f you place twenty dollars a week in a savings account every Monday for a year, never withdrawing any, you will have $1,040.00 plus interest at the end of the year. That is telling the future. Anyone can do that.

To say that someone will lead a revolution within the next ten years and claim that as a prophecy is just as simplistic. Given the events of this world that statement is pretty safe to make, and has a remarkably high probability of ‘fulfillment’.

But, to tell specific events about specific people and actions is confined to God. One argument God provided for the emptiness of idolatry is that the idol cannot declare the things to come. Hear the words of Isaiah, “Let them bring them forth, and shew us what shall happen: let them shew the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them; or declare us things for to come. Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold it together” (Isaiah 41:22-23). None but God can do that.

In Deuteronomy 18:21-22, Moses offered the test of a true prophet whereby the people might discern their claims saying, “And if thou say in thy heart, How shall we know the word which Jehovah hath not spoken? when a prophet speaketh in the name of Jehovah, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which Jehovah hath not spoken: the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously, thou shalt not be afraid of him.”