Q&A 42: What do we say about the claims that portions or all of Isaiah and...

Alright, we're looking at this question. What do we say about the claims that portions or all of Isaiah and Daniel were written much later than the Bible claims they were written? Anybody run into this? Somebody telling you, those things were written a lot later than they weren't really written at the time that it appears they were written? If a guy named Daniel wrote the book of Daniel, it wasn't the Daniel that it claims to be, you know, those kinds of things.

I've had that. I had someone who was quite close to me. who decided that he wasn't going to be a Christian anymore and presented those things to me. And that was about almost 40 years ago. So I've been examining the question, these questions here, for the last several decades. Have you stayed a non-Christian?

Yeah. But basically, I'll summarize. What he told me was a bunch of hooey. But let's go ahead and take a look here at the handout. There's some things to in part review. We talked, oh it's been a couple weeks, a couple months back rather, at the end of August. We talked about this idea of what's a minimalist and what's a maximalist and we're going to return to those terms. Minimalist is not someone who's really tiny but rather A minimalist is someone who basically doesn't believe the Bible unless they have independent confirmation.

They don't trust it at all. They look at basically everything has to be explained by cause and effect. Miracles are set aside. And particularly as it affects Isaiah and Daniel, they set aside the idea that there can even possibly be future prophecies. That can't happen. You can't do that.

And so if that's there, then they have to reinterpret, and that's the middle of, you see points one and two in the middle of page one? This is how they handle the books. They either date the book after the event it appears to predict, or they reinterpret it so that it's predicting something else. So they take one of those two approaches. The maximalist, which is the position that we would take here, is the Bible is to be taken at face value, to be trusted. Its claims are to be taken for what they appear to be. Miracles are indeed possible, and what we find in the Bible is testimony to miracles that have taken place.

So that's kind of the layout. Let's step forward here onto page two. Page two, we've got seven reasons. And what are these reasons for? Starting at the top of the page, taking the approaches described above, the minimalist interprets the available data to arrive at conclusions that are consistent with his assumptions. And the maximalist interprets the available data to arrive at conclusions that are consistent with his assumptions. In spite of the fact that each one is typically highly educated and both have access to the published data, each one ends up arriving at the conclusions that fit with their assumptions. How can this be?

So you'll have this scholar, one of the commentaries I have on Daniel that's skeptical of the whole thing is by a fellow with a doctorate who teaches at Yale, right? So I mean, so he'll look at the book of Daniel and just, you know, everything's dated later and reinterpreted. And of course, he's got all sorts of fine technical detail.

But he starts with the assumption that you cannot have predictive prophecy. He starts with the assumption that, you know, this guy Daniel is not really who he claims to be in the book. You start with the assumption that it was actually written much later. So he starts with the assumption, and guess what he ends up concluding?

The exact same thing he assumed. Isn't that amazing? That is so miraculous. So he assumed it, and lo and behold, after pages and pages and pages of analysis and summaries and everything under the sun, he concludes the same thing he assumed. Wow, that's impressive.

Now, what I found is where this fellow who told me the Book of Daniel was not written at the time that it claims to have been written and it doesn't have predictive prophecy and all that. So I start taking a look at it and I start looking at the data and information in quite a bit of detail. And I look at it and get all sorts of books and read everything and study it all through. And what I find is there's no good reason to take it for other than at face value. There just isn't.

As a matter of fact, the facts and information fit very well with the idea that Daniel wrote the book, that Daniel wrote everything in it himself at the time he claims, and things happened exactly as he claimed. And it fits fine. There is no conflict, there isn't any glaring fact that stands out against that. But So, how can one person hold one position, very highly studied, and another person hold another position?

Well, I'll give seven reasons here. One, we don't have access to all of the potential data. So, you look at it, less than 1% of potential known archaeological sites have been excavated. Less than 1%. Most of the archaeology out there hasn't been touched. And new data is being found all the time. Even among the written data that has been found, much of it has not been translated. There are a half million clay tablets from the Middle East with all that little cuneiform writing in it. Only a small percentage of those half million tablets have ever been looked at by anybody who knows what they are.

About a century ago, several U.S. universities, including UC Berkeley was one of them, got over 100,000 documents from Greek of the period that was in the New Testament called Koine Greek, Common Greek. Less than 5% of those documents have been translated after 100 years. Is there any indication as to what language they may have been written in? Well, the papyrus documents that, let's say UC Berkeley has about 20,000 of them, those were written in Koine Greek, that is the same Greek as the New Testament. The languages that are on clay tablets are several different languages, ancient Middle Eastern languages, Akkadian and languages of that sort.

