Pastor Rick McGough (truncated because of technical issues

Easily grasp it and understand it. That's why in this video series and what we're gonna see tonight, it's broken down into specific numbers even, six scientific flaws of the theory of evolution, eight areas of evidence of a creator.

And in that we deal with it from biggest to smallest. So biggest being the universe all the way down to DNA and other levels in between. Eight areas of evidence that the Bible is the word of God that we're gonna talk about tonight.

We challenge people in my book and in the video series, we direct people to our website where they can actually download for free memorization cards, which you would be able to do that are related to the lesson we're gonna look at tonight.

So that people can memorize those specific areas and then use them in conversation, use them in their home, teaching their kids and grandkids and use them at church or in a class they may be teaching.

So that's what we're gonna try to do. If you're looking for the deepest level of apology heard, you'll be disappointed tonight. That's not what I'm gonna be presenting. I'm gonna be presenting what you would consider probably kind of an overview of evidences.

Each one of these, you would be able to hear if you look for it, you could find apologists that would spend an entire hour on each of these eight areas. So we're not gonna try to go into extreme depth, but we're gonna try to cover this in a way that when you put it all together, you can both remember the main points and use them in everyday life.

And together they create a powerful evidence that the Bible is the word of God. So now let me share my screen and we will get going here tonight. Now, the only thing is Terry, I am up. Let me see here, I'm seeing just your screen rather than mine up in the corner.

So I may need to do something different here.

It says we're viewing yours.

Yes, but we wanted to help him.

Yeah, I've got it. I pinned it and I have it.

Perfect.

Okay, very well. So this is my wife that Terry mentioned for 41 years and she's been amazing, especially as we've launched out in this journey. These are our three sons. We're real proud of all of them.

And we actually have a seventh grandchild now since I wrote that bio. And so we love our grandkids and they fill our lives with lots of joy and they make us tired every time we see them. So that's just a little bit I threw in there about who I am.

The Bible as God's Word and the Eight Lines of Evidence

So we're gonna be talking about the Bible, God's word. This originally Faith and Reason Made Simple was a four part series. It's broke down into eight parts for the TV video series. Each part was broken in half to be instead of one hour session, they broke into two half hour sessions.

So the Bible is the anchor of our faith. And we were told in the scripture, all scripture is inspired by God, profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness. So the Bible makes the proclamation that all of the scriptures are inspired by God or God breathed.

And also Jesus said, sanctify them through thy truth, thy word is truth. So the Bible is inspired by God and it is truth. And yet we live in a culture where we have things like this. Ian McClellan said, I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying, this is fiction.

A study was done back in 2006 of college professors. And from that study, they found that only 6 of college professors said the Bible is the actual word of God. While 51 described it as an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts.

So that's the battle we're up against and why believers need to know not just what we believe, but why we believe it's true and have evidence that we can share with people to help them understand that with rational thinking, we proclaim the Bible is the word of God.

Dr. Votie Bauckham in dealing with this subject, this is the statement he makes of why, what he tells people of why he believes the Bible is the word of God. He says, I choose to believe the Bible because it is a reliable collection of historical documents written down by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses.

They report to us supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies and claim to be divine rather than human in origin. And I've added to Dr. Bauckham's statement here, these events are confirmed by and give us understanding of historical events and the realities of the world today.

So that begins to give us a picture of the types of mentality we wanna approach this with as we share with people why we believe the Bible is the word of God. And I'm gonna be sharing with you eight different areas of evidence.

So this is where we're headed. Internal unity, the bibliographical evidence, archeological and historical evidence. We'll mostly just touch on archeology there in that. Medical facts found in the Bible, scientific facts found in the Bible that are confirmed by modern medicine and modern science.

And then we'll spend quite a lot of our time on fulfilled prophecy of ancient cities, world empires, the Messianic prophecies, the Jews returning to Israel and end times and the city of Jerusalem. And then two other areas, changed lives, the changed lives of millions and millions of people through following what the Bible teaches of Jesus Christ and putting their faith in Christ.

And then the indestructibility and distribution of the Bible. So those are the eight areas we're gonna look at. Now, if you're taking notes, I would encourage you, I'm gonna go quite quickly and I would encourage you, don't get too bogged down in trying to write everything down because I think you'll just get frustrated.

You'll be able to go back over this with YouTube and you do have available to you notes that I've made available as well. So maybe jot a few key things down, but don't be worried about every detail. Okay, let's begin to talk about the evidence area number one, internal unity of the Bible.

