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Posted on Feb 04, 2026 by Mike LeDuke

Do you believe in prophecy? Do you believe that it’s possible for someone to tell the future — that God could speak through them and give a vision of what is going to happen?

Prophecy doesn’t happen anymore, and thus, many people feel skeptical about it today. Gifts like prophecy existed in New Testament times, but as the apostle Paul wrote, there would come a time when prophecies would cease (1 Corinthians 13:8). Ever since the apostles slept the sleep of death, the gift of prophecy has left this world.

Nevertheless, though there are no active prophets today, there certainly are active prophecies. This is the reason that God stopped speaking through prophets after the apostles: because the Biblical text was finished. That text is our prophecy today. We can open it and read of the restoration of Israel, a prophecy that began to be fulfilled when Jews started to return to Palestine. We can read of the destruction of Jerusalem that took place under the Romans in 70 CE. And we can see various empires predicted in the book of Daniel, before they ever existed.

Prophecy still exists today, and prophecy is still powerful. In fact, one of the most powerful examples of prophecy comes from the way in which Bible students were able to read prophecy and predict events that were to come. For instance, in the late 1600s, a man named Pierre Jurieu wrote a book entitled The Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies. In the book, he sought to expound the Book of Revelation. By working through the different symbols and trying to put them together, he predicted the French Revolution and the Pope’s loss of power in France. Another expositor, named Robert Fleming, wrote similarly in 1701, but using the numbers in Revelation, stated that this would take place before 1794. That’s remarkable in that the French Revolution began in 1779.

These people weren’t prophets themselves. And, many expositors have incorrectly used prophecy to try to predict when Jesus will return to the earth (something which we’re explicitly told not to do; Acts 1:7). Nevertheless, prophecy is real, and the things which God has written have definitely come to pass.

I mentioned earlier that prophecy spoke of the Jews returning to Palestine. This is another instance in which Bible readers, long before the modern State of Israel ever existed, explained the future. All of those who read the Hebrew prophets literally recognized that the “dry bones” of God’s people would come together and “live” (Ezekiel 37). God’s people would come again to their land.

So what does this all mean? It’s just a further reminder: we’ve seen that the resurrection happened. We’ve seen that the gospels are trustworthy. We’ve seen that archaeology often recognizes that the Bible’s record is true. And now we’ve seen that the Bible’s prophecies do indeed tell the future.

Thus we can take heart, knowing that another prophecy will certainly be fulfilled: “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).

—Jason Hensley PhD