Prophecy. One of the strongest evidences of the truth of the Old Testament, is the fulfillment of its prophecies. It contains numerous predictions of events which lie entirely beyond the ken of human wisdom. No human sagacity could have foreseen and foretold the numerous remarkable events which the history of this world records as exact fulfillments of the predictions of the ancient seers of God.
The evidences of prophecy are so extensive that it cannot be expected that they will all be exhibited in one short chapter. As Dr. Nelson says, "We are like the man who stands by an immense magazine of wheat. He may take a handful and hold it out to view; but he cannot exhibit each grain in the mass to the eye of any purchaser: it would be a task endless and painful."
Cause and Cure, p. 34.
We can do no more than bring a handful of the fruit from the good land, and exhibit it as a specimen of what the reader may find if he will go into the labor of research.
The evidences of prophecy are of a superior kind. They have advantages over every other kind of evidence. For the proof of miracles we must have recourse to ancient history, also the argument on the authenticity and integrity of the Bible is handed down from generation to generation without increasing in strength. But the fulfillment of prophecy may come under our own observation, or be conveyed to us by living witnesses. Also this class of evidence is daily gaining strength. Prophecy is, and has been, fulfilling all around us since the uttering of the first prediction, and will continue thus to increase in strength until "all things which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began," shall have met their accomplishment.
The mere publication of a prediction is no proof that it is a revelation from God, but any one prediction which has been fulfilled, is of itself an evidence of a supernatural revelation, or more properly speaking, is a revelation. For surely no one but God himself can foretell distant future events which depend entirely upon Him "who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will."
If then one instance of the undoubted accomplishment of prophecy can be produced, we have established the position that a revelation has been given to man. And if the prophets have faithfully foretold the first advent of the Messiah, they may have been as faithful in recording the second. If they have prophesied truly concerning Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre, Rabbah, and Jerusalem, the prophecies concerning the time when "the cities of the nations" shall fall, and great Babylon come in remembrance before God, may also prove true. If they have been correct in foretelling the state of the Jews, the Egyptians, and other nations, they may not mistake when they foretell the whirlwind that shall go forth from nation to nation, the result of which will be that "the slain of the Lord shall be from one end of the earth to the other."
The remark has often been made that most of the prophecies are obscure, and some of them so highly symbolical that they cannot be understood. We admit that there are obscurities and symbols in prophecy; so there are elsewhere; but who thinks of rejecting any of the sciences because of obscurity? And as far as the symbols are concerned, I know of not one which is without a given rule by which it can be interpreted. In using symbols God has manifested great wisdom in hiding these things from the wise and prudent and revealing them unto babes.
All Protestants agree that the little horn brought to view in Dan. vii, which was to wear out the saints of the Most High, &c., is the Papal power. Indeed, every specification of that prophecy has been fulfilled in that power. Now suppose that instead of clothing this prophecy in symbolic language, the Lord had ordained that it should read as follows: "And the Pope of Rome shall come up and shall destroy three of the ten kingdoms, namely, the Heruli, the Vandals, and the Ostrogoths, and shall wear out the saints, and put seventy-five millions of them to death, and abolish the second, and change the fourth, commandment," would not the prophecy written in this manner preclude the possibility of its own fulfillment. If it had read so the Pope could have understood it as well as any one, the result of which would have been, he never would have taken the name of Pope, or if he had, would have had that part of Daniel's prophecy expunged from the Bible, so that we should have been deprived of it.
It is strange that infidels allow all writers and speakers to deal in symbols and figures of speech, and yet do not allow the Author of the Bible the same privilege.
Speakers talk of the American Eagle, of its spreading its pinions from the Atlantic to the Pacific, of its wings' being at the present time bathed in blood, &c., &c. Infidels never object to this, nor do they have any trouble in understanding such expressions when used by political speakers. Why will they not allow the God of the Bible the same privilege?
