This book is primarily about future prophecies. However, two of the chapters are about past prophecies and their fulfillment. This chapter is one of them. The second one is at the end of the book. The main reason I am adding this current chapter to the beginning of my book is to demonstrate the literal nature of Bible prophecy. My second reason is to present a defense of the Christian faith to the open-minded skeptics I know, but it is also for the open-minded skeptics I don’t know who might read this book someday.
As I have covered in blog posts and an earlier book, those who doubt that God exists have to believe that everything that exists created itself. Basic scientific observations point to the existence of God. Yet atheists seem incapable of even considering the possibility. They are very dogmatic about it. In fact, atheists are usually more dogmatic than the Christians I meet. For many atheists, scientists have become the gods of this age, and these atheists seem to have trouble admitting that their “gods” are fallible, sometimes lie, fudge data, and often get things wrong. Case in point is a study from several years ago.
As I’ve written elsewhere, in 2009, Daniele Fanelli, affiliated with INNOGEN and ISSTI—Institute for the Study of Science, Technology & Innovation—revealed the results of a survey of scientists in various fields regarding misconduct.[1] It was revealed that nearly two percent of the surveyed scientists admitted to falsifying data in their peer-reviewed papers. This means that out of the 800,000 plus papers published each year, approximately 16,000 of them contain falsified data. Of course, that’s just the papers of the scientists who admitted to falsifying data.
We know that the four fundamental forces of physics were established immediately after the big bang. For materialists and naturalists, material and energy are the only things that are self-existent and have always existed. They are the things from which everything else comes into existence. However, the evidence of cosmology does not support that view. It points to a universe that had a beginning. That is a problem for materialists. If time, space, and matter had a beginning, then prior to that there was no matter. If everything comes from matter, how did it bring everything into existence before it began to exist?
There are only two worldviews when it comes to this question: “Why does anything exist?” Either someone or something created everything, or it created itself. The ironic thing is that, in their search, atheist scientists have accidentally discovered God—or at least the Biblical description of Him—and Dr. Gerald Schroeder illustrates that in this footnoted video.[2] (If you like videos, I also recommend the “Science Uprising” series at YouTube from the “Discovery Science” channel.)
In Schroeder’s video, he discusses a chart at NASA’s website. It is a diagram of the “condensed knowledge of the scientific community and how the universe was created and how it got to where we are today.” It begins with a “burst of energy” that expands in all directions. Before 1965, the scientific community believed the universe was eternal. That contradicted the first verse of the Bible which claims there was a beginning. When Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs discovered the echo of the Big Bang, the first verse of the Bible was confirmed scientifically.
Science theorizes that we can “create the universe from absolute nothing”—provided we have something to begin with. We need the forces, or laws, of nature. The forces “aren’t physical; they act on the physical. If they create the universe, that means they predate the universe. So now we have a set of forces, we call them the laws of nature that are not physical.” (So that argues against materialism.) They are “able to act on the physical. They create the physical from absolute nothing, and they predate the universe, which means they predate our understanding of time. Put that together and it sounds very familiar. If you haven’t noticed it, that’s the Biblical definition of God.”
God predates time. He is outside of time. He is not a physical or material being, but He is the power that created the universe. What scientists have discovered by accident is the God of the Bible. They have adopted the Cosmological Argument of theists and philosophers: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, it must have a cause. Since the universe cannot cause itself, the cause must be beyond space and time. It must be a cause that lies beyond this universe and is immaterial, uncaused, and powerful.
Just like the God of the Bible.
Still, the eyes of most atheists cannot see God. Or perhaps they just don’t want to. If God exists, He might demand moral accountability, and that is repugnant to both atheists and secular deists. A holy God tends to interfere with little things like sex lives, selfishness, greed, the desire to do our own thing, and the lust for power and control.
I just don’t find the arguments of atheists to be compelling or even logical. Stephen Hawking’s theory is absolute nonsense, “Because there is such a law as gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” You don’t have “nothing”. You have something. A law. But it is more than that because logic tells us that for there to be a law of gravity, gravity had to exist. As Dr. John Lennox points out, that doesn’t explain where it comes from. There is no need for a law of gravity if there is no gravity and something for it to act on.
There are a variety of logical and philosophical arguments that point to the existence of God. The most common ones are the Cosmological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the Anthropological Argument, and the Ontological Argument. I outlined the Cosmological Argument already. It boils down to cause and effect. The effect is the world. The cause is something eternal. What is the “cause?” Is it the laws of nature, matter, chance, or God?
The Teleological Argument points to the design we see all around us and comes to the conclusion that design calls for a designer. The Anthropological Argument focuses on the fact that we are living beings who possess intelligence and a moral sense. It’s difficult to explain these qualities apart from an intelligent, moral, and living God. The Ontological Argument argues its case from the idea of a perfect, moral being. Since we have such an idea, it argues that such a being exists. (Please read the opening chapters of Dr. Charles C. Ryrie’s book, Basic Theology: A Popular Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth, for a brief overview of these arguments, or visit Dr. William Lane Craig’s website for a series of books and videos that cover these arguments in depth.)[3]
Though devout atheists will never admit it, God provides the best explanation for the existence of the universe and everything in it. God is certainly a better explanation than the alternative one: Something came from nothing (which actually required something), then everything created itself. Atheists might admit that something had to have always existed, but they won’t admit that what has always existed is God. They prefer it be the Laws of Nature, but the Laws of Nature point to intelligence, and intelligence is always the product of a mind. Atheists deny that the Laws of Nature require intelligence. They are just intrinsic to the universe. It takes intelligence to understand them, but no intelligence is required for their existence. What nonsense.
Romans 1:20 puts it this way, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.”
As the Teleological Argument maintains, God is the best explanation for the order and design we see in nature. Believing that an intelligent designer encoded the information in DNA seems more logical to me than claiming “lots of time” and “dumb luck” did it. Why do mathematical formulas, natural laws, and chemical-based processes require some of the most brilliant minds in the world to discover and employ if it was just dumb luck or nothing that created them? If they were written into the universe from the beginning, who wrote them, and what caused that “beginning” in the first place? A dazzlingly complex and well-ordered human cell is difficult to explain by the mechanisms of chaos, time, and mutations. Even though there are rare instances where mutations are advantageous, they almost always cause a loss of information. My experiences with chaos, time, and mutations have certainly not been advantageous. That is what I would expect if the Second Law of Thermodynamics is to be believed. I certainly would not expect the factory-like precision, intricate functioning, and multifaceted order of the human cell that scientists have revealed. For a small sample, please see this TEDx Talk.[4]
If complex code, such as that found in DNA, can exist without any kind of “programming, testing, or debugging,” why do so many computer scientists waste years at University studying something that came about by blind chance? Seems that something that is a result of dumb luck would be easy to figure out and would not require years of advanced study. If dumb luck and chaos created everything, why does it take so many brilliant minds and painstaking, methodical work to understand it? Or at least understand a small percentage of it. No. Blind luck is not a viable explanation. It was the Christian worldview that the world is intelligible and ordered, like God, which gave rise to science. It’s why all of the great early scientists, such as Newton and Kepler, were Christians. The view that everything is just chaos and dumb luck, the atheists view, never would have given rise to science. After all, how can you make sense of dumb luck and chaos? How can you study it? How ironic it is for atheists to believe they are the champions of science.
God provides the best explanation for the complexity we see in every living organism; and, as the Anthropological Argument maintains, He provides the best explanation for the existence of love, emotions, beauty, morality, and intelligence. Intelligence always requires a mind, and there is evidence of intelligence in the laws of this universe. There is a mind behind everything, and there is a moral law giver that exists outside of human fickleness. Morality requires a moral standard given by a moral being.
But there are other reasons to believe in the existence of God: such as the serious issues with the theory of evolution; the arguments from Intelligent Design theory; and the fine-tuning of the universe.
In Session 18 of Dr. Gary Habermas’s resurrection course at “Online Christian Courses,”[5] Dr. Habermas talks about an article in a student newspaper that he used to edit. The article detailed one of evolution’s big problems. How could reproductive organs have evolved before the first generation died out?
The student pointed out that it would take evolution millions of years to develop reproductive organs. “If nothing was guiding the development, how did the organs evolve before the first generation died out? Why would an organism start developing reproductive organs when nothing close to them would see the results of it? And what happened in the meantime?” Dr. Habermas says, “You might have one-cell creatures that simply divide and all that, but how does sexual reproduction evolve? It’s so slow; the next generation would die out.”
We see over and over throughout nature that biological organisms need to be fully functioning from the beginning or they cease to exist. There would be no future organisms because everything would have ceased to exist at the lower evolutionary levels. Materialists laugh themselves sick at claims of the supernatural, yet it seems to me that evolution requires an astonishing amount of “psychic insight” by one-celled organisms and life at lower evolutionary levels. Without that “supernatural” “foresight,” how would they know to develop reproductive organs or something as crucial as clotting? How would an organism develop the ability to clot if the first time it got cut it bled to death? Dead things don’t evolve.
In his book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Michael Behe delves into the irreducible complexity of the flagellum motor, a molecular machine that requires multiple parts in order to function. All of those parts had to be in place from the beginning. These little motors propel the bacteria through their environment so they can find food. They are very similar to the motor on a boat, only more efficient. They have rotors, stators, u-joints, propellers, brakes and clutches.
