How sure are you of your facts as a believing follower of Jesus?
How sure are you that God has really revealed Himself to us and that He has spoken to us?
Well, of course, the answer to these questions is a choice that you have made somewhere in your life based on what you believe to be true and certain.
For me personally, it is extremely important that these faith choices that we have made as believing followers of Jesus are based on demonstrable facts that can be rationally and logically defended in any court or lecture hall around the world.
Let me tell you why I believe that in these 66 books of the Bible, we truly discover and hear the true God speak.
I don't know what to say to people who want to dismiss what you believe as short-sighted and even stupid.
Do you know that most of these people have probably never read the Bible themselves or tried to understand what we are dealing with in the Bible?
How does one explain the heart of everything we read in the Bible?
Here is how I usually explain it to people.
I then explain to such people that the essence of what is in the 66 books of the Bible can be summarized in one word, namely, in the name of Jesus in the New Testament, and in His Name in the Old Testament as the Messiah who is coming!
After all, the Bible contains these two parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament.
The Old Testament consists of 39 books that were written by about 30 authors over a period of more than 1000 years, originally in Hebrew, with a very small part in Aramaic.
The first book in the Old Testament, Genesis, begins with the creation of everything, and how God created for Himself a new people, who we know as the Jews, and who will live in the land of Israel. These new people are important for only one reason, and that is because they are to be the womb from which the Messiah would be born years later. The last book of the Old Testament is the book of Malachi.
The second part of the Bible is called the New Testament and consists of 27 books.
This section was originally written in Koine Greek by about 10 writers over a period of about 40 years.
The New Testament begins with four stories by four different writers that talk about the 33 years of Jesus on earth, and ends with the book of Revelation.
The entire New Testament is about Jesus, about His life and everything He said and did, and everything that people believed about Him. It tells how the thousands who believed in Him during those about 40 years after His life on earth, testified about Him and lived for Him. Thousands of them were even willing to die and be martyred for what they believed about Him.
Yes, Jesus, according to the best historical data we have, was born in September, 3 BC, in Bethlehem, Israel, and was also known at that time as Jesus of Nazareth, because His parents lived in the village of Nazareth.
He would ultimately live only 33 years on earth, and on the day before the Jewish Passover that year, in April, 30 AD, he was crucified, buried, and, according to what we believe, rose from the dead three days later on Golgotha, just outside Jerusalem. For 40 days after that, He appeared alive to hundreds of people, and then ascended to heaven, to give and pour out the Holy Spirit on all His followers ten days later, so that they could testify about Him in His Name and be used by God.
Do you know that more is written about Jesus and his life here on earth as a historical person in extra-biblical sources than is written about people like Julius Caesar, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, or Napoleon Bonaparte in the history books of the world? Yes, we can read about Jesus of Nazareth in extra-biblical sources more than 10,000 times.
In other words, a person who really tries cannot have any doubt about the question of whether Jesus really lived.
The next question then is: How do we know that Jesus was really the One? How do we know that Jesus was who He Himself said He was, and what all the millions of His followers today still believe about Him?
This is one of the most important questions that you and I must answer for ourselves. Let me try to give you my answer to this question.
I said that the entire Bible, all 66 books of the Bible, and even the 39 books of the Old Testament, can all be summed up in one word, namely, the name of Jesus. However, in the Old Testament, He is not called Jesus, but the Messiah, the Anointed One, God who becomes man and comes to live among us on earth.
In the Old Testament, we find 322 verses called Messianic prophecies, in which the coming and life of this Messiah or Anointed King are prophesied in advance.
J. John, a well-known evangelist, preacher, speaker, broadcaster, and author, told the following story in this regard:
He tells how he asked one of his Jewish rabbi friends to read through all these Messianic prophecies with him one morning in a coffee shop.
After that, J John asked him: Hey, does each of these 322 prophecies remind you of someone?
How remarkable it is that we cannot help but notice how these 332 prophecies, down to the letter and in the finest detail, describe this Messiah: Where He would be born, in what area His parents would live, and yes, even how He would die, and even the exact number of coins used to pay for His betrayer.
Do you really realize how remarkable all of this is?
Do you know what the mathematical probability is that 322 prophecies, in one man’s life here on earth, described and prophesied precisely and in the finest detail in 39 books that could happen exactly as prophesied over more than 1000 years, could happen exactly as they were prophesied?
The probability that all of this would happen is 1 in 10⁸⁴—that’s 1 followed by 84 zeros!
In other words, to put it mildly, it doesn’t happen every day!