The thing that makes the Bible such an amazing book is the way it predicts events in the future, which then happen. I don’t mean the sort of thing you can read in your average horoscope – ‘Today you will meet a handsome stranger. Tomorrow it will be dry if it’s not raining.’ I mean specific predictions which are unmistakably fulfilled. There are hundreds of them in the Bible.

Ezekiel predicted in the sixth century BC that Tyre (a major city and thriving industrial centre) would be defeated and utterly destroyed. Nebuchadnezzar and then Alexander the Great brought about the fulfilment of this prophecy in 333 BC. It even says in Ezekiel 26:14, ‘I will leave only a bare rock where fishermen can dry their nets.’ Sure enough, after Tyre was taken over by the Arabs in AD 1291, it became a poor fishing village. Among many other fulfilled predictions, Amos foretold the downfall of Israel, Jeremiah the capture of Jerusalem, Isaiah the return of the Jews from exile, and Jesus the destruction of Jerusalem. Jesus’ own coming to earth was predicted in a precise way. He was born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). He would enter Jerusalem on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9), be rejected and killed (Isaiah 53:3-5), while men gambled for his clothes (Psalm 22:18). All these predictions were made over 400 years before Jesus came. Each one happened. In fact, not a single prediction in the Bible can be shown to be false – a remarkable record.

Stephen Gaukroger

Source: Stephen Gaukroger, It Makes Sense, p.64-65