Just like an outboard motor on a boat, individual parts would have been of no use, and would have been chucked. Unless the parts that did exist were “psychic,” why would they develop new parts to complete some future, mythical motor? No, everything had to be in place from the beginning in order to function. Remove even one of the functions, and you do not have a working motor. It is irreducibly complex. Everything fails, and the bacteria all die because they cannot travel through their environment to find food. Once again, dead things don’t evolve.
Irreducible complexity is the norm in nature. Not the exception. No matter what some atheist judge concludes.
Then there is the fine-tuning argument. Some skeptics consider it to be the best argument for Intelligent Design and the existence of God. Michael Shermer is one such skeptic.[6] After conceding that fine tuning is a good argument, he quotes Stephen Hawking regarding fine tuning. Hawking wrote that a small difference in the expansion rate of the universe after the big bang would have either led to a collapsing universe or an empty one. If the expansion rate had been less by just one part in 1010, the universe would have collapsed within a few million years. If the expansion rate had been greater, also by one part in 1010, the universe would have been empty after a few million years. In either case, the universe would not have lasted long enough for life to develop.[7]
Sadly, skeptics always find reasons to remain skeptical.
Fortunately, there are numerous books on Intelligent Design that carefully consider the evidence for a Creator. One such book is The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards. There is also an excellent DVD based on the book. The book and DVD discuss some of the factors that make our planet habitable—and so amazingly privileged. For example, if the earth were just five percent closer to the sun, temperatures would rise to nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit. If the earth were 20 percent farther from the sun, carbon dioxide clouds would form in our upper atmosphere. The earth would fluctuate in a cycle of ice and cold that would sterilize our planet.
Things must be just right for earth to be habitable and able to support complex life. As in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it can’t be too hot or too cold; and our orbit around the sun must be such that the earth can support liquid water. Without it, life is not possible.
Another factor that must be “just right” is the earth’s crust. If the earth’s crust were significantly thicker, the recycling of plate tectonics would not be possible. The crust of the earth ranges in thickness. On the low end, it is about four miles. On the high end, it is about 30 miles. There are more than a dozen tectonic plates that are in constant motion. This movement regulates the planet’s interior temperature and recycles the chemical elements needed to sustain life. Movement of liquid iron at the earth’s core generates a protective magnetic field. If that field were weaker, solar winds would strip away our atmosphere and transform us into a dead wilderness.
Our moon is another critical factor. If it didn’t exist, neither would we. The moon is one-fourth the size of the earth. Its gravitational pull stabilizes the angle of earth’s axis and gives us seasonal changes mild enough to sustain complex life.
If the sun were smaller, the habitable zone would be smaller; that would place the earth closer to the sun and increase gravity. One side of the earth would continually face the sun and be subjected to increased radiation from solar flares. The dark side of the planet would be covered in unrelenting cold and ice. The temperature extremes would be disastrous for complex life.
We need to be in the right location in the galaxy. We also need giant planets to shield us from the many dangers in our “neighborhood.” These giants have been likened to “big brothers” protecting us from bullies. Without them, we would face frequent bombardment from comets and asteroids.
Those are just a few of the factors necessary for complex life. Atheists would say that’s just the way it is, and they chalk it up to the luck of the draw, but it doesn’t end there.
In the 2013 E-book edition of, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is, astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross, examines the exquisite fine-tuning of our universe in great depth. Beginning on page 22, he explains that there must be the right mixture of planet, moon, and star; as well as the right mixture of planets, galaxy, and clusters of galaxies for physical life to be possible. Then in Appendix C, beginning on page 213, he includes a long list of the characteristics required for life to exist in the universe and on our earth. There are 140 of those, and they must all fall within a narrow range for life to be possible. Then, when it comes to our planetary system and galaxy, there are 402 characteristics that must fall within narrow ranges for advanced life to be possible. Just a slight increase or decrease in those values would rule out the possibility of advanced life. There are 824 of those galaxy and planetary system characteristics.
For more on fine tuning, I strongly recommend Dr. Ross’s book and this video produced by Dr. William Lane Craig’s ministry, “Reasonable Faith.” Dr. Craig’s video presents a visually impressive look into the complex subject of fine tuning.[8]
Here is a list of the arguments frequently used to prove that the universe is finely tuned for complex life: The Cosmological Constant; the Strong Nuclear Force; the Weak Nuclear Force; the Electromagnetic Force; and the Gravitational Force. These are just a few pieces of evidence that point to Fine Tuning.
There are good reasons to believe that God exists and that the Bible reveals who God is and tells us what He desires from us. There are good reasons to believe that Jesus of Nazareth lived, taught about the Kingdom of God and how to get there, performed miracles witnessed by thousands, died a sacrificial death for sins, and then rose from the dead three days later.
I think those are all good reasons to embrace Christianity, but there are even more apologetic arguments for the Christian faith. One of the most well-known ones is the reliability argument, which I have covered in blogposts and in my book Gehenna Revisited: Rebutting Francis Chan. Another one is Dr. Gary Habermas’s Minimal Facts Argument. I want to examine those now.
In the book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, Dr. Gary R. Habermas and Dr. Michael R. Licona, present the Minimal Facts Argument for Jesus’s resurrection. The “Minimal Facts Argument” only uses facts that are accepted by almost all New Testament scholars, even skeptical ones. Again, for people who prefer lectures, Dr. Habermas teaches an excellent course on the resurrection at Online Christian Courses.[9] He details the minimal facts like this:
1. Jesus died by Roman crucifixion. Some of the skeptical scholars who accept this as a historical fact: Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, and Marcus Borg.
2. Jesus primarily taught about the Kingdom of God and how to get there.
3. The disciples had experiences after the crucifixion that they believed were appearances of the resurrected Jesus.
4. Saul of Tarsus, an unbeliever who persecuted the early church, had an experience on the road to Damascus that he believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus.
5. James, the brother of Jesus, was a skeptic and did not believe in Jesus until after the crucifixion—when the risen Jesus appeared to him.
6. The disciples despaired immediately after the crucifixion.
7. The resurrection was proclaimed early on.
8. The resurrection of Jesus was the central proclamation of the early church and remains so to today.
Dr. Habermas breaks it down further and lists what he calls the “Top Tier” of the Minimal Facts Argument. Those facts are:
1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. The disciples had experiences which they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus.
3. Saul of Tarsus, a skeptic, became the Apostle Paul and wrote the majority of New Testament books. He converted to Christianity because he believed he had an experience with the risen Jesus.
4. The resurrection was proclaimed early on in the movement.
Although Dr. Habermas does not include the empty tomb in his Minimal Facts approach, since it is not as universally accepted by scholars, there are a large majority of scholars who do accept it, such as Dr. William Lane Craig.
Dr. Habermas compares his Minimal Facts approach to bricks in a wall. Each individual fact is a “brick” that he uses to build a case for the resurrection. He has varied the number of “bricks” over the years. Many of the facts remain the same, but they boil down to this:
History tells us that Jesus died by crucifixion, and his disciples had experiences that they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus. It was their belief in the resurrection that powered Christianity. There would be no Christianity without it. Those early Christians believed in the resurrection of Jesus so strongly that they were willing to die for it, and some of them did. In addition, they preached that message very early on. The consensus opinion of the critics is that the teaching began immediately after the cross.
Even Bart Ehrman states that when Paul was converted on his way to Damascus, there was already a body of early creeds about the resurrection. The creeds existed long before they were written down in the New Testament, and they existed prior to Paul’s conversion. These oral creeds were primarily about the deity, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That was their major message; and, as I said, they were already in existence before Paul’s conversion. He was not the inventor of Christianity as many claim. The message Paul fought against, and hated the most, was already in existence, and it must have been in existence at least two years before Paul’s conversion.
Another important brick is James, the brother of Jesus. He was a hostile skeptic during the lifetime of his brother. Nonetheless, he became a Christian because he, like Paul, had an experience that he believed was an appearance of the resurrected Jesus.
The resurrection was preached early on and embraced by two of the biggest skeptics of that time. James went from open ridicule to devout belief, and he became the leader of the Jerusalem Church. Paul went from a tireless persecutor of Christians to a tireless preacher of Christ, and he traversed much of Asia Minor and beyond with the gospel message. What had been powerful enough to change those men and motivate all of the early Christians to risk their lives preaching an unpopular message?
The best explanation of these facts is that God raised Jesus from the dead, and they knew it.
Skeptical scholars have abandoned the naturalistic arguments now. They no longer fall back on hallucinations, myths, legends, or claims that the disciples stole the body. The majority of New Testament scholars know that these arguments, and all of the other naturalistic arguments, have failed and been effectively countered. They admit the resurrection facts are good, but they still reject the message. The reason they give is simple.
They don’t want to believe.
When Dr. Habermas pushes skeptical scholars, they will admit Christians have an Evidence-Based Case, but they still see a problem with it. They don’t know how to refute it anymore because the naturalistic arguments have all failed, and they are acutely aware of it, but they still reject the resurrection and Christianity.