So the Bible was written by 40 authors, the 40 authors of the 66 books over a 1500 year period on three continents in three different languages with a 400 year gap from the Old Testament to the New Testament.

It was written by shepherds, kings, scholars, fishermen, prophets, a military general, a cup bearer, and a priest. They all pinned portions of the scripture. Now, when you look at that in the natural, you would think, well, this must be a hodgepodge of writings that don't relate at all to one another, have no connection to one another and would be very difficult to find any type of unity in it, but instead what we find is an unfolding story of redemption from Genesis to Revelation that a clear ribbon of truth and of the presentation of the gospel is seen throughout both the Old and New Testament.

The Old Testament and New Testament are linked together in so many different ways. Here's an example. The Old Testament puts great emphasis on the law and God gave his law and the people were trying to gain favor with God by keeping the law.

Well, then you come to the New Testament and the law is mentioned certainly, but there's greater explanation. It says the law was never able to make a person righteous because nobody's able to keep the law perfectly, but it gives us its purpose that God gave us the law in the Old Testament as a tutor to lead us to Christ.

And it does that by showing us our need for a savior. Anybody that looks at the law of God understands their own need and their desperate need for help and it leads them to the answer, which is found in Jesus Christ.

And the book of Galatians expresses that to us. Consider this, the person of Melchizedek. Actually, I'm gonna do two other quick things and then deal with that more here in a moment. But think about this, Abraham and his life, there's a number of chapters in the book of Genesis about the life of Abraham and how he was declared righteous by faith.

He becomes the picture of all of the New Testament of believers becoming righteous in the eyes of God, declared righteous by faith in Christ. He is the faith representative in the Old Testament and by exhibiting the same faith of Abraham, we become children of Abraham.

Think about this, Abraham is seen in Genesis 22 as taking Isaac and offering him as a sacrifice. And he's told to go to the hills of Moriah and that God would then show him the specific place. Well, the hills of Moriah are the hills that surround the city of Jerusalem.

So he goes there and then God points out the specific place and we're told that it becomes a place that it's called that the Lord will provide, in the Mount the Lord will provide. You can't prove this without a shadow of a doubt by any means, but I believe the specific hill that God showed him was the specific hill that Jesus Christ would later be crucified on in order to provide salvation for us.

In that moment, when Abraham's there, God says, because you did not withhold your own son, he says that God will provide, but that also that all the nations will be blessed through his seed. And so there's a promise and what we see is man giving his son to God as a sacrifice on the very place that this covenant now is made with God and mankind that God will in turn offer his son in that very location for the sins of the world.

So amazing unity between Old Testament, New Testament, they're linked together. Now let's talk a little bit about this person of Melchizedek. We find him in Genesis 14 and Melchizedek, King of Salem brought up bread and wine.

This is right after Abraham has just won a battle of really saving Lot, his nephew. So Melchizedek shows up. Now he was a priest of God most high. He blessed him, that is he blessed Abram or Abraham and said, blessed be Abram of God most high, possessor of heaven and earth, and blessed be God most high who has delivered your enemies into your hand.

He gave him a 10th of all. That's Abraham gave Melchizedek a 10th of all. So this out of nowhere, this Melchizedek shows up. No mention of him before this and no mention of him after these three verses until you get to Psalm 110 verse four.

And David the Psalmist mentions one verse about Melchizedek says, the Lord has sworn and will not change his mind. You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. So 1500 years before Jesus Christ is born, Moses writes in the book of Genesis about Melchizedek and showing up suddenly to Abraham, the picture of New Testament believers.

And he's a high priest that Abraham acknowledges as a priest and his name means King of Righteousness. And he's said to be King of Salem, which means King of Peace. So he's King of Righteousness, King of Peace.

We find out in the New Testament, he has no genealogy, he just no beginning of days. So he's obviously either an Old Testament appearance of Christ or just a typology of Christ. But now here's my point in this.

So you've got a total of four verses in the Old Testament. Three of those verses written 1500 years before Christ and one verse 1000 years before Christ. If those four verses were not in the Old Testament written hundreds and hundreds of years before Jesus came, the New Testament, a major doctrine of salvation would be lost.

Because when you get to the book of Hebrews, which is all about the new covenant versus the old covenant and the priesthood of Jesus, we read this in chapter five, just as he says also in another passage, you are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.

