John Lennox Unpacks the Most Accurate Prophecy in the Bible
John Lennox Unpacks the Most Accurate Prophecy in the Bible
The cavernous lecture hall at the University of Oslo was packed to its high, vaulted ceiling, the air filled with the quiet, expectant murmur of hundreds of students and faculty members. Outside, a crisp Norwegian autumn wind swept off the fjord, but inside, the atmosphere was charged with intellectual anticipation. At the front of the hall stood John, an elderly professor of mathematics from the University of Oxford. His silver hair caught the sharp glare of the projector screen, and his tweed jacket gave him the quintessential appearance of a seasoned British academic.
John adjusted his glasses, looking out at the sea of eager, young faces. Behind him, a massive digital slide displayed a title: The Babylon Imprint: Faith, Culture, and the Structure of Daniel.
“First of all,” John began, his voice carrying the distinct, rhythmic cadence of a seasoned lecturer, “the main part of what I’m going to say today concerns Daniel as a young person. I want us to look at what he experienced essentially as a teenager—let’s say between the ages of fifteen and twenty. For the first part of his life, this young man lived in an incredibly narrow, highly protective culture. It was a strictly monotheistic, deeply rooted Jewish culture. And then suddenly, virtually overnight, his world was shattered. He was taken by brutal military force many hundreds of kilometers away to a completely alien civilization.”
John stepped out from behind the podium, gesturing with his hands. “Imagine the profound psychological shock. The language was totally different. The legal system was totally different. The economic system was completely foreign. And so it goes on. It was a staggeringly powerful, culturally dominant empire. And as we sit here in modern Europe, we have to ask ourselves: why should it be important for us to think about this ancient teenager at all? What does his displacement have to do with our reality?”
He paused, letting the question hang in the air before continuing. “Now, I want to come directly to the central point right away, and it is this: Daniel was brought up in a deeply god-fearing environment. That is undeniably clear from the text. And to the very end of his long life, despite living in the heart of a pagan empire, he maintained an unyielding, absolute devotion to God. It is clear that he prayed consistently and that he read his Bible. That is all well and good, and we might expect that from a devout young man. But there is something else he kept doing that truly astounds me. What fundamentally amazes me about this man, Daniel, and his three teenage friends, is that they did not simply maintain their private devotion to God in a closet. They maintained their public witness.”
John turned back to the screen, clicking a remote control to bring up a slide showing an ancient manuscript fragment.
“Now, when we look at ancient documents like the Book of Daniel,” John said, his eyes scanning the auditorium, “people naturally ask lots of critical questions. In fact, I spend my entire life asking difficult questions. How do we know a text is genuine? Isn’t Daniel a profoundly strange book? It is strange because it boldly talks about history on two entirely different levels. It details deeply personal history—the specific, gritty incidents in Daniel’s everyday life. But it also talks extensively about the future. Daniel talks about the future relative to his own day—specifically detailing events that would unfold in the second century BC, during the rise of the Greek processing empires.”
John smiled, a touch of academic irony in his voice. “And he gets the history so astonishingly, precisely right that many secular critics say, ‘Well, of course, Daniel didn’t actually live when he claims he lived. He must have lived four hundred years later, after the events occurred, writing under a fake name.’ They argue this because their worldview insists there is no such thing as predicting the future in the biblical sense. This faces us with a huge, monumentally important question today.”
He walked back toward his laptop, leaning against the edge of the desk. “As some of you know, I am a mathematician. I spend my days working in the hard sciences. And one of the biggest, most aggressive objections to the whole of the Christian faith and the biblical revelation that I regularly meet from colleagues and students is this: ‘Look, John, you cannot possibly believe this ancient stuff. The central claim of Christianity to start with—that God became human—is inherently supernatural. And we know the supernatural simply doesn’t happen. This book of Daniel claims to predict history in advance. Don’t be ridiculous. That is scientifically impossible. No one can know history before it happens.’“
John’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “Well, we shall see.”
He clicked the remote again, revealing a photograph of a dark, clay artifact covered in tiny, wedge-shaped markings.
“It is always good to anchor our ideas in hard history,” John said firmly. “And this slide shows exactly how they wrote newspapers, state records, and official chronicles in the ancient world. They inscribed these clay cylinders. These specific pieces are the Babylonian Chronicles, housed securely in the British Museum. And this particular cylinder explicitly mentions the military capture of Jerusalem in 597 BC. So, we possess actual, historically verified cuneiform texts recording the exact geopolitical events detailed in the Book of Daniel. Cuneiform, by the way, simply means ‘wedge-shaped’ script. These are entirely independent, secular verifications of biblical history.”
