15 - Witness of Prophecy. God's People

XV- WITNESS OF PROPHECY-GOD’S PEOPLE "Behold, I have told you beforehand."-Jesus. NOT only is the history of the heathen nations foretold, but as might be expected, the fortunes of God’s people have been faithfully delineated.

Nearly thirty-five centuries ago, Moses outlined the history of the Jews to the close of time: "And I will destroy your high places. . . . And I will make your cities a waste, and will bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savor of your sweet odors. And I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies that dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And you will I scatter among the nations, and I will draw out the sword after you: and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste." Leviticus 26:30-33. In their stubbornness of heart, the Jews crucified the Saviour, and brought all this woe upon their head. No one can deny that the sanctuaries of the Jews were destroyed, the temple demolished, and the people themselves scattered, "rooted out" of their own land, as Moses said they would be. "Then men shall say, . . . The Lord rooted them out of their land in anger." Deuteronomy 29:25, Deuteronomy 29:28. Not only were they to be deprived of their land, but their enemies should dwell in it. Still the land and the cities were to be desolate and ruined. Dean Stanley is convinced that "above all other countries in the world it is a land of ruins."-"Syria and Palestine,"

It is a strange fact of history that a land so filled with ruins should be inhabited, or being inhabited, the ruins should not have been utilized or removed. Moses foresaw, and so stated the fact. The land flowing with milk and honey became desolate. Dr. Olin remarks: "The very labor which was expended on these sterile hills in former times has increased their present sterility. The natural vegetation has been swept away, and no human cultivation now occupies the terraces which once took the place of forests and pastures." Speaking of the district about Lake Huleh, Mark Twain said: "It is seven in the morning; and as we are in the country, the grass ought to be sparkling with dew, the flowers enriching the air with their fragrance, and the birds singing in the trees. But alas, there is no dew here, nor flowers, nor birds, nor trees. There is a plain and an unshaded lake, and beyond them some barren mountains."-"The New Pilgrim’s Progress," page 124.

Though ruined, desolate, bereft of her own people, Palestine was nevertheless to be preeminently a land of pilgrimages; for Moses said that attention should be called to the condition of the country by "the foreigner that shall come from a far land." Deuteronomy 29:22. There was to be no wealth to allure, no beauty to attract; still it was to be the land to which the stranger from afar should come. To-day fifty languages are spoken in Jerusalem alone, so numerous are the different peoples represented. ("Encyclopedia Britannica," eleventh edition, article "Palestine.")

"And Jehovah will scatter thee among all peoples, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth. . . . And among these nations, shalt thou find no ease, and there shall be no rest for the sole of thy foot. . . . And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have no assurance of thy life." Deuteronomy 28:64-66.

There is nothing in all history so pathetic and so terrible as the tale of the Jews. Two millions were killed or starved to death or sold into slavery worse than death in A. D. 70. Over half a million more were slaughtered by the Romans sixty years later. The history of the Jews has been but the record of the slaughter of a nation, extending over nineteen centuries. "No fanatic monk," says Milman, "set the populace in commotion, no public calamity took place, no atrocious or extravagant report was propagated, but it fell upon the heads of this unhappy caste. In Germany, the black plague raged in all its fury; and wild superstition charged the Jews, as elsewhere, with causing and aggravating the misery, and themselves enjoying a guilty comparative security amid the universal desolation. . . . The same dark stories were industriously propagated, readily believed, and ferociously avenged, of fountains poisoned, children crucified, the Host stolen and outraged. . . . Still, persecuted in one city, they fled to another, and thus spread over the whole of Germany, Brunswick, Austria, Franconia, the Rhine provinces, Silesia, Brandenburg, Bohemia, Lithuania, and Poland. Oppressed by the nobles, anathematized by the clergy, hated as rivals in trade by burghers in commercial cities, despised and abhorred by the populace, their existence is known by the chronicle, rarely of protective edicts, more often of their massacres."-"History of the Jews," volume 3, pages 222, 223.

Strange as it seems, rooted out of their own land, without central government, without ruler, scattered over the whole earth, they have nevertheless been preserved. "Massacred by thousands, yet springing up again from their undying stock, the Jews appear at all times and in all regions. Their perpetuity, their national immortality, is at once the most curious problem to the political inquirer; to the religious man a subject of profound and awful admiration."-Milman, "History of the Jews," volume 2, pages 398, 399.

