How did he, looking up with that naked eye of his, how did he know that in the Milky Way there are countless thousands of suns—and these the centres of other systems? How did he know that world-on-world ranges in the upper spaces of the silent sky, so multitudinously that each increase of the power of the telescope only adds unaccountable myriads until, looking from the rim of those nightly searchers, the eye beholds reach on reach of luminous clouds, and learns with awe profound, that these clouds are stars, are suns and systems—but so far away from us and from one another that they cannot be separated and distinguished by the most powerful glasses; and that these clouds, if we really could separate them and bring them within the field of our particular vision, would reveal themselves as suns and systems so numerous, that only, the Creator himself could number them?
How did Job know all this in that far day when he sat at his tent door in the beauty of the cloudless sky and without a telescope? How did he know all this so that he could tell us with absolute certainty what we now know only by the aid of modern science—that the stars cannot be counted for number?
How did he know what only the modern telescope reveals, that the North is stretched out over the empty place? How did he know that there in the Northern sky there is a space where no star does shine—a dark abyss of fathomless night—as if, suddenly, the universe of worlds had come to an end?
How did he know, at the moment when the wise men of his day were saying that the earth was supported on the shoulders of a giant, that the giant stood on a platform made of the backs of elephants; that the elephants stood on the back of a mighty tortoise, but where the tortoise stood none of them said; how did he dare at that time to write that God hangeth the earth on nothing?
How did Isaiah know that the world is round? How did he learn to speak of “the circle of the earth,” at the time when the scientific men of his day said that it was four square and flat?
How did he know of that imponderable ether in which the stellar universe is said to float? Who taught him to say that God spread out the heavens as “thinness,” when the wise men of that hour were teaching they were a solid vault? How is it that he made use of the most scientific term when he speaks of the heavens as “thinness”? It is true in our English version he is made to say that God spread out the heavens as a “tent”; but the word “tent” in the Hebrew is דּק (dôq) and its root meaning signifies a thing that has been beaten out or stretched into thinness—an elastic thinness; it is a word accurately describing the ether which scientific men tell us is so thin that a teacup full of it may be blown out into a transparent bubble as large as the earth, and, even then, its attenuation would seem no greater than at the beginning.
How did Isaiah know all this?
Evidently his knowledge and wisdom did not come from the knowledge and wisdom of his day.
That the Bible did not come from man is seen in the fact of fulfilled prohpecy.
Page after page of this book is filled with prophetic announcements.