prophecy

On Puzzled Prophets, Part 1

September 23, 2024 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Recently I preached in chapel for BJU Seminary. Here’s a summary of that message.

This semester in chapel, BJU Seminary is working through 1 Peter under the theme “Exiles with Expectant Hope.” Peter begins this letter, which is going to talk a lot about suffering and persecution, by pointing out the confident expectation that God’s people have of an inheritance “reserved in heaven for you” (1P 1.4). And this despite the undeniable fact of “manifold testings” (1P 1.6), which, he says, are not a sign that anything has gone wrong with God’s plan for us, but rather are the very means God is using to prepare us for future eternal service that brings glory to God (1P 1.7).

And then, suddenly, Peter puzzles us, on two counts: 1) what he says in verses 10-12; and 2) why he says it at all in this context. What’s his point?

Do you like puzzles? Let’s work on one.

What Peter Says

Peter says, quite surprisingly, that at certain times the Hebrew prophets did not understand the messages they brought from the Lord. Why is that surprising? Because the prophet’s whole job is to bring a message from God to a given audience—Israel, Judah, occasionally one of the neighboring countries. How can he do that if he doesn’t understand the message? What’s he going to say?

I suppose, to be thorough, we should look for specific examples of puzzled prophets in the OT. The one that comes most immediately to my mind is in Daniel 12, where Daniel is given a message from God, through a messenger, apparently in a vision. He sees two men, one on each side of a river (Da 12.5), one of whom asks a third person, “When does the end come?” (Da 12.6). He answers, “A time, times, and a half” (Da 12.7).

Do you find that perfectly clear? I certainly don’t. (I know, several interpreters see that as 3½ years, or half the tribulation period—but I’d suggest that all these years later, the whole thing’s still pretty obscure, as is evidenced by the fact that believers hold any number of eschatological positions.)

As further evidence, I note the very next verse, where the prophet himself says, “I heard, but I understood not.” You too, huh, Daniel?

So he does the reasonable thing and asks for an explanation—he repeats the original question.

And the angel says (this is the Olinger Revised Version), “Never you mind, fella.” He asks for clarification—and is refused!

Why?

The messenger tells him this much: “It’s not for now; it’s for later” (Da 12.9).

And then the book ends.

Whaaat?!

Well, whatever else we think about this specific prophecy, we have confirmation that Peter is not exaggerating. Here’s at least one case where the prophet does not understand the prophecy he’s given.

Are there others?

I don’t know of any others that are specified as fitting the pattern—though Ezekiel’s wheel vision comes pretty close—but I can think of several that the writers might not have understood:

Did Moses, writing Genesis and describing the Fall event in chapter 3, understand that very odd phrase “the seed of the woman” (Ge 3.15)? Adam and Eve almost certainly didn’t, given that at the time there hadn’t been even one baby born yet; but what about Moses, maybe two or three millennia later? Did he think, “Hmmm. virgin birth?”

Did Isaiah, seven centuries after Moses, understand when he wrote, “He shall make his grave with the wicked, and with the rich” (Is 53.9)? Is there any chance at all that he could have described with any degree of accuracy what would eventually happen?

We don’t know for sure, of course, because the Bible doesn’t specify, and we know that God doesn’t like it when we say he said things that he didn’t (e.g. Jer 14.14). But deep down inside, I doubt that they understood.

Next time: what specifically they were puzzled about, and why Peter brings up this point in the first place.

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The Names of Christmas, Part 2

December 20, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Part 1

Last time we noted what the name Jesus means—and that enabled us to understand what the angel is saying to Joseph in Matthew 1—this baby is Yahweh himself, the one who saves his people from their sins.

God has become one of us.

Now Matthew’s commentary on the angel’s words follows unavoidably:

²²Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, ²³Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

Matthew is writing to Jews, presenting Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ. One of the most obvious ways he does this is by citing prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, and showing specifically how Jesus fulfills those prophecies. Note how often he says, “All this was done, that it might be fulfilled,” or something similar—

Here, of the incarnation
2.15, of his time in Egypt
2.17, of the slaughter of the innocents
2.23, of his upbringing in Nazareth
4.14, of his preaching in Decapolis
8.17, of his healing ministry
12.17, of the Messianic secret
13.13, of the resistance by the religious leaders
13.35, of his parables
21.4, of the triumphal entry
26.54, 56, of his arrest, trial, and execution
27.9, of his betrayal
27.35, of the soldiers’ casting of lots

The first prophecy he chooses to cite reveals the second name of Christmas.

