Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet Jesus

0:43 Would you turn in your Bibles, please, to the Gospel of Mark, chapter 1. Mark, chapter 1. We're going to begin and study in this book. We'll be in it for quite some time. which I love. I love shorter series, but I really love going and plowing through a book like this. So Mark chapter 1. If you were to Google the name Muhammad, you would probably get, like I did, 510 million search results that would come back by that name typed in. The name Buddha will garner 227 million hits. Confucius, 10,400,000. The name Zoroaster will give you 981,000. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, 827 million.

1:42 If you type in the name Jesus, you'll get back 1,540,000,000 search hits for the simple reason that Jesus Christ is the most famous person in all of history. And yet there's a problem. The problem lies in the different ideas that people have about Jesus and who he was. Ask people, who is Jesus? You will get a variety of answers. Reminds me of a story that I've told before about a thief that broke into a house. He was waiting for nightfall. The people had left on vacation. He breaks into the kitchen. And as he breaks into the kitchen, it's in the dark. He hears a voice. And the voice says, Jesus sees you and I see you. This freaks out the thief. He takes his flashlight, looks around, sees nothing, continues his thievery. He hears the voice the second time, Jesus sees you, and I see you. Flashlights on again, looks around, doesn't see anybody, goes back to work, hears it again, third time, Jesus sees you, and I see you. At this point, he just turns on the kitchen lights to look around, and there, on the far side of the kitchen, on the counter in a cage is a parrot. So he sees the parrot, sighs with relief, little smile on his face like no harm, no foul. Then he looks down on the floor next to the counter and sees a Doberman pincher in a crouched position with glistening teeth.

3:28 and before the thief could think any longer, the parrot said, attack, Jesus, attack. And that illustrates the problem. Which Jesus do we follow? Do we follow the right one? You say, what do you mean the right one? Are there more than one? Actually, there are. There are many different Jesus, all construed and made up by people to suit their own idea, make them feel comfortable. Paul in 2 Corinthians 11 said, if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we have preached to you, you may well put up with it. There are many different types of Jesus today. First of all, there's the sentimental, anything goes, Jesus.

4:26 This is the Jesus that's all love, all forgiveness, all compassion, all mercy, no justice, no wrath. He pets babies on the head, never challenges anybody as to their personal lifestyles or belief, just accepts everybody. That's the sentimental, anything goes, Jesus. widely worshiped by people. Then there's the good man, wonderful teacher, but certainly not God, Jesus. This is the Jesus who's just a good example. And it's wonderful that he came into this world to give us a good example, but that's all he is. He's not God. You don't worship him. He's not to be deified. He's just a good example. And then, like our little illustration, there is the attack Jesus. He's mad at everybody, always having a bad day, always kind of frowning at people.

5:28 Every cult in America, every religion in the world has some idea of who Jesus is, some view of Christ. but then there's the real Jesus the historical Jesus the one that is revealed and presented in the New Testament this is not the Jesus of selected scripture I find all the verses that I like that kind of make me think of Jesus in a certain way and then worship that idea that's idolatry, but the real Jesus, the one presented in the New Testament. And one of those stories of Jesus is the gospel of Mark. The gospel of Mark is the shortest of the four gospels. There are only 678 verses in the entire gospel. The next longest is the gospel of John, has 879 verses. The next longest is Matthew with 1,071 verses.

6:34 The longest of all of them is the Gospel of Luke, 1,151 verses. So the Gospel of Mark is the shortest of the Gospels, but great things come in small packages. And it is a packed rendition. Today we're going to cover just one verse of Mark. Mark chapter 1, verse 1 in this introductory study. Now, I know I cannot keep that pace going through because that would mean if there are 678 verses, I would have to do 678 weeks consecutively without missing one. And if I did that, that would be 13 years. So I'm not going to take this pace. We're going to take more verses as we go. But today, we're going to look at one verse. Now, a little bit of background about who Mark was. Mark is also known as John Mark in the New Testament. but we'll call him Mark. Mark was not an apostle. Mark was born 10 to 15 years after Jesus was born, which means he was in his late teens when the key events of the life of Jesus' ministry took place.