Chapter six, where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. Chapter seven, for it is attested of him, you are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.

Jesus is of the tribe of Judah, not of Levi. His priesthood in our lives, which is so important, is based on those four verses of the Old Testament. This one who has his priesthood, not on the basis of being a Levi, but on the basis of an incorruptible or indestructible life where other priests had to constantly be replaced.

This priesthood is everlasting. And Jesus is of this priesthood. And we find the significance of that in Hebrews seven, says, but Jesus, on the other hand, because he continues forever, that's Melchizedek, holds his priesthood permanently.

Therefore he is able also to save forever those who draw near to God through him since he always lives to make intercession for them. So the Bible is absolutely amazing. A major New Testament doctrine would not exist if it were not for three verses written 1 ,500 years before Christ and one verse written 1 ,000 years before Christ.

So how did they know to put that in there? Well, it was because the Holy Spirit was guiding and directing all of this from beginning to end. Think of this, the internal unity between Old and New Testament.

The book of Malachi in chapter three and chapter four ends with prophetic words about the coming of Elijah, who we find out later to be a reference to John the Baptist who would precede the Messiah. And then the New Testament starts with words in both Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John about the ministry of John the Baptist, who is really the first one on the scene in the New Testament and then introducing the ministry of the Messiah or the Christ, Jesus.

So Old Testament ends with what the New Testament begins with. After 400 years, there's claims of inspiration throughout scripture. The Bible claims to be the word of God throughout over 2 ,600 times God said or its equivalent are found throughout the scriptures.

Now, speaking of scriptures, whenever you see the word scripture or scriptures in the New Testament, which it shows up 53 times in the King James, 52 times in the NASB, the New American Standard, a one-time translated sacred writings, it always speaks of the Old Testament.

Think about that, because the scriptures weren't, there was no New Testament yet while the New Testament was being written. So whenever you see a reference to the scriptures in the New Testament, it's pointing you back to the Old Testament.

Well, look at, here's just a couple of examples of significant verses about that. Jesus said this, you search the scriptures, you search the Old Testament because you think that in them you have eternal life.

It is these that testify about me. So he's saying the whole Old Testament that you're looking at is about me. It's pointing to me. On the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, he's talking to two disciples and you know that story.

And it says this, then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, so the law and the prophets, he explained to them the things concerning himself in all the scriptures or all the Old Testament. So some people say, well, only the New Testament is about Jesus.

Well, we see that is clearly not the case. This book written over a 1500 year period is consistently pointing to the person of Christ. He's the central character of the entire Bible. And we find that the Old Testament goes to great lengths to point to specific things about Jesus through types and shadows, the Passover lamb, the ark, the scapegoat, Rahab's scarlet cord in the window, the brazen serpent that Moses put up in Numbers, I think 21, Melchizedek that we already looked at, the sin and guilt offerings.

Moses who represents the law could only bring them to the bank of the Jordan River. Joshua whose name, Joshua is the same as Yeshua, Jesus could bring them in. So New Testament tells us the law can bring you to Christ, only Christ can bring you in to God's promises.

And so we had a picture of that in the Jordan River as the people were going in. The manna and the water from the rock were typologies of Christ as well. If we could spend, and I do a whole session called seeing Jesus in the Old Testament where we dig into these a lot deeper, but it's fascinating.

Let me show you a couple examples though. This one I just love. This is a picture by the way, from modern Saudi Arabia. They believe some who have studied this believe this may very well be the rock that water flowed from when the children of Israel were in the wilderness and going from Egypt to the promised land.

Over that 40 year period.

So we read about this incident in two different places. In Exodus chapter 17 verse six, they come to this location, they're complaining and Moses goes to God and he says, well, I want you to take your staff and I want you to strike the rock.

He does so and massive amounts of water flow out of the rock and life comes, life giving water. And the people are nourished. Okay, then they come back years later in Numbers chapter 20 verse eight to the same location.

And again, same thing is happening. They need water, they're complaining, Moses goes to God. Now this time God says something different to him. He doesn't say strike the rock. He says, speak to the rock and the water will come.

Well, Moses doesn't listen. He's so frustrated with everything that's been happening and the people murmuring, complaining again, that he's angry and he just remembers what happens before. He struck the rock, water does come, but God immediately says that you shouldn't have done that.

And because of this, you're not gonna be able to enter the promised land because you did not consider me holy. Well, why was that such a big deal? Speak to the rock, strike to the rock. Why did God consider that a big deal?

