Nostradamus --a Liar and a Thief

“You might say the Bible predicts it before they happens, but the problem is that the predictions claimed to be correct are not pointed out until after they happen. The Bible predictions are vague enough that people aren't pointing out what and when it will happen, they take an event that has happened and adjust their interpretation to fit the event and claim the event is what the prediction said all along. Gods predictions are not alone, it is done with Nostradamus, horoscopes, and tarot cards predictions too.”

I once believed that Nostradamus was able to somewhat predict the future. However, after closely studying him and his so-called predictions I found that he stole his “prophecies” from the Bible (which he read in secret), revised them, and claimed them as his own. I even produced an award-winning documentary about this, and also wrote a book called Nostradamus, Attack on America.

He was able to plagiarize the prophecies of the Bible and get away with it because in those days the Roman Catholic church forbade the reading of the Scriptures. Nowadays, as in his day, anyone who is ignorant of the Bible’s prophecies will be impressed with the writings of Nostradamus. His "predictions," though, are incredibly generic (just as horoscopes and tarot cards are), and people can read into them any meaning they want to.

That isn’t true with biblical prophecies. They are extremely detailed and precise. Unlike other books, the Bible offers a multitude of specific predictions—some thousands of years in advance—that either have been literally fulfilled or point to a definite future time when they will come true. No other religion has specific, repeated, and unfailing fulfillment of predictions many years in advance of events over which the predictor had no control. The sacred writings of Buddhism, Islam, Confucius, etc., are all missing the element of proven prophecy. These kinds of predictions are unique to the Bible.

Only one who is omniscient can accurately predict details of events thousands of years in the future. Limited human beings know the future only if it is told to them by an omniscient Being. God provided this evidence for us so we would know that the Scriptures have a divine Author:

“For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done.” (Isaiah 46:9,10)

In addition, the Bible declares that prophets must be 100 percent accurate—no exceptions. If anyone claimed to be speaking for God and the prophesied event didn’t come to pass, he was proven to be a liar. The writings of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are littered with false prophecies, so we know can whether they are written by men or by God.

The Bible’s sixty-six books, written between 1400 B.C. and A.D. 90, contain approximately 3,856 verses concerned with prophecy. For example, 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 a 13-year attempt to capture the seacoast city and completely destroy its inhabitants. During the siege of 573 B.C., much of the population of Tyre moved to its new island home half a mile from the land city. Here it remained surrounded by walls as high as 150 feet until judgment fell in 332 B.C. 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 them into the sea, building a 200-foot-wide causeway out to the island.

Alexander’s death and the murder of his two sons were also foretold in the Scripture. Another startling prophecy was Jesus’ detailed prediction of Jerusalem’s destruction, and the further dispersion of Jews throughout the world, which is recorded in Luke 21. In A.D. 70, not only was Jerusalem destroyed by Titus, the future emperor of Rome, but another prediction of Jesus’ in Matthew 24:1,2 came to pass—the complete destruction of the temple of God.

Even more important are the many prophecies of a coming Messiah. God said He would send someone to redeem mankind from sin, and He wanted there to be no mistake about who that Person would be. For example, in the Book of Daniel, the Bible prophesied the coming of the one and only Jewish Messiah prior to the temple’s demise. The Old Testament prophets declared He would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2) to a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), be betrayed for thirty pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12,13), die by crucifixion (Psalm 22), and be buried in a rich man’s tomb (Isaiah 53:9). There was only one person who fits all of the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament: Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary. In all, there are over three hundred prophecies that tell of the ancestry, birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth. All have been literally fulfilled to the smallest detail.

A fact often overlooked by critics is that, even if most biblical predictions could be explained naturally, the existence of just one real case of fulfilled prophecy is sufficient to establish the Bible’s supernatural origin. Over 25 percent of the entire Bible contains specific predictive prophecies that have been literally fulfilled. This is true of no other book in the world. And it is a sure sign of its divine origin.

(Adapted from How to Know God Exists--Bridge-Logos)