Okay, second reason. The data is still in existence, but the site has not yet been discovered so as to be known. Information's out there, but we don't even know about the site. Sites are being discovered, you know, even in our day. So there could be evidence and information out there that we don't even have even the slightest idea that it exists yet. Third reason, a great deal of potential data has been lost due to wars, fires, earthquakes, decay, borrowing of materials from earlier construction for use in new construction or reconstruction. Oh hey, there's a nice little chunk of stone. I think I'll take that stone from over there and use it here, right?

So, for example, at the amphitheater at Caesarea, right there along the eastern Mediterranean, When the archaeologists were going through it, almost 50 years ago now, they were kind of cleaning things up and they found one stone that had been kind of turned around and chipped away at it a little bit in order to fit the new use. But when they turned it around and cleaned it off, what did it have on the other side of it? It said Pontius Pilate. But they'd reused it and done something else with it.

Okay, fourth reason. Archaeological theft is a major problem throughout the world. Artifacts of various kinds are taken by thieves and never seen or known by the public or they are known but the context, the surrounding context, and various points of verification and interpretation are lost or become questionable.

Anybody heard about an ossuary or bone box that was actually from, it says on it, James, brother of Jesus, son of Joseph. I mean, that's what it says. And so there's been all this contention, is this genuine or has it been faked? And while the information is not absolutely conclusive, it leans towards the direction of being genuine. The bone box of James, the half-brother of Jesus, both of whom were at least ostensibly son of Joseph. It appears to be the right thing.

Problem, it was not found on site and that made part of the difficulty. It was not found on site. It was one of those things sold into the antiquities market illegally. Here's another one. Fifth reason. Related to reason number four is forgery or suspicion of forgery. That was one of the problems with the James Ossuary. Suspicion of forgery.

So that then makes it more difficult to confirm something. And then when that's the case, you also have the assumptions of the tester or examiner may also impact the conclusions. The seventh reason, the last one, the available data from historical events, persons, etc., are highly interpretive. We often do not have all the data to cross-check everything objectively for the reasons given above so that the limited known data of varying degrees of certainty, varying assumptions, etc., impact how the data that we do have is interpreted.

All right, so you have So you have this James ossuary, right? How would you go checking out that really is the James, the half-brother of Jesus? Yeah, Norm? There are still ways, even with the thing as old as it is, to do DNA testing. The bone marrow itself is still intact. Yeah, DNA testing and other... Yeah, and then how are you going to do that?

Yeah, yeah. We have, by tradition, the location of America. Think of the Ephesus location? Yeah. Yeah, and so you've got that. Now one that they did nail down quite well was Caiaphas. His bone box has his name on it, has all ornate carving, which fits with his higher socioeconomic status. The age, of the bones and the age of the person based on the evidence of the bones. It fits all the information that that's Caiaphas, the one from the New Testament.

So yeah, that's one where there's a fair amount of confirmation, but it was found on site, in place, those kinds of things. Okay. So let's go to page 3. And this is where we do a brief presentation of something that people have spent a long time on, and that's Isaiah. Let me walk through something. Hold that place here. Let's walk through something on the slides here.

Here is kind of putting Isaiah in historical context. Isaiah had his ministry prior to the year 700 B.C. So you see how he would fit after the time of David by a few centuries, about seven centuries before the time of Christ. And then here's, lo and behold, there's you and me around 2000 A.D. So here's Isaiah. Interesting, Isaiah had his ministry during four different kings who ruled the kingdom. Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.

Isaiah 1.1, the very first verse, lists those four kings. So he basically comes right out and says, here are the four kings that I carried on my prophetic ministry before. and among.

At least one seal, that is what makes the seal, makes the mark, or the seal impression, in other words the receiving material, whether it's clay or wax or something of that sort, typically clay, from the court of each of these kings has been found. What we show a picture there is a seal impression of King Hezekiah. Over a hundred seal impressions of King Hezekiah have been found. over a hundred. And the reason is he went about making a lot of water jars in preparation for the attack coming from the Assyrians. And so on every water jar they put this mark on it and so all around Israel they find these seal impressions from Hezekiah.

