Declaring the End
From the Beginning
Isa. 46:10 Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure:
The God of the Bible is not the begging, pleading, trying and failing little god most of the religious world imagines him to be. Our text tells us that God does all his pleasure—that is, he does everything it pleases him to do. And why should he not—he has all the power there is, and there is nobody who has the power to stop him.
Dan. 4:35 And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and HE DOETH ACCORDING TO HIS WILL in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and NONE CAN STAY HIS HAND, or say unto him, What doest thou?
I love the simplicity of the Bible. It is as simple as it needs to be. The key is to acknowledge that it says what it means, and means what it says. I don’t see what is so hard about that. Just let it say what it says. So, let’s notice what it says.
First, it says the inhabitants of the earth (that is you and me) are reputed as nothing. That is, compared to God, we don’t count. That should not offend anybody. That is like saying, “Compared to an atomic bomb, a firecracker does not count. Saying that should not offend any little firecracker.
It goes on to say that he doeth according to his will. God acts according to his own will—according to his own purpose. He does not have to wait for our permission. How could anybody imagine that God needs our permission to do what he chooses to do.
Either God does what he intends to do, or else he does what he does not intend to do. When you do what you do not intend to do, that is called an accident. God does not have accidents.
And who could imagine that God is so indecisive, or so lacking in foresight, that he makes his plans as he goes along? You can be sure that God knows what he is doing, and he knows what he is going to do.
Again, if God intends to do something, he has always intended to do it. He is in one mind and who can hinder him. God does not have to wait to see how things work out before he decides what he needs to do. Our text says it.
In the words of our text, he declares “the end from the beginning and from ancient times the things that are not yet done.”
God has always known what he is doing, and when he chooses to do so, he tells us what he is going to do—or, perhaps, what somebody else is going to do. The greatest of all prophecies is that very first prophecy in Genesis chapter three. No sooner had Adam sinned than God gave this prophecy:
Gen. 3:15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
God provided that prophecy, that promise, on the very heels of the fall. Before Adam sinned, God had already provided the remedy. His Son, the seed of the woman, was already provided to bruise the head of the serpent. Four thousand years later, he did just that; he took our sins on himself and carried them to the cross and put them all away.
The Lord Jesus Christ was the only person who was ever born the seed of the woman. Every other person has been the seed of the man. Our Lord was the seed of the woman— he was virgin born.
The Lord Jesus Christ became man, and Satan attacked him in his humanity—he bruised his heel. But, in return, the Lord bruised Satan’s head. You can survive a bruise to your heel, but when your very head is bruised, crushed, you are defeated. Our Lord took everything Satan could throw at him and he still bruised his head; he defeated Satan and delivered his people.
It was another four thousand years before that prophecy was fulfilled, but God can just as easily tell what is going to happen in a few weeks—or a few hours.
Ahab the king of Israel persuaded Jehoshaphat the king of Judah to join forces and go with him to battle against the Syrians. Before the battle, the prophet Micaiah told Ahab that he would fall in battle.
Ahab thought he could rise above the situation. He was going to prove the prophecy was wrong. He persuaded Jehoshaphat to go into battle wearing his royal robes, and he would go disguised as a common soldier; he would hide among his men. It did not work.
1 Kings 22:34 And a certain man DREW A BOW AT A VENTURE, and smote the king of Israel between the joints of the harness: wherefore he said unto the driver of his chariot, Turn thine hand, and carry me out of the host; for I am wounded.
35 And the battle increased that day: and the king was stayed up in his chariot against the Syrians, and died at even.
When that certain man sent his arrow on its way, he had no idea where it would land—but God knew. It would find that one spot between the joints of the harness where Ahab was most vulnerable. When God says it, it will happen—at the appointed time and in the appointed way.
If God has said something will take place, and it has not happened, that only proves the time has not come. Just wait, it will come at the proper time.
Hab. 2:3 For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, WAIT FOR IT; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.
Often, God foretold what somebody would do, when they were convinced they would never do it. He prophesied that Hazael would kill little babies. Hazael did not believe he would do any such thing, but God said he would—and he did (2 Kings 8:12,13).
He prophesied that Peter would deny him before the night was out. Peter had more confidence in himself than that. But, before the night was out, he cursed, and swore, and denied that he even knew the Lord (Matt. 26:69-75).
Whether it is in a few hours, or in a few thousand years, every prophecy God has given will be fulfilled—at his time and in his way. The prophecy may have to do with events hundreds of years in the future, but it will be fulfilled at the precise time it was predicted to be fulfilled.
