God’s Truth
Biblical Prophecies 2—Interpretation of Prophecy
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
The Interpretation of Prophecy
Phibber wants to explain to us that there is a reason for the “correctness” of all these Jewish prophecies—he wants to tell us about cause and effect—and he wants to use the authority of science. So he tells us why “a large number” of scientists like him believe in God.
Ninety is a large number. It is not as large as a hundred but it is large. Well it would seem large if they were all in the room in which I am writing this. But plainly ninety people in a world population of six billion is negligible. Ninety scientists in six billion people is also negligible. A Christian website thinks it is making some point by listing hundreds of scientists who admit they are also Christians. It does not tell us what proportion of scientists are Christians relative to the general population, even though it is known from many social surveys. The proportion is much smaller among scientists than it is among the population at large, and in many advanced western countries, apart from the USA, the proportion of believers among the general population is small. The more original the scientific thinker, the less likely they are to believe in ancient myths like the bible.
The point I am making is that our analytical Christian doctor tells us nothing by using a vague term like a “very large number of scientists”. I know that, and he knows that, but he is telling us God’s Truth, so it is perfectly fine to use this deceiving expression. Does he use it in any of his works as an engineer? If he does then he and his reviewers should be sacked. It is not scientific. It is not analytical. It is dishonest. And yet he is claiming that he is applying the same spirit of analytical inquiry that he applies to his own work. No wonder science is being discredited.
Our Christian guide now takes us to the famous scientist Werner von Braun, “America’s leading space scientist”, and before that rocket maker by appointment to the German Nazi leadership, who apparently considers that the world was made by a maker because a fundamental principle of science is that nothing happens without a cause.
We have no choice, Phibber tells us, but to accept that nothing occurs without a cause—it is “plain common sense”.
Would that it were. If it were we would not need analytical or theoretical scientists with doctorates. The common sense is that we define an effect to be due to a cause. So when we see something happen we look for a cause. Regrettably, despite all our common sense we cannot always find a cause.
What causes an unstable atom to emit a particle? What causes an excited atom or molecule to emit a photon? Cause and effect gets very dubious at the quantum level. Our tutor must know this. He calls himself a physicist.
Nevertheless common sense prevails here. If all of those Old Testament prophets saw the future so accurately, there must be a cause. Phibber conjectures that an atheist, “if he is an intelligent man”, would say, “it is the natural outcome of the Hebrew race”. But answers like this are merely “clever”, “sound very impressive”, “dodge the awkward question” and “explain nothing”, Phibber assures us.
The only answer that fits the facts for a real scientist, such as Phibber, is the bible itself, which says that God reveals “his secret to His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7) and according to Deuteronomy 18:22 that which is the word of the Lord is that which comes to pass. This is tantamount to saying, our tutor concludes, that only God’s true prophets can foretell the future. God’s prophets have foretold the whole future of the Jewish race so the bible must be true.
Equally I can answer, if God’s prophets are wrong in one jot then the bible is not true. Well besides the many jots they missed in the future of the Jewish race, Jesus himself told his disciples that the kingdom of God would be inaugurated within their own lifetime. Two thousand years later Christians are, illogically, still praying for it every day in the Lord’s prayer. The Christian physicist’s own criteria serve to disprove God’s Truth!
Babylon and Tyre
Now Phibber, the learned doctor, takes us into more fulfilled prophecy. He takes biblical prophecies literally. Or at least he quotes them in detail expecting us to accept them to be literally true. The bible tells us that mighty cities like Babylon, centre of a great land based Empire, and Tyre, centre of a great trading race were to be destroyed. Babylon would always remain as rubble (Isaiah 13 19-21; Jeremiah 50:39-40;51:26,37).
It was not difficult for the Old Testament scribes to write prophecy like this. Any city will eventually be destroyed and never inhabited again as that city. I can freely predict that the earth will become uninhabited and be confident that eventually my prophecy will be true. Isaiah, supposedly writing about 740 BC, wanted to see Babylon destroyed. His prophecy took a long time to come true—about 500 years.
However, the post exilic scribes reworked the earlier traditional books of the Israelites and it is possible the population of Babylon had been moved to the city of Seleucia, the original city abandoned and then destroyed when the scribes were re-writing this part of Isaiah. This then is not “history written in advance” as Phibber likes us to think but normal history written with hindsight. Didn’t our tutor know this, despite his strings of qualifications and years of biblical study? Or is he intent on deceiving us?
