T
he Greatest Prophecy
Every so often I think it is important for me to contemplate and think about why I believe that God exists and his word is true. This I hope will continuously energize my faith and strengthen me in my walk with God. Hopefully it will also provide food for thought to others. Especially to those who mean the most to me.
To me there is more than enough evidence to show the existence of God, and of the truth of the Bible. In this study, I will lay out the evidence which has convinced me that God exists. This evidence can be categorized as subjective and objective evidence. By subjective evidence I mean that evidence which is personal to me but may not be meaningful to someone else. What to me is incontrovertible evidence, to others might be coincidence. This is what I mean by subjective evidence. Objective evidence on the other hand is evidence that should be convincing to a reasonable person. That is it should be convincing enough or strong enough to convince a reasonable person.
I will start off with the strongest evidence I know of, which shows the existence of God. I will start off with the premise that only God can tell the future. In fact in Isaiah in two places in the book of Isaiah, God declares as one of his attributes the power to tell the future. In fact he throws a challenge to all those who believe in idols and false gods, saying that he is the only one who can foretell the future. He is the one who knows the end from the beginning. See Isaiah 41:21-29, and 44:6-8. I think that we can all agree on the premise that no human can accurately and consistently predict events that will take place in the distant future. Anyone who does this must either be God, or sent by God. This in fact is also a good way of differentiating false prophets from real ones sent by God.
To me, one of the greatest prophecies in the Bible is found in Deuteronomy 28:36-69. When God led the Israelites out of Egypt and was about to lead them into the promised land. At that time, God through Moses gave them a second reading of his laws and entered into a Covenant with them. After Moses finished reading the laws, he admonished the Israelites to obey these laws and follow God. Through Moses God gave the Israelites a promise, telling them that if they observed all the laws that he gave them on that date God would bless them abundantly in every imaginable way. These blessing are found in Deuteronomy 28:1-14. However God also warned them that should they choose to disobey Him and break the laws that He was giving them that day, He would rain down terrible curses on them. These curses are found in Deuteronomy 28:15-69. One of the curses that God said He would inflict upon them was that He would destroy Israel and make it to cease existing as a nation. That the Israelites would be taken as slaves and dispersed throughout the world, where they would be persecuted and oppressed.
The interesting point is that when God gave these laws through Moses and warned Israel of the consequences of not keeping them he also predicted that Israel would eventually break these laws and would worship idols and false gods. He said that when this happened the curses would come to pass and the Israelites would be taken captive and they would be scattered to the ends of the earth. See Deuteronomy 28:49 -68 (especially verses 63-68). Having said this God also said that in their captivity they would return to him and worship him and he would have pity on them and gather them from all the places on earth where he would scatter them and bring them back to Israel and restore them as a nation.
This happened exactly as God said. Initially the Israelites did keep these laws, and obeyed God and his commandments. During this period they were abundantly blessed by God just as He said He would bless them. They conquered the lands around them and were very prosperous. However later on, just as God said would happen, the Israelites strayed and abandoned God. History shows us that in 586 BC , the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar, invaded Israel and took the Israelites into exile. After that Israel ceased to exist as a nation and as a country. Those Israelites/Jews who remained in Israel no longer lived in a country called Israel, but in a place called Judea, and later Palestine.
Under Cyrus of Persia, the Jews in captivity were at one point allowed to go back to Judea and rebuild Jerusalem, under Nehemiah. However neither the country, nor the nation of, Israel was reestablished until thousand s of years later. If one were to consider the return of the Jews to Judah under Nehemiah, as being the fulfillment of God’s promise that he would have pity on them and bring them back to Israel, then we can see the cycle of the demise of the Israelites/Jews repeating. They again strayed from God, and forgot their covenant with him, and as a result, in 70 AD, the Romans totally wiped out Jerusalem, destroying the second Temple. Nearly all of the Israelites this time were dispersed throughout the world as slaves and as second-class citizens, hated, reviled, persecuted by all the nations into which they were dispersed. They remained in this state until April of 1947, when after World War II the state of Israel was reformed. Ever since, Jewish people have been coming back to Israel from every corner of the world where they had been dispersed. Today the state of Israel is a powerful, vibrant nation, stronger than ever. It can be argued then that God’s prophecy regarding Israel was fulfilled twice.
How could Moses, or anyone else for that matter, have knowledge of these things that would happen thousands of years later? To my knowledge, no one else, neither human, nor self-proclaimed god, has been able to prophecy something like this, this accurately. To me this is definitive and objective evidence that God exists, that He is all powerful, and that the Bible is true. There is no rational explanation for this other than God himself told Moses of these events. We are fortunate enough to have witnessed the occurrence as prophesied.
Not only does God set prophesying the future accurately, as a test for determining the true God, but also knowing what happened in the past as a test. See Isaiah 41: 22. At first I had not noticed this and it seemed a strange test to tell if a God is real by telling us accurately of the past. However, upon further reflection, and in studying about creation, it all made sense. God has laid out the story of creation in Genesis 1: 1-31. He told us of the former things, i.e. the very first things that happened in the universe and earth. In later writings, I will show how modern day scientific findings, I believe support God’s account of creation. This showing us that God had in fact shown us the former things. Again how could Moses, without the benefit of modern scientific tools, or anyone else for that matter, have knowledge of the birth of the universe and the order of creation? Again the answer is simply that God himself revealed these things to Moses.
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