The Bible is True: A Two-minute Proof

A battered woman slowly turns pages in a worn Bible, in a one-room violence shelter. She sees the spectacle of a battered man expiring on a rough-hewn cross and understands his pain. ‘For God so loved . . . ,’ it says. Can it be true? She longs to believe she has the divinely attributed worth implied by that sacrificial death. But does God truly exist? Is the writing between these marred leather covers His supernatural communication and, if so, how can one know?

A teenager props his rifle against a tree at a brief rest stop in a steaming, Central African Republic jungle. Head down, he sits and remembers life before he was abducted into Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. He had lived in Uganda near a missionary compound in the year before he was taken at age 13. The missionary once quoted, ‘If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.’ He knew the missionary spoke of a spiritual freedom—a freedom from sin. But could he appeal to the divine Christ for physical freedom as well, some way of escaping the cycle of village plundering and violence Kony has forced him to be an unwilling accomplice in?  The small new testament he has secreted in a cargo pocket describes Christ as possessing ‘all power in heaven and earth.’ But can the description be trusted?

Let me shine some light on the subject.

The question, whether asked in a violence shelter, an African jungle, or there, right there . . . in your chair, is a valid one.

Revelation 11 lets us move aside the curtain of years and gaze into the future to a time just before the Lord Jesus is to return to establish unending life, righteousness and safety. Two witnesses will arise who will prophesy to the hostile masses. If you don’t like them, be careful how you express your dislike—they have the power to destroy their enemies with fire proceeding from their mouths. Additionally, they have the power, which they will use, to afflict the earth with drought and all manner of plagues during the course of their preaching. When they die, their bodies are not permitted to be buried but are made to lie where they drop for three and a half days while the world looks on and rejoices. Party soon ends, however, as the breath of life returns and they stand, and then rise to heaven while their dismayed enemies look on.

Did you see it there, easily missed between plague and resurrection? The entire world—‘peoples and tribes and tongues and nations,’ as the Bible puts it—will be able to view this spectacle!

It was as recently as the 19^th century, eighteen hundred years after this prophecy was written, that the only pictures viewable by groups of people at long distances were word pictures painted by the clicking keys of the telegraph. And even these could not reach people groups on a grand scale. Yet this prophecy predicts the discovery of some video mass communication marvel. Long ago it foresaw the digital technology device hidden in your purse or clipped to your belt, the one which provided you images of armored vehicles rolling into Ukraine, debris fields in the southern Indian Ocean, and mud slides in Washington state, and all in the last few days, and all in real time.

I recall the powerful words of God spoken through Isaiah the Prophet in chapter 46 of his prophecy:

I am God, and there is no other;

I am God, and no one is like me.

I declare the end from the beginning,

And from long ago what is not yet done,

Saying: My plan will take place,

And I will do all my will.

God knows we are intelligent beings. After all, He made us in His image. The faith the Bible requires of us is not a blind faith. It is a faith that believes God will do what He says he will do. But before we believe, our minds require proof that God is, and that the Bible is His word. One of the ways God proves these things to minds rightfully challenging the world’s competing truth claims is by the instrument of fulfilled prophecy. While Revelation 11 is not intended to be fulfilled just yet, its predicted technology has arrived. What’s exciting is, to see it spreading to every corner of the world-every tribe, tongue, and nation-during our day, in our lifetimes.

Revelation 11 affords us one proof, one among the hundreds already fulfilled by Christ’s birth and life, of the supernatural character of the Bible. Yet that one proof alone is enough to kindle hope in hearts all across this planet: in shelters and jungles and right there, in your chair!