The Key to Unlock Biblical Prophecy
How can the Trumpet accurately forecast future world events? Any regular reader of this magazine should know the answer to this basic question.
The Bible is the foundation and source of all the forecasts in this magazine. It contains “the more sure word of prophecy” that guides our analysis of current world events (2 Peter 1:19).
Yet even if you believe the Bible is God’s unerring Word, a master key is still necessary to unlock these prophecies. Without that key, it is impossible to understand what the Bible prophesies will happen to the world’s nations in the near future.
Those who need to understand these prophecies the most—world leaders, news agencies, government policy makers and educational institutions—are all ignorant of them! They reject the divine revelation of the Bible, the only source revealing the significance and true meaning of today’s world news. They have also lost the vital master key needed to unlock biblical prophecy.
What is that key? The identity of Israel and the major world nations!
The Missing Key Revealed
The most important part of that key—the identity of the most powerful world powers in modern times, the United States and Britain—is explained in our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy. This book’s author, Herbert W. Armstrong, founded three colleges as well as the Trumpet’s parent newsmagazine, the Plain Truth.
“Not knowing how and where these nations are specifically mentioned in basic and major prophecies, the educated of the world have been utterly blinded to the plain and simple meaning of prophecy,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in that book. “Due to this lost key more than anything else, the Bible has come to be discredited and rejected in this world’s educational system. The unproved and unprovable theory of evolution has been substituted as the foundational concept which became the supposed rational approach to knowledge.”
The main reason why the world and its educational institutions lack understanding of world events is that they don’t have this key!
Well, the Trumpet will give you this key.
To help you to understand future world events involving the world’s major powers, the Trumpet is beginning a series of articles explaining the origins of the world’s major powers. You can’t know the future of these great nations unless you know their past!
Knowledge of this key will demonstrate how accurate the biblical record and its prophecies are. It will also explain how man came to be and where civilization started, powerfully disproving evolution, that flawed premise of our education system.
A good starting point in understanding the origin of man’s present civilization—and disproving evolution—is the study of language.
Case Study: Language
“Language is mankind’s greatest invention—except, of course, that it was never invented,” writes Guy Deutscher in The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention. There can be no nation, no civilization nor culture without language. Therefore the history of language and our civilizations are inextricably linked.
Deutscher, who holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Cambridge and was a professor at the University of Leiden in Holland, wrote his book from an evolutionary standpoint, trying to demonstrate how language can evolve from basic grunts into the complex languages used today.
However, as he admits, there is one problem: No evolutionist can determine the beginning of language.
Let’s follow the evolutionists’ story and see how they try to reconcile their research and observations with their false premise to overcome this admitted paradox.
Before we start their story, we must acquire a penchant for the fantasy genre—“for how can anyone presume to know what went on in prehistoric times without indulging in make-believe?” asks Deutscher. Any evolutionist must possess a richer imagination than J.K. Rowling and be a greater master of fiction than J.R.R. Tolkien, or else what we are about to read would not sell.
Monkey See Monkey Speak?
The beginning of this erroneous story is set in a time long, long ago when mankind was evolving from apes. For this world to be constructed, apes must be able to learn language. Yet research conducted at Georgia State University concluded that this is impossible.
“[D]espite popular myth, not even chimpanzees can learn a human language,” Deutscher writes. Using the example of an advanced chimp named Kanzi, he concludes, “[E]ven Kanzi cannot string symbols together in anything resembling the complexity of a human language. The human brain is unique in having the necessary hardware for mastering a human language—that much is uncontroversial.”
The only indisputable thing in an evolutionist’s study of language is the insurmountable gap between human speech and animal communication!
The evolutionist must now ignore the research or pretend that even Kanzi, the genius hero of the chimp world, would be a fool compared to his predecessors, which, if evolutionists were to be believed, must also somehow be less evolved than Kanzi.
When we turn the page, we don’t see a chapter two filled with the linguistic exploits of Kanzi’s ancestors. Instead we skip toward the end of the story!
Deutscher starts his explanation of the evolution of language late in its development, assuming several important aspects were already formed: “[W]e must take as given … its symbolic nature: the use of arbitrary signs, which can mean something only by agreed convention …. We also have to assume that these arbiter signs were conveyed vocally … but which derive their sense from being joined up into words. … And finally, we have to take it as given that these words were used essentially for the same purposes that motivate us today ….” He is starting off with three very advanced assumptions to make his theory work because, as he admits, earlier scenarios “don’t really have a leg to stand on.”
Our evolutionist author finds it pointless to fill in the missing chapters, because it is too fictional, even for readers who were sold on chapter one. Yet his story continues on the assumption that some future author will backfill the blank chapters with some missing research.