God told Abraham that his people would be in bondage four hundred years, and that he would bring them out with great substance. He brought them out of Egypt on the very day he intended to bring them out.
Gen. 15:13 And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years;
14 And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.
God brought Israel out of Egypt on the very day he promised that he would do it.
Exo. 12:40 Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.
41 And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, EVEN THE SELFSAME DAY it came to pass, that all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt.
All the furniture inside the Tabernacle was either solid gold, or gold plated. The foundation of the walls was made of huge silver ingots. Did you ever wonder where people in the middle of the desert came up with that much gold and silver. They borrowed gold and silver jewelry from the Egyptians the night they left. By the way, there was nothing dishonest about that; they were just collecting four hundred years of back wages. The Egyptians owed them every penny they took.
That is a lot of gold and silver to be in private hands. Egypt was an enormously affluent nation; but that is a story for another time.
Exo. 12:35 And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment:
36 And the LORD gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians.
Sometimes God not only foretold what would take place, HE FORETOLD THE VERY NAME of the person who would do it. He called Josiah by name and foretold that he would overthrow Jeroboam’s altar, and burn men’s bones on it.
1 Kings 13:1 And, behold, there came a man of God out of Judah by the word of the Lord unto Bethel: and Jeroboam stood by the altar to burn incense.
2 And he cried against the altar in the word of the Lord, and said, O altar, altar, thus saith the Lord; Behold, a child shall be born unto the house of David, JOSIAH BY NAME; and upon thee shall he offer the priests of the high places that burn incense upon thee, and men’s bones shall be burnt upon thee.
Years later—after he had done what the prophet said he would do—Josiah learned that the prophet had called him by name and foretold that he would do what he had just done.
2 Kings 23:15 Moreover the altar that was at Bethel, and the high place which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, had made, both that altar and the high place he brake down, and burned the high place, and stamped it small to powder, and burned the grove.
16 And as JOSIAH turned himself, he spied the sepulchres that were there in the mount, and sent, and took the bones out of the sepulchres, and burned them upon the altar, and polluted it, according to the word of the Lord which the man of God proclaimed, who proclaimed these words.
17 Then he said, What title is that that I see? And the men of the city told him, It is the sepulchre of the man of God, which came from Judah, and proclaimed these things that thou hast done against the altar of Bethel . . . .
20 And he slew all the priests of the high places that were there upon the altars, and burned men’s bones upon them, and returned to Jerusalem.
When God settled Israel in the land he promised them great prosperity if they would serve him and keep his law. But he told them they would suffer if they forsook his law and served the demon gods of the land.
He also gave them the law of the Sabbath (Exo. 20:8-10). They were to work six days and rest every seventh day. What a blessing that was to hardworking people. No other nation had such a law.
More than that, they were to work the land for six years, and they should allow the land to lie fallow, and enjoy its Sabbath, every seventh year (Lev. 25). How would they live the seventh year? God promised that the land would produce twice as much the sixth year—they would not need to work the seventh year. In effect, he promised their entire families a full year’s vacation every seventh year.
Think about that. The most ambitious labor unions of the Twentieth Century never imagined making such a request of their employers—not in their wildest dreams. All Israel had to do was obey the reasonable requirements of the law.
He also promised that every seventh Sabbatic Year (that is, every forty-nine years), he would bless the forty-eighth year so that the land brought forth three times as much (Lev. 25:21). They would get both the forty-ninth and the fiftieth year off. They were not even to gather what grew of itself; they would not need to (vs 11).
Beginning on the Day of Atonement of that year, there was to be complete land reform (ch. 25). Except for property inside walled cities, the entire land was to be redistributed according to the original land grant. That meant that if your daddy, or your granddaddy, had sold the old home place, on that day you got it back.
That meant that property values would vary, depending on how long it was going to be until the Year of Jubilee and the redistribution of the land, but the Law made specific provisions for that too.
He also required that on the tenth day of the seventh month of every fiftieth year—on the Day of Atonement—they would sound the Jubilee, and “proclaim liberty throughout the land” (vs. 10). If anybody had been sold into bondage, on that day he was to be set free.
Just imagine, if you will, some exhausted old bond servant sweating and chopping weeds on somebody else’s farm. He hears people going along the road, whooping it up, and blowing the Jubilee Trumpet, and he can’t figure out why they are in such a good humor.
He walks up to the road and asks what is going on, and somebody asks him, “Don’t you know, this is the Day of Atonement. As of today, the land is all going back to its original owners. Thirty years ago, your granddaddy sold the land you are standing on to old Mr. Moneybags. But, as of today, the land doesn’t belong to him anymore—and you don’t either.