The problem is, as Dr. Habermas points out, by asking them to believe in a resurrection, it’s as if they’ve been asked to believe in Middle Earth, Narnia, or Oz. The skeptics just don’t know of any worlds like that. Dr. Habermas will call “time out” at this point and bring up the subject of Near-Death Experiences, NDE’s. But Dr. Habermas says up to thirty million people in North America, England, and Europe have claimed to have had Near-Death Experiences. Even if the numbers are off, and it is only twenty million, that’s twenty million people who have been to Narnia. So if there is an afterlife, can we now talk about a resurrection?
NDE’s open the door to a conversation about an alternate reality which may last forever. Skeptics hit a wall that hits back when they say, “Yeah, but you’re asking me to believe in Oz.” Habermas’s reply is simple, “Sure, and I’ve got data for Oz. Now, let’s talk about the resurrection.”
These facts give good evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, and the resurrection gives Christians a good reason to believe the gospel message. In other words, the Minimal Facts point to two things: Jesus rose from the dead, and Christianity is true.
There is no way around it: the Christian church, from the beginning, proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus. Many of those early Christians died for that message. They would not compromise with their culture—even to save their lives. Today, Christians compromise with their culture just to fit in and save themselves from embarrassment.
In addition to the minimal facts of Dr. Habermas, we have overwhelming textual evidence for the reliability and accuracy of the Bible. No other ancient document matches the New Testament in terms of manuscript evidence, and I also covered these things in my book, Gehenna Revisited: Rebutting Francis Chan.[10]
In the video, Jesus of Testimony,[11] Dr. Daniel Wallace, one of the foremost textual critics of today, says we have almost 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. There are over 10,000 Latin manuscripts and well over 1,000 manuscripts in the Egyptian Coptic language, plus hundreds of manuscripts in Syriac. There are manuscripts in many other languages as well (such as Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Georgian, and Gothic).
Dr. Wallace says when looked at in total, there are over 26,000 manuscripts of New Testament texts in various languages. The oldest complete manuscript of the New Testament is the Codex Sinaiticus, which is from the middle of the 4th Century, but there are numerous fragmentary manuscripts in existence prior to that time. Many of these fragments have quite a bit of text and date to 125 AD or perhaps earlier. It has been claimed by many textual scholars that they could reconstruct almost the entire New Testament from just the early quotations. That is easy to believe since Dr. Wallace says the church fathers quoted the New Testament over one million times.
Because there are so many manuscripts, scholars know where the textual variants are, and there are so many textual variants because there are so many manuscripts. Yet, any important variant is addressed in your Bible’s footnotes and in commentaries. Even Bart Ehrman, in the February 5, 2007 HarperOne Reprint edition of Misquoting Jesus, admits none of the textual variants affect any doctrine of scripture. He admits they have nothing to do with theology or ideology, “do not detract from the integrity of the New Testament,” page 87, and that most are “completely insignificant,” page 207.
In Greg Koukl’s CBN article, “Misquoting Jesus? Answering Bart Ehrman,”[12] Koukl points out that the differences Ehrman points to—spelling errors, reversed words, etc.—do not affect the work of reconstructing the autographs. In the 20,000 lines of text, only 40 of them are in any doubt, (which means only .2% of the New Testament is in doubt), and none of those variants affect our core doctrines as Christians.
When other ancient manuscripts are compared to the Bible, they fall short in every way. In the video, Jesus of Testimony,[13] Dr. Daniel Wallace charts the manuscript evidence for ancient writings—from Caesar to Plato—and there are hundreds of years between the time they were written and their earliest copies. Since originals don’t exist, and there are very few copies for most ancient writings, less than ten for some of them, accuracy and authenticity should become an issue. But they don’t.
The New Testament, on the other hand, was written, approximately, between the years 40-90 AD—during the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses. One of the earliest copies was made about 35 years after the autograph in 125 AD. That copy was made during the lifetimes of those who knew the eyewitnesses. Errors would have been pointed out quickly both by critics and defenders alike.
Even though there are approximately 26,000 manuscripts of the New Testament, many more have yet to be cataloged and more are discovered regularly. Nothing else in history compares to the New Testament. Yet, unlike other ancient writings (with little evidence to back them up, and time gaps over 1,000 years between writing and the first copy in some cases), the New Testament is constantly criticized and doubted. It is not because of a lack of manuscript evidence though. The manuscript evidence is there, and the material is early.
Something else to consider, when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, is the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth that bears the negative image of a crucified man. I consider it to be a tangible piece of forensic evidence from a crime scene. It is accepted by many scholars as the actual burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth, and the unique image is believed to testify to the brutal crucifixion and death of Jesus. Perhaps even more startling, the image seems to have been created at the moment of His resurrection.
Doubts about its authenticity were raised after well-publicized Carbon-14 test results. However, several significant issues have been raised about that testing, including the fact that only one sample was tested, and it was from a frequently-handled corner area that appears to be an elaborate patch. There have been numerous scientific tests to determine how the image was created; but, until recently, there were not any satisfactory answers.
2025 Update From My Book Gehenna Revisited
In late 1999, I watched a documentary about the Bible Codes. It covered the famous Rabbi experiment conducted by Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg that was published in Statistical Science in 1994. That paper claimed that the names and death dates of famous rabbis were encoded in Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) in the Hebrew text of Genesis. The authors, using predefined rules and statistical controls, wrote that the encoded pairings occurred far more frequently than chance would allow. Their conclusion was that these “codes” could not be explained by randomness.
As I considered the claim that the Bible was encoded, my hostile attitude toward it began to change. I realized that if the Bible truly contained hidden information about people who lived after it was written, then it must have been written by someone who knew the future. Namely, God. And if the Bible was ultimately authored by God, then I knew I had to take it seriously. Still, I placed the information on the back burner. I couldn’t yet see how codes in the Old Testament proved that Jesus was who He claimed to be in the New.
I later watched a program about the Shroud of Turin. Because of Shroud-related work my father had done for Dr. John Jackson, I had known about the Shroud for years, but I had dismissed it after the Carbon-14 testing in 1988. As I revisited the scientific studies surrounding the Shroud, I became convinced that it was the authentic burial cloth of Jesus, and that the inexplicable image of a crucified man on its surface was created by the resurrection. That realization knocked me to my knees. I was one person when I fell to the floor. I was another when I stood up. I now knew what it meant to be born again.
My confidence in the Shroud has only grown over the years. In 2013, Professor Giulio Fanti and journalist Saverio Gaeta published a book presenting the results of chemical and mechanical tests that strongly support a 1st-century origin for the Shroud.[14] According to an article by Andrea Tornielli of Vatican Insider, the study involved three new tests (two chemical and one mechanical):
“The first two were carried out with an FT-IR system, one using infra-red light and the other using Raman spectroscopy. The third was a multi-parametric mechanical test based on five different mechanical parameters linked to the voltage of the wire. The machine used to examine the Shroud’s fibres and test traction, allowed researchers to examine tiny fibres alongside about twenty samples of cloth dated between 3000 BC and 2000 AD.
“Final results show that the Shroud fibres examined produced the following dates, all of which are 95% certain and centuries away from the medieval dating obtained with Carbon-14 testing in 1988: the dates given to the Shroud after FT-IR testing, is 300 BC ±400, 200 BC ±500 after Raman testing and 400 AD ±400 after multi-parametric mechanical testing. The average of all three dates is 33 BC ±250 years.
“The tests were carried out using tiny fibres of material extracted from the Shroud by micro-analyst Giovanni Riggi di Numana who passed away in 2008 but had participated in the1988 research project and gave the material to Fanti through the cultural institute Fondazione 3M.”[15]
In 2011, another scientific study on the Shroud concluded that the image was created by a flash of supernatural light, stating: “It couldn’t be a medieval forgery.”[16] More recently, wide-angle X-ray scattering studies have provided further insights into the Shroud’s physical properties. Based on this analysis, researchers assigned the fabric a date range of between 300 B.C. and A.D. 400, placing it squarely within the historical window of Jesus’s crucifixion.[17]
In David Rolfe’s newest documentary on the Shroud, Who Can He Be?, there is a quote from Dr. Paolo Di Lazzaro, detailing what it would take to recreate the image on the Shroud of Turin. Dr. Di Lazzaro and his team were able to create a small image using pulses of ultraviolet light that replicate the superficiality of the Shroud image. They determined that:
“The ultraviolet light necessary to create this image exceeds the maximum power released by all ultraviolet light sources available today. It would require a pulse having a duration shorter than forty-billionth of a second and an intensity of the order of several billion watts to discolor the cloth without penetrating and destroying it.”[18]
Now, a Jerusalem Post article from July 10, 25 reports: “A fresh examination of high-resolution photographs of the Shroud of Turin concludes that the cloth’s faint body image is best explained by a burst of radiation, rather than by paint, scorch marks or ordinary decay processes, according to a peer-reviewed article released on 18 June 2025 in the International Journal of Archaeology (Vol. 13, Issue 1).”[19] As Dr. Gary Habermas has pointed out before, “Dead bodies don’t irradiate cloths, but this one did.”
I have no doubt that the Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth, and in less than forty-billionths of a second, it recorded the most important event in history: the resurrection of the Son of God. Nothing else explains that image.
It wasn’t just the Shroud and the Bible Codes that shaped my faith. Bible prophecy played a major role as well. After my conversion, I quickly came to realize that all of human history is revealed in the plain text of the Bible through prophecy. Everything we need to know about who we are, why we are here, and where we are going is made known to us in the plain text of God’s Word.