Babylon is till this day an archaeological site but the prophecy of Isaiah invites us to believe that even Arabs would never pitch a tent there! Ancient sites are often associated with ghosts and demons in the superstitious mind. This is even true today for us urban sophisticates who fear abandoned houses and churches. It would probably have been true to the Arabs of Mesopotamia, so God’s curse has some basis in popular psychology. Nevertheless to imagine people deliberately avoiding the site till time immemorial is plainly nonsense. Indeed the Abbe Beauchamps who first investigated the site at the end of the eighteenth century got much of his material from Arabs who frequented the site using it as a source of mortar.
As for the prophesy of Ezekiel about Tyre—it would be cast into the sea (Ezekiel 26:12,14)—it is true that the city was destroyed and its stones finished up in the waters of the Mediterranean sea. Alexander the Great used stones from the old city to build a mole to enable him to attack the new city. This was known by the later scribes who were recasting the Jewish Scriptures. Tyre was of course a thriving town in Roman times so must have been rebuilt, contrary to the biblical prophecy. Phibber knows this but has a way out—the new city was not on the same site as the old city. Oh! Right…
According to Phibber, these prophecies were “fulfilled to the last detail”. In fact, both of these “prophecies” were true in that the cities mentioned were destroyed, but seem to have been true before the accounts in the bible were written, so were not prophecies, and were rebuilt at various times so they never remained desolate.
Daniel Prophesies World History
Dr Ernest Phibber, the “scientific” purveyor of truth, points out in all seriousness that the bible gives us, in Daniel Chapter 2, a complete run down on world history from 600 BC to sometime in the future. The story is that Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, dreams of a man made of gold (head), silver (chest), bronze (belly and thighs), iron (legs) and with feet of clay with some admixed iron. A stone comes and breaks the feet of clay and the whole structure collapses and is blown away in the wind.
Interpreting the story, Phibber assures us that the head was the Empire of Nebuchadnezzar, the chest was its successor, the Empire of the Medes and the Persians, the belly of bronze was the Empire of the Greeks under Alexander the Great, and the iron part was the two limbs representing the Roman Empire which eventually split into two parts. These four were to be the only world empires according to the prophet, and indeed, after the fall of Rome there were no more world empires (feet of mixed clay and iron), our tutor tells us. All of this he confirms by reference to H G Wells’ book, A Short History of the World.
You will be wondering what happened to the Holy Roman Empire, especially for a Christian man, the Arabic empire, several Chinese Empires, the immense Mongol Empire, the Turkish Empire, the Inca Empire, the Spansh, Portuguese, Russian and French Empires and, perhaps, even the British Empire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, upon which the sun never set—truly a world empire.
In God’s Truth, they don’t count!
The learned doctor tells us that the colonial “empires”—he uses the quotation marks to show they were not really “empires”—were quite different from the world “empires”—no quotation marks—of the past. Yet didn’t our mentor say the prophecy applied to the whole of the time from Nebuchadnezzar to the present day and beyond. He did, but now he is telling us that other “empires” are not included!
Phibber gives us the Christian way of making biblical prophecies true in every detail—guaranteed—simply disregard the false details. Do you understand now?
We should have realised it had we noticed that all the mighty empires which preceded Nebuchadnezzar’s new Babylonian Empire were not included either. The Sumerian Empire, the Akkadian Empire, the Old Assyrian Empire, the Old Babylonian Empire, the Middle and the New Assyrian Empires all preceded Nebuchadnezzar’s Empire in the same part of the world. I can hear our doctor saying, “Oh, they don’t count. Daniel only started at Nebuchadnezzar because it was his dream”.
Just in case you might think that, like the other prophecies, this one was written with the benefit of hindsight, our instructor tells us firmly it was not. “The unbelievers’ attempts to explain the facts are pathetic”, he angrily writes. He challenges his critics nose to nose—even if they are right that Daniel was writing in the second and not the sixth century BC, “What of it?” he writes, “it does not explain the two thousand years since”. Sorry, teacher. You told us the two thousand years are not included in the prophecy because it only allows for world empires of old, not modern world “empires” like the British one.