Emmanuel. God with us.

I suspect that neither Isaiah nor his hearers understood the prophecy. They probably thought, God is with us, as he has been with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and with David and Solomon, and with our people throughout our history.

Yes, it includes that idea, but the prophecy embraces a much more intimate “with” than that.

He is going to join us, to become one of us. He’s going to be not just present, but identified with us.

In theological terms, the person of the Son, eternally existent with a divine nature, is going to add to his person a second nature, a human one. He’s going to get tired, and get hurt, and die.

And he’s going to keep that human nature forever.

It amazes me that when God created the world, he knew that giving humans the ability to have a healthy relationship involved giving them the ability to choose—and that meant the ability to choose wrong. And that meant the possibility—nay, the certainty—of sin. And God knew that he would never allow his image to be permanently disfigured in such a way—that he would respond to our rebellion justly, with a sentence of death, and mercifully, with the opportunity for repentance and forgiveness. He would do whatever was necessary to be just and to justify—to rescue—his image. And he knew that justice would require an infinite sacrifice, which we would be unable to pay, and which he would be unable to pay either, because the penalty is death, and he cannot die.

So from the very beginning he knew that by creating humans, beings in his image, on whom he could bestow the joy of his friendship, he was committing himself to become one of them.

Forever.

What a commitment that was!

What a God he is!

Next time, a meditation on what happens when God becomes man.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 4

December 13, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

I’ve asserted my thesis–Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards—and I’ve given a couple of biblical passages that appear to confirm it, as well as an example to give us a more concrete understanding of the principle. Now for the hard question in any assertion—

So what?

I know people who have spent their whole lives trying to understand biblical prophecy. I know others who are troubled, or even disgusted, by the arguments and disagreements that spring from such efforts.

Why can’t we all just get along?

I think the matter we’re discussing here helps us put the modern situation into perspective.

The Bible contains a lot of prophecies that haven’t been fulfilled yet.
In many cases, God has designed these prophecies to be obscure until the time of fulfillment.
Just as Isaiah’s hearers, in trying to imagine a scenario in which Isaiah 53.9 could be fulfilled, would have been very unlikely to imagine what actually happened, so we should expect that our interpretations of the obscure prophecies will be off the mark in ways both minor and significant.
Thus it is likely that believers who love God and his Word and study it deeply will come to different conclusions about what precisely the eschatological material predicts.
The current disagreement is not a problem or evidence of some spiritual failure in the church; it’s exactly what we should expect.

So we have different views at the macroscopic level—

Premillennialists say that we should take prophetic passages just as literally as we take historical passages, because
- Changing hermeneutical horses in the middle of the stream is inconsistent, and
- Prophecies that have already been fulfilled have been fulfilled literally.
Postmillennialists say that if we really want to do that, we need to take literally Jesus’ teaching that the kingdom would come not suddenly, but slowly, over a long period of time (Mt 13.31-33).
And amillennialists say that if we want to take it literally, we’re going to have a problem with 7 heads and 10 horns. If there are clear contextual clues that we shouldn’t take it literally, then we shouldn’t take it literally. And isn’t the new covenant supposed to get away from the physical, literal, external stuff anyway, and move to the inner person of the heart (Jer 31.31-33)? And isn’t Jesus’ kingdom eternal, and not limited to a mere 1000 years (Isa 9.7)?

And even among premillennialists there are differences of interpretation—

Pretribulationists say that if we can be surprised by the Rapture (Mt 25.1-13), then it must be the very next thing to happen on the prophetic timeline.
Midtribulationists say that the Rapture is described as the two witnesses being caught up to heaven (Rev 11.12), at the seventh trumpet judgment (Rev 11.15), the “last trump” (1Co 15.52), at the midway point of the 7-year tribulation.
Posttribulationists say that both believers and unbelievers will be resurrected together at a single return of Christ at the end of the Tribulation (Dan 12.1-3).

Every one of these interpreters has a point. But they can’t all be right.

And maybe, based on what we’ve been discussing, just maybe none of them is completely right.