This land is your land, and you are a free man. Why don’t you throw that hoe down, and go with us and help proclaim the Jubilee?
Do you imagine that might have been a shouting-good time for that old bond servant? By the way, the Day of Atonement, and the Year of Jubilee are types of the gospel message, but you already figured that out.
In case you are concerned for the rich man who stood to lose all his property, don’t worry about him; the Law took care of him too. None of what we have said applied to property inside any walled city. If he bought property in town and nobody redeemed it within a year, he and his heirs could hold it forever (vss 29,30).
He might own a chariot factory, and two or three shoe factories, and apartment houses, and rental houses, and if they were inside the city walls, he could keep all of it. The Law made it possible for anybody with the determination, and the ability, to become fabulously wealthy, and pass it on to their heirs. But it also minimized the ability of the rich and powerful to abuse others.
It was the most nearly perfect economic system the world has ever known. And why should it not be; God was its author; and he does not do shoddy work.
We spend ever so much time talking about what the Law could not do, and we are right about that. The Law could not provide anybody a home in heaven; it was not intended for that. But, for the purpose for which it was intended, it was the best economic system the world has ever seen.
All it required, in order for Israel to retain the carnal and natural benefits it provided was that they live by its reasonable provisions—but they refused to do it. They would not allow the land to return to its rightful owners; they refused to cancel debts at the Jubilee, and they would not set their bond servants free.
But to get back to the prophetic element, God foretold that, because they would not allow the land to enjoy its Sabbaths, he would remove them out of the land, and it would enjoy its Sabbaths in their absence (ch. 26:34,35).
Time rocked on for hundreds of years. It looked like they were going to get away with ignoring the law. And then, Judgment Day came. A law is not worth much if there are no penalties —if judgment day never comes.
When the time came, Jeremiah told them of their fate. They were going to be carried away to Babylon. They could not work the land if they were hundreds of miles away. They could not enslave their countrymen, if they were, themselves, being held as slaves.
Jer. 25:11 And this whole land shall be a desolation, and an astonishment; and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon SEVENTY YEARS.
True to the prophecy, Nebuchadnezzar came with his army and carried them off to Babylon. But they would not be in Babylon forever. Before they were carried away, God foretold that he would bring them home at the end of those seventy years.
Jer. 29:10 For thus saith the LORD, That AFTER SEVENTY YEARS be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place.
Even before Jeremiah’s day, Isaiah foretold that they would be brought back home.
More than two hundred years before Cyrus the king of Persia was born, Isaiah called him by name. He prophesied that he would engage in great conquests, that he would accumulate great wealth, and that he would let the Jews return home— without money and without price.
Isa. 44:28 That saith of CYRUS, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.
Isa. 45:1 Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to CYRUS, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut;
2 I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron:
3 And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel . . . .
13 I have raised him up in righteousness, and I will direct all his ways: he shall build my city, and he shall let go my captives, not for price nor reward, saith the Lord of hosts.
Two hundred years later, Cyrus did exactly what Isaiah had prophesied he would do.
Ezra1:1 Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying,
2 Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The LORD God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
3 Who is there among you of all his people? his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD God of Israel, (he is the God,) which is in Jerusalem.
It is not likely that Cyrus discovered that prophecy on his own. It is more likely that a Jewish Bible scholar discovered it and brought it to his attention. Daniel had been studying his Bible. He knew about the prophecy of Isaiah, and the prophecy of Jeremiah. He may very well be the one who called it to Cyrus’s attention.
Dan. 9:1 In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of the seed of the Medes, which was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans;
2 In the first year of his reign I DANIEL UNDERSTOOD BY BOOKS the number of the years, whereof the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem.
God gave Daniel an abundance of information by direct revelation; but this was not part of it. Daniel learned this by studying his Bible. He said he understood by books the number of years. He had been reading the Hebrew prophets.
If it behooved the inspired prophets to read their Bibles (the part of it they had at that time), it certainly behooves the likes of us to do the same.
Isaiah lived more than one hundred years before Jeremiah. Can you imagine how it shocked that old king to learn that the prophet, who wrote that, wrote it over a hundred years before they were brought to Babylon in the first place.
Can you imagine how it shocked Cyrus to learn that one of the Hebrew prophets had called him by name and indicated that he would release the Jewish people to go home. I would think that finding his name in a two hundred year old prophecy might motivate him to do what the prophet said he would do.
Again, God had provided the remedy before they had the need.
All this talk about prophecy brings on a question: how can God so accurately foretell what is going to happen years, or thousands of years, in the future?
