The Divine Origin of the Bible

People can look a few years ahead and generally be able to predict and form an opinion as to the likely outcomes that current actions will lead to. But no man can look centuries ahead and predict many specific things about a specific individual and have them come true to the letter. Only the all-knowing God can do that, and proven fulfilled prophecies of this sort prove the divine origin of the Book. To quote the words of another: “Whenever we detect a power of foresight which has been able to penetrate the dark centuries that were lying before it, and to declare with unfailing accuracy the things that should come to pass, we know that such powers must have proceeded from God, and from God alone.”

One very suggestive fact about the prophecies is that there would sometimes be two apparently contradictory lines of prophecy, and yet both be literally fulfilled in the outcome. For example, there are two lines of prophecy about the Christ. One line of prophecy set forth an all-conquering Messiah, who should break the nations with a rod of iron and be all-triumphant. (Ps. 2, and many passages.). The other line of prophecy set forth a suffering Messiah, “despised and rejected of men,” slain, crucified (Is. 53, Dan. 9:24-26, Zech. 12:10). So great was this enigma and apparent contradiction that this solution was proposed: that there were to be two Messiahs, one a suffering Messiah of the tribe of Joseph, and the other a conquering Messiah of the tribe of Judah. But in the outcome, the enigma is solved in the two comings of the one Messiah; the first coming to suffer and make atonement for sin; the second coming to conquer and to reign. When the acts which occur centuries after, making clear the prophecies uttered centuries before, and fulfilling everything to the letter, must not an honest and sincere man or woman see God behind the prophecies?

There are other prophecies in the Bible about heathen cities which seemed unlikely to be fulfilled at the time, and in part contradictory and impossible to fulfil, but they are being literally fulfilled right before our eyes, in our own day. Was God behind these prophecies, or wasn’t He?

But there is another class of prophecies that are even more remarkable, the prophecies contained in the types of Scripture.

When you ask a superficial student of the Old Testament what portion of the Old Testament is prophetic, he will mention the major and minor prophets, and perhaps some of the other explicit verbal prophecies scattered through the Psalms, the historical books, and the law of Moses. But ask the man who has really gone into the study of the Old Testament thoroughly and profoundly, and he will tell you that the entire Old Testament is prophetic; that its laws are prophetic, its history is prophetic, people mentioned there are prophetic and its institutions are prophetic. Then if you wonder what he means, and will take time to inquire, he will show you how everything about the tabernacle—for example, its threefold division, its furniture, the table of shewbread, the golden candlestick, the altar of incense, the ark of the covenant, the brazen altar, the bronze basin, the boards of the tabernacle, the coverings of the tabernacle—were the foretelling of prophetic acts and truths related to Jesus Christ and God’s plan for salvation, the church and for heaven. He will show you how Joseph was a prophetic type of Christ in many marvellous ways. He will show you the same thing about David and Solomon. And so, he will go on and show you the wonderful foreshadowing of Christ, and of the church, of Israel’s rejection of the Messiah, the coming day of atonement for Israel and the feast of tabernacles that is to follow. And if you follow him closely you will soon see that this is not at all fanciful, but that evidently the real Author of these portions of Scripture intended all this. Of course, to fully appreciate the force of this, one must go deeply into it, and the more deeply he goes into it the more he will be filled with wonder and admiration.

Unfortunately, the destructive critics never do go into these things. They are so occupied with their ingenious literary speculations and the pursuit of methods of literary analysis and criticism that have been discredited and abandoned in other branches of literary study than the study of the Bible, that they have no time for the study of the actual contents of the literature they are analysing and of which they are trying to discover “the sources.” When the attention of the writer was first called to the types, he thought the things claimed about them fanciful. But study of them has thoroughly convinced him of his mistake.

Now, how are we to account for these countless little facts which were foreshadowed and would come to pass, and truths which were revealed centuries later? Is this within the power of man’s wisdom? Any honest man knows it is not.

As one honestly studies these things he is led to exclaim, “Surely, this is the hand of God.” As any man who is not blinded by sin studies the leaf of a tree or the dust of a butterfly’s wings beneath the microscope he sees the wisdom and the hand of God in it; and as anyone microscopically studies the types of the Old Testament, he sees the hand of God in them ever more clearly.