That means that we have to give one another some room to study, and think, and puzzle, and scratch our heads, and wonder. We need to hear one another’s arguments without making our primary goal to win the argument for our side. We need to approach this puzzle with some sense of historical and hermeneutical understanding, one that holds our own views loosely and humbly, one that waits for the Great Clarity that will come when it all comes to pass.

Humility. Tentativeness. Openness, within the bounds of clear biblical teaching.

Brotherly kindness. Cooperative investigation.

Now, I should say that I’m a pretribulational premillennialist. And I’m pretty sure I’m right. :-)

We ought to study, and think, and try to come to some sort of reasonable conclusion that accounts smoothly for all the biblical data. That’s what theology does, as a matter of stewardship of the great divine gift of the Word. We can’t just sit back lazily and be “panmillennialists—it’ll all pan out in the end.”

But we need to recognize our limits as well, and we need to recognize what those limits say about what kinds of doctrines are worth fighting over, and what kinds aren’t.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll write about that one of these days.

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 3

December 10, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2

I’ve asserted my thesis–Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards—and I’ve given a couple of biblical passages that appear to confirm it. Now it’s time to work with an example, making the idea a little more concrete.

One of the most well-known prophetic passages in the entire Bible, at least among Christians, is Isaiah 53. It’s the fourth and last in a series of “Servant Songs” in Isaiah, and the most well known, primarily, I suppose, because Georg Friedrich Handel included much of it in his oratorio Messiah.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows;
With his stripes we are healed;
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all;
He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter;
It pleased the LORD to bruise him.

We’ve heard the lines often, and they’ve become part of our consciousness, part of our culture, especially at Christmas.

Because of that familiarity, we’re unlikely to hear it the way Isaiah’s hearers—and Isaiah himself—did. The words were not familiar to them; they had to hear them, and try to understand them, for the first time.

And right in the middle of this song the Spirit has Isaiah write something that would have been quite puzzling to him and his Israelite audience:

He made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death.

Put yourself in Isaiah’s sandals.

Whaaaaat?!

That statement doesn’t make any sense at all.

The wicked and the rich don’t die similarly, and they’re not treated the same at the time. The wicked—criminals—are executed, probably by stoning, and their bodies are thrown out with the trash into the Valley of Hinnom, where the vultures pick at their rotting corpses until only the bones remain (Prov 30.17). A very undignified treatment.

The rich, on the other hand, are celebrated and mourned in their death, and their corpses are placed reverently in the family tomb, often a cave, sometimes carved laboriously out of solid rock.

How can both of these things be true for the Servant of Yahweh? How can he die in both disgrace and honor? How can he be numbered with transgressors and yet be buried with the rich?

As I say, our familiarity with these words—and with the prophecy’s fulfillment—means that the words don’t even give us pause. We nod our heads appreciatively, envisioning the fulfillment with perfect clarity—

Executed as a criminal, between two other criminals;
Has a secret disciple, a member of the Sanhedrin, well respected and very wealthy, who uses his influence to acquire the body after execution and places it in his own personal tomb.

Well, as a friend of mine used to say, “Hindsight’s 50/50.” :-) It’s easy to understand the question if you already know the answer, and it’s easy to “solve” a problem if you already know what happens.

But Isaiah and his hearers didn’t have any of that. They scratched their heads, grimaced, and wondered.

What could this possibly mean?

It’s obscure for more than 700 years. And during those years, generation after generation wonders.

And then, in real time and in the sight of all, the prophecy is fulfilled. The promise comes to pass.

And in an instant, the wonder of puzzlement gives way to the wonder of delight, and the fog lifts and understanding comes.

So that’s what it means! Wow!

The prophecy is obscure until the time of fulfillment—but then it’s as clear as day.

This isn’t some meaningless musing of a Nostradamus, whose prophecies are so vague that they could be fulfilled by any number of unspectacular events. No, this is a specific but incomprehensible prophecy, one that is immediately recognizable at its unique and precise fulfillment.

Discovery is a really great teaching technique. You remember what you discover, especially when the discovery hits you hard, right between the eyes. Especially when you solve a puzzle that’s been stumping the experts for centuries.

Maybe that’s why God did it this way.

Next time, I’ll draw some conclusions and applications from all this.