Let me take a look. Here is the seal of, it sounds almost like he's Texan, Aliyah, servant of King Uzziah. Now that is the actual seal. That is, it's not the impression, but it's the actual thing that they made the impression with. So that's his actual seal. Here is the actual signet ring of King Jotham, right there. That's it. And here's a seal impression of King Ahaz. And this is what I had shown you, the seal impression of King Hezekiah. So we have a seal or seal impression of each one of those four kings. So there's actual historical confirmation. These are real persons. They're not just some made up story. And so the information fits and the sequence fits.

Now, the first king was King Uzziah and a burial plate was found on the Mount of Olives located directly across from the Temple Mount which reads, here the bones of King Uzziah, King of Judah, were brought. Do not open. That's the king, there's the burial plaque. Basically don't touch it, but there it is. And that goes along with the seal that we saw, right? Is he a real guy? Yeah! He's a real guy. And so Isaiah wrote about a real guy. Apparently somebody did, yeah.

One of the things that Hezekiah did, aside from setting up the jars, like I mentioned, they found mostly from the jar handles where they put the seal on there, many, many seals. But additionally, Hezekiah also made preparation by building walls, protective walls, additional walls on top of, that is, in addition to the walls that are already there.

And this is one of them right here. What you see right here is, and that wall is mentioned in 2 Chronicles, 2 Kings, and Isaiah. So three places in the Bible mention this wall. There it is. Here's another view of the defensive wall. So here's the wall right in here. So it's another view of that same wall.

In the background, you see the Dome of the Rock, which is the Muslim created structure, and then this is the amount of olives in the background. But there it is. It's the real thing, and that's what the Bible talks about in three different places. Sounds real to me. Does it sound real to you? Yeah. So, there it is.

Now another thing, aside from having the jars all over and building extra walls, Hezekiah did one more thing, and a frequent way to attack A city, aside from going after it directly, was just basically to hold a siege against it so nobody can go in or out.

Hopefully they'd run out of food, run out of water, things of that sort. So Hezekiah went and protected the water supply, and he did that by having a tunnel constructed. This is the inside of that tunnel. The description in the Bible is found in 2 Kings 20 and 2 Chronicles 32, and that was to defend against the anticipated siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib, the Assyrian ruler. And Isaiah 36 and 37 also make reference to this. So here is a third item in evidence that indicates that what the Bible is describing in more than one place was actual and real in terms of Hezekiah's preparations for this attack by the Assyrian ruler.

So now, here this tunnel system which has been mapped, here is a cutaway diagram It employed cutting edge technology. Why do I say that? The usual thing, you'll notice that this tunnel has a real circuitous path to it. See that? So he wanted this tunnel to bring the water supply all behind protected walls.

And so what he did when he had this thing constructed, this outside storage reservoir called the Waters of Shiloh, Isaiah 8.6, the Pool of Shelah, and that's by Nehemiah, the name had changed by his time, the name had changed, and then in the Gospel of John, chapter 9, it's called the Pool of Siloam. Those three names for the same water supply location. So here is the spring of Gehon, down here where it would come in and start in the water supply.

So, up to this point in history, all prior tunnels of similar length were made with vertical shafts at the turning points. Why would they do it with vertical shafts? It was tough to navigate inside this long turning tunnel, right? And so they would come in with vertical shafts. Now, I've drawn the lines up there as if that's where they are. But in fact, the new technology employed in this tunnel is no vertical shafts. So that was breakthrough technology.

At one end of the tunnel, the water source is the spring of Gihon. 2 Kings 1 tells how Solomon was anointed king next to the spring. It's obviously, by the photograph, a spring that's still there. The structure is still there. Second Chronicles 3230 records that it was the waters from this spring that Hezekiah protected.

Multiple lines of evidence indicate the tunnel was begun from both ends. Both ends. In other words, they had somebody digging at one end, somebody digging at the other end, and the crews met in the middle at the location you see right here. Well, he probably did, but I doubt he'd admit to it. So right here at this location is where the crews met.

There was an inscription written in the wall in Hebrew where they met. Because what happened is, and you can find from the description, this is highlighting the lettering so you can see it a little bit better. You can see from the description, one of the workers in there documented on the wall how they came together. And they started hearing the noises from the workers on the other side. And they could hear them whack, whack, whack, whack, whack. And then they knew that they were quite close to one another. But so that was recorded here in the Siloam inscription. And this is the translation of the parts that remain. There is a triangular section that's missing. So let me read that for you.