Even to-day we are often startled and shocked by the news of some dread and sudden massacre of the Jews in foreign lands, reminding us that the sword is still drawn out after this unfortunate people. But that is not all. "Jehovah will bring thee, and thy king whom thou shalt set over thee, unto a nation that thou hast not known, thou nor thy fathers; and there shalt thou serve other gods, wood and stone." Deuteronomy 28:36. In Deuteronomy 28:64, the same doom is repeated when they shall be scattered over the earth. The temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and the temple of Jerusalem were destroyed the same day. The temple tax of half a shekel paid by every Jew for the maintenance of their temple was after this, used to help rebuild the Roman temple. In vain they refused to pay. They were compelled to lay their offering on the altar of Jove. Not only were they thus obliged to worship the idols of heathen Rome, but papal Rome exacted a greater toll from them, forcing thousands of them to build for her houses of worship, and to supply the money for the adorning and worshiped images; and many of the Jews were compelled to worship these images on pain of death. Thus they worshiped gods, which neither they nor their fathers had known.

Still further, "The children of Israel shall abide many days without king, and without prince, and without sacrifice, and without pillar, and without ephod or teraphim." Hosea 3:4. As we know, the last king perished in the first century; but a prince of the captivity was honored for centuries. The last prince of the captivity perished on the scaffold in the eleventh century. And they have now been "many days without king, and without prince."

They were to be "without sacrifice, and without pillar." The pillar has reference to even the rudest holy place for sacrifice. For eighteen centuries, there has been neither sacrifice nor holy place to Israel an almost unbearable punishment.

They were likewise to be "without ephod or teraphim." These were used in the priestly ministrations in the endeavor to learn the mind of God. In the destruction of Jerusalem, the entire priesthood perished. (Milman, "History of the Jews," volume 3, page 414.) The rabbi has taken the place of the priest, and the synagogue has succeeded to the sacred service of the holy temple. The critics, who endeavor to account for these phenomenal forecasts on the supposition of guesswork or accident, are more credulous than the Christians, who believe the obvious fact that the prophecies were inspired - history written in advance. The critics rather elude than elucidate the facts. If men are such good guessers, how does it happen that only in the Bible have we accounts of the successful guesses of men? If Plato, for instance, had accurately forecast the history of Greece for a hundred years, not to say two thousand, how eagerly the unbelievers would have seized upon the fact to exalt Plato! Even as it is, this heathen philosopher is lauded as inspired. But the Bible has foretold the history of all the great nations of the world, not merely for a hundred years, nor for a thousand, but for all time. The historians can add only the details of fulfillment of the prophecies. Puny man, who cannot himself tell what a day will bring forth, calls this guesswork. Such arrogance and willful ignorance stand rebuked before the fact that the men who so confidently exclaim, "Mere guessing!" are themselves unable to predict a single event, not to mention a whole series of them, all contrary to probability- for nothing seemed more improbable than that a nation could be scattered to every nation on earth, hated and killed by them all, yet remain for two thousand years distinct. In pronouncing judgment upon the last king of Israel, Ezekiel also outlined, with a few epic strokes of the pen, the whole history of the world till the second coming of Jesus: "Thus saith the Lord God ; Remove the diadem, and take off the crown : . . . exalt him that is low, and abase him that is high. I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it: and it shall be no more, until He come whose right it is; and I will give it Him." Ezekiel 21:26-27. The crown thus removed from Israel passed successively to Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, Note the historic truth of prediction. Babylon was conquered by Medo-Persia, Medo-Persia by Greece, and Greece by Rome; but concerning Rome, the prophet says, not that it shall be "overturned" by another power, but "it shall be no more," it shall fade away, and there shall be no other universal kingdoms until Jesus, the King of kings, shall come, In the brief space of five hundred years, four universal kingdoms successively bore undisputed sway, as prophecy had said; but in all the two thousand years since the establishment of the universal empire of Rome, there has been no successor to the mighty four. Contrary to all human analogy and reason, four universal empires in five centuries have been followed by twenty centuries in which, instead of sixteen more universal kingdoms, there has been not so much as one set up, despite the desperate attempts of ambitious Napoleons. The history of the Christian era is an almost uncanny commentary upon the words, "It shall be no more, until He come whose right it is."

Babylon’s golden pomp, Persia’s innumerable hosts, Greece’s brilliant sway, Rome’s invincible might - where are they all? These world powers, which seemed destined to rule forever - where are they? - Vanished into the dim mists of long ago, sunk into the oblivion of dust-covered antiquity. All that is left of their once proud power is a few moldy ruins and a name. As "the flower of the grass" they have perished, and only the ashes of their former greatness remain to attest the eternal truth of the inspired record, and to comfort us with the increasingly evident truth that "surely the Lord Jehovah will do nothing, except He reveal His secret unto His servants the prophets." Amos 3:7. "God hath spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began." Acts 3:21.