Clueless
Deutscher often uses words like “assume” and “a given,” which are fancy ways of saying that he has to speculate and guess.
He even must speculate as to the time in man’s history when this already advanced language would have evolved, because, “Unfortunately, no one has any idea (or more accurately, too many people have too many ideas) about when exactly this point should be located in time: 40,000 years ago, 100,000 years, or even much earlier than that?”
This is how history books read when it comes to origins of man. You will come across a profusion of words like seem, likely, may and probably. No evolutionist can decide on when man first made an appearance. Just as the scientific method starts with a hypothesis, so does the historical method, with each historian, anthropologist and archeologist choosing and interpreting the facts in a way that appears to substantiate his own theory, trying to turn fiction into nonfiction and oftentimes disagreeing with conclusions put forward by others in the process.
Linguists Ignore Two Basic Facts
Let’s step away from the realm of fiction and make-believe and into the rational, observable world. When studying today’s languages, evolutionists ignore two concrete facts.
First, they ignore that older languages tend to be of a higher order and complexity than modern languages. Deutscher writes, “[I]t seemed that the deeper linguists dug into history, the more impressive was the make-up of words they encountered, but when they followed the movement of languages through time, the only processes that could be discerned were disintegration and collapse.”
That’s not to say there haven’t been any developments since that time, but the general trend is degeneration. Instead of languages getting more complex, they have grown simpler! Compare Old English with modern English, Latin with modern Romance languages, and ancient Hebrew with modern Hebrew. In every case, the trend directly contradicts the concept of evolution, that of ever increasing sophistication and complexity.
Second, evolutionists ignore how far back in time we find language. “The available written records of any language extend at most 5,000 years into the past,” Deutscher writes, “and the languages around by that time already have pretty much the full repertoire of complex features found in today’s languages.”
Instead of seeing written records that show some kind of evolution of a primitive language, we see a sudden arrival, around 5,000 years ago, of already complex languages. There are no “missing links.”
Is it a coincidence that the origins of language can only be traced back about 5,000 years, about when the dendrochronological record ends? (sidebar, page 16). Is there an account that explains this similarity in dates and explains why languages have gone through a trend of degeneration?
Yes there is—IF we accept divine revelation!
Linguists can’t figure out how language was invented because it wasn’t invented by man! That is the conclusion to which all the facts logically lead.
If we take the Bible as the foundational historical document that it is, there is an explanation—not an assumption, theory or guess, but an absolutely true description—of facts that fly in the face of evolution.
Interestingly, even Deutscher admits the biblical account confirms the research. Yet though the Bible perfectly explains the sudden arrival of multiple languages each equipped with powerful complexities and irregularities, he simply discards its accounts. “Taken literally, however, neither invention by divine fiat nor dispersal as a punishment for human folly seems at all likely today. But has anyone ever come up with a more convincing explanation?”
The answer to his question is no! And there can be no other explanation that fits all the facts. Though the biblical record is brief, it contains no missing chapters. The real story starts about 6,000 years ago.
The Real History of Nations and Language
At that time, Earth was renewed in one week from complete desolation and emptiness. On the sixth day, the first man, Adam, was created and given language—a fully formed, complete language! This explains the conclusion of modern research that only man’s brain can master language: That brain was formed and designed for a specific purpose by a Creator!
It is no coincidence that one of the names for God is the Word. Neither is it a coincidence that divine authority declares that the Word was there “in the beginning”!
Names have meaning, and God’s own name shows who invented man’s language. It is only fitting that God would have this name. Just think how powerful language is: Without it, nothing can be done! When the Word spoke, the entire universe was created! (John 1:1-5). That is the power of this Supreme Being who gave us language.
About 2,000 years after the creation of Adam, mankind became so evil that God flooded the Earth and saved only one righteous man, Noah, and his family. Surviving the Flood with Noah was his wife and his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, each with their wives.
As Noah began to separate and colonize the growing families throughout the Earth, a rebellious people led by Cush and his son Nimrod decided to stay where they were and unite the families. The details are brief, but found in Genesis 10 and 11. “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. … Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:5-6, 9).
This event begins the history of the nations. Here God divided the people into nations by creating multiple languages. God gave several unique languages to the people, probably one to each of the main families listed in Genesis 10.
These parent languages would have then been changed and simplified over time into all the languages we have today, much like Latin gave rise to Spanish, French and Italian.
Our ancestors would have had no real choice but to migrate and dwell with the people with whom they could communicate, developing their own unique cultures and civilizations through their independent languages.
This account in Genesis explains everything! It is in complete agreement with all the established facts and observations—not just of the history of language, but of the history of our nations and even the provable elements of dating “science”!
Ancient Records Too!
