Major Fulfilled Bible Prophecies You Should Know About

Prophets seem like something from novels or movies.

The predictions they make couldn’t actually happen, could they? After all, nobody can tell the future!

At least humans can’t. Right?

Yet, in the Bible, prophecies happened just the way the prophets said they would. These prophets, who had a special relationship with God, received these messages from Him—sometimes through directly hearing His voice or sometimes through visions or dreams.

So, how do we know these prophecies came to pass?

Some biblical prophecies are backed by historical evidence, while other smaller ones are fulfilled later in the Bible. Seeing how these prophecies have unfolded is an enormous reminder of God’s power. It gives us confidence that He will fulfill all the other promises and prophecies that have yet to occur.

So let’s take a look at some of these fulfilled prophecies. We’ll cover three major categories:

• Ancient kingdom prophecies
• Messianic prophecies
• End-time prophecies

Then, we’ll finish off by looking at why Bible prophecies are still important today.

Ancient kingdom prophecies

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Ancient kingdom prophecies are prophecies that God gave to help people understand the rise and fall of nations throughout history.

Though the concept of prophecy is a little more strange in modern times, the idea wasn’t all that foreign to the ancient world. Many “prophets” foretold delight and disasters for nations. Kings often had magicians and wise men to tell them the future, too (Genesis 41:8; Daniel 2:2).

Others consulted oracles—people or things believed to hold knowledge from the gods.

The difference between these “prophets” and biblical prophets was the trustworthiness of the messages. The false prophets didn’t really know what would happen, and often their predictions were more like educated guesses. We see the limitations of their abilities in the Daniel 2 story of the wise men who were called by King Nebuchadnezzar and failed to tell him the dream he’d had.

On the other hand, God and His prophets have a consistent track record of fulfilled prophecies, which we can confirm if we turn back the pages of history.

Here are a few prophecies concerning nations of the ancient world.

Israel and Edom

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The book of Genesis in the Old Testament tells the story of twin brothers named Jacob and Esau. Before the twins were born, God gave their mother a key prophecy:

“Two nations are in your womb, two peoples shall be separated from your body; one people shall be stronger than the other, and the older shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23, NKJV).

This indeed happened.

The oldest, Esau, and his descendants became the nation of Edom, while Jacob and his descendants became the nation of Israel.

As the Israelites left Egypt, the nation of Edom made life difficult for them through wars, raids, and other petty actions (Numbers 20:18). Eventually, though, King David of Israel conquered them (2 Samuel 8:14) and brought them into subservience to Israel, fulfilling the prophecy.

However, they later rebelled against Israel, causing God to pronounce judgment on them. This judgment is found in Jeremiah 49. Here’s a part of what it says:

“Edom shall become a horror. Everyone who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its disasters…. no man shall dwell there, no man shall sojourn in her” (Jeremiah 49:17-18, ESV).

The Book of Obadiah also lists the judgments of God against Edom.

Later, Edom was conquered by the Nabateans around the time Greece rose to power.¹ In Roman times, they resurfaced as the Idumaeans when they sided with Rome during the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.²

But after that, we no longer find them in historical records.

The destruction of Jerusalem

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This event was prophesied twice—at two different times in history.

The first time occurs in the Old Testament. Jeremiah delivered this message from God to the people of Judah:

“‘Behold, I will send and take all the families of the north,’ says the Lord, ‘and Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, My servant, and will bring them against this land…and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, a hissing, and perpetual desolations… [T]hese nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years’” (Jeremiah 25:9, 11, NKJV).

True to the prophecy, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon raided Judah three times before capturing Jerusalem (Daniel 1:1), destroying the temple (2 Kings 25:9), and hauling the majority of the Jews off to Babylon.³

The Jews remained in Babylon until they were freed during the Medo-Persian rule (Ezra 1:1-4).⁴

Jerusalem’s second destruction was prophesied by Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Showing His disciples the temple, He told them,

“Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2, NKJV).

He went on to tell them of other atrocities that would happen, including death, war, and persecution. While this prophecy applies to end-time events, it also directly refers to the Jews in Jerusalem.

A.D. 70 brought the fulfillment of this prophecy. The Romans besieged Jerusalem until they broke down the Jews’ defenses and killed many of them.⁵ They also destroyed the temple so completely that nothing was left.

Cyrus and the rebuilding of the temple

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Coinciding with the prophecy of the first destruction of Jerusalem is Isaiah’s prophecy of the king who would release the Jewish captives, allowing them to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple:

“Who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd, and he shall perform all My pleasure, saying to Jerusalem, “You shall be built,” and to the temple, “Your foundation shall be laid”’” (Isaiah 44:28, NKJV).

Later, Isaiah relayed that God would direct Cyrus’ actions, and the king would build Jerusalem and let the Israelites return for free (Isaiah 45:13).

Over 200 years later, a king named Cyrus did come to power and defeat Babylon. The discovery of the Cyrus Cylinder in 1879 helped confirm that Cyrus freed all the Babylonian captives and even saw himself as God’s tool in allowing the Jews to rebuild the temple.⁶

Josephus, the Jewish historian, records the following about this historical event in Antiquities:

“Accordingly, when Cyrus read this [Isaiah’s words], and admired the Divine power, an earnest desire and ambition seized upon him to fulfill what was so written.”⁷

Babylon’s future

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God had a lot to say about Babylon, the first kingdom to conquer Judah. This kingdom’s poor treatment of the Israelite captives was one of the offenses that would eventually result in it receiving God’s judgments.

Babylon’s immediate destruction was foretold by mysterious writing on the wall during a party put on by the king (recorded in Daniel 5). The king called the prophet Daniel in to interpret it:

“This is the interpretation of each word. Mene: God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it; Tekel: You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting; Peres: Your kingdom has been divided, and given to the Medes and Persians” (Daniel 5:26-27, NKJV).

That very night, the Medo-Persians invaded Babylon, murdering the king and taking over Babylon (Daniel 5:30).

Greek historian Herodotus later recounted this capture by Medo-Persia, noting that Cyrus got into the impregnable Babylon by diverting the Euphrates River, which ran through the city.⁸

But that wasn’t all God had to say about Babylon. Jeremiah prophesied that Babylon would one day be “desolate forever” and “a dry land and a wilderness” (Jeremiah 51:26, 43, NKJV).

Today, only dust, wind, and ruins inhabit the spot where Babylon stood, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, Iraq. Saddam Hussein tried to rebuild it in the 1970s,⁹ but even this failed, showing how accurately Jeremiah’s prophecy happened.

Nebuchadnezzar’s statue

In Daniel 2, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar received a dream from God that included an important prophecy about successive world empires.

The dream was about a statue made of different kinds of metals (Daniel 2:31-35):

• A head of gold
• Chest and arms of silver
• Belly and thighs of bronze
• Legs of iron
• Feet of iron and clay mixed

God gave Daniel the interpretation of the king’s dream, telling him that the different metals represented kingdoms, each succeeding the one before it (Daniel 2:39-44).

The first metal, gold, represented Babylon (Daniel 2:38). Babylon was the most powerful kingdom in the known world at that time.

Medo-Persia, the next world power, conquered Babylon in 539 B.C.¹⁰

After Medo-Persia came Greece with Alexander the Great as ruler.

Rome conquered Greece in the 100s B.C.¹¹

When Rome divided and finally crumbled in the early centuries after Christ, several smaller countries rose from it in Europe, including France, Italy, Germany, and England. This fulfilled the feet.