We don't know until the New Testament is written hundreds of years later. And we find in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, verse four, speaking of this time, it says, and all drank the same spiritual drink for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them and the rock was Christ.

Now you think about it. How many times was Jesus to be smitten, stricken to bring life just once? And what do we now do to receive life from Christ? We simply speak to him. And you see it was beautiful typology of not only what was written, but what was happening in real time, hundreds and hundreds of years before Christ, all recorded in the Bible, amazing internal unity, certainly not just the writings of men.

No way they could have conspired all of this, people on different continents and different languages over hundreds of years to make this fit like this. Also, we see Jesus Christ as the central character of the entire Bible through the Old Testament prophecies that he fulfilled.

We'll look more about that a little bit later. And then the Bible also has all this embarrassing testimony. This is considered good evidence for the integrity of scripture because if you were making up a story, all the stars would be impeccable.

You wouldn't write about their embarrassing moments if you're making it up. But what we find throughout scripture is extremely embarrassing things to some of the key people in scripture. Cain murders Abel, Noah gets drunk, Abraham's lying about Sarah being his wife.

Judah gets involved in prostitution, it becomes a part of the lineage of Jesus. Israel is constantly in rebellion. Samson is guilty of lust. Eli, the high priest, his sons and Samuel's sons even were rebellious and not good stewards of the positions that they should have inherited.

David is found guilty of adultery and murder. The disciples are arguing about who is the greatest. They're afraid at sea. Peter's rebuked two times. Peter denies Jesus. The disciples are sleeping at a critical moment.

They're fleeing when Jesus is captured. And after the crucifixion, it's women that are the first witnesses of the resurrection in a culture where women's testimony was not even permitted in a court of law.

You see, none of this points to somebody making up a pretty story.

This is real life.

The stars had flaws and it's shown throughout the Bible. So we see numerous things of internal unity in the scriptures. Now, obviously I'm not gonna take as much time on some of these as others. That one we spent quite a bit, we'll spend a lot on fulfilled prophecy.

Some of these in between, we're gonna go quite quickly on. Bibliographical evidence. This more points to the integrity of the modern day scriptures. Some say, well, even if the Bible was the word of God and accurate hundreds and hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago, it certainly isn't today.

They talk about the old telephone story. You know, you start a story and by the time it gets back through many different links, it doesn't sound anything like it did originally. So that's what some try to claim about the Bible.

Bibliographical evidence is what deals with that. Now, this is a chart. The way ancient writings are valued as far as their integrity is two things. The time span between the earliest known copy from the original, the shorter that is, the more integrity we find.

And then the number of manuscript copies, portions or entire copies, the higher the number that is, the more it speaks to the integrity of the ancient writings. Well, this is all of these writings at the top here by Caesar, Plato, and so on, Aristotle.

In universities, they're not even questioned, but look at the time span between our earliest copies of these writings and the original, they're all over a thousand years. Then you get to Homer's Iliad, little bit better, about 500 years.

And the number of copies that we have are minuscule. But then you get to the New Testament and you see that we have copies that originate back as close as 25 years from the originals and over 24 ,000 manuscript portions or entire manuscripts that are available to us.

So the manuscript evidence, the bibliographical evidence for the Bible, for the New Testament, is way surpasses any other ancient writings. So if there's any ancient writing that we should look at and say it's trustworthy, it's the Bible.

British paleographer and biblical and classical scholar, Sir Frederick Kenyon has said this, the interval between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extent evidence become so small as to be in fact negligible.

And the last foundation of any doubt that the scriptures have come down substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.

And then in addition to that, we have all the writings of the early church fathers, Clement of Rome, Origen, Tertullian, Arrhenius, Ignatius, Polycarp, et cetera. They quoted the New Testament over a million times in their writings.

And scholars have noted that if all the manuscripts of the New Testament were destroyed, but the writings of the church fathers were still available, we could reconstruct pretty much the entire New Testament just by their writings alone.

So we have wonderful evidence of what was originally in the scriptures from the early church father writings. And they confirm that what we have today is accurate. What about the Old Testament? Well, in our truth conferences, Josh McDowell brings a 700 year old Torah scroll and rolls it out in front of us for people to actually be able to come up close and see it.

And he explains the rules that were involved in by the scribal rules in copying the Old Testament. And this scroll that he brings is from the 1400s. So just before the printing press and he shows these things that there and explains there were 4 ,000 scribal rules.

