7 Sermon Illustrations on Prophecy

Let us suppose, that at the time when Britain was peopled by half-savage tribes, before the period of the Roman sway, some gifted seer among the Druids had engraven upon a rock a minute prediction of a portion of the future history of the island. Suppose he had declared that it should, ere long, be conquered by a warrior people from the south; that he should name the Casar himself, describe his eagle standard, and all the circumstances of the conquest. Suppose he should portray the Saxon invasion centuries after, the sevenfold division of the monarchy, the Danish inroad, the arrival and victory of the Normans. Our imagined prophet pauses here, or at whatever other precise period you please to suppose; and his next prediction, overleaping a vast undescribed interval, suddenly represents the England of the present day. Now conceive the forefathers of existing England to have studied this wondrous record, and to find, to their amazement, that every one of its predictions was accurately verified; that, as their generations succeeded, they but walked in the traces assigned for them by the prophetic inscription, and all it spoke progressively became fact. Can we suppose, that however far away in futurity was the one remaining event, and however impossible to them, at their early stage, to conceive the means by which all the present wonders of this mighty empire could ever be realized, they would permit themselves to doubt its absolute certainty after such overwhelming proofs of the supernatural powers of the seer who guaranteed it? Would they not shape their course as confidently in view of the unquestionable future as in reference to the unquestionable past? It should be thus with regard to the coming judgment. Archer Butler.

I am profoundly affected by the grandeur of prophecy. God unveils the frescoed wall of the future, not so much that we may count the figures, and measure the robes, and analyze the pigments, but that, gazing upon it, our imaginations may be enkindled, and hope be inspired, to bear us through the dismal barrenness of the present. Prophecy was not addressed to the reason, nor to the statistical faculty, but to the imagination; and I should as soon think of measuring love by the scales of commerce, or of admiring flowers by the rule of feet and inches, or of applying arithmetic to taste and enthusiasm, as calculations and figures to these grand evanishing signals which God waves in the future only to tell the world which way it is to march. Beecher.

Dr. Cotton was intimate with Dr. Young, and paid him a visit about a fortnight before he was seized with his last illness. Dr. Young was then in his usual health; his venerable appearance, the gravity of his utterance, and the earnestness with which he discoursed about religion, gave him, in Dr. Cotton's view, the appearance of a prophet. They had been delivering their sentiments on Newton's "Dissertation on the Prophecies," when Dr. Young closed the conference thus:—"My friend, there are two considerations upon which my faith in Christ is built as upon a rock. The fall of man, the redemption of man, and the resurrection of man: these three cardinal articles of our religion are such as *human ingenuity could never have invented*; therefore they must be Divine. The other argument is this:—If the *prophecies* have been fulfilled, of which there is no doubt, then the Bible must be the word of God; and if the Scriptures are the word of God, Christianity must be true."