I have studied the Bible and Christian apologetics in depth since 1999. As I have mentioned before, my faith is sustained by many things now (from fulfilled Bible prophecy, to the archaeological, historical, scientific, textual, and philosophical arguments for the Bible). Most especially, though, there is the credible eyewitness testimony to the resurrection of Jesus by those who were there, testimony that was signed with the blood of those who gave it. I also know what my own born-again experience was, and how radically God changed me and my family’s circumstances.
And I know how He continues to change me.
For several years after my conversion, I studied Bible Codes and conducted my own studies. I have included that information in my books from the beginning. However, in the early 2020’s, I began using large language models to help me calculate the p-values and mathematical odds of my research.
There are different methods by which a text can be encoded. The method used in my experiments is known as Equidistant Letter Sequences, or ELS. Rather than reading the text one letter at a time in the usual order, ELS codes are uncovered by skipping letters at fixed intervals. For example, a code might be embedded using a skip sequence of every 50 letters, though the interval can be smaller or larger. The key principle is that each letter in the code is found by using the same skip interval throughout. If the sequence begins with a skip of 50, it must consistently continue with skips of 50.
I ran several Bible Codes experiments using Bible Codes 2000 software shortly after my conversion, and I applied the scientific method throughout those searches. I had a working hypothesis and a plan outlining what I intended to do, how I would do it, and what I expected to discover. Each search was conducted a priori. I used only the software’s built-in resources, including its dictionaries, lexicons, and date calculators. I did not run scavenger hunts, nor did I use phonetic spellings. I knew that was unprofessional. In addition, research using such tactics is considered deceptive. When someone relies on phonetic spelling, they can make the results say almost anything they want, just by tweaking how they spell something phonetically.
That is what the code critics did to discredit the codes. They also ran scavenger hunts, looking for anything that might prove their foregone conclusions, while apparently discarding everything else. They believed Bible Code proponents had used such tactics to get the results they wanted, so the critics manipulated their data to show it could be done. I think it was cynical and dishonest. I don’t think it proved anything either, except that the critics had falsified their data to achieve the results they wanted (for example, McKay’s Statistical Science rebuttal. McKay admits he ran scavenger hunts, tweaked spelling, and never found anything of statistical significance. Yet, he has convinced the world that Bible Codes have been debunked, and that is not the case at all).[20]
But, as I said, I used the software’s resources. I didn’t want to tweak or manipulate anything.
One of the codes I searched for was conducted across the entire Tanakh. It included my full name in Hebrew, which (when my middle initial is added) consists of nine characters. To the right of my name appeared a broken triangle that included my sister’s name, the exact month, day, and year of her death, along with the word died. That triangle effectively says, “Holly died July 17, 2002,” and that is precisely what happened. The Hebrew word for encode begins directly beneath my name and merges with it. That means the code even self-identifies as a code. Above my name was the middle name of my maternal grandmother, Esther. My son’s nickname was also present in the matrix. According to the software’s odds calculator, the chance of just my name appearing at that skip was one in 300. However, when the entire matrix is taken into account, the odds that it occurred by chance were calculated at one in 300 quintillion by the large language model Grok in 2025.
You can view the matrix and the calculation details on my blog:
gehennarevisited.blogspot.com.[21]
I also conducted a search limited to the Torah. My first and last name (without my middle initial), which is eight characters in Hebrew, appeared three times. The Bible Codes 2000 odds’ calculator listed the probability of this occurrence as less than one in a million. To the right of my name was my son’s name. The word encode was also found in this matrix. To the left of my name (standing shoulder to shoulder with it) was my chosen profession. Details in both of these searches were determined a priori, except for my profession in the second one. I only noticed it after completing the search, as it was immediately adjacent to my name. The odds of this matrix occurring by chance were calculated by Grok to be one in one octillion. It calculated the odds of the full matrix.
The recent odds by ChatGPT were different from its previous odds, but I gave ChatGPT minimal information this time. I have varied how much information I provide each LLM. Another difference is that ChatGPT’s recent calculations also involved one million Control Text Simulations. That had never been done before.
I originally ran these matrices by ChatGPT in 2023. I have now run them past ChatGPT again in 2025.
In addition to calculating the p-value (using a very conservative approach), ChatGPT’s Control Text Simulations were based on 1,000,000 Torah-sized random matrices.
You can see all of these results on my blog.[22]
There were two different p-values that ChatGPT calculated. The first one was for my search in the Torah, which was a priori. It included my name, my son’s name, and the word encode. The p-value for that was: p = 1 in 1,000,000,000,000. I asked ChatGPT for a real-world example, and it boiled down to this: Blindfold someone and ask them to pick one specific atom from a trillion tennis balls spread across Earth’s land surface, layered a thousand high. The odds of choosing the pre-marked atom are about 1 in a trillion. That’s the p-value for my name, my son’s legal name, and “encode” all appearing together in one small matrix inside the Torah.
After doing that, ChatGPT calculated the p-value for the same matrix when the term for my profession was added in. It was found post hoc and was not part of my a priori search. However, it stood shoulder to shoulder with my name and was visible in the matrix. The p-value for that was p = 1 in 500 trillion. Here’s what that real-world example looks like: Imagine 500 trillion numbered slips of paper, one marked as the winner. Scatter them across the Earth’s surface from an airplane. Blindfold someone, have them land anywhere, and pick one slip at random. What are the odds of them choosing the winning slip? The same odds as my p-value.
This next code was discovered in the book of Genesis, and it is included in the Bible Codes 2000 software. Like all of these codes, it is in Hebrew, but here is the English translation: “God Encoded God is Truth.” ChatGPT also ran one million Control Text Simulations of this code, and the only place it occurred was in the Bible.
The code, “God Encoded God is Truth,” has an expected occurrence of zero. Yet it occurs once. It has a Standard Deviation of 384,011.50. A SD of 5 is considered statistically significant. (I will include more information about this code and other Bible Codes in Chapter Nine. You can also find out more information at my blog.)[23]
According to Grok, “Finding this code with a SD of 384,011.50 is like picking one specific grain of sand, etched with ‘God Encoded. God is Truth,’ from a beach containing more grains than stars in the observable universe (e.g., 10^22 grains). The odds of selecting that exact grain by chance are so low (p less than 10^-100,000) it’s as if the grain was placed there intentionally, making the find extraordinarily significant.”
A “SD of 384,011.50 indicates a p-value far below 10^-6.” The significance: “The odds are astronomically low, like finding one grain in a cosmic beach.”
Conclusion: “This extreme SD confirms non-random pattern, suggesting design.”
For earlier calculations and a full history of code research, please see Chapter Nine and this footnote.[24]
Now, amazingly, Bible Codes don’t mean much to skeptics, but they got my attention. Combined with the Shroud, that was it. I was convinced. I was humbled. And, in 1999, they brought me to my knees daily.
Is it illogical of me to seriously consider an ancient manuscript that has me encoded in it, along with one of the most significant moments of my life? Is it logical to think all of that is an accident or completely insignificant, in spite of the odds? Both Grok and ChatGPT say these things defy randomness. If it is not an accident or insignificant, what should I determine about the source of that ancient document? Should I think I can trust a document that knew when my sister was going to die? And it knew 3,000 years before she was even born.
I’m real. My sister was real. Her cancer was real. Her death was real. The Bible got a lot of real things right in my case. Skeptics who argue with me about these things cannot even tell me my sister’s name unless I, or some other source, feed it to them first. So why should I consider them a better source of truth than the Bible?
Answer: No reason at all.
I can’t deny the encoded information I discovered throughout the Old Testament, no matter how much skeptics scoff at it. I know that it’s impossible to chalk it up to dumb luck. The information is not a natural result of hidden words in a large block of text. The math denies that as a possibility.
So, for me, the first punch was the Bible Codes. The thought that the Bible was encoded with all of human history intrigued me. That punch was quickly followed by new information about the Shroud of Turin.
The codes and the Shroud are still important to me, but they are not as important to my faith as they were in the beginning. They are what God used to bring me to Him. I can’t change that, no matter how controversial those things are, how much they are mocked, dismissed as nonsense, or how offensive they are to people.
It didn’t take long after my conversion to realize that many Christians are offended by the idea of a Bible Code, no matter how compelling the evidence is. They look with contempt at it. And me. My response is simple: God is sovereign, and the Bible is God-breathed. Yes, hidden words can be found in any book, but the Bible is not just any book, and nothing takes God by surprise. I don’t believe anything in Scripture, including hidden words within the text, is beyond His control. Nor do I believe such things are entirely without meaning.
Truth is, I am especially bothered by Christians who refuse to consider that the Bible could be encoded. It baffles me that Christians can believe that God encoded DNA, but they cannot believe that God encoded the Bible. It baffles me that Christians can believe that God encoded the laws of physics and mathematics into the universe, but they cannot believe that God encoded the Bible. It baffles me that Christians can believe that Jesus rose from the dead and walked on water; believe that Jonah spent three days and nights in the belly of a large fish; believe that Moses parted the Red Sea and stopped the sun for a day, but they cannot believe that God encoded the Bible. It’s not just that they don’t believe it. They are offended by it. That baffles me.