They were extremely meticulous, very careful and precise. And in the scroll he lays out like the one you see on the screen. It looks like something on some kind of ancient computer with all of the lines being exactly straight and parallel with one another.

It's amazing. And then he explains how they would number the words and the letters. Think about this, like in a Torah scroll, it would take them about two years to copy a Torah scroll. And they knew exactly how many words were in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.

It's also called the Pentateuch. And they knew what word was the middle word. And when they got all done, they had to count. And if that word was not the middle word, they had to throw the whole thing away and start over.

There's no book in history that by even close to having the care that the Bibles had to make sure that the writings we have today are very accurate. It's been confirmed then by the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were found in the Middle East there back in the 1940s.

And they date from 200 BC to 68 AD, about 1 ,000 years older copies than the ones that were the earliest copies we had before that. So it made it very interesting to compare the Dead Sea Scrolls with the copies that we had before because there's a 1 ,000 year gap between them.

So we could find out, well, did things change a lot in that 1 ,000 years? Well, an example was found in, for example, in Isaiah 53, of the 166 words in that chapter, only 17 letters were in question. 10 of these letters were simply a matter of spelling.

The spelling of words change over a period of time. Four more letters are minor stylistic changes. The remaining letters comprise the word light, which is added in verse 11 and does not affect the meaning.

It was a three-letter word for light. In other words, in one chapter of 166 words, there was only one word but three letters in question after 1 ,000 years of transmission and copying, and they didn't change the meaning at all.

So that's a great example that confirms to us the Bible is very accurate, the ones we read today. Okay, number three, archeology and history. Other documents that confirm the things that are recorded in the scriptures for us.

So this is just a picture of some of the archeological findings there near the ancient Jericho. Nelson Gluck, who was a famous archeologist, said, as a matter of fact, however, it may be stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.

Then James Mann of US News and World Report wrote, a wave of archeological discoveries is altering old ideas about the roots of Christianity and Judaism and affirming the Bible is more historically accurate than many scholars thought.

Take, for example, Luke's writings. In his writings, Luke's very detailed and was very precise in the way he wrote. He mentions 32 countries. This is in the book of Luke and book of Acts combined. 32 countries, 54 cities, nine islands, numerous ports, names and titles of priests and political leaders, deities that certain cities worshiped, weather patterns, particular shipping lanes, laws and customs.

So that's a lot of detail he puts in that can be checked to see, was this historically accurate? Here's an example of how he added so many details like this. Now, in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was Tetrarch of Galilee and his brother Philip was Tetrarch of the region of Eterreia and Trachonith, I should have read that ahead of time, and Lysanias was Tetrarch of Abilene.

Now, see, all of these details could be checked to see if it's historically accurate. In the high priesthood of Annas in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias in the wilderness, and he came into all the district around the Jordan.

He wouldn't have had to put all those details in there, but he did to really paint a picture of the historical surroundings of what he's about to write about about John the Baptist's ministry. What archeology has shown, more than 80 details in the Book of Acts alone have been confirmed by historical and archeological research, as well as many details from the Book of Luke.

So archeology is continually confirming not that the Bible missed it and is historically inaccurate, but confirming rather that the Bible is accurate historically and not just a book of moral precepts.

Medical and Scientific Facts Confirmed by Modern Science

Okay, then what about medical facts? So the Bible has a lot of medical facts that have now been, which were written most of these 3 ,500 years ago. And now modern medicine in the last 250 years or so has been confirming some of these things written in the ancient scriptures.

For instance, the Book of Leviticus, we all have experienced going through it and thinking, oh my goodness, there's so much detail here about cleansing, because what they're really expressing is the danger of germs and how they can be spread and how you had to quarantine people at times and why meticulously things.

And well, that wasn't understood even in modern medicine until I think a couple of hundred years ago or so. At one point, a doctor would work on a cadaver and then, or a dead body, and then go deliver a baby without even washing his hands.

But now we know, certainly in the age of COVID -19, we really know a lot about being careful about the passing of germs. Now, Leviticus 17, 14, again, 3 ,500 years ago, the Bible's made this statement, the life is in the blood.

Well, as recently as in the life of George Washington, you can read this account that when he became ill at the end of his life, doctors did something three or four times the last three days or so of his life that was a common practice of that time.

