The Old and New Testament prophets agreed that history will move toward a climax. This climax will occur just before the personal return of Christ. Then, history as we know it will come to an end and God will take over the world from that time on. This pattern could be called a “linear” view of history, because it has a beginning and an end.
Such a view of history is very different from that held by most religions. Religions usually teach that history is going through repetitive cycles. They believe human history will be either eternal or extremely long—some claim millions of years into the future.[1]
Most scholars are convinced that these circular views of history derive from the seasonal cycles in nature and birth-fertility-death cycles. Religious thinkers project the course of nature onto history. In agrarian or hunter-gatherer societies, where nothing changes for hundreds of years, such cyclical theories were plausible.[2]
However, as human history has developed, we now realize that cyclical views of history are simply wrong. Human history is clearly moving in directions that have never happened before. For instance, the world has never experienced a period of highly developed technology or population density in supposed previous cycles of history. Instead of cycles, we now see history conforming to the pattern predicted in the Bible. History is clearly moving toward a climax different from anything in earlier times.
Not only is the Bible correct about the linear pattern of history, it also goes into great detail about events at the end of history as we know it. Some of these events are happening in our own day. These amazing predictions have the same effect as those we saw earlier—they show that the Bible is all alone as a validated source of supernatural insight from God.
[1]Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (London: Harvill Press, 1957), p. 49. See also his discussion of the universal “belief in a time that is cyclic, in an eternal returning, in the periodic destruction of the world and mankind to be followed by a new world and a new, regenerated mankind.” (Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: New American Library, 1974), 407.
[2]This is why, in most religions, the new year festival is the premier festival of the year. (Harold Turner, “Holy Places, Sacred Calendars,” in R. Pierce Beaver et. al., eds., Eerdmans’ Handbook to the World’s Religions, (Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 1982), 20-21. Interestingly, biblical teaching apparently doesn’t even have a New Year festival. Passover is in Nisan, which is the first month of the year (Exodus 12:2). However, it is on the fourteenth day of the month (Exodus 12:6). The New Year held no great significance for the ancient Hebrews.The ancient prophet Isaiah wrote:
In that day the Lord will reach out his hand a second time to reclaim the remnant that is left of his people from Assyria, from Lower Egypt, from Upper Egypt, from Cush, from Elam, from Babylonia, from Hamath and from the islands of the sea (Isaiah 11:11).[3]
This world-wide regathering of the nation of Israel after their nation ceased to exist for thousands of years is one of the most frequently predicted events in the Bible. This is an important point, because if something was only predicted once, people might misinterpret the passage. But in biblical prophecy, key predictions are repeated multiple times in different books, making the intention very clear. This is called correlation—parallel statements in unrelated literary settings. It’s an important feature of authentic prophecy that is completely lacking in pseudo-prophecies like what we saw earlier in Nostradamus.[4]
These parallel passages are well worth studying in their own context, although we won’t have space to do so here: Deuteronomy 4:27-30; 28:64-5; 30:1-6; Isaiah 11:11–16; 27:12-13; 43:5-7; 66:19-20; Jeremiah 3:14-18; 16:14-15; 23:3-8; 30:3, 10-11; 32:37-44; Ezekiel 11:16-20; 20:41-42; 28:25; 34:12-14; 37:11-12, 14, 21-22, 25; 38:8; 39:25-29; Hosea 1:11; 3:4-5; 11:10-11; Micah 2:12-13; 4:6; 5:2-4; 7:9-13; Zephaniah 3:18-20; Zechariah 8:3, 7, 20-22; 10:9-12.
In one of the earliest books, Moses warned that the day was coming when, “the Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth…” (Deuteronomy 28:64). But then he goes on to predict an amazing regathering into their own land:
Then the Lord your God will restore you from captivity, and have compassion on you, and will gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you. If your outcasts are at the ends of the earth, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there He will bring you back. The Lord your God will bring you into the land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will prosper you and multiply you more than your fathers (30:3-5).
All the way back in the time of Moses, before the Jewish people even had possession of their land, this startling prediction was made. It refers to events more than three thousand years after the writing of the text!
[3]The “islands of the sea” refers to distant lands that lay beyond the ocean. It is sometimes translated “coastlands.”
[4]The plentitude of passages on Israel’s regathering are complicated by the strange fact that Israel has been regathered to their land no fewer than three times! The first was in Exodus, when they were delivered from Egypt. The second was when they returned after being exiled in Babylon in the 500’s BC. The predictions of regathering from Babylon could be confused with the predictions of the great worldwide regathering of the last days. In general, any regathering that comes from all directions and all nations must refer to the one in the twentieth century. These couldn’t refer to the regathering from Babylon, which was a few thousand people, all coming from one country and one direction to Israel.
