Just so I don't lose this.

Background: It's waaay after Christmas and I've been reading a book I heard about on the radio at Christmastime. It's called "God Is In the Small Stuff at Christmas" by Bruce & Stan (seriously... they didn't put their last names on the cover) I've been done with the book for a month or so but have been holding on to it because I wanted to make a note of one of the stats in there. I'm posting it here for 3 reasons. 1) I want to write it down so I can clean off my shelf and pass the book to someone else who'd like to read it. 2) If I write it down on paper somewhere, I'll lose it
and never be able to find it when I need it. And 3) there are still people all over the world reading this blog - I know, surprising, huh?!? - and it might give someone a little extra food for thought that they've been needing.

The chapter I was reading was on the prophets and the prophecies surrounding the Christmas story. You see, God didn't keep his divine plan a secret, he dropped clues all along the way. He left a trail of breadcrumbs even 1,400 years prior to the birth of Christ when he told Moses the Savior of the world would be born of a woman and would be a descendant of Abraham. So, here goes.

"Bible scholars point to more than forty clear prophecies that refer to the Messiah, all of which were filled by Jesus Christ alone. They include:

• That His childhood would be spent in Egypt;
• That He would ride triumphantly into Jerusalem on a donkey;
• That He would suffer for the sins of the world;
• That He would be hung on a cross, but contrary to the custom, none of His bones would be broken;
• That men would gamble for His clothes;
• His exact dying words;
• That He would come back to life after death.

What are the odds that a person could fulfill all of the Bible prophecies about the Messiah as Jesus did? One mathematician, who calculated those odds, illustrated the answer with the following analogy: Suppose that the State of Texas, some 267,000 square miles, could be covered three feet deep with silver dollars. (He calculated it would take 7.5 trillion cubic feet of silver dollars to accomplish this task.) Only one of those silver dollars would be marked with a red X and buried randomly in the gigantic pile. Finally, a blindfolded man would be dropped from a plane anywhere over Texas and allowed to stumbled around for days, knee-deep in silver dollars, before he would be allowed to select just one coin. The odds that the man would select the silver dollar with the X are the same odds as one man satisfying ALL the prophecies of the Messiah."


Now, I've never been one of those deep diggers that sorted through all the prophecies and tried to analyze each and every one but those stats just really struck a chord with me. Hopefully you'll find them as interesting as I did.

Thanks for humoring my note space for today! What do you think?

Be Blessed!
-jenni