Breaking through, and this was the matter of breaking through while yet, and then dot, dot, dot. There are three cubits to the noise of one calling to the other, for there was a cleft in the rock on the right. And on the day of the breaking through, the miners hewed one to meet the other, pickaxe against pickaxe, and flowed the water from the source of the pool over a space of 1,200 cubits. And 100 cubits was the height of the rock above the head of the miners. That's what it says there on the wall, at the place where they matched each other.

So Hezekiah was preparing for this Assyrian attack with great thought and great strategy. He was putting a lot of effort into protecting all the cities, but especially Jerusalem. These are the steps leading to an outside storage reservoir called the Waters of Shiloh in Isaiah 8.6, the Pool of Shelah in Nehemiah, and the Pool of Siloam in John 9, which was when and where Jesus healed the man who was blind from birth. This is the one where, you know, who sinned, that little account, okay? So here's the steps of the Pool of Siloam exposed by excavation for a sewer project in June 2004. So it was just discovered here since I came here. Okay.

Shown here are the steps of the Pool of Shalal written in Nehemiah 3.15 and 12.7. So that's it. And that's also part of the structure that King Hezekiah was wanting to make sure was preserved and that he wouldn't have the Assyrians cutting off Jerusalem's water supply. Yes.

Pardon? Ah, interesting. Okay, two things. One, it was breakthrough that they didn't, but there are two reasons why the vertical shafts are preferred not to use them. Reason number one, more work, more time. Okay? Preparing for the Assyrians, you want to get her done, right? And so devising a technology by which you could go in and take the circuitous path And by the way, we're not entirely certain why the circuitous path, but that's what they chose perhaps to fit soft spots or cracks in the rock.

So one reason is time and it's more work and delay and it could be dangerous to take longer. The other reason is because the more vertical shafts you have in there, the greater chance you have of something getting attacked or broken into. So having something that's no vertical shafts gets done much more quickly and it's safer in the long run. Yeah, the enemy could use the vertical shafts as a means of you know, bring about some kind of an attack or carrying out a stoppage of the water or something of that sort. If you don't give them access, then they can't get to it. Yes, yeah, the idea was to bring the whole water supply all behind protected walls and not have any vertical shafts so that there'd be some place where they could, you know, get in to some portion of it and have access and vulnerability. Now, the other thing is, let me see what I've got here. Okay. This is a prism.

Now, what you find is the Bible describes the accounts of King Hezekiah and what he did here in preparation for Sennacherib and how Sennacherib, you know, came there in three places in the Bible, Isaiah and in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles. But Sennacherib, the one who did the attack, also had his account and that's on this prism that you see here.

So he wrote about it, but remember if you look at the biblical account what happened is there were 185,000 Assyrian soldiers that were ready to attack. I mean, that's scary, right? But everybody was praying, and the Lord wiped them out miraculously overnight. So instead of attacking Sennacherib with what little he had left, He just departed. Now, so you have three biblical accounts, Isaiah, 1 Kings, 2 Chronicles. Then you have Sennacherib's account. And you know what Sennacherib wrote on this prism?

He talked about, this city I wiped them out, and this city I wiped them out, and this city I wiped them out. I'm speaking figuratively and paraphrase of course. But about Jerusalem and Hezekiah, he said, and I shut up Hezekiah and his royal city like a bird in a cage.

He didn't wipe them out. And he didn't admit that his own soldiers got wiped out. Now, we're not done. The Greeks, Herodotus, also has an account. So there are basically three biblical accounts and two secular accounts. Herodotus said something mysterious happened and here was his explanation for why the Assyrians ran away. He said that a whole bunch of mice came and chewed up the Assyrians bowstrings and so they couldn't shoot them. Now between Sennacherib's account and Herodotus' account where the mice came and chewed up the bowstrings and the biblical accounts, where we have three of them. I'll choose the biblical accounts. How about you? Right? Okay.

There's then the famously intriguing Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls have been found at intervals from 1947 into the 1950s with some related finds from time to time. The Dead Sea Scrolls are everything from a very well-preserved scroll to a whole bunch of little tiny fragments that you can hardly read anything on. So there's a whole range. Here is Cave 1 where the first find was made. And then so we have these Dead Sea Scrolls. There's actually 22 manuscripts of Isaiah among the Dead Sea Scrolls of varying degrees of preservation. What you see in front of you is the best preservation. Some of the others are almost unidentifiable. There's little black fragments. But you've got all those manuscripts.