Mr. Patterson states and answers this infidel objection as follows:
"But it is objected that the prophecies of Scripture are as obscure as the oracles; are all wrapped up in symbolical language; that many of them have a double meaning; that no two interpreters are agreed as to the meaning of the unfulfilled predictions; and that no man can certainly foretell any future event by means of them. The objection proceeds on a total mistake of the nature and design of prophecy, which is not to unveil the future for the gratification of your curiosity, but to give you direction in your present duty—precisely the reverse of the oracles referred to, which proposed to tell their votaries what would happen—but rarely condescended to direct them how to behave themselves so that things might happen well. The larger part of the prophecies of Scripture is taken up with directions to men how to regulate their conduct, rather than with information how God means to regulate his. There is just as much of the latter as is sufficient to show us that the God who gave the Bible governs the world, and even that always urges the same moral lesson: 'Say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with him, for he shall eat the fruit of his doings.' 'Woe to the wicked; it shall be ill with him, for the reward of his hands shall be given him.' Whenever a vision relates to what God would do in the distant future, it is dark and mysterious; but whenever any directions are given necessary for our immediate duty, then the 'vision is written and made plain on tables, that he may run that readeth it.' The possessors of a clearly engrossed title-deed have surely no reason to complain that the President has chosen that his seal appended to it shall consist of a device which, by reason of its being hard to read and harder to imitate, secures both himself and them against forgery. The double meaning of some prophecies is a double check. So far from resembling the equivocations of heathen oracles, by taking either of two opposite events for a fulfillment, they require both of two corresponding ones; and some prophecies, like a master-key, open several successive events, and thus show that the same mind planned both locks and key. When the prediction is fulfilled all mystery vanishes, and men see plainly that thus it is written—that is to say, men who look—for the man who will not open his eyes will never see anything that it concerns him to know. But the man who thinks that it concerns him so much to know what God will do with the world a hundred years after he is dead, that unless the prophecies of the Bible are all made plain to him, he will neither read God's word nor obey his law, may go on his own way. We expound no mysteries to such persons; for it is written, 'None of the wicked shall understand.'
"As to the objection taken from the symbolical language170of prophecy, and which seems to a number of our modern critics so weighty that they remove to the purely mythologic ground everything 'couched in symbolical language,' and account nothing to be a prediction unless 'literal history written in advance'—I would merely ask, How is it possible to reveal heavenly things to earth-born men but by earthly figures? Do you know a single word in your own, or any other, language, to express a spiritual state or mental operation, that is not the name of some material state or physical operation, used symbolically? Heart, soul, spirit, idea, memory, imagination, inclination, &c., every one of them a figure of speech—a symbol. Nay, is there a letter in your own, or any other, alphabet, that was not originally a picture of something? I demand to know in what way God or man could teach you to know anything you have never seen, but by showing you a picture of it, or telling you what it is like. That is simply by type or symbol; and these are the only possible media of conveying heavenly truth, or future history, to our minds. When, therefore, the skeptic insists that prophecy be given literally in the style of history written in advance, he simply requires that God would make it utterly unintelligible. We can gather clear and definite ideas from the significant hieroglyphics of symbolic language, but the literalities of history written in advance would be worse to decipher than the arrow-headed inscriptions of Nineveh. Just imagine to yourself Alexander the Great reading Guizot, instead of Daniel; or Hildreth, as being less mysterious than Ezekiel; and meeting, for instance, such a record as this: "In the year of Christ 1847, the United States conquered Mexico, and annexed California." 'In the year of Christ—what now Olympiad may that be?' he would say. 'The United States of course means the States of the Achæa League, but on what shore of the Euxine may Mexico and California be found?' What information could Aristotle gather from the record that 'in 1857 the trans-Atlantic telegraph was in operation?' Could all the augurs in the seven-hilled city have expounded to Julius Cæsar the famous dispatch, if intercepted in prophetic vision, 'Sebastopol was evacuated last night, after enduring for three days an infernal fire of shot and shell?' Nay, to diminish the vista to even two or three centuries, what could Oliver Cromwell, aided by the whole Westminster Assembly, have made of a prophetic vision of a single newspaper paragraph of history written in advance, to inform him that 'three companies of dragoons came down last night from Berwick to Southampton, by a special train, traveling 54⅓ miles an hour, including stoppages, and embarked immediately on arrival. The fleet put to sea at noon, in the face of a full gale from the S. W.?' Why, the intelligible part of this single paragraph would seem more impossible, and the unintelligible part more absurd, than all the mysterious symbols of the Apocalypse."
But for the gratification of infidels we propose to confine ourselves to those prophecies which are not clothed in symbolic language, and the specifications shall be so numerous that no human sagacity could point them out.