The Sure Word of Prophecy
By W. A. S.
Synopsis of Present Truth— No. 5
The Sure Word of Prophecy
The Desolation of Babylon
While Babylon was still the mightiest city of the world, with the period of greatest glory yet before it, the Lord revealed its ignoble end. By the prophet Isaiah, he declared:— “And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And8the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.” Isa. 13:19-22. Never could a more doleful future have been pictured for a city full of splendor, the metropolis of the world. About one hundred and seventy-five years later the Medes and Persians were at the gates. Her time had come, and Babylon’s rule ended. But still, under Medo-Persia, and later, under the Greeks, the city itself was populous and prosperous and beautiful. The skeptic of the time may have pointed to it as evidence that here, at least, the Hebrew prophet had missed the mark. Apollonius, the sage of Tyana, who lived in the days of Nero and the apostles, has left an account of Babylon as he saw it, as late as the first century of our era. Still the Euphrates swept beneath its walls, dividing the city into halves, with great palaces on either side:— The palaces are roofed with bronze, and a glitter goes off from them; but the chambers of the women and of the men, and the porticoes, are adorned partly with silver and partly with golden tapestries, and partly with solid gold in the form of pictures. And of the king’s judgment hall he reported— that the roof had been carried up in the form of a dome, to resemble in a manner the heavens, and that it was roofed with sapphire, a stone that is very blue, and like heaven to the eye; and there were images of the gods, which they worship, fixed aloft, and looking like golden figures shining out of ether.—Philostratus’s “Life of Apollonius,” book 1, chap. 25. Evidently Babylon was still “the land of graven images,” and the desolation foretold by the prophet had not yet befallen its palaces. But that prophetic word, written eight hundred years before, was still upon the scroll of the Book, the sure word of God, who sees the end from the beginning. The view given us by Apollonius is perhaps the last glimpse we have of Babylon’s passing glory. Even then for centuries the walls had been a quarry from which stones were drawn for Babylon’s rival, Seleucia, on the Tigris. And Strabo, the Greek geographer (who wrote also in the first century), had described Babylon as “in great part deserted,” adding,— No one would hesitate to apply to it what one of the comic writers said of Megalopolitae, in Arcadia, “The great city is a great desert.”—“Geography,” book 16, chap. 1. Already pagan writers had begun to describe its condition in the very terms of the prophecy uttered so long before. And now what is its state? The doom foretold has fallen heavy upon the city, upon its palaces, and “upon the graven images of Babylon.” For a century and more, travelers’ accounts have frequently borne witness to the exact fulfillment of the prophecy in the remarkable desolations of that city, once mistress of the world. “Babylon shall become heaps,” said the prophecy, “and owls shall dwell there.” This is what Mr. Layard, the English archeologist, found on his visit in 1845:— Shapeless heaps of rubbish cover for many an acre the face of the land. . . . On all sides, fragments of glass, marble, pottery, and inscribed brick are mingled with that peculiar nitrous and blanched soil, which, bred from the remains of ancient habitations, checks or destroys vegetation, and renders the site of Babylon a naked and a hideous waste. Owls (which are of a large gray kind, and often found in flocks of nearly a hundred) start from the scanty thickets, and the foul jackal skulks through the furrows.—“Nineveh and Babylon,” page 484. By the native Arabs the ruins are called Mudjelibe, “the Overturned.” See “Encyclopedia of Islam,” article “Babil.” The prophecy said, “Neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there.” The words might be construed to mean that the famous site would never become the place of a Bedouin village. But it is literally true, say travelers, that the Arabs avoid the place even for the temporary pitching of their tents. They consider the spot under a curse. As late as 1913, one of our missionaries, W. C. Ising, visited the site, where Professor Koldeway was excavating the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace. He wrote:— Involuntarily one is reminded of the prophecy in the thirteenth of Isaiah, and many other places, which, in course of time, have been fulfilled to the letter. No one is living on the site of ancient Babylon, and whatever Arabs are employed by the excavators have built their mud huts in the bed of the ancient river, which at the present time is shifted half a mile farther west.—European Division Quarterly, Fourth Quarter, 1913. Thus the centuries bear testimony to the fulfillment of the prophetic word. The Lord not only spoke the word in warning and entreaty for those to whom it first came, but it is written in the Scriptures of Truth as a testimony to all time that the Bible is the word of God, and that all his purposes revealed therein and all the promises of the blessed Book are certain and sure. Fulfilled prophecy is the testimony of the centuries to the living God. The evidence of prophecy and its fulfillment is God’s challenge and appeal to men to acknowledge him as the true God and the Holy Scriptures as his word from heaven:— “I have declared the former things from the beginning; and they went forth out of my mouth, and I showed them; I did them suddenly, and they came to pass. Because I knew that thou art obstinate, and thy neck is an iron sinew, and thy brow brass; I have even from the beginning declared it to thee; before it came to pass I showed it thee. . . . Thou hast heard, see all this; and will not ye declare it?” Isa. 48:3-6. Surely no one can look at the evidence in history of the fulfillment of prophecy without seeing that of a truth the One who spoke these words knew the end from the beginning; and finding the living God in the sure word of prophecy, one must be prepared to listen to his voice in all the Scriptures, when it speaks of sin and the way of salvation through Jesus Christ. Further, the prophetic word also has much to say of events yet future, of the course of history in modern times. It behooves us to give heed to what that word speaks concerning our own times and the events that are to take place upon the earth before the end. The apostle Peter (2 Peter 1:9) exhorts us to the study in these words:— “We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in your hearts.”