05.02.02 - Prophecy Considered as Evidence

(2) Prophecy Considered as Evidence Modern Criticism has not only disputed the place assigned to prediction in the evidences of Divine I Sermons on Prophecy. revelation, but questions whether there is, or can be, any such thing as prediction of future events at all, and whether it has any evidential value worthy of notice. What is called prediction is said to be mere conjecture, or a happy guess, or at best an intellectual forecast, an estimation of probabilities, or the calculations of likelihood, that may happen within a given period of time. Like miracle, prediction is pronounced impossible and incredible. But as in the case of miracle, so it is with prophecy; its possibility is admissible, and can only be impossible on the ground that a personal, infinite, all-wise God is impossible.

Admit the existence of God, and that He has access to the minds of men, and the communication of such truths as imply superhuman foresight and knowledge is not only possible but highly probable. The Prophets were not mere politicians, or shrewd observers of men and things, men with sagacious minds, who, while speaking of current events, perceived their probable distant issues and forecasted their probable results. They were “ seers,” “ men of God,” who spake from God and for God, who were given to see things, or had things revealed to them, hidden from ordinary men, and which facts and truths they were commissioned to declare in the name of God. Hence their statements were not mere imaginary, conjectural, or inferential utterances of their own imagining or forecasting, but things disclosed or revealed to them, and which they had to declare in God’s name. As already stated, they are not to be classed with heathen forthtellers, diviners, sooth sayers, and prognosticates, albeit their messages to the people contained elements of warning and threatening, promise and reward, of forecast and prediction, relating to the near and distant future. They dealt with a people whose existence, mission, and religion concerned not only their own age but the ages to come, not only their own immediate relations, but the divine purposes of redemption and salvation for the race, and as such had a necessary relation to the future, and contained within itself an element of prediction and foreshadowing of things to come, inseparable from all God’s dealings with them.