But the account of Babylon is not just in the Bible. The building of the tower is also recorded in the ancient writings of Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Greece and Media. The most complete secular account is found in the Akkadian Creation Epic, reproduced in James B. Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts, which even speaks of a father and son leading the project.
The Chinese, Hindus, Irish, Native Americans and Persians also tell us of the divisions of speech by a supreme God. In fact, thanks to Chinese and Egyptian record keeping, we can trace the date of the tower of Babel to approximately 2200 b.c. That is roughly the time period that these ancient manuscripts mark as the beginning of the origins of their civilization.
That is within the same time frame as linguists can demonstrate when our complex languages started!
Yet modern scholars and educational institutions reject all of this. They not only reject the Bible, but they also relegate ancient manuscripts, which they spent years deciphering and trying to understand, to nothing but fantasy! These manuscripts do contain a large amount of myth, but they also carefully preserve annals of and references to their patriarchs.
The rejection of these sources is a fairly recent phenomenon. It wasn’t until German rationalism became the rage within academia in the 19th century that the knowledge of the Bible and divine intervention was removed from education and the ancient manuscripts taken as pure myth. That is why today’s linguists are trying to prove how language evolved using godless evolutionary methods.
Men are using human reasoning to explain something that was divinely ordained at the spiritual level—a level clear above human flesh, which divine authority created! Hence the confusion (1 Corinthians 2:14).
Scholars theorize by attempting to create a prehistoric time period for evolution—yet in the literal sense there is no such thing as prehistoric man. Man was given language from the beginning, which was also used to pass on mankind’s history, through oral traditions and written records! That is how Moses was able to write Genesis. The first language appeared with the first man, and there is no history of men before the written word existed!
The first recorded conversation was between God and man (Genesis 1:28-30; 2:16-17). The first conversation between two human beings is recorded in Genesis 2:23. The first attempt by man to reason without a foundation of divine revelation is recorded in Genesis 3:1-6, and its detrimental results in the remainder of that chapter.
Then What Is Prehistoric Man?
What about the artifacts and bones of “prehistoric” man? The remains of thousands of bones, rudimentary tools and weapons lie embedded in all the continents. How do these fossils and remains fit in if there is no such thing as prehistoric?
First, realize that today’s scholars don’t even know how these artifacts fit in their theory of evolution. Anthropologists and archeologists segment history into ages—such as the Stone Age for prehistoric times—yet this is useless for determining a chronological history because, as they admit, these ages may not be sequential, but actually contemporary!
There is no concrete time period for the start and end of each age, nor is there agreement on how many ages exist. The ages only represent developmental periods in various cultures that occur at different times for different people. It’s not a sequential order of time at all!
According to The Encyclopedia of World History by Peter Stearns, the term Stone Age “has little more than technological significance” and “has no chronological significance.” In this age of space exploration, the Internet, and nuclear power, we still have people in a primitive “stone age” culture in places like tropical rainforests.
Stearns says the archeological theories on prehistory are intensely controversial even as highly “sophisticated” evolutionary theories are still being developed.
How sad that these theories are labeled sophisticated when in reality they are deliberately made complex in order to attempt to keep the evolution theory from completely falling apart! If scientists would only look to the Bible, all their theories could be explained in one simple passage!
Job 30:1-8 contains the truth about the stone cultures we see today and in ancient history: “But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock. Yea, whereto might the strength of their hands profit me, in whom old age was perished? For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste. Who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat. They were driven forth from among men … To dwell in the clifts of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in the rocks. Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they were gathered together. They were children of fools, yea, children of base men: they were viler than the earth.”
Scripture actually speaks of men living in caves and under bushes. They descended from civilized people of low birth and degenerate habits—yet more proof not of evolution but of degeneration! These degenerate, primitive people were driven out of civilization into remote parts such as tropical forests—places where we can yet find them today!
If in our advanced time we still have these primitive people, then it is easy to believe that in ancient times, before and after the Flood, degenerate people were driven out into caves and forests. Their remains are the prehistoric fossils and artifacts scholars find, which, with the unreliable carbon dating method, are postulated to be tens of thousands of years old! In reality they can’t be older than 6,000 years!
Your Only Option!
So what will you believe? The account from the written Word of God that explains all the facts and is corroborated by ancient secular manuscripts and modern research?
Or will you reject divine revelation and the truth that God intervenes in history so that you can blindly believe in evolution, whose supporters must ignore and discard facts, even accepting unreliable data that must first jump through hoops to match their theory?
Where will you put your faith?
If you want to know the origins of the major powers and understand the soon-coming earth-shattering events that these nations will participate in, believe what the Bible says. It must have come from another Source, the One who designed the human brain so man alone is able to master language!