Again, God showed Ezekiel a vision of a vast valley filled with dried bones of dead people. Then, they began to assemble into skeletons, flesh grew on the bones, and finally, skin. Now the valley was full of corpses. Only a second prophecy summoning the breath of God caused the dead people to come to life and stand “on their feet, an exceedingly great army” (Ezekiel 37:10). God went on to explain:
Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope has perished…” Thus says the Lord God, “Behold, I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, My people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel” (vs. 11, 12).[5]
This concept—that a nation could be scattered all over the earth for hundreds, even thousands of years, persecuted bitterly, and then be regathered to their ancestral homeland—is utterly unprecedented in human history. Nothing like that has ever happened to any nation or people. Many ancient nations were scattered and disappeared; most of those appearing in the Old Testament, like the Philistines, the Moabites, and the Ammonites, are all gone. The Jews should have been like them, but God said no. He would gather them from every country and bring them back to their ancient homeland.
In 33 A.D. Jesus warned that Jerusalem would soon be destroyed (Luke 21:20) and that its inhabitants “will fall by the edge of the sword, and will be led captive into all the nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled under foot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:24). Notice the last phrase and the word “until.” This gentile ownership of Jerusalem was only temporary. After the “times of the Gentiles,” Jerusalem would again become a Jewish city.[6]
In A.D. 70, the Roman general, Titus Vespasian, besieged Jerusalem and eventually burned the city. The Romans completely leveled the temple just as Jesus had predicted (Matthew 24:2). They killed many of the Jews in Jerusalem and sold the rest as slaves. Jerusalem fell under the power of Gentiles, as Jesus said it would. This situation lasted until 1967, when the Jews finally recaptured Jerusalem.
The regathering of Israel was a precondition for the other events predicted in Luke 21. It was also pivotal in the program of God because, according to verse 24, it signaled that “the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.” The events going on in Israel today are directly fulfilling prophecies uttered more than twenty centuries ago.
[5]This is an example of a passage clearly not referring to the Jews’ return to Israel from Babylon, because in this case the Jews were scattered to nations in every direction from Israel: “I will take the sons of Israel from among the nations where they have gone, and I will gather them from every side and bring them into their own land” (37:21).
[6]Note that Bible prophecy predicts both good and evil events. The fact that it predicts the retaking of Jerusalem by the Israelis is not in itself a moral commentary on all actions taken by the Israelis. In fact, some unjustifiable actions may well have occurred there. Jesus only says it will happen, not that it is morally correct. This is evident from the fact that the destruction of Jewish society by the Romans is also predicted in the same passage.
So, in our own day we see the fulfillment of a batch of predictions that:
In a word, the best explanation for this prediction is that it comes from a supernatural, all-knowing source.
When confronted with this series of predictions about the regathering of Israel, the only answer skeptics suggest is that the Jews must have purposefully fulfilled the prophecies they knew were in the Old Testament. But before jumping on this foolish explanation, consider some of the massive problems it faces:
1. If it’s that easy for a people to reacquire their ancient homeland, why hasn’t anyone else done it? Wouldn’t the Cherokee or the Mohicans like to have their lands back? Of course they would. The Kurds in Turkey and Iraq have been trying to get a homeland for centuries without success.
2. If the Jews self-fulfilled these prophecies simply because they believed them, why did they wait two thousand years to do so?
3. How did the Jews manage to get the United Nations to vote their country into existence, including nations like the USSR, which could have vetoed the resolution single-handed? Why would such an atheistic government join a conspiracy to fulfill prophecy from the Bible?
4. Why were most of the founders of Zionism non-believers in God or the Bible? The movement began under the leadership of socialists who had no faith in the Bible.
5. Those who know how the nation of Israel came into existence are aware that only the holocaust was powerful enough to move the nations of the world to vote Israel into existence out of compassion (although the move to Israel had been going on for almost a hundred years before World War II). So, to believe the Jews “caused” the fulfillment of the prophecies, one would have to believe that they somehow caused the holocaust!
If we want to explain evidence away, we can always find some way to do so. But this explanation sounds like anti-Semitic theorists who think the Jews are controlling the world! Such explanations are ludicrous and nowhere near as believable as the plain truth—that fulfilled supernatural prophecy of Israel’s regathering once again shows that God speaks through the Bible.