Queen Esther, the wife of King Ahasuerus, had a problem. Her people, the Jews, were under the sentence of death because of a proclamation issued by her husband. She was the only one who could change his mind on the issue but she was afraid because she had not revealed her ethnic identity to him and doing so might cost her life. Her uncle, Mordecai, persuaded her to be bold because she had been put on earth in the position she was in by the sovereign hand of God for “such a time as this.“
This morning I was surveying my preaching calendar and I realized that in a very short time I will be preaching Christmas messages, one of which deals with Galatians 4:4 which says that God sent forth His Son in the “fullness of time.” There was a time that was appointed by God for Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Redeemer to come into the world and do what only He could do- save man from the penalty of sin which is eternal death.
In the Old Testament there were numerous prophecies concerning the person of Jesus Christ. In his book Science Speaks, Peter Stoner calculated the probability that any one person could fulfill 48 of all the prophecies concerning the Christ. His calculations were reviewed by the American Scientific Affiliation and were found to be dependable and accurate in regard to the scientific material presented. His calculations concluded that any one person being able to fulfill 48 prophecies was 1 in 10 to the 157th power.
In order to visualize the odds of this occurring I did not calculating of my own. Picture a shirt button. It has a diameter of ½ inch and is 1/8 of an inch thick. Now try to picture 1 with a 157 zeros after it of them. All of them are white, except one which is red. Now picture those buttons spread out over the continental United States. The area of the continental United States is 3.1 million square miles. In order to cover 1 square mile of territory, you would need just a little over 1.6 billion buttons. So to cover the United States it would require 1.6 billion times 3.1 million or approximately 5 times 10 to the 16th power buttons. In order to use up all the buttons you would need to stack them on top of each other. 1 times 10 to the 157th divided by 5 times 10 to the 16th would compute to 2 times 10 to the 140th layers of buttons. It takes just a little over 3.5 times 10 to the 3rd layers to make 1 mile high of buttons. Dividing the number of layers by the number of layers in a mile you would have approximately 5.7 times 10 to the 138th power miles of buttons stacked on top of each other covering the continental United States. The closest star to the Earth is Proxima Centauri, 2.5 times 10 to the 13th miles away. This means that you could stack these buttons on top of each other and reach Proxima Centauri a little over 2 times 10 to the 125th times. Now ask someone to randomly pick out the one lone red button and you have the same approximate odds as Jesus randomly fulfilling 48 prophecies concerning Him, which, by the way, He did. The only logical conclusion is that Jesus came at an appointed time by the will of God to do what only He could do.
There are no specific prophecies of Scripture concerning you or me like there were for Jesus Christ. Yet the same sovereignty of God put us here for a purpose just as He did for Queen Esther and Jesus Christ. We are not here by chance, but for a specific purpose at a specific time. May we be faithful to accomplish what God desires from us.