You have similarly here, here are four seals with the name Eliakim dating from around the time of Isaiah. Many of the seals with Eliakim's name are found on pottery jar handles, Isaiah 22, 24. So they will hang on him all the glory of his father's house, offspring and issue, all the least of vessels from bowls to all the jars. Isaiah said there'd be, you know, this guy Eliakim would be credited here for having produced all the jars. He also was one of those who was involved with the storage jars that were used in the cities. So the name is given in Isaiah, the name is found in Seals.

Here's four of them right there. Matches up, doesn't it? Yeah, looks good to me. Okay, we're going to stop there. Let's take a look at this page three with Isaiah. How am I doing for time here? I'm burning up the clock. Okay. Isaiah is an anthology, is one of the points we make here at the top of page three. An anthology is a collection of different writings. Some of it is historical, some of it is future, some of it is in the present, so various kinds of writings. It's a collection of writings.

We made the point when we were going through the book of Isaiah that it has 66 chapters. How many books does the Bible have? 66, yeah. And we noted a bunch of similarities between the chapter numbers in Isaiah and the books that it corresponds to, including There are 39 books in the Old Testament. That means Matthew is the 40th book, right? And guess what? You go to chapter 40 of Isaiah and it starts talking about John the Baptist. Major cool.

So what we find here, and I'm looking at the middle of the first paragraph, The name of Isaiah, the son of Amos, is the only one connected with the book in any of the Hebrew manuscripts or ancient versions. Josephus, 37 AD to 100 AD, a Jewish historian, believed that Isaiah wrote the book that bears his name. He said that the Persian king Cyrus read the prophecies that Isaiah had written about him and wished to fulfill them. Very interesting.

But with the rise of rationalism in the late 18th century, some German scholars took the lead in questioning that the Book of Isaiah was a genuine document, all written by Isaiah. They claim that different sections of the Book of Isaiah showed differences in style, content, and emphasis. Other minimalist scholars have said that it is not really the text itself that argues for multiple authorship as much as the presence of predictive prophecy. That just Goes against the grain, right?

Because that sounds miraculous. That sounds like God knows the future. Nah, we can't have that. Okay. So, at any rate, they developed this idea that there were multiple authors for Isaiah. So they had the initial part of Isaiah, the first 39 chapters, and then consolation in this second Isaiah, Deutero-Isaiah, With further study, a theory of three writers, Trito-Isaiah emerged because of the stylistic differences between chapters 40 to 55 and 56 to 66. So they used analysis of writing style to conclude that there are three different historical settings in these three parts of the book of Isaiah.

What I've done at the bottom of the page is I've got a timeline that shows there are different sections. We have Isaiah, the first part, and then the next item of the timeline is the second Isaiah, Deutero-Isaiah, and then the third part. So they've got it stretched out to three different portions.

And I actually have the date of Cyrus there marked there. The Dead Sea Scroll, and I showed pictures of it, the Dead Sea Scroll there, the Isaiah Scroll, was written about 150 years before, or copied, about 150 years before the birth of Christ. So that's, and that's the oldest copy of Isaiah that we have. But one of the things you find is when you take a close look, let me jump back here a bit, You see, here's a picture of the scroll. When you look at the break that they say is there, there's no break in the text in the scroll. I mean, it goes smoothly from one to the next, right? There's no evidence for any different portions or anything of that sort. It looks like it's been written by one author entirely. But also one other thing. I was presented with this information, you know, that, oh, there's different styles and that sort of thing. Is that good reason to say it was written by different authors?

So here's what I did. I took some software that's supposed to go and analyze writing styles to see if you've got different authors for different documents. And I said, I'm going to test this. I took two documents that I had written. I took two documents that I had written. I knew that I had written the documents, but they were written to different people for different purposes, right? And guess what it said? It said that the two documents that I knew that I had written were written by different people.

So I guess I'm going to have to go see a psychiatrist. So anyway, now let's move on to Daniel, which is page four. I see part of the timeline rolled over on the page there. Book of Daniel. It says in several places that Daniel is indeed the writer. Now, some people will say, but it talks in some places like Daniel is writing about somebody else. Therefore, that's evidence that Daniel didn't write it because he's talking like Daniel is somebody else.

Let me ask you this. Did Jesus sometimes refer to himself aside from saying I or me? What did he call himself? Son of man. Yes. Numerous times. He referred to himself in the third person. Like Daniel did. Right? Okay. So that's not proof of anything. Right? That's not good proof of anything.