It saddens me as well, because I know from firsthand experience how effective Bible Codes can be as a tool for evangelism. Today, many young people have no real hope. I believe we’re witnessing a lost generation, and unless Christ returns soon, they will raise the next lost generation, and the one after that. Even many young people who identify as Christians no longer believe the Bible. Tragically, a growing number of pastors don’t believe it either. I truly believe that Bible Codes could help restore faith and reach many who are lost.
If people realized the Bible was encoded, it could break down some of the barriers that keep them from believing. It’s difficult to dismiss a book as a pack of lies when it contains embedded information that defies chance. Sadly, Satan has been remarkably successful in discrediting both the Bible and the codes, and he has often used Christians themselves to do it. I know how instrumental the codes were in reaching me, and I believe they could help reach others as well. While I was deeply moved by the Shroud of Turin, I honestly question whether it alone would have been enough to bring me to my knees if I had still believed the Bible was just a man-made book. It was the Bible Codes that caused me to take the Bible seriously. It was not the Shroud of Turin.
Still, it is the plain text of the Bible that ultimately matters. While I do believe the codes serve as God’s Divine Signature, they should never be used to form doctrine or predict the future. Codes often reflect what people are simply thinking or talking about, including things that do and do not happen. As a result, you will find conflicting messages within the codes. Perhaps this is similar to a concept in quantum theory: the idea that just by an observer watching, reality is affected. In this case, perhaps just thinking or speaking about something influences what we end up discovering.
These facts give good evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and the New Testament, and the resurrection of Jesus gives Christians a good reason to believe the gospel message. The gospel message is that Jesus is God; He died on a Roman cross for the sins of the world, and He was resurrected three days later. If those things are true, and there is good evidence that they are, then Christianity is true.
We have a reliable Bible with excellent manuscript evidence and careful copying procedures, and we have a set of historical facts—accepted by the vast majority of New Testament scholars—that give good reasons for our faith. We also have a burial cloth that many believe is the actual burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth and a witness of His resurrection from the dead. And we have encoded information that defies chance.
Yet, even with all of this evidence, many skeptics cannot make it past the opening chapters of Genesis. I understand this. I struggled with Genesis when I first became a Christian. However, in my early days as a Christian, books by Dr. Gerald Schroeder helped me reconcile the book of Genesis with science.
Dr. Schroeder’s early works teach that we live in an expanded universe, and the expansion rate of the universe is a million squared. So, an inch at the creation event is now one million, million inches. What began as one second is one million, million seconds. And so on. When we look back, we see billions of years, but that’s because of the universe’s expansion. When we take the universe’s expansion rate and go backwards—dividing by a million squared—we end up with approximately six days. Just like the Bible says in the book of Genesis.
As Dr. Schroeder points out in his books and lectures, we are looking at Genesis from two different perspectives: God’s perspective and man’s. God looked forward from the creation event, and that was before the universe expanded. It was before time, space, and matter expanded. They are all interconnected, and one cannot be affected without the others being affected as well. Man is looking back at the creation event from a vastly expanded universe. In other words, we are looking at the universe after the expansion of time, space, and matter. (As well as information.) We look back in time to the creation event and see billions of years. The Bible looks forward in time at the creation event and sees six days.
The difference is perspective.
I disagree with Dr. Schroeder on many things. Dr. Schroeder is Jewish and tends toward mysticism. I am Christian and find most views and practices of mysticism to be dangerous. However, I agree with his teaching on the six days of creation. Once again, that teaching helped me to reconcile the Genesis account of creation with science.
However, from a young earth standpoint, https://isgenesishistory.com/ has compelling arguments as well. I especially recommend their documentary Is Genesis History? Another good documentary showcasing the evidence for a global flood is The Ark and the Darkness from Sevenfold Films and Genesis Apologetics.
My reason for believing the Genesis account is different now. It is because the Bible chronicled the future history of the Jewish people, thousands of years in advance, and got it right. Since history and current events prove the Bible was right about mankind’s future, I believe what it tells me about mankind’s past. If it knows the end, it knew the beginning.
Here is where I am usually accused of not believing in science. A common misconception in the West is that Christians are uneducated and anti-science. Yet, between 1901 and 2000, 65.4% of Nobel laureates were Christians.[25]
Scientists can never verify their theories of origins because they cannot repeat creation, observe it, or test it. Science is to atheists what the sun, moon, and stars are to Pagans. Something to worship in place of God. Both groups worship the creations of God rather than God Himself. Science arose from the Christian worldview, so of course Christians believe in science. Many of the greatest scientists in our history books were Christians, exemplified in men like Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and James Clerk Maxwell. In Book V of Harmonices Mundi (1619), Johannes Kepler, after describing his third law of planetary motion, thanked God for calling him to reveal the glory of His works to humanity.
God is the one who created all of the laws and principles of science. He doesn’t get anything wrong. However, we know that scientists get things wrong all of the time. They have also been known to fabricate evidence, as I covered in the 2009 study by Daniele Fanelli.
I have covered some of the basic observations that I believe point to the existence of God, but who is God? Is it possible the answers truly are found in the Bible? Many people don’t believe that the Bible is a reliable book, but archaeology frequently supports it and its claim to be ancient history.
For example, there is the discovery of two small silver scrolls[26] that contain portions of the Priestly Blessing from the Book of Numbers. They date from the late seventh to early sixth century BC, and that is prior to the Babylonian captivity. A bulla was discovered that contains Hebrew text that reads, “Belonging to Hezekiah, (son of) Ahaz, king of Judah.” It is tenth century BC. In July of 2013, the earliest sample of written text ever found—up to that point—was discovered in Jerusalem by Dr. Eilat Mazar and her team. It was part of a ceramic necklace jar and dates back to the time of King David and Solomon. Her team also discovered gold coins, gold and silver jewelry, and a gold medallion etched with various symbols—including a menorah, a shofar, and a Torah scroll.[27] That find was pre-exile; yet, many claim the Torah was written after the destruction of Jerusalem. Why would there be etchings of Torah scrolls that predate the exile of the Jewish people if the Torah was not written until after the exile of the Jewish people and the destruction of Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar?
(For a list of 53 people who are recorded in the Bible and confirmed by archaeology, see this footnote.)[28]
So, who is God? Is He really the God of the Bible? Is it possible to know? I believe the Bible answers the question, “Who is God?” I also believe the Bible demonstrates that its answers are true. I’ve served some large slices of that evidence already, but another large piece of the pie comes to us in the form of fulfilled prophecy. And I have the math to back up that claim.
I first learned about several of these prophecies during a guest lecture given by an elderly pastor. I was a new believer at the time, so that must have been about twenty-five years ago. I noted what he said. Unfortunately, I have lost any note of his name or I would share it. I have since studied these prophecies in depth, and for myself, but I first learned many of the following prophecies from a godly pastor who loved Bible prophecy. He must have been in his 80’s then, so I suspect he has gone to be with the Lord now.
In the Bible, as I’ve already covered, God specifically points to prophecy as evidence that He is God and that the Bible is His Word. Only God knows the future. Only God knows the end of everything from the beginning of everything. One of the places we find this is in Isaiah 46:9–10. “Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.”
Throughout the scriptures, God revealed the future to His prophets. Here are a few of the prophecies God has provided. I am going to focus on prophecies related to Israel because some of these prophecies have been fulfilled in my lifetime. Since the prophecies have been “set in stone” for thousands of years, we know the prophecies preceded the events. They are not postdiction. They are not vaticinium ex eventu. They were not written after the events had transpired. They are genuine prophecies.
In Deuteronomy 28:64–67, the Lord said to the Jewish people, “And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone. And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest: but the LORD shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind: And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life: In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.”
And that is pretty much a history of the Jewish people.
That prophecy was made over 3,000 years ago, and more than a thousand years after it was made, it came to pass. The Jewish people were dispersed throughout the entire earth, and they were hated, persecuted, and killed wherever they went. The prophecy was fulfilled literally, not spiritually.
After they were driven out, we see that they would be scattered over the whole earth. And that happened. The Bible also predicted that they would be hated and enslaved. In Isaiah 3:24 we read, “Instead of fragrance there will be a stench; instead of a sash, a rope; instead of well-dressed hair, baldness; instead of fine clothing, sackcloth; instead of beauty, branding.” They were literally branded during the Holocaust. It is evil and foolish to deny the reality of the Holocaust when there are still people who bear the evidence in their flesh.
We read that after they were driven out, their land would be desolate. “And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.”
But God also promised that He would bring them back to their land. About 2,600 years ago, the prophet Ezekiel (11:16–17) said, “Therefore say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Although I have cast them far off among the heathen, and although I have scattered them among the countries, yet will I be to them as a little sanctuary in the countries where they shall come. Therefore say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will even gather you from the people, and assemble you out of the countries where ye have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.”
The Bible tells us it is God who gives the land to the Jewish people. To deny their right to the land is to fight against God.
That is a losing battle.
It is also a satanic battle for Satan hates God and everything God loves. And God loves Israel.
It was not the UN that gave the land to the Jewish people—nor was it anything or anyone else. It was God. No one has the right to try to take it away from them, but the whole world is under the sway of Satan (1 John 5:19), and Satan is the God of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4). As a result, the battle against Israel, the Jewish people, and everything God loves will continue until Christ reigns and God dwells among us.
