Carl Pollard
Prophecy is one of the boldest claims any religious text can make: that a transcendent God reveals specific future events, sometimes centuries or millennia in advance, through human spokesmen. The Bible contains roughly 2,500 prophecies, of which most have already been fulfilled with 100 percent accuracy! The remaining prophecy are yet to come with the return of Christ. This track record is unique among world religions and texts.
Deuteronomy 18:21–22 gives us the standard: “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken.” A single verifiable failure disqualifies a prophet. By this biblical standard, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, Nostradamus, and every modern “psychic” are eliminated. No biblical prophet ever fails when the prophecy is testable.
Biblical prophecy is extremely detailed, not the vague horoscope-style language used by many today. For example:
- Micah 5:2 (700 BC) names Bethlehem Ephrathah as the Messiah’s birthplace, out of hundreds of Judean villages.
- Isaiah 44:28–45:1 (700 BC) names Cyrus as the Persian king who would release the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem, 150 years before Cyrus was born.
- Psalm 22 (1000 BC) describes crucifixion, nails in hands and feet, garments divided by lots, centuries before Rome invented the practice.
- Zechariah 11:12–13 foretells the betrayal price of thirty pieces of silver, cast to the potter in the temple, fulfilled to the letter in Judas Iscariot (Matthew 27:3–10).
Mathematician Peter Stoner calculated the odds of one man fulfilling just eight messianic prophecies at 1 in 10¹⁷ (one followed by seventeen zeros). For forty-eight prophecies, the probability drops to 1 in 10¹⁵⁷ a number so large that if you filled the state of Texas two feet deep with silver dollars, marked one, and asked a blindfolded person to pick it on the first try, those are the odds.
Skeptics dismiss prophecy as “after-the-fact interpretation” or “self-fulfilling.” Yet many predictions (the fall of Tyre in Ezekiel 26; the precise sequence of empires in Daniel 2 and 7; the desolation of Edom in Obadiah, Jeremiah 49) were fulfilled centuries later in ways no human could manipulate.
Biblical prophecy is not fortune-telling; it is history written in advance by the only Being who stands outside time. Its perfect record remains the strongest external evidence that the Bible is exactly what it claims to be: the word of the living God!
The Preacher Pollard Blog 