Dear friend,
I want to show you something this morning that stopped me cold the first time I read it carefully.
Not a feeling. Not a personal experience. Something you can check for yourself. Something that has been sitting in your Bible the whole time, waiting for someone to walk through it slowly enough that the full weight of it lands.
I have been with the Church for fifty years. I have read the Bible every morning for fifty years. And there are still passages that stop me. That make me put the Book down and sit very still for a moment.
This is one of them.
Before I show you let me place something in your hands.
I wrote a guide called They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. It traces the same kind of Biblical pattern I am about to show you — specific, verifiable, unmistakable — applied to what is happening right now in America. You can find it by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you can find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Now let me show you what I mean.
The city of Tyre.
In 590 BC a man named Ezekiel wrote down a prophecy. He was a Jewish priest living in exile in Babylon. He had never been to the city of Tyre. He had no military intelligence. No political connections. No way of knowing what was about to happen to one of the most powerful cities in the ancient world.
And yet he wrote down exactly what was going to happen to it. In detail. With specifics that no human being could have guessed.
You will find this in Ezekiel chapter 26. I want to walk through it slowly because the details matter.
What Ezekiel said would happen.
Ezekiel made six specific predictions about Tyre. Not vague. Not general. Six specific things he said would happen to this city.
One. Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon would come against Tyre and destroy the mainland city.
Two. Many nations would come against Tyre. Not just one. Many.
Three. The stones and timber and soil of the city would be thrown into the sea.
Four. Tyre would become a bare rock. A place for spreading fishing nets.
Five. The city would never be rebuilt.
Six. Tyre would never be found again.
Six specific predictions. Written in 590 BC. Now let me show you what actually happened.
What actually happened.
In 585 BC — five years after Ezekiel wrote his prophecy — Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched his army against Tyre exactly as predicted. He besieged the mainland city for thirteen years and eventually destroyed it.
But here is where it gets extraordinary.
When Nebuchadnezzar finally broke through the walls he found the city mostly empty. The people of Tyre had seen him coming. They had moved everything — their wealth, their people, their possessions — half a mile offshore to a small island. And from that island they continued to thrive as one of the most powerful trading cities in the ancient world.
So the first prediction came true. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the mainland city. But the city itself survived on the island.
Ezekiel's other five predictions had not yet come true.
They would. But not for another 240 years.
In 332 BC a young Macedonian general named Alexander the Great decided he wanted Tyre.
The island city felt safe. Half a mile of open water between them and any army on land. They had survived Nebuchadnezzar. They would survive Alexander.
They were wrong.
Alexander did something that nobody in the history of warfare had ever done before. He built a causeway. Half a mile long. From the mainland shore to the island. And do you know what he used to build it?
The rubble of the old mainland city.
The stones. The timber. The soil of old Tyre. All of it scraped up from the ruins that Nebuchadnezzar had left behind. Thrown into the sea to build a road to the island.
Ezekiel had written it 240 years earlier. They will throw your stones and your timber and your soil into the sea.
When Alexander's causeway was finished his army walked across it and took the island city. He destroyed it completely. He killed most of the men and sold the women and children into slavery.
And then something happened that has never been reversed.
The city was never rebuilt. The island became connected to the mainland permanently by the causeway — which is still there today. The site of old Tyre became what Ezekiel said it would become. A bare rock. A place where fishermen spread their nets to dry.
Archaeologists have confirmed this. Historians have confirmed this. The site of ancient Tyre is a rocky peninsula where fishermen still spread their nets today.
Six predictions. Written in 590 BC. Fulfilled over the following centuries by two completely separate conquerors who had never read Ezekiel and were not trying to fulfil anything.
I want you to think about what this means.
Ezekiel did not predict that Tyre would be destroyed. Lots of cities get destroyed. That would not be remarkable. He predicted the specific method of destruction. He predicted that the rubble would be thrown into the sea. He predicted that multiple nations would be involved. He predicted that it would become a bare rock. He predicted it would never be rebuilt.
The odds of guessing all six of those specific details correctly by chance are so small that they are not worth calculating.
There is only one explanation that makes sense.
He knew because he was told. By someone who exists outside of time. Who could see 590 BC and 332 BC at the same moment. Who could describe the actions of Alexander the Great two and a half centuries before Alexander was born.
That is not the God of vague feelings and general comfort. That is the God of specific, verifiable, falsifiable prediction. The God who is so confident in His own sovereignty over history that He writes down exactly what is going to happen and then waits for history to catch up.
Now I want to tell you why this matters for today.
Because the same God who told Ezekiel exactly what would happen to Tyre 240 years before it happened is the same God who is looking at what is happening in America right now.
He is not watching it unfold and wondering what to do. He is not surprised by any of it. He has already seen how it ends. He is as confident about the outcome of this moment as He was about the outcome of Tyre. And He left us enough evidence in Scripture to know that His confidence is not misplaced.
I have been sitting with this for a long time. And I wrote all of it down in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. The same God who described the fall of Tyre in six specific details also described the pattern of opposition and survival and vindication that I believe is unfolding right now. Read it this week. I think it will do for you what Ezekiel chapter 26 did for me the first time I read it carefully. You may find it by clicking on the image below:
It will stop you cold. And then it will steady you. Because a God who is that specific about history is a God you can trust with the present.
God bless you, friend. He already knows how this ends.
With you in prayer,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do three things:
One. Read Ezekiel chapter 26 this week. The whole chapter. Slowly. As you read each prediction write it down on a piece of paper. Then look up the history of Tyre and Alexander the Great and check each one against what actually happened. Let the evidence do what evidence is designed to do.
Two. The next time someone in your life tells you the Bible is just an old book written by men, tell them about Tyre. Not aggressively. Just — here is something I found that I cannot explain any other way. Let the facts speak for themselves.
Three. Read They Tried To Stop Him this week: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
The God who predicted Tyre is not finished predicting. Read the guide and see if the pattern He described thousands of years ago looks familiar to you right now.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.