BRING NEW LIFE-CHANGING IMPACT
SCIENCE & THE BIBLE by Bolton Davidheher, Pb.D., Chairman of the Science Division, Biola College
TO YOUR SUNDAY SCHOOL with appealing S cripture P ress papers Over a million pupils are reached weekly by these true-to-the-Bible take-home papers. Lives are being changed through real-life stories that vividly portray Christ’s re deeming power in the experiences | of real people. These thrilling stories of c h a n g ed lives are changing other lives. \ * Ateen-ager reports . . .
77t earth. Fifty may be considered a con servative figure because there are more than this and because we have already eliminated from our calcula tion all of the other Biblical prophe cies. Christians believe that t h e prophecies given by God are certain to be fulfilled, but the non-believer does not. To be extra conservative, let us assume in our figuring that the prophecies were just as likely not to be fulfilled as they were to be ful filled. Actually this is quite a con cession to the non-believer because many of these prophecies were very unlikely to be fulfilled in the normal course of events and some required a miracle in order to be fulfilled. On the basis of these assumptions, the probability that all of these prophecies should be fulfilled with out divine intervention is only about one chance in 1,000,000,000,000,000. In other words, the probability of all of them being fulfilled in the natural course of events is so extremely small that we must conclude that God di rected their fulfillment. Another way of expressing this figure is to say that the chance of a person fulfilling the requirements imposed by proph ecy in order to be recognized as the Messiah is the same as the chance of a blindfolded person picking out one particular pinto bean which has been mixed up in a bin of beans ten miles square and six feet deep. Never did anyone have better credentials. Besides this, there were the miracles and also there were the testimonies of others and there was His testimony of Himself. In the end He came forth alive from a sealed and guarded tomb and appeared to the disciples and to others. On one occasion He appeared to more than 500 at one time. But some will not believe no matter how strong the evidence. The disciple Thomas at first would not believe, but when he saw for himself and could no longer doubt, the Lord’s comment was, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” T h e fact that there are mathemati cians who are not Christians in a land where the Bible is well known shows that one cannot prove mathe matically that the Bible is the word of God. At least part of the explana tion of this is that belief is a matter of the heart rather than of the head. As an illustration of the fact that head knowledge is not enough, one may remember the case of the Israel ites at Mount Sinai. They had ex perienced many supernatural mani festations of the work of God in their behalf and yet at the very time that Moses was representing them in the presence of God, they made a calf of gold and said, “This is what brought us out of Egypt.” One of the aspects of Scripture which most readily lends itself to mathematical treatment is prophecy. To evaluate the evidence of prophecy one needs to know just two things: the number of prophecies and the probability of each being fulfilled. If we use figures which are much more conservative than they need to be and still find the evidence to be very great, the value of the evidence should thereby be demonstrated to be overwhelming. Not all prophecies will be accepted as such by non-believers. The prophe cies of the 11th chapter of Daniel are so remarkable that the skeptics think that they must have been written after the events which they describe. Some who are classed as scholarly theologians do not even accept the prophecy of the virgin birth of Christ, although: (1) the rabbis before the time of Christ taught that this proph ecy revealed that the Messiah would be virgin-bom, (2) the Septuagint translation of the third century B.C. states it clearly in Greek, (3) the New Testament plainly says that Christ was virgin-bom and that it had been so prophesied. Let us consider only the prophecies of the Old Testament which were ful filled in Christ while He was on “‘POWER led me to see ¡how dedicated Christians *!may be used of God’s Spirit to evangelize a | whole town, and with my ¡life fully surrendered to ¡Him, these years as a ¡teen-ager and the rest of «my life can be used to win ¡¡more souls for Christ.” —California Ateacher comments. . . is“For several years I have ¡taught children the Word ■of God in an area where ¡there is gang warfare. I now am sending POWER, MY COUNSELLOR, ¡and PRIMARY DAYS to I some of them. The moth ers say the children just E w-a-i-t for the papers, ¡then devour them. One beloved family comes to mind. The young son ¡takes the papers out on ¡park benches with him, ¡sometimes takes them to bed, also shares them but always demands their re- ¡turn. He knows Christ as ¡Saviour and loves the ¡things of God. Surely the ILord will keep this family from the ‘gang life’ that ¡surrounds them.” price (or each paper: only 25c for 13 weeks when y0u order 5 or more sets —lessthan2c a week per —N e w Y o r k pupil. You can have a part In bringing new life-changing impact to your Sunday School. Send for FREE samples . . . or order a trial supply. \ □ Enter order for (quantity)-------------- — n Bill church f~l Money enclosed No. in Sunday School.______ __ Dept. KBP-50 37 MAY, 1960
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