John 539, Jesus said, Search the scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me. In this 10th devotional of our Evidence for God series, we've given numerous pieces of evidence for the existence of God, not just any God, but the God of the Bible. There are some evidences that simply deal with the basic idea that there is a God, and these evidences support what we could call theism. We're going to come back to those, and some would think we should have started there, but in our approach to the evidences for God, we want to emphasize that while there are logical and philosophical arguments for the existence of God, these take a backseat to the Word of God itself. The reality is that the God of the Bible has made his existence clear to us in our conscience, in creation, and in scripture. That's why we began with the words of Jesus in John 14, 29, and now I have told you before it come to pass that when it has come to pass, you might believe. When you look at the Bible, Bible prophecy, the nature of God, and the creation of God, and then other philosophical and logical arguments, those are simply icing on the cake. But the cake, the real substance of evidence for God, is found in His word, as we discussed in the last few evidences for God devotionals. As Jesus said, we were told before it came to pass, so then when it did come to pass, we might believe. And then we learn that there are literally hundreds of other prophecies about the Messiah that was to come during the Old Testament era that run from creation to 400 BC, and one by one we see these fulfilled in the life of Jesus. Here's just a list of eight of such prophecies. Micah 5, 2 tells Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. You can't pick your birthplace, by the way, so that's an amazing thing when added to Isaiah 7, 14, which predicted Messiah would be miraculously born of a virgin, just as Jesus was. Micah 3.1 predicted that the Messiah would have a messenger go before him, and then arrives John the Baptist six months before Jesus, and he's doing just that in the Gospels. Psalm 118.22-24 predicted that Messiah would be the stone that the builders rejected, just as Jesus was rejected by the Jewish leaders. Isaiah 61.1-2 predicted the miracles that Jesus did. Zechariah 9, 9 foretold how Messiah would enter, as we discussed earlier. The entire chapter of Isaiah 53 describes the suffering of Messiah. It was fulfilled by Jesus in Gethsemane, in His scourging, and in His crucifixion. And then number 8, you have that amazing prophecy we discussed earlier, Daniel 9, 24-27, which told us the exact day Messiah arrives to be cut off. Now that's just eight prophecies of specifics that number into the hundreds of such prophecies that were given centuries before Jesus. In 1957, a book titled Science Speaks, written by a professor named Peter Stoner, was published by Moody Press in Chicago. In that book, Stoner calculated the odds of any one man fulfilling just eight such messianic prophecies such as we just listed. His conclusion was that the odds of Jesus fulfilling just eight of these prophecies was a number that the mind of man cannot even imagine. The odds are 1 times 10 to the 28th power. So you take a piece of paper and write down the number 1 and then add 28 zeros behind it. Something like 100 billion billion billion. Now imagine how large that number gets when you add 100 other very clear specific prophecies that were fulfilled by one man, the man Christ Jesus. Folks, there's no other explanation than that there is a God. who foretold the coming of his only begotten son, the Messiah of Israel, as Jesus said, Search the scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me. And any honest man or woman looking at such evidence could have no real reason to reject the existence of the God of the Bible and had no excuse not to trust in his book which testifies of Jesus Christ and tells us how that we might have eternal life if we will repent toward God with faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ believing how that his shed blood and death on the cross paid for our sins and then after three days he rose from the dead conquering sin, death, and hell on our behalf.