What a Clue!
My family enjoys playing board games. Recently, the four of us sat down for a family game night and pulled out the game Clue. In this game the person who guesses the right person, place, and weapon wins. Typically you go many rounds guessing and through the process of elimination someone eventually gets to the right combination. This time when we played something happened that I had never seen before. After pulling out the board, laying out the pieces, shuffling and selecting the cards, my son with the first turn in the game correctly guessed the right combination of person, place and weapon. We all sat stunned. I know he didn’t cheat as I selected the cards when he wasn’t there (and he’s a very honest kid). Mathematically, the chances are 1/342 of that happening which means if you play enough Clue it can happen, but it’s still amazing when it does.
In the Old Testament of the Bible (all of which happens and is written before Jesus is born on earth) there are hundreds of prophecies of the coming Messiah, later known as Jesus. Peter W. Stoner who was a math professor at Pasadena City College calculated the mathematical probability of one person in the first century fulfilling just eight of these Old Testament prophecies to be 1/100,000,000,000,000,000. To put that in perspective, the odds of winning the Powerball lottery are 1/292,201,338.
To believe that a guy randomly fulfilled these prophecies would be to believe in something essentially statistically impossible. Instead, the fulfillment of all these prophecies gives us hard evidence to believe that the Bible is supernaturally inspired and the plan of redemption it offers us is worthy of us trusting our life to it. Christianity isn’t a blind faith, but instead a faith based on evidence.
We recently celebrated Easter where we remember the death, burial, and miraculous resurrection of Jesus. The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, points his readers to the evidence of Jesus fulfilling scripture, then being supernaturally raised from the dead validated by hundreds of people they personally would have known. Paul boldly states in verse 14” And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. “
The tomb was either empty or it wasn’t. Jesus was either raised from the dead or he wasn’t. The clues all point to an empty tomb, a raised Jesus, and a fulfilled promise by God. Let’s stand in awe of the miracle of Jesus.