7:48 Mark's name first appears in the book of Acts. Acts chapter 12 is when his name first appears. He is seen as the cousin of Barnabas, the cousin of Barnabas. But also, he was the guy who had a mother named Mary. There's a lot of ladies in the Bible named Mary. Mark's mother named Mary had a house in Jerusalem, and it happened to be the gathering place of the early church in the book of Acts. They met at her home, and when Peter was in prison, they had a prayer meeting at her house so that Peter would be released. So the early church met in Mark and Mary's home. It therefore may have been the place for the last supper that Jesus had in a large upper room in Jerusalem. And if that is the case, the man that Jesus told his disciples to look for carrying a pitcher of water could have been Mark's father that led him to that house.

8:52 because Mark was a cousin of Barnabas, Mark accompanied Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey. You may recall that they went on that journey, and about halfway through, Mark tapped out, decided to go back home to Jerusalem. This is way too much for him. He did not sign up for this kind of persecution, so he goes back home. Paul sees that as a failure and now discounts Mark totally and doesn't want really anything to do with him. So that on their second missionary journey, when Barnabas says, let's take John Mark with us, Paul says, no way, Jose. He didn't actually say that, but he didn't want him because it was a failure the first time. So there's a split that took place between Paul and Mark and Barnabas, and two missionary teams were developed. That rift was patched up later on in a beautiful way because Paul will endorse John Mark to the church at Colossae. And at the end of Paul's life, when he writes 2 Timothy, the last letter he ever wrote, he's in prison. He knows he's going to die. He writes a letter to Timothy and says, when you come, bring Mark with you also, for he is useful to me in ministry.

10:10 So the rift was patched and they were reconciled. Now... Mark wrote this book, and yet there's no name Mark attached to this book. That is, Mark didn't say, hi, my name is Mark. I'm writing this book. He didn't sign his name to it. But that shouldn't throw us off because neither did Matthew, neither did Luke, neither did John. Yet we're fairly certain that they wrote those books. Well, how do we know Mark wrote the book? Because of all the testimony, the historic testimony of the early church and their writers in the first one and first and second century. So all of those historians say that Mark wrote the book of Mark, John Mark wrote the book of Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, but that the book of Mark is really the testimony of the apostle Peter.

11:08 So what we're about to study are what Mark wrote down that Peter the Apostle told him firsthand. And those early church sources are men like Papias, Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, and Eusebius. So here's an interesting tie-in. because in Peter's letter at the end of 1 Peter chapter 5, Peter refers to Mark as Mark, my son, not in a physical sense, but in a spiritual sense. It is believed that Mark got restored back into useful ministry largely from the mentorship of the apostle Peter. And who would understand failure and restoration better than Peter, who was restored to ministry usefulness by Jesus himself in John 21. So Mark is back.

12:06 He is serving with Peter. He writes this book from Rome where Peter will die. So he writes the gospel of Mark based on the testimony of the apostle Peter. He witnesses Peter's death in Rome. That's a little background on Mark. Now, what I'm going to do in verse 1 is break it up into four segments. This is all an introductory study, but I think it'll set the pace for us. And I'm calling this message, Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet Jesus. So the first section of verse 1, the first breakdown, is the presentation of Jesus. The presentation. That is, how does Mark present Jesus to the audience? What is his approach to the life of Christ? Notice the opening words. verse, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Verse 1 is thought to be the original title to the gospel of Mark, the entire verse.

13:06 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That's Mark's purpose. That is his theme in this book. He is articulating the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Now, his presentation, his approach, is different from the other three gospels. Refresh your memory.

13:28 Matthew opens up with a genealogical record of Jesus. Luke opens up with all the birth narratives of Jesus, including the angel coming to Joseph, Mary, Zacharias, the Bethlehem account. Now, John goes way back to the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He goes back to eternity past. Mark begins with the beginning of Jesus' public ministry, and that is the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan River. So Mark's approach and presentation is very unique. Now, let me explain something just a little further. We have four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Why four? That was my first question in reading the New Testament. I got a little book called Good News for Modern Man.

