The revelation of future events, however, is not the principal design of the prophecies of the Bible; they bear witness to God's powerful present influence over the world now. For God's prophecy is not merely his foretelling something which will certainly happen at some future time, but over which he has no control—as an astronomer foretells an eclipse of the sun, but can neither hasten nor hinder it—but it is his revealing of a part of his plan of this world's affairs, to show that God, and not man, is the sovereign of this world. For this purpose he tells beforehand the actions which wicked men, of their own free will, will commit, contrary to his law, and the measures he will take to thwart their designs, and fulfill his own. Nay, he declares he will so manage matters that, without their knowledge, and even contrary to their intentions, heathen armies, and infidel scoffers shall serve his purposes, and show his power; while yet they are as perfectly voluntary in all their movements as if they, and not God, governed the world. Every fulfilled prophecy thus becomes an instance and evidence of a supernatural government; and is, to a thinking mind, a greater miracle than casting mountains into the sea. The style of prophecy corresponds to this design. It is not by any means apologetic, or supplicating; but, on the contrary, majestic, convincing, and terrifying to the ungodly.
"Remember this and show yourselves men.
Bring it again to mind, O ye transgressors.
For I am God, and there is none else.
I am God, and there is none like me.
Declaring the end from the beginning,
And from, ancient times the things that are not yet done,
Saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.'"[83]
Infidels feel the power of this manifestation of God in his word; and are driven to every possible denial of the fact, and evasion of the argument drawn from it. They feel instinctively that Bible prophecies are far more than mere predictions. They would rather endow every human being on earth with the power of predicting the future than allow the God of heaven that power of ruling the present which these prophecies assert. Hence the attempt to admit their predictive truth, and yet deny their divine authority, by ascribing them to human sagacity.
Transatlantic steam navigation has produced a remarkable change in the tone of Infidel writers and speakers in regard to the prophecies of the Bible. You could not converse long with an Infidel on this subject, a few years ago, until he would assure you, with all confidence, that the prophecies were all written after their fulfillment, and so were not prophecies at all. But now that travelers of all classes, scoffers, sailors, and doctors in divinity, scientific expeditions, and correspondents of daily papers, have flooded the world with undeniable attestations that many of them are receiving their fulfillment at this day, none but the most grossly ignorant and stupid attempt to deny that the prophecies of the Bible were written thousands of years since, and that many of them have since been accomplished; and that so many have been fulfilled that their accomplishment can not be ascribed to chance. But the force of the argument for the divine inspiration of the prophets is met by the assertion, that there is nothing supernatural in prophecy, and that it is only one form of the inspiration of genius applying the general laws of nature.
Calculating securely on that profound ignorance of the Bible which characterizes their followers, modern writers inform them that "none of the prophets ever uttered any distinct, definite, unambiguous prediction of any future event which has since taken place, which a man without a miracle could not equally well predict." It is alleged that the prophecies, in predicting the overthrow of the nations of antiquity, predicted nothing beyond the ken of human sagacity, enlightened by a careful study of the experience of the past, and the invariable laws of nature; that it requires no inspiration to foretell the decay of perishing things; that the invariable progress of all things, empires as well as individuals, is first upward, through a period of youthful vigor and energy, then onward through a period of ripe maturity, and then downward, through a gradual decay, and final dissolution, to the inevitable grave. The world's history is but a history of the decline and fall of nations.
1. Now, if this be true, it is an awful truth for the Infidel, for it sweeps away the last vestige of a foundation of his hope for eternity. The only reason any unbeliever in Revelation could ever give, or that modern Rationalists do give, for their hope of a happy eternity, is the analogy of nature—the alleged constant progress of all things toward perfection in this world. It is an awkward truth that individually we must die, and the worms crawl over us; but then the wretched fate of the individual was to be compensated by the glorious progress of the race onward and ever onward and upward; from the fungus to the frog, and from the frog to the monkey, from the monkey to the man, from the noble savage wild in woods, to the pastoral tribe, thence to the empire and the federal republic, and finally to the reign of individual and passional attraction, and union with the sum of all the intelligences of the universe, through a constant progress toward infinite perfection.
But, alas! it seems it was a false analogy, an ill-observed fact, a delusion; the course of nature is all the other way. The tendency of all perishing things is not to perfection, but to perdition; and it needs no inspiration to tell that man's loftiest towers, and strongest cities, and proudest empires will come to ruin; or that the most polished, powerful, and populous nations of antiquity will dwindle down into Turks, Moors, and Egyptians. Here is a fact of awful omen. Death reigns in this world of ours; death moral, social, political, and physical, has ever trampled upon man, proud man, learned man, civilized man, over all the plans of man, over every man, and over every association of men, even the largest, the widest, the mightiest. And now the Infidel, having taken away our hope of help from heaven, comes with the serpent's hiss, and fiendish sneer, to taunt the perishing world with this miserable truism—that the tendency of everything on earth is to perdition, and that it needs no inspiration to tell it. Truly it does not. Were that all the prophets of God had to tell us—as it is all the prophets of Infidelity can prophecy—we had as little need for the one as for the other. Earthquake and hurricane, volcano and valley flood, autumn frosts and winter blasts, fever, consumption, war, and pestilence, the grave-yard and the charnel-house, the Parthenon and the Pyramids, the silent cities of Colorado, and the buried palaces of Assyria, unite to attest this awful doom.
But what reason has the skeptic to believe that this invariable law of nature shall ever be repealed, and this inevitable progress of all things to perdition be arrested? Why may not men be as selfish, and filthy, and grasping, and murderous in the other world, as they are in this? Why may not the course of nature be as fatal to the sinner's prosperity there as it is here? Why may not the progress of the proud empires and spheres of futurity be such as the skeptic declares the progress of the past to have been, so invariably toward dissolution and death, that it shall need no inspiration to predict its course downward, downward, ever downward, to endless perdition? Stand forward, skeptic, and point the world to an instance in which an ungodly nation has stemmed this all-destroying torrent of ruin; or acknowledge that all you can promise the nations of the world to come, from your experience of the invariable laws of nature, is perdition, endless perdition.
2. It is manifest, however, that this destruction of nations and desolation of empires must have had a beginning some time or other. Nations could not perish before they had grown, nor empires be destroyed till they had accumulated; and during all this period of their growth and vigor the experience of mankind would never lead them to predict their ruin. The sagacious observer, beholding Babylon, Nineveh, Damascus, and Tyre, growing and flourishing during a period of a thousand years past, could have had no reason from such an experience to expect anything else than a thousand years of prosperity to come. Especially impossible is it for human sagacity, enlightened by experience, to predict unexampled desolations, destructions such as the world had never witnessed.
Now the predictions of the Bible are predictions of unexampled desolations, and unparalleled ruin of empires. The desolation of any extensive region of the earth, or the overthrow of any great nation, was an event absolutely unknown to the world when the prophets of the Bible began to utter their predictions; unless the skeptic will allow the truth of the Bible record of the prediction and execution of the deluge, and the destruction of Sodom. War and conquest had indeed caused some provinces to change masters; one nation had made marauding invasions on others, and carried off cattle and slaves; but the result of the greatest military operation of which we have any record, at the commencement of the prophetic era—the conquest of Palestine by the Israelites—so far from desolating the region, or exterminating the people, had been merely to increase its productiveness, and to drive its former occupants to new settlements, where at that era they were fully able to cope with their former conquerors. Whatever the experience of thirty centuries may have since taught the nations concerning the certainty of the connection between national crime and national ruin, a long-suffering God had not then given any such signal examples of it, as those of which he gave warning by the prophets.