Once it is recognised that Daniel was writing history and not prophecy then there is nothing miraculous to explain. Any student of the bible knows full well that the empires of Daniel’s “prophecy”, if they have historical meaning at all, were the Babylonian Empire (gold), the Empire of the Medes (silver), the Empire of Cyrus the Persian (bronze) which succeeded the Babylonians and the Medes, and the Empire of Alexander the Great (iron) which subjected the Persians.
With the death of Alexander, his empire split and eventually consolidated into two, the Ptolomaic Empire based on Egypt and the Seleucid Empire based on Syria. These two Greek empires had Judaea squashed between them and were obviously the ones that concerned Daniel. He wanted them destroyed so that the Jews could restore the glory of Solomon. That is the Jewish wish expressed throughout the Jewish scriptures and is the objective of their Deliverer, the Messiah.
Phibber asserts that such wonderful prophecies can only happen because God can reveal such secrets. Unfortunately the secrets seem not to be mysterious, unless like our tutor, you have closed your mind to truth and reason. He proves this by insisting “the bible is right every time!”
Jesus Prophesies the Crucifixion
Now Phibber moves on to prophecies of Jesus, beginning in his introductory comments by telling us that most unbelievers know very little about the bible—“unbelievers” know little about it! Anyway he quotes from Luke (18:31-33) in which Jesus tells his twelve apostles that Old Testament prophecies about him will be fulfilled—he will be delivered unto the gentiles, mocked and spat on, scourged and murdered; on the third day he would rise.
Aware of a likely criticism, Phibber raises the possibility of Christians changing the Old Testament record to match the events of Jesus’s life. “Not possible”, says our guide. The version of the Old Testament used by the Christians was called the Septuagint and was in the Greek language, but there were also Hebrew versions of the scriptures kept by the Jews. If either Jews or Christians altered their versions the two would not agree.
Let us consent at once that there was not a wholesale alteration of the Septuagint to fit the Passion of Jesus, but our truthful teacher is again being sparse with the commodity he is instructing us in. The Septuagint has indeed been altered deliberately as few other than the most outrageous Christian dogmatists accept. Jews, who in the main were dependent on the goodwill of Christian kings and popes were sometimes pressurised to change their own versions to match. When they did not, the Christians cried that the differences were because the Jews had altered their Hebrew scriptures. Did our analytically minded bible scholar not know this?
The passages of scriptural prophecy Phibber discusses are Psalms 22 and chapter 53 of Isaiah. Both have some remarkable parallels with the events of the crucifixion of Jesus and our learned friend finds this astonishing. Though many scholars consider the suffering servant of Isaiah to be a personification of the Children of Israel, Phibber pooh-poohs it—it is a description of Jesus eight centuries before he lived!
But, if this passage is indeed a description of Jesus, why does Phibber ignore certain parts of it? The description actually starts at the end of the previous chapter. It tells us:
his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men,Isaiah 52:14
and:
he hath no form nor comeliness and when we see him there is no beauty that we should desire him,Isaiah 53:2
and:
he was as one from whom men hide their face.Isaiah 53:3
Not a handsome man, to be sure.
If we accept this passage as applying to Jesus then will our honest instructor advocate a change in church imagery so that the handsome, blond Aryan shown there is altered to one which matches this description?
Of course not. Christians like to pick and choose which bits of the bible to include in prophecy. This bit must have been wrong—ignore it! The rest is right, though!
No honest person could accept such eclecticism. That Christians evidently do, tells us much about God’s Truth.
When there are unmistakable similarities between passages in the Old Testament and in the New, the obvious, none miraculous, explanation is that the writers of the New Testament have copied the Old. Indeed in any book other than the bible most Christians would have no hesitation in recognising such copying. But the bible is different. In the bible it’s a prophecy!
The analytic truth as opposed to God’s truth is that the gospels are written to show that Old Testament prophecy was realised in Jesus Christ. Consequently Old Testament prophecy was realised in the gospels irrespective of what happened in real life.
Interestingly, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the gradual presentation to public examination of many of the lesser fragments might cast fresh light on both Old and New Testament accounts of suffering servants. It seems that a leader of the Essenes, a Jewish apocalyptic sect, sometime in the century before the crucifixion was himself murdered, possibly crucified, and became the model of the suffering servant of the Old Testament and the Jesus Christ of the New.