John checked his wrist. “So, we have a little bit of an idea of the history and a little bit of an idea of the culture. And I ought to say, of course, that most of us in this room are wearing watches of some kind or another. Have you ever stopped to notice that there are exactly sixty seconds in a minute, and sixty minutes in an hour? Do you know where that cross-cultural imprint originally came from? It came directly from ancient Babylon. They were absolutely brilliant mathematicians. How they managed to perform complex astronomical calculations in their cumbersome cuneiform script, I do not know, but their mathematical texts are absolutely fascinating. They had worked out that the number sixty was highly divisible by whole numbers, so they utilized it as a numerical base. Traces of Babylon are culturally imprinted right here in Norway today.”
He straightened up, his tone turning deeply philosophical. “But what about their worldview? What did the Babylonians actually think about ultimate reality? This is one of the most critical questions we can ask, because contrary to many popular atheist ideas, every single one of us in this room has a worldview. We all carry a foundational set of answers to the big questions of existence. You have a worldview—for many of you here, it is Christian. Richard Dawkins has a worldview, which is strict naturalism. And the Babylonians had a very specific worldview, complete with their own ideas of creation. To them, creation proceeded through the chaotic sexual union of various gods. But here is the most interesting thing: they possessed a theogony as well as a cosmogony.”
John looked across the lecture hall, ensuring the students were following the distinction. “Now, what do those terms mean? A cosmogony is the genesis of the universe—the origin of cosmos. We believing Christians have a clear cosmogony; it is called Genesis chapter one. But the Babylonians also had a theogony, which means an explanation for how the gods themselves originated. They believed the gods came from somewhere; they were not always there. Their mythology taught that in the beginning, there was only primeval, chaotic matter, and all else—the world, the skies, and the gods themselves—gradually arose out of this original, mindless matter.”
John let out a soft snort of amusement. “And you might sit here today and say, ‘But John, this is a very bizarre, remote idea from an ancient, superstitious world.’ But just wait a minute. What the Babylonians did effectively was to take the mindless forces of nature and turn them into gods. And right there, I see a huge, unmistakable similarity to the secular scientific community today. I know elite physicists who effectively believe that the four fundamental forces of nature—the gravitational force, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism—completely determine absolutely everything in existence. They don’t call them gods, but they might as well, because those forces will get you in the end! Gravity will unfortunately get a lot of us in the end.”
The students broke into a wave of light laughter, and John smiled. “Many brilliant thinkers, like the physicist Paul Davies, look out at the cosmos and see immense, undeniable evidence of intelligence and cosmic design. You would think he is on the verge of becoming a believer in a transcendent God. Oh, no. Davies argues that this is a superhuman intelligence, but it is not supernatural. He claims it simply evolved naturally out of the universe in exactly the same way our own human intelligence did. Do you see the parallel? Apart from the modern academic language, there is hardly any difference at all between many prominent atheists today and the ancient Babylonians. In other words, Daniel and his three teenage friends were violently pushed into an environment dominated by an essentially materialistic worldview. Notice where the Babylonian gods came from: they came out of the pre-existing matter of the universe. They were material gods. And because of that, we can learn a great deal from how those four boys dealt with their culture.”
John walked over to a chalkboard, picking up a piece of chalk. “Of course, these days, no one can avoid the ultimate question of creation. Modern materialists desperately want to get rid of a transcendent Creator God. But then they face a logical crisis: they still have to explain how everything got here. So, they claim that matter is somehow capable of self-creation. You have to attribute creation to something! But lately, they have gone a step further. They now claim that nothing is the ultimate creator—that the entire universe literally created itself out of absolute nothingness. And at this point, ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply tempted to give you a full mathematical lecture on the physics of nothing. But I am not going to do that today, primarily because I have already written an entire book about nothing, called God and Stephen Hawking, which investigates this precise logical fallacy.”
He tapped the chalkboard firmly. “In our contemporary western culture today, the absolute basic choice you have to make is between God as creator, or nothing as creator. That is one of the foundational reasons why the biblical worldview makes so much profound sense to me. There are striking parallels between Daniel’s world and ours. But now, let’s look quickly at the macro-structure of the entire book.”
John put down the chalk and clicked to a new slide displaying a color-coded diagram. “The trouble with short academic talks like this is that if we aren’t careful, we don’t get very far into the text. I know you are all highly intelligent young people. And one of the things that has deeply fascinated me since my own boyhood is the sophisticated way in which ancient biblical literature is organized at the structural level. The Book of Daniel is a brilliant, breathtaking example of literary engineering. I want us to look at what the book is actually like as a cohesive literary unit.”