14:23 It was a modern version of the New Testament when I was first saved, and I started reading Matthew, and I'm very interested. Then I get to Mark, and I go, okay, so this guy's like repeating what that guy said. Then I read Luke, and I go, that guy's repeating what both those guys said. And it's like four times. Why four gospels? The four gospels give to us a fourfold picture of Jesus Christ. You may want to think of it like a stringed quartet where you have two violins, a viola, and a cello, all playing the same tune, but all playing different notes to bring harmony. or you may want to look at the four gospels like a movie set being filmed on four separate cameras so you get four different angles it's like the holy spirit is the director on the set and he is having one person look at one thing one person focus on another thing and you have four of these vantage points. So Matthew was written to the Jews, speaking of the fulfillment by Jesus Christ of the Old Testament prophecy. That's why Matthew will often use the word over and over again, the word fulfilled, fulfilled, that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken of by the prophets.

15:45 He uses that over and over again to show his Jewish audience that Jesus Christ has fulfilled messianic Old Testament prophecy. Then you have the Gospel of Luke, and Luke was written for the Greeks, and the Greeks made much of humanity.

16:07 And Luke was a doctor. He knew humanity. He knew anatomy. He brings out all those terms. He speaks of Jesus as the son of man quite a bit, the ideal man, the perfect man. The gospel of John is a gospel for the entire world, Jew and Gentile. It's sort of like a gospel tract. It's very theological. I usually tell new believers, begin your Bible reading in the gospel of John. It makes much of the supremacy of Jesus Christ. By the way, I tell unbelievers to do that. I challenge atheists, read the gospel of John. Read it through several times. Just read it through. No explanation. Just read it through. And at the end of that time, tell me what you think. Mark was written for the Romans, a Roman Gentile audience.

17:07 And it pictures Jesus as the suffering servant, the obedient servant. So Matthew emphasizes what Jesus said, what he said. That's why Matthew includes three great discourses, the Sermon on the Mount in totality, the kingdom parables, the Olivet Discourse. Luke records what Jesus felt more than what he said, what he felt. Again, he was a doctor, Luke was. He speaks of the humanity and compassion and mercy and feelings of Jesus. John tells us who Jesus was, that he was God and man. In the beginning was the word, etc. All of that leading up to verse or chapter 20 of the gospel of John, these things were written that you might believe that Jesus is the Son of God and by believing have life in his name.

18:05 Mark, unlike the previous three, emphasizes what Jesus did. It focuses not on what he said, but more on what he did, his action. It is like a movie script. It is like a very fast-paced movie script. It's action-packed. It is showing Jesus on the move, very quickly moving from place to place. There's a word that Mark uses quite a bit in this book. It's the word immediately. If you've read the gospel of Mark, you've noticed that immediately. And then he did this immediately, and then he did that immediately, and then immediately he went there. And you get winded just reading the text. 42 times he uses the word immediately. That's noteworthy because the word immediately only shows up seven times in the gospel of Matthew, only one time in the gospel of Luke, 42 times in the gospel of Mark immediately.

19:08 late. There's a couple other words that are important that he uses a lot. The word and, the word now, and the word then. Used 1,331 times in the book. And he'll begin 12 of the 16 chapters with the word and, or now, or then. My English teacher would not let me get away with that. But Mark does. Why is it so fast-paced? Why so energetic? He is portraying what Jesus did. He is a very busy servant who accomplished a lot in three and a half years. You'll pick up on that. So we don't have four biographies. We have four testimonies. We have four different camera angles focused on the same person noticing different things.

20:07 A string quartet all playing the same song with different notes. Mark is writing to encourage the Gentile church in Rome. So let me kind of boil it down to this. Mark gives us historical information to convey a biographical explanation which will lead us to personal transformation. That's the gospel of Mark. Historical information to convey biographical explanation that will lead to personal transformation. That's how he presents Jesus. That's the presentation. The second segment is the proclamation of Jesus. He says in verse 1, the beginning of the gospel. The gospel.

