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How to be a Bible Apologist

Step Five: Acknowledge the hundreds of fulfilled prophecies contained in the Bible.

As a Bible apologist, one of your main occupations is to locate and be amazed at all the wonderful and fulfilled prophecies contained in the Bible. After accepting the previous steps, this step should present no problem.

Helpful Tip
Those of you with a background in logic may find the idea of supporting a proposition with that same proposition a bit strange, but because we already know the Bible is literally true, we can use the Bible to support the Bible.

The prophecies you will find in the Bible are not always in the form of "Event X will happen in the future", and are never in the form of "Event X will happen at 12:30 on December 8 102 AD in the city of Jerusalem to Jacob who owns that bakery on 1st street" (which is what many non-apologists incorrectly expect), but these facts shouldn't slow you down: you are an apologist, mere facts can't stop you. We'll just apply the previous steps to reveal the prophecies.

a) Because of step one, we already know the Bible is the divine and literal word of God, so now we can use this knowledge to automatically assume all the prophecies in the Bible have been fulfilled, thus supporting the literal Bible further.

b) Using step two, we can make virtually any phrase found in the Bible into some sort of prophecy.

c) Step three allows us to believe the facts and prophecies are in agreement.

d) Thanks to step four, we can bend facts around to fulfill even the most tenuous of prophecies

What you'll be looking for, mainly, is phrases in the Old Testament that can be twisted around (via step two) so they remotely resemble something found in the New Testament.

So when you see a phrase like "Do not break any of the bones" in the old testament, you, as an apologist, should easily be able to read that as a prophecy if you just try. Since none of Christ's bones were broken, we know that "Do not break any of the bones" must have been a prophecy, even though it was referring to slaughtering a sheep and didn't mention anything about being a prophecy of Christ.

If someone was to claim that one of these prophecies is not actually a prophecy, just a similarly worded piece of text or simply a repetition of a previous story for context's sake, you can either ignore it (the preferred method), or claim it isn't a prophecy and fulfillment after all, it is just a set of interesting passages which mutually validate each other. This makes it a very neat usage of step three, allowing you to believe it is a prophecy while simultaneously believing it is not a prophecy.

Important Note
It's very important that you don't try to use this same technique with other religious texts, only the Bible. While it's true that you may find the same kind of "prophecies" in other religious and even secular books, those are not true prophecies since they are not in the Bible (see step one). You may find it helpful to avoid reading any books that aren't written by Hank Hanegraaff.

Another significant portion of the prophecies you will find are prophecies of things outside the Bible. The general idea is to claim that anytime the Bible mentions a town, village, nation, person, or event; it is a prophecy. So if the Bible mentions a nation called "Egypt", and there really was a nation called "Egypt", this makes that Biblical reference a fulfilled prophecy. As you can imagine, this means there are literally thousands of these prophecies. Many non-apologists will try to debunk these kinds of prophecies, saying that all ancient books reference thousands of physical locations, almost all of which really do exist. The answer is simple: they aren't from the Bible, so therefore they don't count.

One of the best types of these external prophecies is the prophecy of the destruction of a city. There are many of these in the Bible. Take the city of Sodom as an example: the Bible tells us that the ancient city Sodom was destroyed by God, and sure enough, after 3000 years, the city doesn't exist. It was so thoroughly destroyed that modern archaeologists can't even agree the city of Sodom ever even existed!


The most famous of these prophecies is the prophecy of the destruction of the city of Tyre: the Bible clearly says it will be destroyed and never, ever, be rebuilt, and if we apply the previous steps, we can certainly make this absolutely true. Non-apologists will likely say the city still exists and there are over a hundred thousand people who live there, but this shouldn't concern you: you're an apologist! We'll just interpret the literal story to say any of the following corrections:

a) "Sure it still exists, but it's not nearly as important as it was, therefore the prophecy was fulfilled. Really!"

b) "When the Bible say it won't ever be rebuilt, it was just hyperbole, and was meant to show how strongly God felt about destroying it in the first place (see step two.)"

c) "The Bible was talking only about the part of the city which has never been rebuilt, not the part which has."

d) "The prophecy has not yet been fulfilled, one day the city will be destroyed, and then it will never ever be rebuilt."

Since the city still exists, the real meaning of the prophecy must have been one of them; otherwise the passage would not be literally true and it obviously is. Of course, if the city did not exist and people weren't pointing it out, you would not want to use any of these since it would be literally true and no correction would be needed!

Step Six

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