THIS WEEKS BIBLE FACTS/TRIVIA/HUMOR

The Bible is the most famous and widely distributed book in history, but even people who grew up reading it are often surprised by how bizarre, dramatic, and culturally powerful its story really is. Over the centuries, the Bible has inspired wars, revolutions, masterpieces of art, blockbuster movies, and countless songs. It has also been censored, mistranslated, smuggled, stolen, and even printed with one of the most infamous typos ever made. From the legendary “Sinners’ Bible” that accidentally commanded people to commit adultery to the fact that no original biblical manuscripts still exist, these surprising Bible facts show why the world’s most influential book is also one of its strangest.

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The Bible’s 100 Percent Accurate Prophecies

 

THE BIRTH OF A NATION

 

Prophecies from the Old and New Testaments that have been fulfilled also add credibility to the Bible. For example, in Isaiah 66:7,8 (700 BC), the prophet gives a strange prophecy: “Shall the earth be made to give birth in one day? Or shall a nation be born at once? For as soon as Zion was in labor, she gave birth to her children.”

In 1922 the League of Nations gave Great Britain the mandate (political authority) over Palestine. On May 14, 1948, Britain withdrew her mandate, and the nation of Israel was “born in a day.”

There are more than twenty-five Bible prophecies concerning Palestine that have been literally fulfilled. Probability estimations conclude that the chances of these being randomly fulfilled are less than one chance in 33 million.

 

THE RISE AND FALL OF NATIONS AND LEADERS

 

The Scriptures predicted the rise and fall of great empires like Greece and Rome (Daniel 2:39,40), and foretold the destruction of cities like Tyre and Sidon (Isaiah 23). Tyre’s demise is recorded by ancient historians, who tell how Alexander the Great lay siege to the city for seven months. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had failed in his thirteen-year attempt to capture the seacoast city and completely destroy its inhabitants.

During the siege of 573 BC, much of the population of Tyre moved to its new island home approximately half a mile off the coast. Here it remained surrounded by walls as high as 150 feet until judgment fell in 332 BC with the arrival of Alexander the Great. In the seven-month siege, he fulfilled the remainder of the prophecies (Zechariah 9:4; Ezekiel 26:12) concerning the city at sea by completely destroying Tyre, killing 8,000 of its inhabitants and selling 30,000 of its population into slavery. To reach the island, he scraped up the dust and rubble of the old land city of Tyre, just like the Bible predicted, and cast it into the sea, building a 200-foot-wide causeway out to the island.

Another startling prophecy was Jesus’ detailed prediction of Jerusalem’s destruction, and the further dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the world, which is recorded in Luke 21. In AD 70, not only was Jerusalem destroyed by Titus, the future emperor of Rome, but another prediction of Jesus (Matthew 24:1,2) came to pass: the complete destruction of the Jerusalem temple.

 

THE COMING OF THE MESSIAH

 

In Daniel chapter 9, the Bible prophesied the timeline of the coming of the one and only Jewish Messiah, prior to the temple’s demise. Five centuries in advance, the Bible gives a precise and accurate countdown from when King Artaxerxes would give the decree to restore Jerusalem in 445 BC to the crucifixion of Christ in AD 33, culminating in the temple’s destruction in AD 70.

Some argue that prophecies like this must have been written after the events took place, to make the Bible appear supernatural. However, any historian can attest that the Jewish Scriptures had already been completed, translated into the Greek Septuagint, and widely published before Jesus’ birth.

In the following description, see if you can identify who is being referred to:

He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon him…And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth…He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people he was stricken.

Who do you think this text is speaking about? If you said Jesus Christ, you would be correct. What you may not realize is that this description was given 700 years before Jesus’ birth in the Book of Isaiah (chapter 53). This is another clear foretelling of the Savior given hundreds of years before His birth. While many have died for noble causes through the centuries, Jesus alone uniquely embodies these words—so that we could easily identify Him as the Savior.