21:00 That's a familiar word to us. Usually, we use the word gospel to speak of one of the first four books of the New Testament, the gospel of Matthew, gospel of Mark, gospel of Luke, gospel of John. That is not how biblical writers used it. They're not referring to a book of the Bible. They're referring to the message of the gospel. That is the substance of saving truth that includes death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That to them is the gospel. The gospel is given in nutshell form in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul says, I declared to you the gospel that Jesus died for our sins according to the scripture, that he was buried, and that he rose again on the third day according to the scriptures. That's the gospel. That's the message. Not a book, a message. Our English word gospel comes from our old English Anglo-Saxon word godspell, godspell, now shortened to the word gospel. Gospel or godspell means good news.

22:10 The Greek word euangelion means the same thing, good news. I like to say it better, glad news. It's glad news. It's glad tidings. It's the glad tidings, the good news about Jesus Christ. It's the greatest story ever told because it's about the greatest person who ever lived. That's the gospel. Now, the word gospel would be a familiar word to a Jewish audience, and it would be a familiar word to a Gentile audience, a non-Jewish audience. Both of those audiences were familiar with the term gospel. The Jewish audience would be familiar with that word because it shows up in the Old Testament. and it was a message of deliverance that was promised. It shows up a few times.

23:06 The most famous is in Isaiah 52. It says, How beautiful on the mountain are the feet of him who brings good news, who proclaims peace, who brings glad tidings, who proclaims salvation. They were familiar with the term good news, gospel. gospel. The Gentiles were also familiar with the word gospel because they used it to refer to good tidings of a coming king. They were used to hearing that. In fact, they have found an inscription, a Roman inscription about the birth of Caesar Augustus, calling him in that inscription a god and a Savior, and that his birth, quote, was the beginning of the glad tidings that have come to men through him, close quote. So here comes Mark, and he says, here is the message of the gospel.

24:08 It would be a familiar word to a Jewish audience because of the Old Testament, a familiar word to the Greek, Gentile, Roman audience because of Caesar and others. So it's about the gospel, Good news. Glad news. it's sad that many people do not see Christianity as glad news. They see it as bad news, sad news. When I first gave my life to Christ and I shared with my ex-high school buddies, I graduated from high school, but I went back to my buddies in Southern California to tell them I'm a Christian now. Their reaction amazed me. They said, I'm so sorry. And they were like genuinely sad for me. They thought, man, he's throwing his whole life away. He has such a bright future, and now this. It wasn't glad to them.

25:02 It was sad to them. And there have been times in church history where, to be honest, it was believed that the gloomier you looked, the sadder that you looked, the more spiritual you were thought to be. That dude looks really bummed out. He must be a Christian. they thought that let me tell you why and how there was a monastic tradition way back in the early days where monks and priests were expected to wear black to symbolize dying to the world still a tradition that is carried through to this day john calvin even the great reformer directed believers not to wear bright colors because it's too worldly. You need to show piety and humility by drab, coarse wear. The Puritans in England and America did the same. They wanted people to show respect and seriousness, somberness. So you have a history that tells people, you got to look bummed out and sad to show that you're really spiritual. No wonder Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote this, I would have entered the ministry if the clergyman I knew didn't look and act so much like undertakers.

26:21 Robert Louis Stevenson even went to church one day, came home, and wrote in his diary as if an extraordinary event had just happened. He said, I went to church today, and I'm not depressed. all of that is not the Bible.

26:44 It's not found in Scripture. What is found in Scripture are verses like this, Psalm 144. Happy are the people whose God is the Lord. Psalm 16, in your presence is fullness of joy. At your right hand there are pleasures forevermore. Even the word blessed means, oh, how happy.

27:08 Why is it that unbelievers then think that our news is not very good news? Well, maybe it's how we present it. Maybe the way we present it isn't really convincing, like it really has changed us all that much. Or maybe when we share with people, we're focusing on the afterlife more than this life. It's true. The afterlife is going to be awesome. we're going to go to heaven. But sometimes people present the gospel like, well, you know, it's really bad right now. Life is horrible, but just wait till you die.

27:42 When you die, it gets really good. So people are thinking, well, maybe it's better if I die. What we should be saying is right now your life can be changed. You can have hope. You can have transformation in this present time. It's called abundant life. I have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly. And then it extends for eternity. So that's the presentation and the proclamation of Jesus in this verse. The third little segment I want to draw your attention to is the person of Jesus. So it says, the beginning of the gospel, here it is, of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. This series of Mark is going to be a deep dive into the life of Jesus. Okay, first of all, the name Jesus Christ. it's not a cuss word. It's not an expletive. Also, it's not his first and last name.