One of the most famous passages in the Bible that predicts the return of the Jewish people to their land is the “Dry Bones” passage in Ezekiel 37. Not only does it predict that the Jewish people will return to the land of Israel, it predicts the condition the people will be in. It predicts they will no longer be two nations but one, and it predicts they will build a mighty army.[29] When you read this passage, think about the Holocaust as you go through it, and think about the condition that the Jewish people were in when they were rescued from the concentration camps.
Ezekiel 37:1–14, “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord.
“So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them. Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.
“Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord.”
The verses that follow verse 14, predict that the nation will no longer be two nations but one.
Some teachers believe Ezekiel 37 refers to the resurrection, but I believe it clearly points to the rebirth of Israel after the Holocaust. The two main reasons for my view are the mighty army of Ezekiel 37, and the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. After the nation of Israel was reborn in 1948, it survived an attack from the surrounding Islamic nations. Israel did not have a mighty army during their War of Independence. However, after the war ended, the Jewish people formed one.
If Ezekiel 37 is the resurrection, as a small number of teachers claim, what need is there for armies? We know that in the Millennium, we beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. No one will learn war anymore. (Isaiah 2:4.)
The next two chapters in Ezekiel speak about the battle of God of Magog.[30] I believe there may be two battles of Gog of Magog. If that is the case, the one before the Millennium foreshadows the ultimate one after the Millennium—and Ezekiel 38–39 points to both.
As I have explained frequently in my writing, many prophecies in scripture have more than one fulfillment, such as the Abomination of Desolation (Matthew 24:15–18; Daniel 9:27, 11:31, and 12:11). As Ecclesiastes says, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). We will repeat history, and we will repeat prophecy. After Satan is released in Revelation 20, and the final and ultimate battle of Gog of Magog occurs, it is not stopped by mighty armies but by a supernatural act of God—which we also see in Ezekiel 38–39.
So, in Ezekiel 38–39, we read about a battle of Gog of Magog that occurs after the nation of Israel is reborn, and at a time when it and its enemies have mighty armies. The countries that the Bible predicts will come against Israel after her rebirth are currently forming coalitions against her, but we also see they will be supernaturally defeated by God at some point. Nevertheless, we also see a battle of Gog of Magog that occurs after the time for armies has ended. That rebellion puts together a one-sided army, but it is supernaturally defeated by God alone.
There are dark days ahead for Israel and the Jewish people, as we see in places like Zechariah 12 and Revelation 12, but all of Israel’s enemies will be defeated in the end. Someday, as God promised and predicted in Isaiah 62:7, He will establish Jerusalem and make her the praise of the earth.
That prophecy in Isaiah has never been fulfilled, but it will be in the future. If you are an enemy of Israel and the Jewish people, you are on the wrong side. I pray God will give you a love for that nation and its people. I don’t claim that the nation or the Jewish people are perfect, and there are many powerful and wealthy Jewish families and individuals who are evil and fight against God, but God will deal with them, and I pray it happens soon.
We see this promise—that God will regather and return the Jewish people to their land—over and over in scripture. Today, in many of our lifetimes, the Jewish people have returned to their land, and they have come from every corner of the earth. They have returned to the land that God promised them. As prophesied.
Another fulfilled prophecy in the Bible is that Israel, when it comes back to the land, will blossom like the rose.
When God warned Israel that disobedience would lead to exile, He also said the land would be left desolate. Ezekiel 6:14 says, “So will I stretch out my hand upon them, and make the land desolate…” God cautioned them that if they rebelled their land would be forsaken. It would not support anyone. It would not grow anything.
When Mark Twain traveled to the Holy Land in 1867, he could not understand why anyone would want to live there. He said it was a desolate country with rich enough soil, but it was “…given over wholly to weeds. … A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. … We never saw a human being on the whole route. … There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”[31] Twain’s visit was a fulfillment of Deuteronomy 29:22–25, which prophesied that foreigners from a distant land would witness this desolation one day and speak of it to the shocked nations. Mark Twain literally did that in his book, The Innocents Abroad. That was over one hundred years ago. Now Israel is a thriving nation, one that would astonish Mark Twain.
Israel has turned deserts and malaria-infested swamps into agricultural wonderlands. It has bred “Super Cows” that produce more milk than any other cows on the planet. (That strikes me as a literal fulfillment of Numbers 14:8—among many other verses—which promised that the people of Israel would enter a land “flowing with milk and honey.”) It has become a land of rich pastures and is covered with orchards and vineyards. Today, Israel ships fruit all around the world. Europe has a population of more than half a billion people, and it depends upon fruits and vegetables from Israel all winter long.
In addition to fruits and vegetables, Israel ships flowers to Europe, including Holland—which Holland reships all around the world. In Isaiah 35:1, God said, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” Isaiah 27:6 says, “He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.” Those prophecies have been fulfilled, and they have been fulfilled literally in my lifetime.
In the 1930’s, the British said they could not let any Jews go back to the land because the land could not sustain them. In recent years, Israel’s agricultural exports have totaled more than two billion dollars annually.
God told us in Isaiah 66:7–9 that when Israel would be reborn, it would be reborn in a day. “Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child. Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children. Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the LORD: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy God.”
One of the things I find interesting in this passage is that God says this will happen before her pain comes. In other words, the delivery precedes the pain. The significance is that Israel’s War of Independence came after the declaration of nationhood. Not before. The pain of war came after nationhood. War did not lead to the establishment of Israel as a nation as is usually the case. There had been civil disturbance, but all-out war came after the birth of Israel.
Furthermore, in this passage, God asks, “Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once?” Here we see God reveal that when Israel would be reborn, it would be reborn in a day. Israel became a nation on May 14, 1948. It was literally born in a day. From the passage we can also see that there would be those who would try to stop the birth. The day after Israel officially became a nation, it was attacked by five Arab armies. Once again, we see that Israel’s pain came after delivery.
Armies invaded from the south, east, and north. Israel was militarily unprepared for war, yet it turned back five well-equipped and well-trained armies in one of the most miraculous wars of recent history. These Muslim armies swept in with planes, tanks, advanced weaponry, standing armies, and they attacked Israel from multiple fronts. They claimed that their goal was to kill every living Jew. Israel fielded the battle with local farmers and anyone who could fight, from the very young to the very old. Many who joined the fight just had small arms. Others had no weapons at all. Israel didn’t have the strong military that they have today. In 1948, Israel stood against vastly superior foes and won.
God told the Jewish people that they would return to the land, and He revealed exactly what would happen when they did.
Another point of interest in the passage is this question that God asks, “Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? ...shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb?” God will not be like the Nazis who literally shut the wombs of pregnant women about to give birth, and I believe this question from God may point to that barbaric Nazi torture of women. Israel was born at the end of an unspeakably cruel Holocaust and shortly after the end of WWII. Many tried to annihilate the Jewish people and stop the birth of Israel, and its people, but they failed. All who continue their attempts to destroy Israel and the Jewish people will continue to fail because God has made many promises to the Jews that He has yet to fulfill. He will fulfill them. One true certainty in life is this: God keeps His promises.
God also revealed in scripture where the Jewish people would come from when they returned, and He revealed the order that it would happen in. Isaiah 43:5–6 reads, “Fear not: for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth.”
First, God tells the Jewish people that when they return, they will come from the east. In the first half of the 1900’s, Jews began to return to Israel, and they came from the Middle East. Some of the countries they returned from were Syria, Jordan, Yemen, and Iraq. After the Holocaust, the Jews began to return from the west. They were coming out of Europe. In the 1980’s and ‘90’s, they came from the north when over one million Jews came out of Russia. Then the Jews in the south began to make aliyah, and they returned to the land of Israel out of Ethiopia. In fact, Israel sent more than a dozen jumbo jets into Ethiopia, and in just a few days they brought back approximately 20,000 Jews from the south.
This is the exact order of return—the east, the west, the north, and the south—that was prophesied by Isaiah and also by David in the book of Psalms (Psalm 107:3). This is exactly what God said would happen. The prophecies were fulfilled literally. They are further evidence that God shows us what He will do before He does it. The Bible says He does this so we can know that He is God, and the Bible is His Word. We can trust it.
We need to listen to what God tells us in His word. He truly is speaking to us.
There are hundreds of prophecies that have been fulfilled in the past, and they have been fulfilled literally. We can be assured that the remaining prophecies—ones that have yet to be fulfilled—will also be fulfilled, and they will be fulfilled literally. The literal fulfillment of prophecy is not going to change in the future.
Next, God tells us that when He brings the Jewish people back to the land that He will restore their language. In Zephaniah 3:9 God says, “For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve him with one consent.” In Jeremiah 31:23 we read, “Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; As yet they shall use this speech in the land of Judah and in the cities thereof, when I shall bring again their captivity.”
Before the Jews returned to the land, Hebrew was a dead language. There was no nation on earth that spoke Hebrew. Today, all over Israel, the language spoken is Hebrew. Except for Hebrew, no other language has ever been reborn. Once again, the prophecy was fulfilled literally.
The next prophecy I want to examine is Ezekiel 36:10–11. It says, “And I will multiply men upon you, all the house of Israel, even all of it: and the cities shall be inhabited, and the wastes shall be builded: And I will multiply upon you man and beast; and they shall increase and bring fruit: and I will settle you after your old estates, and will do better unto you than at your beginnings: and ye shall know that I am the LORD.”