They would bleed a person thinking the infection that was in their body was in the blood, so they needed to get rid of the blood. Well, we know now that that doesn't work. Modern medicine has ruled that out as a treatment, but the Bible knew it 3 ,500 years ago.

And then, I love this one. Leviticus 12, 3 says you're to circumcise every male child on the eighth day. That's pretty specific. Well, more research about blood clotting was done in 1939 that we know that vitamin K and prothrombin combines together as a major part of blood clotting.

Well, when a human being is born, their body is deficient in vitamin K, and it doesn't start producing vitamin K for the first few days. But then, once it starts, it does a really good job, and it peaks.

There's a day in a person's life that vitamin K is at its peak level, and then it kind of falls off and levels out for the rest of their life. You know what day it peaks on? The best day of a person's life for blood clotting is the eighth day of their life.

Now, how does a skeptic explain the Bible picking that day to say every male child should go through this experience of circumcision, which blood clotting would be very important for, on the eighth day?

You see, this confirms to us, this book is not just a grouping of men's writing trying to make up some story, but this is the word of God. And then what about scientific facts that are confirmed by modern science?

Well, the Bible tells us the Earth is a sphere, that it's round, Isaiah 40, verse 22, that the heavens or the universe are being stretched out. There are actually 10 different places in the Old Testament that says that, and we know now the universe to be expanding.

Stars forming the Pleiades constellation are gravitationally bound, and stars forming Orion are not gravitationally bound. Job 38, 31 told us that, and modern science has confirmed that. The Earth hangs on nothing, Job 26, 7 has been confirmed by modern science and that there are springs within the seas and oceans.

These are examples. Now, this one is really kind of neat. In Psalm 8, 8, we read the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, whatever passes through the paths, the paths of the sea. Well, this verse is what caused Matthew Maury in the 1800s, who was an oceanographer, to begin to contemplate what the Bible was saying about the paths of the sea.

And so he began, based on that verse of scripture written about 2 ,500 years ago, he began to explore the possibility that there were currents, oceans, and he found that there were. And it changed, revolutionized shipping, drastically cutting travel times, all based on him looking into the Bible.

And he said this, the Bible is the authority for everything it touches, not just doctrine, but science and history as well. And here's an example. And there's this monument to him, you see over on the left side, is in Richmond, Virginia.

He's called the Pathfinder of the Seas, all directed by the Bible. So the scientific facts in the Bible that are confirming that it is accurate in the word of God. Now let's look at fulfilled prophecy.

This is a major important one here. 27 of the verses in the Bible somebody has said, and I say that because I haven't checked it out to confirm it, and I haven't went through every verse myself, are predictive prophecy.

Here's an example. In Isaiah 44 and in 45, chapter 45, 200 years before the birth of Cyrus the Great, it says, it is I who says of Cyrus, he is my shepherd and he will perform all my desire. And he declares of Jerusalem, she will be built and of the temple, your foundation will be laid.

Well, Cyrus ends up fulfilling prophecy about his involvement in having Jerusalem rebuilt in fulfillment of a 200 year old prophecy. Now that's an ancient prophecy. Here's some other ancient prophecies about the destruction of ancient cities.

Cities that were major cities of their day like Babylon and Petra and Tyre. And some of them go into great detail. I wanna give you just one example. Again, all of these, you could go into way more detail.

We could spend the whole night on each one of these areas, but I'm just hitting the high points. But here's an example of Tyre. Notice this prophecy. They will destroy the walls of Tyre. This is Ezekiel 26 four and break down her towers and I will scrape her debris from her and make her a bare rock.

Well, that's pretty specific. Well, what happened was in 500 and some odd years BC, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed ancient Tyre, the mainland city. The city of Tyre was kind of in two parts, the mainland city, but then there was an island about a half a mile off the coast that was also part of the city.

When Nebuchadnezzar was able to destroy the mainland and he broke down her towers and her walls fulfilling part of this and left it in shambles for a couple hundred years. But the last part of this verse says, I will scrape her debris from her and make her a bare rock.

Well, what happened was in 332 BC, Alexander the Great shows up and he wants to conquer this island portion of the city of Tyre. And so he, the way it was structured and fortified with no flight in, no helicopters or airplanes at that time, he and his naval fleets could not get too tired in order to conquer it.

So what he did was he told his soldiers, his foot soldiers, I want you to take all of that debris that's on the mainland portion of the city leftover that's just been laying there. I want you to scrape it all into the waters and create a causeway to the island portion.