28:45 Some people think that his is first. Jesus is his first name. Christ is his last name. It's the Christ family that lived in Nazareth. No, Jesus is his name. Christ is his title. His name is Jesus, Yesu in Greek, Yesu. Yeshua in Hebrew or Yehoshua means God is salvation, Jehovah is salvation, Yahweh is salvation. The angel said to Joseph, you will call his name Jesus because he will save his people from their sin. That's what it means, Jesus. Christ is the Greek translation Christos of the Hebrew word Mashiach, Messiah. So Christ means Messiah. Jesus the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Mashiach means anointed one. Literally, Mashiach means to smear. It is the smeared one. That's because in the Old Testament, they anointed people with what? Oil. They poured oil on them and smeared it on them, designating that one as an anointed one. So the idea of a Messiah, sometimes it's used in the Old Testament to refer to divinely appointed kings, but then always, ultimately, one who would becoming who has come, he identifies Jesus, the Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Okay.

30:22 We began by asking who Jesus was. Is he the sentimental pat babies on the head Jesus? Is he the mad Jesus? Who was Jesus exactly? That is the most important question. Remember our Lord said to his disciples, who do men say that I am? And they shot back and they said, some say you're John the Baptist. Some say you're Elijah. Some say you're Jeremiah. Some say you're one of the prophets. Were any of those answers correct? that's how many answers to that were correct. Zero. Jesus was not John the Baptist. He was not Elijah. He was not Jeremiah, and he was not one of the prophets. But there were different ideas as to who he was. People have been speculating since the time he was born as to who he was. There are so many differing opinions. Let me give you a sampling from the scripture. The Magi called him the king of the Jews.

31:19 Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have followed his star from the east. We have come to worship him. King of the Jews. Also, Pilate called him the king of the Jews, wrote that above the cross. Nicodemus called him a teacher. Come from God. It's kind of nice, but it's inaccurate. He wasn't a teacher come from God. He was God who had come to teach. Herod Antipas, who killed John the Baptist, said, this is John the Baptist who has risen from the dead. The Pharisees said that he was born of fornication. They're calling him an illegitimate child. Jesus' own family said he is out of his mind. None of them are right. Some people think he was an Essene. I don't know if you know who that group is. E-S-E-E-S-S-E-N-E. Essenes were a group living by the Dead Sea, very austere, very legalistic. Some said he was a Pharisee.

32:27 The Jewish Talmud said he is the illegitimate son of Mary, whom they fancy as a hairdresser. some say he was one of the ascended masters Islam regards him as a prophet John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar called Jesus an illiterate craftsman from a low caste of artisans in rural Galilee and my favorite wrong answer is from John Allegro a supposed Semitic scholar who said Jesus Christ was a code name for a sacred hallucinogenic mushroom Thank you. allegedly used by first Christians. Amen. You want some Jesus Christ? They got high and they supposed they saw him. Wild answers. Who was Jesus? Mark answers the question. Jesus Christ, the son of God. That's who he was, the son of God. Where did he get that idea?

33:31 from Peter. when Jesus said, who do men say that I am? They said, this is what people are saying. Then he said, who do you say that I am? Peter said, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. What does that term mean, son of God? Jesus is called that 45 times. Yes, we are all sons and daughters of God by redemption. But when it's used of Jesus, it is always an assertion of his divine nature. He is the Son of God, like a son to a father, in that they share the same nature. Jesus shared the same nature with his Father. I and my Father are one. Son of God means he is co-equal, co-eternal, second person of the Godhead, God in human flesh. The hymn writer nailed it. Nailed it. When he wrote, veiled in flesh, the Godhead see, hail incarnate deity. Born as man with men to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel. Hark the herald angels sing glory to the newborn king. God in human flesh. This is the reason when the Jews heard this term, they wanted to kill him. They said, according to our law, he must die because he claimed to be the son of God. He is claiming to have the identical nature with God as his father. So Mark presents the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God. The good news, the good news, the glad news, the glad tidings is that Jesus is capable to save people because he is the son of God. Because he is the son of God.

