The Divine Origin and Authority of the Bible

The second proof of the divine origin and authority of the Bible is its fulfilled prophecies. Fulfilled prophecy is a fact, and a fact that every honest, intelligent, and serious-minded person must face and account for.

There are many prophecies in the Old Testament of things that were to occur hundreds of years in the future. These prophecies, in many instances, were very clear, detailed, and precise, and they have been fulfilled to the letter. The average man and woman, and even the average Christian, knows little or nothing about prophecy. When the writer undertook the study of prophecy some years ago, he was amazed at the number and explicitness of the prophecies that had been literally fulfilled. So is everyone else that goes into the subject with any thoroughness, fairness, and candour. Many are the sceptics and unbelievers who have been converted to a faith in the Bible as the Word of God by the study of Bible prophecies. The subject is a very large one, and the fulness of the proof can only be hinted at in a book like this. There are three prophetic themes in the Old Testament: prophecies about Israel, prophecies about the Gentile nations, and prophecies about the Messiah. We will confine ourselves, by way of illustration, to prophecies about the Messiah, and to four of the many of these.

In Micah 5:2, Jeremiah 23:5, Isaiah 53, and Daniel 9:24-26, we have very explicit predictions as to the place where the Christ should be born, the family which He should be born into, the state of the family at the time of His birth (a state entirely different from that existing at the time of the prophecy), the way He should be received by men and by His own people (a way entirely contrary to all human probability), His death, the precise manner of His death, His burial with its accompanying circumstances in minute detail, His resurrection and victory subsequent to His death. These predictions were literally fulfilled with the utmost exactness in Jesus of Nazareth. The attempt has been made over and over again by the rationalists to break the force of the argument by denying that Isaiah 53 refers to the Messiah, but the attempt has broken down utterly. Not only has it been completely proven from their own works that the Jewish rabbis interpreted it as of the Messiah but, furthermore, when the question has been asked, if it does not refer to the Messiah then to whom does it refer, the best answer they can give is, “It refers to suffering Israel.” But anyone can see this is impossible if he will study the chapter for himself.

The sufferer of Isaiah 53 is an innocent victim, suffering for the sins of another to whom the blows were due (see especially vs. 4-8) and this “other” for whom he was suffering was “my people”—i.e., Israel. So evidently the sufferer cannot be Israel. There are many other reasons why the sufferer cannot be Israel, but this is conclusive and sufficient. By any theory of authorship that anyone has ever ventured to propose, these prophecies were made centuries before Jesus Christ.