You and I cannot foretell what somebody is going to do tomorrow; why is God so different? The fact is that God is different; he is so different that there is nothing with which we can compare him.
Isa. 40:18, To whom then will ye liken God, or with what likeness will he compare him?
Our problem is that we tend to think God is like us, but that is not the case.
Psa. 50:21, Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.
I would say that comparing any man to God is like comparing a tiny marble to a planet, but that is far too weak a comparison. There is far more difference than that.
God is the Eternal One. I would say that God fills all of time and space, but again, that is far too weak a thought. That assumes that God is in time and in space; it is the other way around. God is not in time and space; time and space are in him. He encompasses all of time just as he encompasses all of space.
Our little minds cannot fully comprehend the greatness of God, and we cannot fully comprehend our own littleness. If you will bear with me, I want to take a quick look at how little we are.
Some of the things we are going to look at will sound more than a little tedious, because we are looking at things that can never be fully explained, but it behooves us to follow the subject, and to follow the Bible, as far as our light will take us. This is not an area where speculation is any benefit, and we dare not speculate, but we do want as much as God will give us.
And above all, we do not have patience with those who are so sure that, because we cannot do something, that means God cannot do it.
There are those who are sure that, because you and I cannot know what is going to happen in the future, unless we have decided to make it happen, that means God is limited in the same way. They are sure that God cannot know what is going to happen unless he has decided to make it happen.
We make a mistake any time we place limits on God, any time we begin a comment with, “God cannot . . . . unless.”
There are very few things God cannot do and the Bible tells us what they are. First, he cannot swear by one greater than himself, because there is nobody greater than he is.
Heb. 6:13, “For when God made promise to Abraham, BECAUSE HE COULD SWEAR BY NO GREATER, he sware by himself.”
Second, he cannot deny himself. That would be to deny his very nature and attributes.
2 Tim. 2:13, “If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful, HE CANNOT DENY HIMSELF.”
And he cannot lie; he is the very embodiment of truth.
Heb. 6:18, “ That by two immutable things, in which it is IMPOSSIBLE FOR GOD TO LIE.”
He can do anything he chooses to do, but he cannot do anything that is contrary to his own nature and attributes. That would be to deny himself.
He can see the future, without being the cause of those things that are going to happen in the future. He can look across time more easily than you and I can look across the room.
Sometimes we can better understand what God is like, by realizing that he is not like us. Looking at our own weakness contrasts with his majesty. To repeat myself, you and I are such tiny creatures that we can never fully realize what tiny things we are. First, look at how very small we are in the grand scheme of things.
Our physical bodies are usually about 150 to 200 pounds. Most of us are from five to six feet tall. But if you were to back off two or three hundred yards, we would look a lot smaller. If we were to back off much farther, we would only be a speck on the horizon.
We live on a planet that completely dwarfs us, but if we were on another planet, looking back at the earth, our planet would only be a little bright spot in the night sky. Compare the tiny spot you occupy with the vastness of the universe, and you will get the picture. In the grand scheme of things we hardly register.
To approach the subject from another direction, we are creatures of time. Even the brightest linguists have difficulty defining time. My huge hundred-year-old Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary gives twenty-nine different definitions for time. I will get back to that in a moment.
The only existence you and I have is in the present moment of time, and the present is so fleeting that it cannot be measured.
The past is forever gone, and the future is always on its way. You and I are stuck in the present, and the present is so brief that, by the time we think about it, it is gone.
We often make the comment that we live our lives one day at a time, but that is not true.
If we lived our lives one day at a time, we could throw away our clocks. All we would need is a calendar. Our boss might complain when we show up for work at 11:00, and we could tell him “This is Monday, isn’t it; Monday is the first workday of the week, and I am here on Monday, ready to work. That might not satisfy him. The present does not last so much as one day.
The present does not last so much as one minute. If the present lasted so much as a minute, you would never have a car wreck. Given a full minute, any driver could get out of the way of the other car.
If the present lasted a full second, no boxer could lay a hand on his opponent.
The people who build computers talk in terms of nanoseconds; that is the billionth part of a second. If those people could not split a second into a million parts and beyond, they could never build computers that would work. We would spend all our time waiting for it to do something.
So, when you get right down to it, the present does not last so long as the tiniest part of a second. The only existence you and I have is the present, and by the time we think about it, it is past.
On the other hand, God encompasses all of time and space. You could never squeeze the omnipresent God into the tiny spot you and I occupy, and you could never squeeze him into the tiny instant we call the present.