35:25 So that's the presentation, proclamation, and the person of Jesus. Fourth and finally, the prediction of Jesus. Now, I am going to dip into verse two for just a few words. Look at verse two. After he gives us the introductory verse, verse two, as it is written in the prophets. Stop there. As it is written in the prophets. Now, Mark uses this phrase to introduce John the Baptist to us, to show us that John the Baptist was predicted by the Old Testament prophets. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight or prepare the way of the Lord. But John the Baptist in prophecy is part of the entire prophetic package that anticipates Jesus Christ. Now Mark is going to use this phrase as it is written in the prophets four more times in his book, far less than the other gospel writers. Matthew uses it 60 times, Luke 30 times, John 14 times. All of the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all speak about what has been written in the Old Testament because all 39 books of the Old Testament anticipated the New Testament, the new covenant. Jeremiah 31, I'm making a new covenant with the house of Israel.

36:49 All of the books of the Old Testament anticipate the coming of the Messiah. Now, I don't know if you've ever heard this formula, but I'll introduce it to you if you haven't heard it. Some of you have heard it. The new is in the old contained. The old is in the new explained. Have you ever heard that before? So that comes from St. Augustine, Augustine of Hippo in Africa. St. Augustine said the new, that is the New Testament, is in the Old Testament contained. That is, you have all of the promises, all of the anticipation of something else coming in the Old Testament. The new is in the old contained. The old is in the new explained. You have all these promises, and they make really no sense until you get to the New Testament. And they're all fulfilled.

37:43 They're all explained. So the new is in the old contained. The old is in the new explained. of all the books in the world that claim to be sacred texts, whether it's from the Hindus or Islam or whatever, none of them contain something the New Testament and the Old Testament contain in spades. It's called predictive prophecy. Predictive prophecy. It's not found in the writings of Buddha or Lao Tzu or Confucius or the Hindu Vedas or Bhagavad Gita or in the Muslim Koran. The Bible has predictive prophecy. Do you remember the movie Dumb and Dumber?

38:27 If you remember that movie with Jim Carrey, who's playing the character Lloyd in that movie, at one point, one of the famous scenes is Lloyd says to Mary, what are the chances of a guy like me and a girl like you ending up together? She says, not good. And he says, not good like one out of a hundred? She says, not good, like one out of a million. And so he smiles real big and says, so you're telling me I have a chance. What are the chances of 330 predictions made of the Messiah? What are the odds and chances of those being fulfilled in one person in history, which they were in Jesus. That's called Bible prophecy. Now, Bible prophecy is not just a coincidence or a good guess. It has multiple contingencies and features and layers that cannot be known nor controlled. And the more details you add to a prophecy, the realm of compound probability is against you. So, for example, there's a prediction that the Messiah will be born where? Anybody? Bethlehem. Okay. So you got to ask yourself, how many men in history have been born in Bethlehem from the time that prediction was given to the modern time?

39:53 Well, let's say you come up with that figure. Then you got to ask yourself this. How many men born in Bethlehem had a forerunner preparing their way? Because that's one of the predictions too. So let's say, well, yeah, I can find a few. They've been born in Bethlehem and they have a forerunner preparing their way. Okay. How many men born in Bethlehem who had a forerunner preparing their way rode into Jerusalem on a donkey to present himself to the Jews, as another prophet says? Every time you add another layer, the odds decrease. So for example, let's say I have 10 pennies in my pocket and they're all marked 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, a little piece of tape with a number on them. They're in my pocket. They're in there. My hands are up here. And I say, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to reach into my pocket and I'm going to pick penny mark number one. What are the odds that I could do that?

40:47 One in 10. Say I reach in and I grab it and I put it up there. There it is. One in 10. It happened. I put it up there. Then I say, I'm going to reach into my pocket now and pick out penny mark number two. Well, now my odds decrease. Now it's one in 100. and every prophecy I make that I'm gonna do one, two, three, four, five, all the way to 10 sequentially, if I could do that, the odds are one in 3,600,000. They exponentially decrease. Okay, so you have Bible prophecy.