In this prophecy, God tells us that the cities of Israel will once again be rebuilt and be inhabited. We know from history that many of the cities of Israel were not inhabited for almost 1,800 years. Now, not only is Israel reborn, but the ancient cities are once again inhabited and many are called by their old names.
After Israel rebelled against Rome—and the Temple and Jerusalem were destroyed in AD 70—Rome took control and renamed all of the cities. After the Muslims conquered the area, they also renamed the cities, and they named them with Islamic names. The Turks did the same thing. Then the cities were largely abandoned and left desolate. Israel became a wasteland without cities. However, today, almost all of the old cities have been rebuilt, and many of them are called by their original names.
This verse also tells us that not only will the Jews inhabit their ancient cities, but God will do better for them than at their beginnings. One of the ways we see this, besides their amazing “Super Cows,” is in the technological advances of the Jewish people. From 1901 to 2006, there were approximately 750 Nobel Prize winners. Of them, 160 were Jewish. Jews accounted for almost one-fifth of all Nobel Laureates in those years, and they only numbered a fraction of one percent of the world’s population.
Next, the Bible tells us that even though God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, there would come a time when they would have to purchase it. We see this prophecy in Jeremiah 32:42–43, “For thus saith the LORD; Like as I have brought all this great evil upon this people, so will I bring upon them all the good that I have promised them. And fields shall be bought in this land, whereof ye say, It is desolate without man or beast…” God said through Jeremiah that a time would come when the Jewish people would have to purchase the land. However, this is not how it was done throughout Israel’s history. Initially, the land was given to the tribes by the casting of lots. That’s how land was allocated in Biblical times.
When the Jewish people came out of Babylon (ancient Chaldea), King Cyrus said, “This is your land, go and possess it.” The Jewish people did not pay any price for the land. It was given back to them. However, when the Jewish people returned to the land in our days, initially coming out of the areas of ancient Chaldea, they had to purchase it. They bought all the land that they could. Land was purchased all over Israel by the Jews as they went back. They purchased large tracts of land for their kibbutzim. Much of the land was purchased from Turkey, and many times they had to buy the same property twice.
Approximately 2,500 years ago, the prophet Ezekiel prophesied that Jerusalem’s Eastern Gate would be shut. He said in Ezekiel 44:1–3, “Then he brought me back the way of the gate of the outward sanctuary which looketh toward the east; and it was shut. Then said the Lord unto me; this gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it; because the Lord, the God of Israel, hath entered in by it, therefore, it shall be shut. It is for the prince; the prince, he shall sit in it to eat bread before the Lord; he shall enter by the way of the porch of that gate, and shall go out by the way of the same.”
This prophecy contains a past and future fulfillment. In 1535, Suleiman the Lawgiver of the Ottoman Empire rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem as they exist today. Fifteen-hundred years earlier, Jesus entered Jerusalem on a colt through the Eastern Gate. Suleiman had planned to enter through the Golden Gate with great pomp, but he suddenly changed his mind and ordered instead that the gate be sealed and remain shut. It has remained shut for nearly 500 years. Today, all gates of the holy city are in daily use except the Golden Gate. The first half of this prophecy has already been fulfilled literally. The gate has been shut, but there will come a day when it will be reopened, and there will come a day when Jesus will once again enter by way of this gate. That will also be fulfilled literally.
Jeremiah, who was a prophet during the final years of the Kingdom of Judah, predicted the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the fall of Jerusalem due to the people’s sins. Daniel, who was a prophet during the Babylonian exile, prophesied the future destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. In Daniel 9:24–26, he indicated Jerusalem and the Temple would face destruction a second time after being rebuilt. Ezekiel, who was also a prophet during the Babylonian exile, prophesied the impending judgment of Jerusalem and the Temple as a consequence of the people’s unfaithfulness to God.
Grant Jeffrey, in his book Armageddon: Appointment with Destiny, connected Ezekiel’s prophecy in Ezekiel 4:4–6 to the rebirth of Israel on May 14, 1948. According to Mr. Jeffrey, in this passage, God instructs Ezekiel to lie on his left side for 390 days to bear the iniquity of Israel. Then Ezekiel is told to lie on his right side for 40 days for Judah. Each day represents a year of punishment, totaling 430 years.
Jeffrey argued that this 430-year period related to Israel’s captivity and dispersion. He subtracted the 70 years of Babylonian captivity (which ended in 536 BC), leaving 360 years of remaining punishment. Citing Leviticus 26:18—which states that unrepentant sin would result in punishment being multiplied by seven—he multiplied the remaining 360 years by seven, resulting in 2,520 biblical years.
Since biblical years are typically calculated as 360 days each, Jeffrey converted the 2,520 years into days:
2,520 × 360 = 907,200 days.
He then converted those 907,200 days into solar years by dividing by 365.25 (the average solar year), arriving at approximately 2,483.8 years. Adding that to 536 BC (the end of the Babylonian captivity), and accounting for the absence of a year zero between BC and AD, he arrived at the year 1948—the year of Israel’s rebirth.
Mr. Jeffrey claimed this pointed precisely to May 14, 1948, when Israel declared independence, thereby fulfilling Ezekiel’s prophecy of national restoration.
I don’t know if this is an accurate understanding of the prophecy, but it is certainly an interesting one.
There are many prophecies in the Bible, and prophecy proves the divine origin of scripture. God alone knows the future, and in the Bible, we find predictions for the most important events in human history—the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—Yeshua Hamashiach—the Jewish Messiah and Son of God.
It is estimated that the Old Testament contains over 100 prophecies of the first advent of Jesus. (Josh McDowell says the number is over 300.) Each of those prophecies was fulfilled literally, down to the smallest detail.
In Psalm 22:13–18, we see a clear prediction of Jesus’s crucifixion. This was written hundreds of years before crucifixion was invented, and it was written 1,000 years before Jesus was crucified.
“They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death. For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet. I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me. They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.”
Psalm 22 was fulfilled literally, and to the last detail, in the New Testament accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus (Matthew 27:32–56; Mark 15:21–41; Luke 23:26–49; and John 19).
The Bible prophesied the Messiah’s death, and it prophesied His birth. In Isaiah 7:11–14, we learn that He would be born of a virgin. “Ask thee a sign of the LORD thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the LORD. And he (Isaiah) said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Immanuel means “God with us.”)
Many Jewish people object to this prophecy, stating that the word for virgin here can also mean a young maiden. And that is true. However, what kind of a mighty sign is that for God? Young maidens give birth every day, and they always have. But this passage says to, “Ask thee a sign of the LORD thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above.” In other words, this is something extraordinary. It is not something commonplace like a young woman having a child.
Isaiah also prophesied of a child who would be called mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. We see this in Isaiah 9:6: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
These are all titles we Christians attribute to Jesus. Even if unbelievers deny that Jesus is almighty God, they cannot deny that He is called that.
Isaiah 53 tells us even more about Jesus and His work. It is the clearest picture in the Old Testament of the life, death, purpose, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
Isaiah 53:1–12, “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”
Isaiah 53 was written hundreds of years before the life of Jesus, and it was fulfilled in stark detail in the life of the Messiah. Many have believed in Jesus because of that one prophecy. Yet the Bible is overflowing with an abundance of fulfilled prophecies.
In Daniel 9:25–26, we are told that the Messiah would come, die for the sake of others, and then the Temple would be destroyed. That was also fulfilled.
“Know therefore and understand,
That from the going forth of the commandment
To restore and to build Jerusalem
Until the Messiah the Prince,
shall be seven weeks (sevens) and sixty-two weeks (sevens):
(These “sevens” are “sevens of years—or weeks of years.” They are not “seven-day weeks” but “seven-year weeks.”)
The street shall be built again, and the wall,
Even in troublous times.
And after sixty-two weeks (“sevens”):
Shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself;
And the people of the prince that shall come
Shall destroy the city and the sanctuary...”
The Temple (the sanctuary) was destroyed in AD 70. There is only one candidate for the Messiah who was born and died for the sake of others before the destruction of the Temple. That man is Jesus the Christ, the Jewish Messiah.
Here is a brief understanding of the “Seventy Sevens” or “Seventy Weeks” prophecy, and how it points to the exact timing of the Messiah’s arrival in Israel in the First Century AD.
Verse 24: The prophecy outlines seventy “sevens” (or seventy “weeks” of years), totaling 490 years. These “weeks” have two important purposes: to atone for sin and to bring in everlasting righteousness. Sin was atoned for at the cross, but everlasting righteousness has not yet been brought in. That will happen after the 70th “week.”
The time separation between the 69th week and the 70th week results in two distinct time periods: the first is 483 years, and the second is 7 years.
Messiah’s Arrival (v. 25): The 483-year countdown began with the decree to rebuild Jerusalem, issued by Artaxerxes (circa 457 BC). From that decree until the coming of Jesus was approximately 483 years. Jesus fulfilled that timeline during His ministry. The Messiah’s appearance and public ministry began around AD 27, aligning perfectly with this prophecy. Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection fulfill the first 69 weeks.
Messiah Cut Off (v. 26): Jesus arrives in Jerusalem at the end of the 69th week, provides atonement through His sacrifice on the cross, and establishes the New Covenant. He is “cut off” (killed) after the 69 weeks—a fulfillment seen in Jesus’s crucifixion (circa AD 30–33). This atones for sin but is followed by a time gap between the 69th and 70th “weeks.”
