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from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come” (Isaiah 46:9-10, NIV).
    Through the prophet Amos, the Lord said, “The Lord G OD does nothing unless He reveals His secret counsel to His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7).
    Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord told his people, “Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3).
    Referring to the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus told his disciples, “When He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come” (John 16:13).
    Bible prophecies are, if you will, intercepts from the mind of God. They tell us God’s secrets. They tell us “great and mighty things” we do not know about the future. They tell us “what is to come.” Often, biblical prophecies are “storm warnings” for the future, warnings of wars or natural disasters or other catastrophic events that God has decided he is going to allow to happen or cause to happen. Yet in his love and mercy, he wants us to be aware of—and thereby fully prepared for—these events before they come to pass.
    On What Basis Can We Trust the Prophecies Found in the Bible?
    Couldn’t any book claim to be written by God? Yes.
    Haven’t other books in history claimed to predict the future? Yes.
    On what basis, then, can we trust the prophecies found in the Bible about the last days in general and about the future of specific countries in particular? This is an important question, and the answer is simple: we can trust the Bible’s prophecies about the future because the Bible’s prophecies about the past have all come true.
    Think about it for a moment. The prophets in the Bible told mankind about hundreds of specific events that would happen—and made those predictions before they happened. And then those events actually happened just as they were foretold. That fact provides proof that these men in the Bible truly spoke from God. After all, only God knows “the end from the beginning.” Therefore, only God could give his servants advance knowledge of the things to come, not just in a few instances, but in hundreds and hundreds of specific cases, and with 100 percent accuracy. Indeed, fulfilled prophecy is one of the distinctive elements that give us confidence that the Bible is the very Word of God, not the scribblings of mere mortals.
    The Prophecies about the Captivity of Jerusalem Came True
    The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah once prophesied that God was going to enact judgment on an unrepentant nation of Israel by sending the Babylonians to conquer the Holy Land and take her inhabitants captive. “And the L ORD has sent to you all His servants the prophets again and again, but you have not listened nor inclined your ear to hear . . . Therefore thus says the L ORD of hosts, ‘Because you have not obeyed My words, behold, I will send and take all the families of the north . . . and I will send to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, My servant, and will bring them against this land and against its inhabitants and against all these nations round about . . . This whole land will be a desolation and a horror, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon’” (Jeremiah 25:4-11). Scholars indicate that Jeremiah began his prophetic ministry around 626 BC. And sure enough, the Babylonians, under the leadership of King Nebuchadnezzar, conquered Jerusalem in 586 BC, just as prophesied.
    Jeremiah also prophesied that the captivity of the Jewish people in Babylon would last for seventy years, at which point the prophet said the Jewish people would be set free to return to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. “‘Then it will be when seventy years are completed I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation . . . For behold, days are coming,’ declares the L ORD , ‘when I will restore the fortunes