One of the great things about the Bible is fulfilled prophecy. It doesn’t just predict things that it expects to happen in the future that we cannot see and don’t expect to happen any time soon. The majority of biblical future predictions (at the time of writing) have actually already come to pass. We don’t need a crystal ball to see whether they will happen or not, we just need to know a bit of history.

Hugh Ross has this to say about biblical prophecy:

Unique among all books ever written, the Bible accurately foretells specific events-in detail-many years, sometimes centuries, before they occur. Approximately 2,500 prophecies appear in the pages of the Bible, about 2,000 of which already have been fulfilled… Since the probability for any one of these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance averages less than one in ten (figured very conservatively) and since the prophecies are for the most part independent of one another, the odds for all these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance without error is less than one in 10²⁰⁰⁰ (that is 1 with 2,000 zeros written after it)!

Fulfilled Prophecy: Evidence for the Reliability of the Bible – Reasons to Believe

I would encourage you to go and read Ross’s post in full. Not least because he lands on some specific examples of biblical prophecies that have been fulfilled and most helpfully gives a figure concerning how likely it is each event came about by chance and then how likely it is that anyone should predict all these events without mistake or error consistently. The post makes clear just how unlikely it is that every event the Bible prophecies that has come to pass would happen simply by chance.

The great thing about fulfilled prophecy is that we can date the books and know when the prophecies were made. We can also see in history when these things were fulfilled. Something like the book of Daniel is an amazing example because of its scary level of accuracy. Liberal scholars have repeatedly tried to suggest the book must have been written after the events because they so accurate portray and predict them – using the accuracy of the predictions as their only a priori evidence for a later date – whilst textual critics have consistently dated it before the events. Ross outlines a series of other examples.

Fulfilled prophecy does at least two things for us. First, it attests to the truthfulness of what the Bible says. If it can predict with such great accuracy events that were predicted many centuries before they came to pass, it provides us with a strong case for believing other things it says that have yet to come to pass. If around 2000 of its predictions have come true in history and can be verified, we have strong grounds to believe what it has to say about the future in the remaining 500 or so cases.

The other things fulfilled prophecy does for us is points us to a God who is in total control of the universe. We so often think of prophecy as God looking into the future and telling a prophet what he sees will happen, like a mystic looking into his crystal ball. But the truth is, the Bible doesn’t present God in that way. Rather, it presents him as a master architect showing his prophet his blueprints and then bending the whole of history to his design. God is not future-telling by gazing into the future, he is telling his prophets precisely what he is going to do and will bring to pass. The fact that these things are fulfilled attests to the truthfulness of scripture and the scriptures themselves point to a God who is in total control, even over the events of human history which he uses to tell his story and point, repeatedly, to what he wants us to discern about him and his plans for humankind.

But in the end, fulfilled prophecy at a very basic level gives us powerful reasons to trust the scriptures. If they are able to accurately predict the future, and can be attested as doing so by history, we have strong grounds to believe they are true in what they say and they have been guided by one who not only knows the future, but ultimately controls it.