The Prophetical Scriptures Bear The Impress of Deity

           Second Part.  The prophetic part of the Scrip­tures; which contains some wonderful predictions of things to come, as could drop from no pen but one guided by a divine hand; all of which have had their punctual performance in the just periods foretold. Indeed from whom could these come but God?  ‘The secret things belong unto the Lord our God,’ Deut. 29:29.  And predictions surely may pass very well for secrets; they are arcana ejus imperii—secrets of his government; such secrets, that God offers to take him —whoever he is—and set him with himself in his own throne, that is able to foretell things to come.  ‘Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods,’ Isa. 41:23.  This must be con­fessed to be a flower of the crown, and an incom­municable property and prerogative of the only true God, who stands upon the hill of eternity, and from thence hath the full prospect of all things, and to whose infinite understanding they are all present; for his will being the cause of all events, he must needs know them, because he knoweth that.  The devil, in­deed, is very ambitious to be thought able to do this, and to gain the reputation hereof, hath had his mock‑prophets and prophecies in all ages, with which he hath abused the ignorant credulous world.  But alas! his predictions are no more true prophecies, than his miracles are true miracles.  He puts a cheat upon the understandings of silly souls in the one, as he doth on their senses in the other.  For his predictions are either dark and dubious, cunningly packed and laid, that, like a picture in plicis—folds, they carried two faces under one hood; and in these folds the subtle serpent wrapped himself, on purpose to save his credit, which way soever the event fell out. And this got Apollo the name of Loxias, of 8@>ÎH, obliquus; propter obliqua et tortuosa responsa ejus—because he mocked them that consulted his oracle with such ambiguous answers, that sent them as wise home as they came to him.  Indeed, the devil found it necessary thus to do.  Had he not with this patch of policy eked out the scantiness of his own un­derstanding, the nakedness thereof would have been seen by every vulgar eye, to his shame and to the con­tempt of his oracles.  Or, if his predictions were more plainly delivered, they were,

           First.  Of such things as he spelled out by the help of nature’s alphabet, and came to the knowledge of by diving into the secrets of natural causes, before they discovered themselves unto the observation of man’s duller understanding; and this made them cried up for wonderful predictions, and supernatural, by those who could not see this clue in Satan’s hand that guided him.  If a man should meet you in the street, and tell you such a friend of yours will die within a few months, whom you left well, to your thinking, but a few minutes before, and the event should seal to the truth of what he said, you might possibly begin to think this a wonderful prophecy. But, when you afterwards know that he who told you this was a physician rarely accomplished, and had upon much study and strict observation of your friend’s bodily state, found a dangerous disease growing insensibly upon him, you would alter your opinion, and not think him a prophet, but admire him for a skilful physician.  Thus, did we but consider the vastness of Satan’s natural parts—though limited, because created—and the improvement he hath made of them, by the study and experience of so many thousand years, we shall not count his predictions for prophecies, but rather as comments and explications of the short and dark text of natural causes, and acknowledge him a learned naturalist, but not deserv­ing the name of a true prophet.

           Second.  If he hath not his hint from natural causes, then he gathers his inferences from moral and political causes, which, compared together by so deep a pate as his, give him great help and advantage to infer many times what in very great probability, and all likelihood of reason, will come to pass.  Thus what the devil told Saul would become of him, his army, and kingdom, was nothing but what he might ration­ally conclude from those premises which lay before him, in his being rejected of God, and another anointed by God’s own command to be king in his stead, together with the just height, and full measure, to which Saul’s sins might now be thought to have arrived—by his going to a witch for counsel—and a puissant army of the Philistines preparing against him, whose wonted courage now so failed him, that he went rather like a malefactor pinioned and bound with the terrors of his accusing conscience, to meet an executioner that should give the fatal stroke to him, than like a valiant captain, to adorn and enrich him­self with the spoils of his enemies.  All these laid to­gether make it appear the devil, without a gift of prophecy, might tell him his doom.

           Third.  God may, and doth, sometimes reveal future events to Satan, as when god intends him to be his instrument to execute some of his purposes, he may, and doth, acquaint him with the same some time before.  And you will not say the hangman is a prophet, that can tell such a man shall, on such a day, be beheaded or hanged, when hath a warrant from the king that appoints him to do that office.  Thus Satan could have told Job beforehand what sad afflictions would certainly befall him in his estate, servants, chil­dren, and his own body; because God had granted him a commission to be the instrument that should bring all these upon him.  But neither Satan nor any creatures else are able of themselves to foretell such events as neither arise from natural causes, nor may be rationally concluded to follow from moral and po­litical probabilities; but are locked up in the cabinet of the divine will, how they shall fall out.  And such are the prophecies which we find in the holy Scrip­tures, by which they plainly prove their heavenly extraction.  They must needs come from God that tell us what God only knew, and depended on his will to be disposed of.  Who but God could tell Abraham where his posterity should be, and what should partic­ularly befall them, four hundred years after his death? —for so long before was he acquainted with their deliverance out of Egypt, Gen. 15, which accord­ingly came to pass punctually on the very day foretold, Ex. 12:41.  How admirable are the prophecies of Christ the Messiah, in which his person, birth, life, and death, even to the minute, and circumstances of them, are as exactly and particularly set down, many ages before his coming upon the stage, as by the evan­gelists themselves, who were upon the place with him, and saw all that was done with their own eyes.  And though some things foretold of him may be thought, because small and inconsiderable in themselves, not to deserve a mention in so high and sacred a proph­ecy—as our Saviour’s riding on an ass, Zech. 9:9; the thirty pieces given for him, and the purchase of the potter’s field afterwards with them, Zech. 11:12, 13; and the preserving his bones whole, when they that had suffered with him had theirs broken—these, I say, and such like, though they may seem inconsiderable passages in themselves, yet upon due weighing the end for which they are mentioned, we shall find that our weak faiths could not well have spared their help to strengthen it in the belief of the prophecy.  Indeed, a great weight of the argument to prove the truth and divinity of the prophecy, moves upon these little hinges; because, the less these are in themselves, the more admirably piercing and strong must that eye be that could see such small things at so great a distance. None but an infinite understanding could do this! And now I hope none will dare ask ‘But how may we be sure that such prophecies were extant so long be­fore their fulfilling, and not foisted in after these things were done?’—seeing they were upon public record in the church of the Jews, and not denied by those that denied Christ himself.  And truly this one consideration cast into the scale after all the former, doth give an overweight to the argument we are now upon—I mean, that these prophecies were so long, and that so openly, read and known.  And conse­quently [it were] impossible that Satan should be ig­norant of them, and not take the alarm from them to do his utmost to impede their accomplishment, see­ing his whole kingdom lay at stake, so as either he must hinder them, or they would ruin it; and that notwithstanding all this, together with his restless en­deavour against them, they should be all so fairly delivered in their full time; yea, many of them by the midwifery of those very persons that would, if pos­sible, have destroyed them in the womb, as we see, Acts 4:27.  Here breaks out the wisdom and power of a God, with such a strong beam of light and evidence, that none of the Scriptures’ enemies can wishly look against it.