In 1924, a wire article from The New York Times ran with the following headline: “Hitler Tamed by Prison.” The article, less than a hundred words, said now that Hitler had been released from prison it seems that he learned his lessons. The article ended like this: “he is no longer to be feared. It is believed that he will retire to private life and return to Austria, the country of his birth.”
Not quite.
Of course, to be fair, telling the future is not easy, is it? The world is an incredibly complicated place, with all sorts of factors at play that we can’t even begin to imagine. Just the physical forces alone are staggering. As one physicist explained it: “If you fill a kettle with water and switch it on, all the supercomputers on Earth working for the age of the universe could not solve the equations that predict what all those water molecules will do – even if we could somehow determine their initial state and that of all the outside influences on them, which is itself an intractable task.”
If it’s that way for a kettle of boiling water, how much more so for knowing the future of nations? And yet, in the Bible, we have been given powerful evidence, “proof” even, of God’s knowledge of the future. From Jesus telling Peter that “Assuredly, I say to you that this night, before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times” (Matthew 26: 34), which Peter did, to the amazing sequence of events in Daniel 2, culminating with the end of this world: “And in the days of these kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever (Daniel 2:44)—the Bible has shown us that we can trust the future, however hard it is for us to predict, to the Lord, who, indeed, knows the beginning from the end.