Part 4

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 1

December 3, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

A lot of Christians are confused, and some are even troubled, by biblical prophecy. It seems really hard to understand—what’s with those wheels that Ezekiel saw? and how do you get seven heads and ten horns on a beast? Other Christians are troubled by the fact that nobody can seem to agree on how things are supposed to turn out. Some people have been predicting the Rapture for decades now—and they’ve been wrong every time. And others, who look like perfectly good Christians, chuckle, “Rapture, huh? You don’t really believe that, do you?”

There’s a reason for all this. And when you understand it—the reason, not the prophecies—you’ll realize that there’s really nothing to be upset about.

Let me see if I can clarify some things.

I should begin by defining what I’m talking about. When I say “prophecy,” I’m talking about biblical predictions, places where the Bible says that something’s going to happen in the future. Technically, everything the Bible says is “prophecy,” in the sense that it’s a message from God to humans, delivered through mouthpieces, prophets. But here I’m using the word more narrowly.

The Bible does make a lot of predictions. The first one is in Gen 3.15, where God predicts that “the seed of the woman” will crush the serpent’s head. The last one is Jesus’ statement, “Surely I come quickly,” in Rev 22.20. And there are a lot of them in between.

We can sort them into 2 groups—those that have been fulfilled, and those that haven’t. A great many of those that have been fulfilled are about just 2 events—the exiles of Israel (especially the exile of Judah to Babylon and back) and the first coming of Christ. It can be instructive to study how those prophecies were stated and then how they were fulfilled; I think that study serves as a kind of lab for how we should expect other prophecies to be fulfilled (more on that later).

Most of the ones that haven’t been fulfilled are about the end times—what we call eschatology. And there is where most of the disagreement is among biblical scholars and among everyday Christians.

So why all the disagreement?

I would suggest that it springs primarily from the way God has chosen to give his prophecies.

In short, they’re really hard to understand.

Note that I’ve said that this is “the way God has chosen” to speak to us about these things. The fact that the predictions are obscure is not some kind of defect in God’s ability to communicate, some failure on his part. And I don’t think it’s a problem with our ability to understand, either.

Why do I say that? Because there are all kinds of statements in the Scripture that we understand perfectly well. God can speak clearly when he wants to, and he is completely justified in holding us accountable for those things. He’s told us who we are, where we came from, who he is, and how we can have a relationship with him. These things are clear, and life and death hang on our responding rightly to what he has clearly told us.

But when we cross over into predictive prophecy, it seems as though everything just goes a little crazy. Suddenly we’re knitting our eyebrows, furrowing our foreheads, shaking our heads. Wheel in a wheel in a wheel, indeed.

This stuff is hard. Charles Hodge, the great Princeton theologian of the 19^th century, said frankly that nobody was qualified to interpret biblical prophecy unless he’d spent an entire lifetime doing so—and since he, Hodge, hadn’t, he wasn’t going to make any authoritative pronouncements.

So here’s my thesis.

Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards.

God has decided, for reasons of his own, to speak this way. I’ll speculate later on a possible reason for that, but for now I’d like to spend a few posts demonstrating

that my thesis is true,
that it explains the current diversity of views about the end times, and
that it gives us some guidance on how we ought to study and apply these matters.

(If you’re expecting me to finish the series by telling you when Jesus is coming back, you’re going to be disappointed.)

See you next time.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

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Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 8: On a Scientific Examination of the Data

August 31, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

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Part 1      Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Since we’ve raised the issue of Messianic prophecies, there are plenty of others worth adding to the pile:

That Messiah’s mother would be a virgin (Isa 7.14). (And yes, the Hebrew word there means virgin, as the choice of the Septuagint translators shows: they chose the Greek word parthenos, which unambiguously means virgin. The Septuagint translators were much more likely to know the nuances of a Hebrew word in their day than a modern scholar with naturalistic biases.) See Matt 1.22-23.
That he would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5.2). You’ll recall that Herod’s advisors used this prophecy to tell the Babylonian magi (the “wise men”) where they could find the infant king (Matt 2.3-6).
That he would spend early years in Egypt (Hos 11.1). See Matt 2.15.
That one preparing his way would cry out in the wilderness (Isa 40.3). See Matt 3.3.
That he would bring light to Galilee (Isa 9.1-2). See Matt 4.12-16.
That he would heal people (Isa 53.4). See Matt 8.16-17.
That he would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey but also as a king (Zech 9.9). See Matt 21.1-5.
That he would be betrayed by a friend, one who ate bread with him (Ps 41.9). See Matt 26.20-25, 47-56.
That he would be sold for 30 pieces of silver (Zech 11.12-13). See Matt 27.9-10.
That he would be silent before his accusers (Isa 53.7-8). See Matt 27.12-14.
That he would be tortured (Isa 50.6). See Matt 26.67-68.
That he would be mockingly urged to let God deliver him (Ps 22.7-8). See Matt 27.39-40.
That he would be pierced (Zech 12.10). See Matt 27.35.
That his clothes would be disposed of by lot (Ps 22.18). See Matt 27.35.
That his death would be alongside both the wicked and the rich (Isa 53.9, 12). See Matt 27.38, 57-60.

