The Bible - Prophecies, Archaeology, and Survival

The predictions of men, based on facts of the past and logical conclusions drawn from them, are sometimes right, but more often are in error. Even weather predictions, with all the sophisticated equipment and a storehouse of knowledge, often are wrong. But the difference in human predictions and Bible prophecy is that no man who spoke from God was ever wrong. These men prophesied of men - even mentioning their names and events, hundreds of years before such events came to pass, and concerning things which were obviously beyond the scope of human knowledge and wisdom at the time they were written.

The prophet Isaiah prophesied during the days of the divided kingdom of Israel that Cyrus “shall perform all My pleasure, saying to Jerusalem, You shall be built, and to the temple, Your foundation shall be laid” (Isaiah 44:28). He names Cyrus by name, yet he’s telling of an event that would happen over 200 years later. Cyrus was king of the Medo-Persian empire that allowed the children of Israel to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the city and temple. Isaiah prophecies this before Judah was taken into Babylonian captivity. Babylon would later be destroyed by the Medo-Persians under king Cyrus. Furthermore, how could Micah know the Savior would be born in little, insignificant Bethlehem when he wrote 700 years before Christ was even born?  And Jesus in Mark 9:1 prophesied that the kingdom would come with “power” which came about in the second chapter of Acts. The prophets could prophesy these things because God was with them. Christ could prophesy because He was God (John 1:1,14).

Besides all the 300 plus prophecies concerning Christ, there are many archaeological and other proofs that the Bible is the product of an all-powerful creator. Scientists digging into the ruins of the past, have uncovered amazing corroborative evidence to verify the Bible account of cities and events, many of which were doubted and even disputed by skeptics. The uncovering of battle records, names of kings and cities, all correspond with the Biblical account of the same events. We have old copies of Bible writing, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are known to have existed long before the fulfilment of these prophecies actually occurred and became facts of history.

Ancient Babylon is a good example. In Isaiah the 13th chapter (written about 700 years before Christ), the prediction is made that the city would become desolate, even to the point that the wild beast would not lie there. Neither would the Arab pitch his tent there. Visitors to this site verify the truthfulness of this statement.

Isaiah, in speaking of God, stated in Isaiah 40:22: “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.” The Hebrew word that Isaiah used for “circle” is the word khug. It literally means something with “roundness”, a “sphere.” But, of course, the people of Isaiah's day (and in fact, for many generations to come) thought the earth was flat. How did Isaiah know that NOT to be the case? There is scientific foreknowledge in the Bible which is years ahead of its time. How could the Bible writers have known these things and countless more - except God, who created the universe and knew every detail of it, told them! No rational, sane person would believe that such foreknowledge could have come through just men. All this had to come from only one source, and that is God almighty!

If a few uneducated men wrote a book today, what would be the odds of its being a best seller for hundreds of years? Imagine then the odds against the writings of a few uneducated fishermen and uneducated Jews in a captive Roman province surviving the persecutions of the Jewish authorities and the pagan religious leaders, to say nothing of the determined efforts of the Roman Empire to stamp them out! But such writings have not only survived, but they continue to be the best seller of all books. The Bible has not only survived in early days, but it has withstood the blows of the skeptics and the infidel’s best efforts to destroy it through the centuries. If the Bible is not from God, then how do we account for such phenomena? If it is from God, these things are easily understood - God saw to it that it did survive! The Bible (the inspired Word of God), has survived into the 21st century, and will continue to do so until the end of time.