When large numbers people began to join the early Church, the Jerusalem establishment knew it had a problem. “The most knowledgeable Jews have read the prophecies. They know that Jesus fulfilled them. Every time more Jews come to Jerusalem, the converts tell them about Jesus, His accursed Church, and how His Disciples and those whom they ordain are able to turn bread and wine into His Body and Blood. It’s as crazy as believing that the Red Sea divided and Moses led people through it on dry land! Still, Jews like to be thought of as having been chosen to participate in weird miracles. They want to get from here to Heaven. What are we going to do?”
Someone had a very bad answer: “Let’s make new, updated translations to ‘reflect the knowledge of modern times’. We can rewrite the prophecies so vaguely that no one will connect them with Jesus and The Church that’s taking so many people, and donors, away from us.”
Scribes were set to work. In two generations, big changes had occurred. On one hand, the name “Catholic” was being used to describe The Only Church Jesus Founded. On the other, new “Prophecy-free” translations were being used by every synagogue that could afford them. The sales pitch was simple: “These new, hand-written scrolls on approved parchment cost over two hundred thousand dollars. Still, if they keep your smarter people from connecting the prophecies to Jesus and not leaving your synagogue, they’re cheap at twice the price!”
What three prophecies show how statistically absurd it is to not believe that Jesus is The Messiah?
There were about 60,000,000 people in the Roman Empire. Jews were scattered throughout its far-flung provinces and cities. In Genesis 49:10, The Messiah was prophesied to be born of The Tribe of Judah from the House of David. If half the 1.2 million people in Palestine were Jews, and half of them were from the Tribe of Judah, the chances that the prophecies saying Jesus would be born of Judah’s Tribe were one in a hundred.
The Prophet Jeremiah, 32:4-4 makes it clear that The Messiah would be descended from King David. David’s descendants were a political threat to every ruling party in Israel. Many of them moved, or were driven, away. During the census, when Jesus, Mary, and Joseph went to Bethlehem, there were no more than a few thousand left. Only the available rooms in a small town were filled. It’s not unreasonable to assume that not more than 6,000 descendants of David were alive and showed up in Bethlehem.
The chances that Jesus would be born of Judah and David among the population of The Roman Empire and would end up in Bethlehem? At most, 6,000 in 60,000,000. One in a million.
Most of us would bet everything we own if God appeared to us and said: “If you go to the nearest casino and bet on the first roulette wheel that the number 12 will come up, I will give you odds of a million to one that you will win.” What would we do with our money? We’d bet the house!
What keeps people from betting that their souls will be better off if they become Catholic? Vanity! Demons work to keep people away from The Only Church Jesus Founded. “You don’t want to be one of those Catholics. You want to be free to think, do, and say whatever you want. Ignore those prophecies!”
The odds get better! Of all the 100,000 towns in the 30 some Provinces of The Roman Empire, what were the odds that Caesar would have had the descendants of David show up in Bethlehem, as The Prophet Micah predicted in Micah 5:2? One in a hundred thousand. Multiply that one in a hundred thousand chance by the earlier one in a million. It helps us get from here to Heaven by understanding that the odds from just three prophecies that Jesus is NOT The Messiah are one in 100,000,000,000.
If we are blessed with understanding that, we realize that we should strive to obey all that Jesus commands if we want to get from here to Heaven. His commands include the bizarre instruction: “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.”
There is only one place on earth to do that: In the Catholic Mass in The Only Church He Who Fulfilled the Prophecies Founded. Either that, or vanity and what follows. We should play the odds as we try to get from here to Heaven.