Whew. That’s quite a list.

And did you notice a pattern?

All the confirmations I’ve listed are from Matthew.

Matthew is clearly writing his Gospel to demonstrate to his Jewish audience that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. One of the clearest ways he does that is by demonstrating that Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophecies; he’s constantly saying, “All these things happened so that it might be fulfilled which was written by the prophet … .” A study of those passages would be worth your time; I haven’t included all of them in the list above.

I began this series by saying that I’ve found two objective evidences that the Bible is not an ordinary book. We’ve looked—briefly—at both its literary unity and its prophetic accuracy. After a lifetime of study, I find those evidences compelling.

Perhaps you don’t. Fair enough. But I hope you’ll be intellectually honest enough—and scientific enough—not to simply dismiss evidences that don’t support what you’d like to believe. A pile of hard data calls for serious investigation.

You wouldn’t want to be unscientific, would you?

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 7: Trifecta!

August 28, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

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So we’ve seen that Daniel’s specific prophecy of the rise and fall of Alexander the Great was at best very unlikely to have been written after Alexander’s death in 323 BC; and if Daniel describes Antiochus IV in chapter 11, then the skeptic’s position is even less likely. Daniel is accurately predicting future events, not faking it.

What say we go ahead and dispense with the skeptic’s position? How about if we demonstrate that it’s just impossible?

OK, at your insistence.

Daniel makes another prophecy. He speaks of a series of “weeks” yet to come (Daniel 9.25-27). After 7 weeks, followed by 62 weeks, Messiah shall “be cut off” (v 26). Now, that’s a surprising statement, because Messiah is pictured in much of the OT as a victorious king (1Sam 2.10; Ps 2.2; 20.6; Hab 3.13); the term is metaphorically applied more than once to strong kings (2Sam 22.51; Ps 132.17; Isa 45.1). What’s this about being “cut off”?

And when will it happen? At the end of 69 “weeks,” Daniel says. Most interpreters take the word week (which is just the Hebrew word seven) to refer to a period of 7 years (compare Gen 29.27). That would make 69 weeks a period of 483 years.

So Daniel says Messiah will be “cut off” 483 years after something. After what? After “the going forth of the commandment to restore and build Jerusalem” (Dan 9.25). When was that?

Well, there were actually several events that he might be referring to. We already know that Cyrus gave the Jews permission to return to Jerusalem in 538 BC. That proclamation included the commandment to “build the house of the Lord God of Israel … which is in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1.3). So that could be it, though it doesn’t include a command to build the city itself.

In 458 BC, Artaxerxes gave Ezra permission to take more Jews back to Jerusalem (Ezra 7.11-26) and to set up the priestly (Ezra 7.17) and judicial systems (Ezra 7.25-26). Artaxerxes also doesn’t mention building the city, but he does specify that Ezra can use treasury money for anything else that seemed good to him (Ezra 7.18), including but not limited to “whatever else is required for the house of your God” (Ezra 7.20).

In 445 BC the same Artaxerxes also gave Nehemiah permission to return to Jerusalem (Nehemiah 2.5-8). We know that Nehemiah used this trip to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls (Nehemiah 2.17).

So which one is it?

There are well-regarded scholars who argue for each of these. But I’d suggest that the middle one seems most likely. Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls in 445 seems to presume that there’s already something worth protecting inside. And Ezra’s large group of returnees (Ezra 2.64-65) surely would have built sufficient housing.

So what’s 483 years after 458 BC? Somewhere around AD 35.