Now, of course, one of the things is the idea of predictive prophecy. Daniel has prophecies that are predictive all the way from his own time into the time of Christ. It predicts the Roman Empire. So what they have to do is go shift the date and reinterpret it so that somebody writing what they figure is about 165 B.C. is not predicting the Roman Empire. So they have to reinterpret it and shift the date in order to make it not a miraculous book.

Okay. But let's take a look at some things. I'm going to shift here. Daniel was a ruler not at the top, but at a high level in Babylon, and when Babylon fell to the Persians in Persia. So both, right? So look at what happens here. In Babylon, we find that the Babylonian culture, they worshipped lions, and in Persia they worshipped fire. Okay, let's look at the next thing.

So that's why in Daniel chapter 3 we find that the Babylonians had no problem punishing with fire, but they wouldn't punish with lions. But when you go to Persia, what do you find? The reverse. Because the Persians worshipped fire, they wouldn't throw somebody in the fire because they worshipped fire.

But they had no problem punishing somebody with lions. So does Daniel fit the historical background and the cultural background of each of those empires? Yes, very well. Exactly as a matter of fact. The other thing we find is in Babylon, the ruler could change decisions. So that's what we find in Daniel chapter 3. Get those guys out of that fire. But in Persia, The ruler could not change the decision. Even though he regretted it, he had to have Daniel go into the lion's den. He couldn't change the rules.

And guess what? That matches what each of those cultures and each of those empires did. Exactly as you find recorded in the book of Daniel. Funny how that fits, isn't it? Okay. So we find the fire in Babylon as punishment and the lion's den to fit the book of Daniel quite well.

There's something else that's real interesting. Curiously, what is now called Daniel's tomb, I'm not sure we'll ever confirm it because they're not going to let you go in there and excavate anything, is now a major tourist destination in Iraq. He was and remains very revered among the people, even those who are not of Jewish descent." Very interesting. Why would that be, right?

So anyway, then here is this Cyrus. who decrees the return of the Jews. That's why we have Ezra and Nehemiah going back. And we have, as Bruce and I saw over in the British Museum, here's the Cyrus Cylinder. Which, by the way, they're trying to get back into Iran. But here's the Cyrus Cylinder that records Cyrus's edicts. Send this people back to this country, and this people back to this country, and this people back to this country. Why would he do that? Why would that be so important that Cyrus do that? Send people back to their country? Because one of the main, and this is almost shocking, one of the main pieces of religious doctrine among the religion of the Persians was you don't take people out of the country that they came from.

Isn't that weird? But that's like, boy, you just don't do that. That's just awful. And so as soon as Cyrus came into power, what he did was send people back. And that's how the Lord used the new ruler to send the Jews back to Jerusalem, back to rebuild the temple, back to build up the walls. and get them back to their land by amazing changes in culture and in history. If you were to try to figure that out, you know, how is this going to happen?

You would almost never dream of that. And yet, we find it matches up exactly with what the Bible has. Can you imagine a religion where one of the main things is you can't take people away from their homeland, you have to send them back? That's almost a weird religion. But that's what the Persians believed, and that's exactly what was needed for the Persians to support the Jews going back to their homeland with extra money to go rebuild.

Amazing. Amazing. Okay, we've run plum out of time. Let me see. We run out of slides too. How about that? Questions, comments? Yeah, I look at it, you know, I say that there is not any good reason why I should set this aside, that the facts do not dictate that I should call this bogus, you know, history.

There's just nothing to support it. The only thing that says you shouldn't believe this is an unverifiable presupposition. If you assume it without basis, lo and behold, that's what you conclude. Yeah, that's right. The bottom line is they can't believe it. They don't believe it. They don't want to believe it. So let's change our conclusions. There can't possibly be a miracle.

Oh yeah? Prove it. There's no such thing as predictive prophecy. Oh yeah? Prove it. Well, they don't. What they do is they change all the history of how they interpret the books. rather than proving it. There's no good reason to do that. Okay, we're running out of time.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that as you have inspired these writings, as they are indeed historically true, as both Daniel and Isaiah are referred to by our Lord, as the Apostles quoted These prophets, we are thankful that we can trust you and what you have inspired, not only for history and the future of what's on this earth, but we can trust you for what it says about things that we can't see and for an eternity that from our standpoint hasn't even happened yet. We thank you that you're trustworthy, your word is trustworthy, and we can count upon you for everything. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.