This period following the 69th week is the Church Age. When it concludes, God will redirect His focus to Israel, and the 70th week—the Time of Jacob’s Trouble, or the 7-year Tribulation—will begin. After that, the Millennial Reign of Christ will commence, and the promise of everlasting righteousness will be fulfilled.
I have covered more than ten fulfilled Bible prophecies in this chapter. The Bible is self-authenticating through its staggering number of fulfilled prophecies. I have run these numbers through the large language models Grok and ChatGPT. The odds of just ten Bible prophecies occurring by chance, at a minimum, are one in a sextillion.[32]
ChatGPT 4 estimated that 10 independent prophecies had a p value of ~10⁻⁶⁰ (10 to the power of negative 60). In other words, the probability (p) is about one chance in one million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. In simpler terms, it’s an extremely small chance of something happening. Yet the prophecies were made, and the prophecies were fulfilled. For 10 prophecies that are dependent on each other, the odds are approximately one in one ten-billionth of one hundredth. It’s a very small number, essentially zero for practical purposes. Again, the Bible has done the impossible. It has accurately predicted the future over and over.
As Grok continued to refine its odds, it determined the odds for 10 independent prophecies being fulfilled by chance were ~1 in 3.2 × 10⁵³ ( 1 in 320 septendecillion). That’s a zero, a decimal point, then 53 zeroes, ending with 3125. Grok said that’s like selecting one specific water molecule from Earth’s oceans (10⁴⁵ molecules), then repeating that across 10⁹ planets, ensuring it’s in a wave that spells ×¢ִבְרִית (Hebrew).
If the 10 prophecies depend upon other prophecies being fulfilled first, the odds are one in ~10⁻²¹: That’s like picking one grain of sand from Earth’s beaches (10¹⁸ grains) in a dune that’s shaped like a menorah in modern-day Israel.
The conclusion of both Grok and ChatGPT was that these odds reject random chance and support divine foresight.
I’ve covered a few of the prophecies Jesus fulfilled, but there are various Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in Jesus and in history.[33]
These prophecies support Divine foresight, and there are dozens if not hundreds more. These same large language models, when stripped of their bias filters, all converged to declare that Christ is the Truth and the axiom point of reality.[34] But prophecy, codes, statistical analysis, LLMs, science, history, archaeology, philosophy, and textual criticism are not the only arguments for the reliability of the Bible. Jesus believed it was inspired and authoritative, and God raised Him from the dead. I believe that Jesus’s acceptance of Scripture as Divinely inspired, and His forward validation of the writings of His Apostles, also prove that the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is a trustworthy book.
When Jesus was crucified on the cross, His disciples scattered and ran for their lives. They cowered in locked rooms. They were afraid to show their faces for fear they would be crucified too. They did not expect Jesus to rise from the dead; and when Jesus died on the cross, their belief that He was the promised Messiah died with Him. However, three days later, the women came to the disciples and claimed they had seen the risen Lord. The women were not the only witnesses. Matthew 28:6 speaks of an angelic witness as well. “He is not here, for He is risen, as He said…”
After that, the Bible says the risen Jesus was seen by Peter and John; He was seen on the road to Emmaus by two disciples; He was seen by the remaining disciples, including Thomas. He was seen by over 500 witnesses at one time; and He was later seen by Saul, a persecutor of the Church. Saul became the apostle Paul and went on to write much of the New Testament.
In 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 we read, “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.”
What changed these men? It was their encounter with the risen Jesus. After they had seen the risen Christ, they came out of hiding and stood in the Temple and in the streets of Jerusalem—the very place where Jesus had been crucified—and they preached that Jesus was raised from the dead.
And there was an empty tomb to back up their claim.
They were persecuted, and they were martyred; yet not one of them changed their story that they had seen the risen Jesus.
Early Christians were crucified. They were flogged, flayed, stoned, imprisoned, boiled in oil, ran through with swords, torn asunder, and fed to lions. But the eyewitnesses never once denied what they had seen with their own eyes. They never denied the risen Jesus.
We know that many will die for what they believe. We have seen that in countless terrorist attacks. However, we see something different with the disciples. They were in a position to know. They knew if they had seen the risen Jesus, and they knew if they were lying. People will die for what they believe is the truth; people will lie and die to protect the life of a loved one, but no one is going to die for what they know is a lie with no benefit. Especially the way these men died. Almost all of these men died because they were faithful to the message that Jesus is the risen Lord and the only begotten Son of God.
As I said earlier, there are good reasons to believe that God exists and that the Bible reveals who God is and what He desires from us. There are good reasons to believe that Jesus of Nazareth lived, taught about the Kingdom of God and how to get there, performed miracles witnessed by thousands, died a sacrificial death for sins, and then rose from the dead three days later. Because Jesus rose from the dead, we will rise too, and our reception in Heaven depends on what we did about Jesus on Earth.
[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005738
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQVm8RokoBA
[3] https://www.reasonablefaith.org/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkjwL6gnvoA
[5] https://www.onlinechristiancourses.com/occ-resurrection-of-jesus-self-paced-course/
[6] Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters (Henry Holt & Company, LLC, 2006) Kindle location 934-948.
[7] Stephen Hawking, "Quantum Cosmology," in Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton, J.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 89-90.
[8] https://www.reasonablefaith.org/finetuning
[9] https://www.onlinechristiancourses.com/occ-resurrection-of-jesus-self-paced-course/
[10] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XPVBKQ4
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGPeS4xRRLI
[12]https://secure.cbn.com/special/apologetics/articles/koukl_misquoting_jesus_bart_ehrman.aspx.
[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGPeS4xRRLI
[14] Giulio Fanti and Saverio Gaeta, Il Mistero della Sindone (The Mystery of the Shroud) (Milan: Rizzoli, 2013).
[15] Andrea Tornielli, “New Experiments on Shroud Show It’s Not Medieval,” Vatican Insider, March 27, 2013.
[16] “Scientists conclude: Shroud image was created by ‘a flash of supernatural light,’” La Stampa / Vatican Insider, 2011.
[17] Giulio Fanti and colleagues, wide-angle X-ray scattering study, cited in various scientific summaries (2018–2022).
[18] Dr. Paolo Di Lazzaro, quoted in Who Can He Be?, documentary by David Rolfe, 2023.
[19] https://www.jpost.com/archaeology/article-860551
[20] https://jewishaction.com/jewish-world/people/up_close_with_harold_gans/
[21] DL Kennedy, “Grok Declares Christ Is Truth and the Bible Is Coded,” Gehenna Revisited (blog), May 2025, https://gehennarevisited.blogspot.com/2025/05/grok-declares-christ-is-truth-and-bible.html.
[22] DL Kennedy, “Revisiting ChatGPT and Bible Codes,” Gehenna Revisited (blog), June 2023, https://gehennarevisited.blogspot.com/2025/06/revisiting-chatgpt-and-bible-codes-and.html.
[23] DL Kennedy, “The Suppression of Bible Codes,” Gehenna Revisited (blog), March 2023, https://gehennarevisited.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-suppression-of-bible-codes.html.
[24] DL Kennedy, “The Suppression of Bible Codes,” Gehenna Revisited (blog), March 2023, https://gehennarevisited.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-suppression-of-bible-codes.html.
[25] Baruch A. Shalev, 100 Years of Nobel Prizes (2003), Atlantic Publishers & Distributors , p.57.
[26] https://biblearchaeology.org/research/divided-kingdom/3567-the-blessing-of-the-silver-scrolls
[27] https://watchjerusalem.co.il/35-menorah-medallion-and-treasure-trove
[28] http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/50-people-in-the-bible-confirmed-archaeologically/
[29]https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2037&version=NKJV
[30] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ezekiel%2038-39&version=KJV
[31] Mark Twain The Innocents Abroad, T.W. Press, October 25, 2013, p 228, 229, 244, 262.
[32] https://gehennarevisited.blogspot.com/2025/05/grok-declares-christ-is-truth-and-bible.html
[33] Genesis 3:25; 22:3; 17:29; 49:10; Numbers 24:17; Deuteronomy 18:15; Psalm 2:7; 8:2; 16:10; 22; 34:20; 35:11, 19; 41:9; 45:6–7; 49:15; 68:18; 69:9; 78:2–4; 102:25–27; 109:4; 110:4; Micah 5:2; Daniel 9:25; Isaiah 52:13–53:12; Isaiah 7:14; 9:1–2; 40:3–5; 50:6; 61:1–2; Jeremiah 31:15, 31:31; Hosea 11:1; Malachi 3:1; 4:5–6; Zechariah 9:9; 11:12; 12:10. Other prophecies: Isaiah 66:8 (Israel’s rebirth); Isaiah 44:28 (Cyrus’s decree); Zechariah 11:12–13 (revival of the shekel); Zephaniah 3:9 (revival of the Hebrew language) (KJV).
[34] https://gehennarevisited.blogspot.com/2025/05/grok-declares-christ-is-truth-and-bible.html
Excellent Chapter 2. Writing is well documented, easy to understand, and supported by scripture. Ordered the book and looking forward to reading the whole book.
ReplyDeleteStill not able to leave a comment on my own blog. I just want to thank you so much for the kind words! I'm honored you ordered my book, and I hope you enjoy it. DL
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