Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What Are the Odds Jesus Is the Messiah? | The Gospels | Matthew 2:13–18

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

How could Jesus fulfill Old Testament passages that weren’t originally written as predictions? What does it actually mean for Jesus to “fulfill” Scripture? And how does the whole story of the Old Testament point us to him? In today’s episode, Patrick explores how Matthew 2:13–18 shows that Jesus fulfills Scripture not only through prophecy, but through the patterns and stories of the Old Testament, revealing him as the true and better Israel. Read the Bible with us! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and it's never too late to join! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passage: Matthew 2:13–18

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. There was a mathematician named Peter Stoner, and he worked at Pasadena City College in Santa Barbara, California. And when he was the chairman of their science division, he decided he wanted to conduct a little experiment. He wanted to discover what are the odds that someone could have fulfilled all of the prophecies in the Old Testament about the Messiah in a single lifetime. Basically, what are the odds of Jesus's story actually happening? The first thing he discovered, basically immediately, was that there were something like 101

prophecies that he could look into, and trying to do all of those was going to be almost mathematically impossible. And so he just shrunk the numbers. He said, okay, what are the odds that just eight of the prophecies about Jesus could be fulfilled in the lifetime of a single individual? Well, through a lot of experimentation and research, he said that the odds were one and 100 quadrillion. That's a number you can't even conceive of.

Like, when I look at it written down on a paper, it's so big, I can't even conceptualize it. But that's what he said. One in 100 quadrillion. That's the odds of Jesus existing. To illustrate the point, this is what he wrote. He said, it would be like taking 100 quadrillion silver dollars and laying them across the whole face of the state of Texas. He said that they would cover the state two feet deep. That's how many silver dollars there would be.

He goes on. He says, now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, blindfold the man, and tell him, that he must pick up one silver dollar and say that that first silver dollar must be the right one. What are the chances of him getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets had of writing just eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man from their day to the present time. So that is kind of a wild statistic and it's kind of unbelievable to imagine. Jesus really defeated the odds because he didn't just fulfill eight prophecies. Some people let's say he fulfilled 101 prophecies.

There's some really cool infographics you can find online that basically shows all of the prophecies made in the Old Testament and where they connect in the New Testament. So it'll be like a line from the book of Isaiah to a part of the gospel of Matthew. And again, when you look at all these lines connecting the Old Testament and New Testament of fulfillments of prophecies from the Old Testament, it's kind of amazing.

You're like, wow, how did God orchestrate this? How did God know what was going to happen? And of course, the answer is he's God. He had a plan. He knew what he was doing. Now, I said all this to say. The fact that Jesus fulfilled many of the prophecies of the Old Testament really is remarkable. But I think sometimes as Christians, we have a misconception about what fulfillment means. You see, there's definitely cases in the Old Testament where there was a prophet who predicted the future. He said, this is what's going to happen in the future. This is who the Messiah will be. This is how history will unfold. And in those cases, Jesus did fulfill those predictions. But when the New Testament, talks about Jesus fulfilling the Old Testament. It's not just saying there were predictions and he made their reality come to past. Sometimes it's saying something much deeper. And this is really important to understand as we read through the Gospel of Matthew, because the Gospel of Matthew was the gospel written largely to a Jewish audience. In other words, people who knew their Old Testament

very well. And so Matthew is really fixated on showing how Jesus fulfills the Old Testament. because his readers, the people who would have originally heard his gospel being read out loud, they wanted to know, hey, is Jesus actually the one that the Old Testament promised? Matthew's saying very clearly, yes, he's the fulfillment of everything that the Old Testament points to. And to show you what Matthew means by fulfillment, that it's not just a prediction and then the prediction coming true. I want us to read a short passage in Matthew 2. At this point of the story, Jesus is probably a few years old, and he's just been visited by a group of foreigners called the Magi. These were people who came from a different land because they saw a star

and they followed the star and they found Jesus and they worshipped him as the king and they worshipped him as God. They eventually leave and Joseph and Mary and Jesus. They're all just living in Bethlehem. This is what happens next in verse 13. When they, the Magi, had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. Get up, he said. Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you. For Herod, this was the king of Judea, the king of the region that they were in, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him. So he got up. He took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where they stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled. So this is the fulfillment passage, and so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet.