He pointed to the diagram on the screen. “Well, first of all, some of it is chronological, but unfortunately for a casual reader, the supernatural revelations detailed in chapters seven and eight historically occur before the dramatic events recorded in chapter six. So, the book is absolutely not a simple, linear chronology. Secondly, it is not neatly divided into prophecy and narrative. There is narrative in chapter one, dramatic prophecy in chapter two, intense narrative in chapters three, four, and five, and then a shift back to prophecy. So, that isn’t neat either.”
John leaned forward, his eyes bright with excitement. “The key to unlocking it is to look at its symmetrical, literary structure. Now, this might be a slightly new, radical idea to some of you. So, I am going to give you the fastest run through the Book of Daniel you have ever seen in your lives. Fasten your seat belts, and let’s go!”
The students sat up, pencils poised as John began checking off the chapters with rapid-fire enthusiasm.
“Here is the structural table of contents of the book of Daniel,” John announced. “First, in chapter one, we have the famous story in the Babylonian royal university where Daniel and his friends courageously refuse to eat the king’s defiled food. Do you remember that? Secondly, in chapter two, we find the story of King Nebuchadnezzar’s terrifying prophetic dream—the dream of a massive, glorious metallic image that came crashing down to dust when a single, supernatural stone struck its feet. Third, in chapter three, Nebuchadnezzar himself builds a massive, literal golden image. You see, the pride of the dream had gone straight to his head! He built a golden idol and commanded the entire empire, including Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, to bow down to it, and they flatly refused, facing the fiery furnace.”
John took a quick breath, tracking his pointer along the slide. “Fourth, in chapter four, it is about Nebuchadnezzar again. He grew intensely proud, walking on the roof of his royal palace in Babylon, saying, ‘Is not this great Babylon that I have built by my own power for my glory and my majesty?’ And in that exact moment of supreme arrogance, he was cut down by God, in precise fulfillment of a prophetic dream he had about a great tree being chopped to the stump. He lost his sanity, behaved exactly like a wild animal, ate grass like an ox, and his hair and nails grew long for seven agonizing years until he finally humbled himself and God miraculously restored his sanity and his throne.”
John’s voice dropped an octave, adding a dramatic intensity to the lecture hall. “But look at the next chapter, chapter five. We meet another king, Belshazzar. He did not learn from his grandfather’s humiliation. He made a direct, blasphemous mockery of the living God. He hosted a massive, drunken banquet—Belshazzar’s Feast—where he deliberately ordered the sacred gold vessels plundered from the Temple of God in Jerusalem to be brought to his drinking tables so his wives and concubines could drink wine from them while praising idols. In that very hour, a mysterious, disembodied human hand came out and wrote a terrifying judgment on the wall. That exact night, Belshazzar was killed, and the mighty empire of Babylon fell to the invading forces. Why that happened, we shall see in a moment.”
He cleared his throat, pausing to look at the notes on his podium. “So, we have five distinct stories occurring one after the other, building up to a massive, historical climax at Belshazzar’s feast and the sudden, violent collapse of the Babylonian superpower. Now, be very careful here. Babylon remained the capital city as we transition into chapter six, because the new governing superpower is the Medo-Persian Empire. It is the same capital city, but an entirely new regime. It is very much like how Hong Kong was ruled by the British for a long season, and then suddenly went back to the Chinese—it is the exact same physical place, but with completely different rulers. That is precisely what happened here incidentally.”
John leaned in, tapping the podium for emphasis. “Daniel is the only administrative figure in recorded human history of any kind who successfully ran two separate, competing global empires. How do you rise to the absolute top of two rival world empires as a foreign captive, and not only maintain your private faith in God, but maintain an uncompromised public witness to His sovereignty? Well, we shall see.”
He clicked to the next part of the structural chart. “Let’s look at what happens next in the text. In chapter six, we have the famous story of Daniel refusing to obey the new king’s decree banning prayer to anyone but the monarch. He is thrown into the lions’ den, and he is miraculously released. Then, in chapters seven and eight, we encounter two massive apocalyptic visions: a vision of four terrifying wild animals rising from the sea, followed by a vision of two animals locking in prophetic conflict. In chapter nine, we find Daniel diligently studying the scriptures of Jeremiah, realizing that the seventy years of exile are about to be fulfilled. He falls to his knees and prays passionately, ‘What is going to happen to my beloved home city of Jerusalem?’ And God sends an angel to tell him that there will be a long, complex history of trouble before Jerusalem is ultimately restored. And then, the final three chapters are obviously one single, cohesive prophetic section that details the rise of the Greek Empire and points directly down toward a stunning prediction of the end of time.”