If you are still with me, hang on while I get tedious for awhile longer. Granted, this is a difficult subject, and there are some things that are beyond our comprehension, but when anybody twists and derails the truth the way some of our friends have with this subject, it behooves us that we take them on.
Difficult as the subject is, I believe it will become simpler if we break it up into tiny pieces.
I believe we have demonstrated that the present is such a brief instant that it cannot be measured. The best definition I can come up with for the present is that the present is the point where the past gives way to the future. It is at that instant that the future becomes the past. If you can make it any more precise than that, I would be glad to hear it.
But, suppose the present does last long enough to be measured. Suppose the present lasts for the hundredth part of a second. In school I learned that, if we witness anything that passes in less than one fifteenth of a second, it is too brief for our eyes to see it, and our mind to recognize it. That may be right. I would not know how to disprove it.
In order to simplify the arithmetic, suppose we can recognize anything that happens in one tenth of a second.
It takes ten one hundredths to equal one tenth. That means that it takes ten present moments of time for anything to register in our minds. Again, that means that by the time we know anything about any event, it is already in the past. In other words, all we have is the present, and we know nothing about the present, because, by the time we know it, it is already in the past.
Why is that? It is because we are squeezed into this tiny little thing we call the present. The past is forever gone, and the only thing we can do about the future is wait for it.
To carry that illustration one step farther, everything we know anything about is in the past, and if it takes ten present moments of time for us to know anything, we know all those ten moments as a unit, and we know them as if they were the present.
Sometimes our weakness can actually help us to understand something about the greatness of God. We know those ten tiny individual present moments of time all at once, as if they were the present, because, to say it again, we have to see all of them in order to see any of them.
But, God sees all of time and eternity as a unit. All is one eternal now with him. To say it again, he can look across time as easily as you and I can look across a room.
We are told that he is the beginning and the end (Rev. 1:8). That is not to say he is the beginning and he will be the end. He is the beginning and the end at one and the same time.
God is not traveling through time the way you and I are. He is outside of time. God is not in time—time is in God.
There is nothing, and nobody, like God—so there is nothing with which we can compare him. Any analogy we might use is inadequate; but we still make the effort. Any illustration we might come up with is weak and inadequate, but inadequate as it is, the best I can come up with is this.
Imagine that the very atmosphere around us represents God, and imagine that all of time is a drinking straw suspended high up in mid-air. Now, imagine that all of mankind is a tiny ant crawling through the length of that straw—that is, traveling through time one moment after another. If the ant is at one end of the straw, it is not at the other end, nor in the middle. That is us; we are traveling from one point in time to another.
But that drinking straw is too little to contain God. The drinking straw is in the atmosphere, the atmosphere is not in the drinking straw. By the same token, time is in God; God is not in time. He does not become one day older every twenty four hours.
Do you tell me you cannot comprehend anything not becoming older with the passage of time. Of course you cannot comprehend it, because you and I are creatures of time; we are encompassed by time, and held fast by time. Time is a vise that holds our minds, our imagination, our persons, and everything about us.
We cannot think except in terms of time. But God is not a prisoner of time the way we are. You and I cannot conceive of eternity—not in any way that means anything. If we try to think of eternity, we can only think of it in terms of unending time—and that is not eternity, that is still time—unending time, but time nonetheless. John Newton did as good a job as any of us are going to do.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.
We know what he meant; we agree with him, and we rejoice in the thought, but John Newton fell far short of getting it right. There are no years in eternity. Eternity is the opposite of days, and months, and years.
Before we close, I want to shift gears, and take just a moment to make sure nobody takes advantage of what we have said. Look at our text again.
Isa. 46:10 Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure:
There are those who will tell you that since God can foretell what is going to happen before it happens, that means God intends to make it happen, and they use this passage as one of their proof texts. But, look at the verse again. The text says that God will do all his pleasure. Everything God does, or causes others to do, pleases him.
Before you can prove that God is the cause of all your meanness, you will have to prove that your meanness pleases God. Short of that, you might as well give it up.
“And God saw everything that he had made and, behold it was very good” (Gen. 1:31)
You find that expression all through that chapter, and it applies to everything God does. Until our friends can show that sin pleases God, they do not need this text.
All through the Old Testament, beginning with Gen. 3:15, God painted a prophetic picture of the coming Messiah. By the time the Lord appeared, that prophetic picture was so complete the Jewish people, and especially the religious hierarchy should have had no problem recognizing him.
This would be the proper place to look at those prophecies, but that would take far more time than would be a good idea at this time. I have devoted our next booklet to dealing with those Messianic prophecies.
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