Since we find such unequivocal testimony to the truthfulness and inspiration of Old Testament prophets, let us turn to the New Testament prophets. We should expect at least equal authority for them. Let us pass directly to the greatest of all prophets - Jesus. "For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A Prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; Him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever He shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that Prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people." Acts 3:22-23. From all who recognize any authority whatever in the Bible, such inevasible testimony commands attention. Let us listen to His words where He explicitly claims the prophetic gift: "Behold, I have told you beforehand." Matthew 24:25. In answer to the disciples’ anxious request that He tell them when would be the destruction of Jerusalem, and the sign of His coming and of the end of the world, Jesus told them, in a few graphic sentences of awful significance, the punishment that would befall those who were to utter those historic words, "His blood be on us, and on our children," and the tribulation of the faithful, down the ages to the end of time.

Christ said that when Jerusalem was overthrown, not one stone of the temple should remain on another. After the most horrible siege in all history, in which a million Jews perished, Jerusalem was destroyed by Titus in A. D. 70. Later the Jews began to return; and sixty years after the destruction of the city, all the Jews were banished, and the site of the temple was plowed up. (Angus, "Encyclopedic Handbook of the Bible," page 285.) Thus were literally fulfilled not only the Saviour’s words, but also Micah’s, spoken eight hundred years previously: "Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps." Micah 3:12.

Then in a few terse sentences, bursting with meaning, Jesus foretold the history of the world from the time when Rome was to "be no more," "for nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines and earthquakes in divers places." The political history of the world was not, as before, one universal kingdom following another, nor even one kingdom ruling another; but "kingdom against kingdom" was the divine phrase which foretold nineteen hundred years of bloody warfare. In no other instance was so much political history ever embodied in so few words. With awe and amazement we read, on the pages of history, the accounts of a thousand such movements of kingdom against kingdom; and the end is not yet. Nineteen centuries are but one long commentary upon Christ’s words. So much for the civil history of the world. Christ next outlined as graphically the religious history of all time: "Then shall they deliver you up unto tribulation, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all the nations for My name’s sake. And then shall many stumble, and shall deliver up one another, and shall hate one another."

Again let history speak. Have Christians been in tribulation? Let the unanimous reply of historians from Tacitus the heathen to Gibbon the infidel tell us. Have Christians been killed? Let the blood of millions of martyrs testify. Have the nations hated the Christians? Again let the pages of the past bear witness to the universal execration in which they have been held. But saddest of all, besides being hated of nations and killed by hostile powers, have Christians hated and betrayed one another? What infidel does not taunt the Christian with the obvious, infinitely sad fact? What Tom Paine lets slip an opportunity to ridicule, denounce, revile, and hold up to fiendish contempt the Christianity that saturated the soil of Europe with the blood of its professed brothers, in the name of the gentle Jesus? How strangely true, in the light of history, are those mysterious words of Jesus, "I came not to send peace, but a sword." But let not the Christian’s faith in Christianity falter and faint when some all too ready skeptic, whether in the church or out, sneers at Christianity because of Christians’ betrayal and slaughter of one another; but let him see therein only one more evidence of the exact truthfulness of the Scriptures. Every taunt of the unbeliever against Christianity, based upon the grounds of its bloody past, is an unconscious, unwilling, and therefore valuable testimony to the unaltering fact that the Bible is not only true in its accounts of the past, but minutely accurate in its forecast of all ages. The Christian may well blush at the fierce hatred displayed by his ancestors toward one another; but when mocked with it, he should rejoice that in the very fact of Christianity’s greatest shame lies one of the most impregnable proofs of the divine origin of the Christianity that is derided - a proof which even his enemies never tire of thrusting into his face. Instead of blushing and stammering and apologizing, then, let him arouse, and grasp firmly the proof so openly offered by his enemies, of the truth of Christianity, and upon the impregnable rock of the Saviour’s fulfilled words build a victorious faith. Let him grasp firmly, gladly, aggressively the weapons thus put into his hands by the enemies of the gospel. Let him rejoice whenever higher critics or infidels pile up books telling of the world’s hatred of Christians, of the Christians’ hatred of one another; for they are only adding proof upon proof that as Jesus said upon this very occasion, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away." Thus what the unbeliever in his blindness thinks is a weapon to demolish Christianity and the Bible will prove to be but a boomerang that will in time destroy him and his puny power. That Christ’s words shall not pass away He tells us in even more unequivocal language: "This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations; and then shall the end come." For hundreds of years, nothing seemed more unlikely than the spreading of the gospel to all nations of the earth. For fourteen hundred years, no headway was made. In fact, ground was lost. Then a new continent, doubling the size of the known world, was discovered, making the prospect of the fulfillment of Christ’s prediction recede into the remote future. Well might the skeptic of that day laugh at the simplicity of the Christian who believed Christ’s prediction.

