I'll start by saying that I made up the phrase "secondary apologetics." I'm not aware of anyone that uses that term on an academic level. When I decided I wanted to pursue a degree in apologetics I saw two different applications of the subject. The primary goal of apologetics is to defend your faith with reason, facts and logic. If you're going to play defense, you need an opposing offense. That offense represents the skeptics, atheists, agnostics and the lost world in general. However I saw a secondary purpose for apologetics, and that purpose is to build up or encourage the rest of your defensive teammates. To this point most of my posts have been written like a good blitz package on 3rd and long. They were written so that you can actively engage non-believers with facts about our faith. I'm well aware that facts don't draw people to Christ. The Holy Spirit draws people to Christ. So with my disclaimer firmly in place I will proceed by trying to help you fortify your walls a bit. In every area of life, the more convinced you are that you have the truth, the more prone you are to be bold in it's proclamation. Throwing out prophecy to the non-believer will seldom yield results, but I hope it's helpful to you personally. This is written by a defender, to the defenders.
Improbable Prophesy:
There are hundreds of Old Testament prophesies about the coming Messiah and I'm simply not educated enough to list them all (nor am I arrogant enough to think you'd read my blog for that long). Most of them are fairly vague if I'm forced to be honest here. You can see Christ in them, but it's a stretch for most people. Old Testament prophecy simply isn't my strong suit, but I'm working on it. Part of me wanted to leave this out due to my own ignorance, but I've quickly learned that any apologist worthy of the title has to grow in this area. I'm also not educated enough to give you all of the date ranges of the predictions, but I know that some of the most accurate date back as far as 800 years before the birth of Christ. I will list a hand full of the most compelling predictions.
Micah 5:2 says that Christ will be born in Bethlehem. Isaiah 53:3 says He will be despised and rejected. Isaiah 53:5 says He will be beaten and we will be healed. Isaiah 53:6 says that His punishment is for the iniquity of us all. In Psalm 22:16 it is written that they will pierce His hands and His feet, which is astounding when you consider how long it would be before crucifixion would be invented. Jesus fulfilled at least 50 more that are equally as strong as the list I assembled. These are just a few, but I strongly encourage you to grow in you understanding of prophesy.
I studied the testimony of a man named Louis Lapides, a little known Jewish scholar. He was presented the prophecy contained in Isaiah 53 by a Christian friend. Naturally Lapides assumed that the Christian Bible contained a forged account of the Old Testament, so he quickly turned to his Jewish version only to discover that it was exactly the same. By this Lapides was convinced that Isaiah was writing about Jesus. Through this application of apologetics he became a Christian and went on to become the president of a network of 15 different Messianic congregations. Information is not salvation, but facts can produce conviction. So don't stop defending what you believe. Facts are the advantage in Christianity, especially when it comes to debating other world religions.
Let's Do Some Math:
While pursuing my Bachelor's degree I spent 5 years majoring in everything from Mid-Evil Literature to Textiles. I finally sat down with my guidance counselor and said "What can I major in that requires little to no math? I have to get out of this place eventually." His response, "Marketing." Needless to say, after nearly 7 years of undergraduate study, I left The University of Montevallo with a marketing degree that I now display on my wall as if I were born to develop product placement plans and advertising campaigns. The reality is that I just earned it by being a poor mathematician. So in order for us to grasp the mathematical impossibility of anyone but Jesus fulfilling the prophecy provided in the Old Testament, I pulled the research of a man that was gifted in an area where I was born deficient.
Peter Stoner was the chairman of the mathematics department at Westmont College from 1953-1957. He was gifted with a brilliant mathematical mind and a heart for Christian apologetics. He produced some fantastic work in combining both fields. Stoner once had 600 math students come up with the odds that one person could even fulfill 8 of the Old Testament prophesies. The result was a number that I can only express alphanumerically. The students came back with the odds set at 1 in a hundred million billion. He went on to express this in a more visual sense by using tiles. If you were to take this number in one inch square tiles you could cover the entire Earth, both water and land. Now imagine you placed a gold star on the bottom of one tile. Your next assignment is simple, you are to walk the Earth and you are only given the opportunity to pick up one tile to see if it has the star on the bottom. The chances of you picking the correct tile with only one shot are the same as Jesus fulfilling only 8 of the Old Testament predictions.
Why stop at 8? Now what are the chances that one man fulfilled 48 Old Testament prophesies? I'll skip the number and go straight for the visual here. It would be like taking one atom (keep in mind that one hair is the width of 1 million atoms) and spray painting it red. Then you can release the atom into one of one trillion trillion trillion billion completely different universes. Now you have to get in a spaceship and fly through all of these different universes stopping only once to collect a sample so that you can then examine the atoms it contains. The chances of you finding the red one are the same as the chances that any human could meet those odds. I could go on, but needless to say were going to have to start to exceed the limits of the human mind to conceptualize odds that great.
I hope that somewhere in this series you've seen that the resurrection of Jesus is not only historical fact, but it's mathematically sound as well. Having history and math on your side is a pretty powerful combination.
Going Forward:
This completes the series on the historical resurrection of Jesus. I pray that you found some of it useful. It looks like my coursework will take me into explaining the problem of evil in the world. I expect it to be challenging for me personally and I hope I can relay it properly. When I studied atheism I found that a lot of atheists encountered events in their lives that could only be explained by evil. In turn they couldn't reconcile this back to the loving God described in the Bible and therefore shut Him out as an option. Evil is a difficult subject and we are surrounded by it every day. My only comfort is knowing that evil itself is still bound by God's sovereignty, but is an inevitable byproduct of living in a fallen world. I also take comfort in knowing that one day I will walk in a place were all the devastation of sin is absent. Until that day we will live in a world where evil and sin exist and we need to prepare to explain it.