I say “somewhere around” because getting more precise than this is little difficult, for at least three reasons. First, we use a solar year (365.25 days), and most of the ancient world used a lunar year (360 days) with various adjustments as needed for accuracy, so coordinating our calendar with the Babylonian and Hebrew calendars involves some work. Second, there’s some discussion among scholars over whether the verb “cut off” might refer to an event other than Messiah’s physical death. And finally, scholars disagree over the year of Jesus’ death; common assertions range from AD 30 to AD 36. So this is as close as we’re going to get with any degree of certainty at this point.

But seriously. Are we going to ignore the fact that Daniel predicted the date of Messiah’s death? What are the odds of that?

And what about the skeptic’s standard fallback? Prophecy is impossible, so the passage must have been written after the fact and passed off as an earlier document. Not even the skeptics attempt that one here, because it’s just impossible. The book of Daniel was certainly in the Hebrew Scriptures before the death of Christ; Jesus even refers to this very passage from Daniel (Dan 9.27; also Dan 11.31) in his Olivet Discourse (Matt 24.15) and refers to another passage (Dan 7.13) in his trial before Caiaphas (Mat 26.64).

So. A specific, numeric prophecy of a significant event, fulfilled.

Again, you can reject the Bible if you want to. You can consider it merely an ancient writing of an interesting but misguided people. But you cannot do so—legitimately—without dealing with the evidence.

Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 6: On a Roll

August 24, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

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The study of fulfilled biblical prophecies is a book in itself. We’ve looked at Jeremiah’s “70 years” prophecy of Judah’s exile in Babylon; in this post we’ll look at a prophecy that came during the Babylonian Captivity from a prophet living in Babylon.

Daniel went into exile in Babylon as a young man during the first deportation about 606 BC (Dan 1.1-6). According to the story (Dan 2), God sent Nebuchadnezzar a dream that he did not understand. The king, apparently suspecting his regular seers as frauds, demanded that they tell him both what he had dreamed and its meaning. When the seers protested, he ordered them all executed. Daniel then stepped up and offered to fulfill the king’s demand, and God gave him the answer “in a night vision” (Dan 2.19). (I note that in the Scripture, dreams occur while the recipient is sleeping, and visions occur while the recipient is awake. Daniel was apparently awake all night, awaiting the answer from God.)

Daniel reports to the king the next day with the substance of the dream and its meaning. Nebuchadnezzar had seen a large statue, with a head of gold, a chest of silver, hips and thighs of brass, and legs and feet of mixed iron and clay. Daniel reported that the image represented coming world powers: Babylon itself (the head), then Medo-Persia (the chest), then Greece (the hips), and finally Rome (the legs).

Now, Daniel does not name any of these kingdoms except for the first, but their reference is unmistakable, especially in light of later visions given to Daniel himself (Daniel 7-8), where Medo-Persia and Greece are named, and where the king of Greece is said to be “broken” and replaced by 4 kings (Dan 8.22)—an event that you can read about in your world history book in the section entitled “The Death of Alexander the Great.”

No one questions the accuracy of these predictions, because it would be foolish to. They are precisely accurate. So what’s a skeptic to do? Well, all he can do is assert that such a prediction is obviously impossible—so the author must have written after the events occurred and falsely claimed to be Daniel.

Well, that’s theoretically possible, of course. I could write a history of World War II and put Rasputin’s name on it. But I’d have a really hard time passing it off as some kind of miracle and getting it broadly accepted as legitimate. And therein lies the problem with this explanation.

The view requires that the account be written after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, and even 40 years or so later, when it became clear that the kingdom would be divided into 4 stable parts. And even that’s not good enough. Daniel appears to describe Antiochus IV (Dan 11), who didn’t begin to reign until 175 BC.

OK, so why couldn’t the book have been written after that?

That’s pretty simple—because Daniel is included in the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) into Greek, which was done in the 200s BC. (We have manuscripts of it from that century, and it is cited by other authors of that century.) How did pseudo-Daniel write about Antiochus, who didn’t start reigning until 175 BC? How did he write about the division of Alexander’s empire, which didn’t occur until perhaps 300 or 290 BC, and get all Jewry to accept his fraud as Scripture in time to get it into the Septuagint before 200 BC at the very latest? Jews are pretty skeptical about adding to their Scripture, if you haven’t noticed.