41:25 There's a book that I brought. Here it is. I've had it for some time. one of my favorite little books called Science Speaks, written by two astrophysicists. And they look at the prophecies of Scripture, and in particular, the prophecies of Jesus Christ, second to the last chapter. And he isolates 48 prophecies. He tells you what those are, and goes one by one, what are the odds of anybody fulfilling these? Did a massive study on this. and Professor Peter Stoner said, let's just take eight major prophecies. Number one, he has to be born in Bethlehem. Number two, has to have a forerunner. Number three, ride Jerusalem on a donkey, et cetera, et cetera. Took eight of them and he came up with this. The odds of one man in history fulfilling eight predictions, all eight predictions is one in 10 to the 17th power.

42:21 I know that's just a number so he illustrates it you could take that number let's say you had that many silver dollars you could fill the entire state of Texas two feet thick of silver dollars if you marked one of those silver dollars I don't know red yellow whatever color you'd like blindfold a man stir up the state of Texas silver dollars send a guy into Texas blindfolded, the odds of him finding the silver dollar you selected would be one in 10 to the 17th power or the odds of one man fulfilling eight predictions. Well, then he goes further. He goes, well, this is fun. What about 16 prophecies? And he enumerates those.

43:10 And he said, the odds of one man fulfilling 16 prophecies that Jesus fulfilled is 1 in 10 to the 45th power. And to illustrate it, he uses silver dollars, but he has to go bigger. So he says, you could make a ball of silver dollars with that number so big that from the center of that ball to the edge of the ball, it would be the distance the earth is to the sun times 30.

43:38 So the earth is 93 million miles from the sun times 30. that's in that silver ball, the distance from the center of that ball to the edge. Get that many silver dollars in a ball, blindfold a dude, pick one. The odds that he's gonna find the right silver dollar is one in 10 to the 45th power or one man in history fulfilling 16 prophecies. He goes all the way to 48 prophecies and he gives it the number one in 10 to the 157th power and he does illustrate it. He uses electrons because you have to go smaller for obvious purposes. I won't go through that. It's tedious, but it's a fun read. Science speaks. In a hundred billion years, there's no chance that those prophecies could ever be fulfilled in a single person without God. And when you study prophecy that way, this, as it is written in the prophets, you realize this book, the Bible, has divine authorship. So the prophets were like archers. They shot their arrows of truth into the air. They weren't sure of where they're going to land. They just predicted things. So Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Amos, Hosea, all pulled back on the prophetic bow strings. Their prophecy arrows disappeared over the horizon. They had no idea where they were going to hit. And all 330 of them hit on one person in history named Jesus Christ. 330 predictions made over a 1600 year period all fell on Jesus.

45:27 So ladies and gentlemen, meet Jesus Christ. That's the Jesus you follow. the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in the prophets. Father, we are humbled that you have revealed your truth to us, that you have, as Paul wrote, selected us, chosen us before the foundation of the world. You knew that in time and space, we would exist. You devised a way by which we would hear, believe, be redeemed, and you've entrusted us with the treasure of scripture. We're amazed by it. We thank you for it. We thank you for Jesus and what he has done for us, what he means to us. Not only his life, not only his example, not only his words, but his death, burial, and resurrection that gives us hope and life. We're in that season of celebrating that. Strengthen us. I pray if anybody doesn't know that Jesus, hasn't met that Jesus, that they would open their hearts.

46:53 And with just in a moment of silence, you could be here today. and you've heard about him, you've heard others talk about him, you've seen others get excited about him, but for you, it has never resonated personally with you. So your experience is only second, third hand. maybe God has opened your heart and you're willing to open your heart to this Jesus who loves you. If so, if you're willing to open your heart and invite him in, right where you are, just say to him, speak to him, whisper in your heart or out loud say, Lord, I give you my life.

47:47 I admit I'm a sinner. Forgive me. I believe in Jesus. I believe he came. I believe he died. I believe he rose again. I turn from my past. I repent of my sin. I turn to Jesus as Savior and Lord.

48:11 Fill me with your spirit. Help me to live a life.