John stepped back, a triumphant smile on his face. “Well, that was a very fast run through Daniel, wasn’t it? Now, think about it deeply as mathematicians and scientists. There are exactly ten distinct segments to the book. Do they make any structural sense when placed together? Yes, they do, beautifully! The book is written in a magnificent chiasm—a parallel structure.”
He pointed to the interlocking lines on the screen. “You start with an administrative story of testing in Babylon. You then follow that with two great images: one a dream image in chapter two, and one a physical image in chapter three. Then you have two successive world kings disciplined by the Almighty: one is disciplined, humbles himself, and is fully restored; the other is disciplined in his arrogance and is permanently destroyed. Then the structure starts up again in the second half of the book: you have a story of administrative testing under the Medo-Persians in chapter six. And then you have two corresponding apocalyptic visions of wild animals in chapters seven and eight. Finally, you have two separate divine writings explained: the first is the Holy Scripture itself in chapter nine, and the second is what the angel calls the ‘Writing of Truth’ in the final chapters. You can look at them side by side in perfect symmetry.”
John looked out at the students, his voice filled with reverence for the text. “This is the highly sophisticated kind of structure that appears occasionally in secular classical literature, but it appears in a uniquely, flawlessly developed form in our Bible—and not only here in Daniel. What originally got me going on this structural research was my late friend and mentor, Professor David Gooding, whom some of the older faculty here in Norway know well. He discovered this beautiful literary symmetry in Daniel many years ago and wrote a landmark monograph about it for Tyndale Press. Now, you will notice that within this parallel structure, the first half of the book details the historical end of Babylonian supremacy, while the second half of the book projects outward to the ultimate time of the end. It is talking about the far-distant future. It is truly fascinating. We have a perfect mixture of personal biography, political history, and sweeping cosmic prophecy. Is it really historically credible or not?”
John walked back to the podium, opening his heavy study Bible. “Now, we are going to dive into some specific textual detail, just in case you are getting fed up with academic generalities. Let me read to you from the literal opening lines of Daniel, chapter one: ‘In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god. Then the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch—who seems to have functioned essentially as the dean of students—to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility, youths without blemish, of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competent to stand in the king’s palace, and to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans.’“
John tracked his finger along the text, his voice echoing clearly. “‘The king assigned them a daily portion of the food that the king ate, and of the wine that he drank. They were to be educated for exactly three years. Just like our undergraduate systems at Oxford and Cambridge—which is probably where those universities originally got the idea from—they were to be rigorously educated for three years. At the end of that time, they were to stand before the king. Among these were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah of the tribe of Judah. And the chief of the eunuchs gave them new Babylonian names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego. But Daniel resolved in his heart that he would not defile himself…’ I very much hope that you, as young students, have made a similar resolution in your own lives.”
John closed the Bible slightly, leaning over the podium to look directly into the eyes of the young men and women in the front rows.
“So, let us look carefully at the very first major event in this teenager’s life,” John said softly, the lecture hall falling into an absolute, breathless silence. “It starts out seeming quite innocent, a standard historical record: Nebuchadnezzar came against Jerusalem in a certain year. But then the text drops a phrase that should shock any conventional historian. It says: ‘And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand.’ What? Come on! Think about that from a military perspective.”
John smiled warmly, his eyes flashing with conviction. “If the text had been written the other way around—if it had said, ‘The Lord gave Nebuchadnezzar, who was an incredibly powerful monarch with all the latest iron weapons and a vast, unbeatable army, into the hands of the weak king Jehoiakim,’ we would all say, ‘Wow, that is a spectacular, impressive miracle!’ But listen to me carefully: any contemporary secular historian of that era, and I have spent my life talking to them, would look at the sack of Jerusalem and say, ‘What happened there is simply a textbook example of historical Darwinism. You have a vast, aggressive, technologically advanced empire. You have a tiny, fragile nation standing directly in their path, and the empire simply rolls over them, wipes them out, and takes captives.’“
John slammed his hand down lightly on the wood of the podium, his voice ringing out with immense power. “So, watch this phrase then: ‘The Lord gave.’ Why would the biblical writer risk looking like an absolute fool by asserting that the living God was the sovereign power behind their own nation’s catastrophic military defeat and humiliation? It is deeply striking to me, and it tells us an immense deal about the character of Daniel.”
John leaned forward, a look of profound peace on his aged face as he delivered his final point. “Right here, in the midst of national tragedy and forced exile, we find the absolute, unshakeable source of this young man’s confidence. Even as a isolated teenager stripped of his home, his language, and his name, Daniel passionately, fiercely believed that there is a sovereign God who is in total, absolute control of human history.”
