Have you ever stopped to consider, why Jesus (not Muhammed, Ghandi, the Pope, or some other person yet to come)? How can anyone be certain that Jesus is the one Messiah or Savior promised in Scripture long ago? Jesus self-proclaimed that He was the way, truth, and life and that no one could come to the Father in Heaven except through Him (John 14:6). But are His words all we have to go by? How can we know that He is truly God’s Son and our source of hope, not just at Easter, but all year long?

Over and over, the Bible claims that God is love and that He loves us as His creation. Because of His love, He promised a way of salvation - the chance to be reconciled into a right relationship with Him, forgiven eternally for our sin. But what good would God’s way of salvation be if it was unclear or never revealed to us?

It wouldn’t be, right?

The Bible also tells us that God is not the author of confusion (1 Cor. 14:33) and is too loving and too kind to leave us guessing about the way to be made right with Him.

Ultimately, God had a plan for salvation before man even sinned and that plan was always Jesus.

2 Timothy 1:9-10 says, For God saved us and called us to live a holy life. He did this, not because we deserved it, but because that was his plan from before the beginning of time—to show us his grace through Christ Jesus. And now he has made all of this plain to us by the appearing of Christ Jesus, our Savior. He broke the power of death and illuminated the way to life and immortality through the Good News.

Throughout time and the recording of the scriptures, God has faithfully pointed directly to Jesus as Messiah so that there would be no room for doubt or uncertainty.

Throughout the Old Testament, the Messiah, or Promised One, was FORETOLD.

There were prophesies, or claims of future events, made about Him - some hundreds and others even thousands of years before He was born. They would describe His bloodline, His birthplace, His character, His life events, His death, and His resurrection. There were not just a handful of these prophecies made - there were over 300! The God of the Bible wanted it to be clear who the Messiah was so that His people would recognize Him once He arrived.

Mathematician Peter Stone dug into the numerical certainty that Jesus is indeed the Messiah. He did this by computing the statistical probability that one man could fulfill the prophecies recorded in Scripture. After all, we can say Jesus lines up with what was foretold, but couldn’t many other people too? Peter Stone’s answer? Definitely not. Stone calculated that a person would have a 1 in 100 quadrillion chance of fulfilling just 8 of the 300 prophecies. Statistically, it is improbable, if not impossible, that one person would fulfill even just a few of these prophecies made in Scripture by chance. Jesus filled more than a few or even just eight.

Through Jesus, the prophecies FORETOLD were FULFILLED - every single one.