1]http://www.accordingtothescriptures.org/prophecy/353prophecies.html

[2]http://www.bereanpublishers.com/the-odds-of-eight-messianic-prophecies-coming-true/

[3] Professor Stoners book can be read here for free in English. http://sciencespeaks.dstoner.net