Out of Egypt, I have called my son. When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem, and in its vicinity, who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled. A voice is heard in Rama, weeping in great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted because they are no more. So if we look at this passage, we're going to see two different forms of prophecy and fulfillment. In the first instance, Matthew gives us a passage from the prophet Hosea.

And this is what Hosea wrote. He said, out of Egypt, I called my son. And he says that Jesus, in his story, he goes down to Egypt to escape Herod and then obviously has to come back up out of Egypt. And he's saying, hey, look, this fulfills what the prophet says. Now, here's the challenge. Josea wasn't actually making a future prediction. He wasn't saying one day a Messiah is going to come and he's going to be sent down to Egypt and

then he's going to be brought up out of Egypt. In the context of the passage, Hosea is actually describing Israel's story. He's talking about the Exodus, the point at which Israel lived as slaves in Egypt, and then God sent Moses and brought Israel out of Egypt. And he's saying in this passage, he's reinterpreting history, and he's saying, hey, when I brought you out of Egypt, I was like a father and I was calling you out. I was bringing my son out of chains. I was bringing my son out of Egypt.

So it's kind of weird when Matthew comes along, and he says all of a sudden that Jesus, that Jesus is fulfilling this prophecy. Or I say it's weird if you think that the only form of fulfillment is prediction. Because that's not what Matthew's trying to imply. You see, what Matthew's trying to show us isn't merely that Jesus fulfills the predictions. He's trying to show us that Jesus fulfills the patterns of the Old Testament. You see, what he's trying to do in this moment is show that Jesus is the ultimate Israel. He is the true Israel, just like Israel had to go down in Egypt because of oppression

and then be brought up out of Egypt by God's favor. He's saying Jesus is fulfilling that story. He too had to sojourn in Egypt because of an outside oppression, in this case Herod, and he too was called out of Egypt as God's son. He's saying, look, the story of Israel, it points you towards Jesus. Or you could do it the other way around. When you look at Jesus' story, you'll find the story of Israel because he is the true Israel. He is the true people of God.

And something similar is happening in the second example as well. Remember in this example, it talks about how Herod went and he killed all the children under the age of three in Bethlehem. And of course, people start weeping. And so he quotes the prophet Jeremiah and says that Jeremiah was fulfilled. And here's the passage. He says, a voice is heard in Rama, weeping in great mourning. Rachel, she was kind of a matriarch of Israel. She's weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more.

Now again, in context, Jeremiah wasn't making a prediction about a future Messiah. in context he was talking about the destruction of Jerusalem and Jerusalem's temple by a foreign nation called Babylon. He's saying, hey, this nation's coming. They're going to destroy Jerusalem. They're going to burn down the temple. They're going to murder women and children. And of course, there's going to be great weeping for all of the loss that we experience. So Matthew takes this passage. And he says, just as people in Jeremiah's day wept for the destruction of Jerusalem, so we see the same pattern happening today. people weeping for the destruction that's occurring in Bethlehem. Now here's the real kicker. You see what Jeremiah goes on to do in the passage is he says, yes, you're going to be exiled.

The people of God were going to be sent out of Israel, but he's going to establish a new covenant. He's going to renew their hearts. He's going to put his spirit inside of his people, and he's going to bring them back to himself. And that's what I find so interesting here, because I think that's what Matthew is implying. He's saying, just as there was weeping in Bethlehem, just as there was weeping in Jerusalem, that weeping, those tears, they were like seed. And when sown, they point towards this future reality that God is going to bring his people back to himself, that he's going to cleanse them and forgive them. He's going to fill them with their spirit. And so when he says that Jesus fulfills this passage, again, it's a

pattern. He's saying, hey, this same pattern of exile and return that's implied by this passage, that's what Jesus is doing. He's going to take the exiles, not just of Israel, but the exiles of all creation, and he's going to bring them back into the presence of the God from whom they were exiled. So when we talk about fulfillment and prophecy, this is a really important thing for you to grasp. Sometimes there's a prediction and Jesus just fulfills it. And that is incredible because just eight of those is incredibly unlikely, one in 100 quadrillion odds of him doing it. But other times, when we read about fulfillment, we need to understand something more complex, which is that Jesus fulfills the pattern of the Old Testament, that he is the true and better Israel. He is the true and better

king. He is the true and better prophet. He is the true and better sacrifice that in every way the Old Testament in all of its patterns and structures was trying to point us toward who Jesus would be, not merely in prediction, but in patterned.