Yet in God’s own good time, a missionary zeal stirred the hearts of His faithful children, and the Reformation was born in a travail of blood. And what do we see now? - The Bible, which was nearly extinct in the Middle Ages, printed by the hundreds of millions in half a thousand languages and dialects, carried and taught by missionaries in every nation under the sun. All the rest of Christ’s prophetic forecast has been fulfilled. The next event, according to the divine Word, which "cannot be broken," is the end of the world, and the coming of Christ Himself in the clouds of heaven, to gather His elect, to reward His faithful of all ages. In addition to all of this, archaeology has in late years been pouring an abundance of light upon the past, all proving the divinity of Scripture. As Archibald Sayce, the world’s leading archeologist, puts it, "Every turn of the spade has furnished corroborative evidence of the minute truthfulness of Scripture history." The points where archeology has corroborated the Bible would fill a large volume, One instance is all we have space for: In Joshua and Kings are many references that imply the existence of a very powerful Hittite empire north of Palestine. Nowhere in all the world outside of the Bible was there a single reference to this nation. Yet it was represented as equal in power with Egypt. Naturally here was matter for the derision of the higher critics. When they will not believe Bible statements which are supported by abundance of secular evidence, surely we would not look for faith in the unsupported statements of Scripture. So we find them sneering at the Bible account, jeering at those who were simple-minded enough - feeble-minded enough, they called it - to believe that such an empire ever existed. Why, the very fact that the Bible related such a preposterous history of a nation that never existed, was in itself all the proof needed to blast forever the foolish, grandmotherly notion that unsupported statements of the Bible should receive a grain of credence! For hundreds of years, skeptics made merry over the deluded Christians who believed in the former existence of the Hittites. The higher critics copied their arguments, seasoning them with a few eloquent phrases of learned scientific ignorance, and with condescending pity for the abysmal stupidity of the Christian believer. They condescended to show him how "unscientific" it was to believe that a nation so powerful and long-lived as the Bible represented the Hittites to be, could possibly have escaped record in secular history. They demonstrated their position with all the mathematical precision of Euclid; and then, when the Christian still maintained that because the Bible said the nation existed, he would believe it in spite of all their proof, they lost patience, and called him a fool, and other names not altogether conducive to harmony. But now, from both Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, we learn that the Hittite empire for a thousand years was a great power in Syria and western Asia, and was as extensive and as powerful as either Egypt or Assyria, and its history now fills volumes. It is found to be even stronger and more extensive than the Bible led us to believe. To human reasoning, it seems impossible that so vast and so mighty a nation could exist for ten centuries - seven times as long as the United States - and escape completely all profane record. Yet we know such to be the case. Thus is the Christian’s faith in his Bible vindicated where there seemed least likelihood that it could be. The Bible prophecies relate not to things done in a corner, but to the mightiest nations of earth. Alexander Keith, in "Evidence of Prophecy," pages 17, I8, sums up a few of the leading events that have been foretold and fulfilled:

"Jerusalem was destroyed and laid waste by the Romans; the land of Palestine, and the surrounding countries, are now thinly inhabited, and, in comparison of their former fertility, have been almost converted into deserts; the Jews have been scattered among the nations; and remain to this day a dispersed and yet a distinct people; Egypt, one of the first and most powerful of nations, has long since ceased to be a kingdom; Nineveh is no more; Babylon is now a ruin; the Persian empire succeeded to the Babylonian; the Grecian empire succeeded to the Persian, and the Roman to the Grecian; the old Roman empire has been divided into several kingdoms; Rome itself became the seat of a government of a different nature from any other that ever existed in the world; the doctrine of the gospel was transformed into a system of spiritual tyranny and of temporal power; the authority of the pope was held supreme in Europe for many ages; the Saracens obtained a sudden and mighty power, overran a great part of Asia and of Europe, and many parts of Christendom suffered much from their incursions; the Arabs maintain their warlike character and retain possession of their own land; the Africans are a humble race, and are still treated as slaves; the Turkish empire attained to great power it continued to rise for the space of several centuries, but it paused in its progress, has since decayed, and now evidently verges to its fall.

"These form some of the most prominent and remarkable facts of the history of the world from the ages of the prophets to the present time; and if to each and all of them, from the first to the last, an index is to be found in the prophecies, we may warrantably conclude that they could only have been revealed by the Ruler among the nations, and that they afford more than human testimony of the truth of Christianity."

God has so filled earth, sea, sky, and history with the proofs of His word, has buried in the earth for centuries so many wonderful proofs that the Bible is the infallible word of the living God, that only those who are determined not to accept evidence, can remain unconvinced. All through the New Testament are scattered multiplied prophecies, giving many different signs of the imminent second coming of Christ. This is the one great event of prophecy toward which all events trend, to which all prophecies point, for which the church has for ages hoped.

"He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly."

"Even so, come, Lord Jesus."