Now, I suppose there might be just a liiiiittle bit of wiggle room for the skeptic in those dates. But we haven’t finished with the data yet. Next time we’ll look at evidence that the skeptic’s explanation simply cannot stand.

Part 7 Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 5: Right Horse Every Time

August 21, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

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So one evidence that the Bible is an extraordinary book is its literary coherence absent a human editor. Back in Part 1 I said there were at least two verifiable evidences—what’s the second?

The Bible makes a lot of predictions. And not vague ones, like a Chinese fortune cookie (“You will meet someone today!”), or completely indecipherable ones, like Nostradamus (“A thing existing without any senses will cause its own end to happen through artifice”), but specific predictions that can be verified.

The predictive prophecies in the Bible fall into two groups: those that haven’t happened yet (we call those “end-time prophecies,” or “eschatology”), and those that have. Of the latter group there are a great many, but the two historical events most actively predicted are the Babylonian Captivity and the earthly life of Jesus. I’d like to look at several of these.

Jeremiah lived in Judah during the time that Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon was advancing against this southern kingdom. He prophesied that Babylon would win and counseled Judah to surrender. (You can imagine what kind of response that got from the king.) Very specifically, he said that Judah would go into captivity in Babylon for 70 years and then return (Jer 25.8-14). Eventually he bought property and saved the deed as evidence of his confidence that Judah would return to the land (Jer 32.6-15).

Seventy years of captivity in Babylon. How did he do?

Nebuchadnezzar’s first attack on Judah came in the third year of Jehoiakim (Dan 1.1), which would have been about 606 BC. He took a relatively few captives, including Daniel. He returned about 10 years later, in 597 BC, and took 10,000 captives, including the new king Jehoiachin (2K 24.8-17). A third wave, the Big One, came in 586, when the Temple was destroyed and the city left in ruins (2K 25.8-21).

Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon descended, in more ways than one, through his heirs until Nabonidus overthrew the dynasty in 556 BC. His son, Belshazzar, quickly became his co-regent in 553. As we all know, it was during a feast thrown by Belshazzar in Babylon that the kingdom was overthrown by the Persian Cyrus II (“the Great”) in 539 BC (Daniel 5).

Cyrus was enlightened, compared to his contemporary dictators. He figured that exiled peoples would probably be happier if they could go home, and about 538 BC he issued a proclamation allowing exactly that (Ezra 1.1-4). A number of Jewish exiles organized (Ezra 1.5-11) and returned to Jerusalem (Ezra 2) in 536 BC. They rebuilt the altar at the site of the former Temple and began sacrifices, which had ceased during the Captivity (Ezra 3). However, they quickly ran into opposition from the local Persian officials (Ezra 4), and construction stopped for about 16 years.

In 520 BC the prophets Haggai and Zechariah arrived (Ezra 5) and began exhorting the people to rededicate themselves to the construction work, which they quickly did (Haggai 1.12-15). Just 4 years later, in 516 BC, the Second Temple was dedicated (Ezra 6.13-18).

Now, that’s a lot of dates. What do they say about Jeremiah’s prophecy?

Right away we notice that Judah returned to the land in 536 BC, after Cyrus’s decree. And that’s 70 years after the first deportation. We also notice that the Second Temple was dedicated in 516 BC, 70 years after it was destroyed in 586.

Well, whaddaya know? Jeremiah was right. In fact, he was right twice, with just one prophecy. That’s really difficult to pull off, especially since Jeremiah was long dead by the time either of these resolutions occurred.

I suspect a skeptical reader might accuse me of cherry-picking—of finding any old numbers in the narrative that are 70 years apart and calling the prophecy validated. Slanted selection of evidence, that’s called in research.

Fair enough. The allegation should be examined for slanted selection.

So let me ask. How would you calculate the length of an exile? Wouldn’t you reckon from the first deportation to the first return? And in a case where the defining event of the exile was the destruction of the central monument to the nation’s unique religious belief, wouldn’t you count from the destruction to the reconstruction? How else would you count?

So there’s a clear, verifiable, objectively countable prediction, for which there is abundant historical confirmation of veracity.

You can reject the premise that the Bible is extraordinary, but you can’t legitimately do that without dealing with this evidence.

By the way, this isn’t the only such prediction, not by a mile. We’ll look at more in the next post.

Part 6 Part 7 Part 8