(WND)—People like trying to predict the future. Millions still consult their horoscope every day. As New Year’s approaches, publications will be filled with predictions for 2025.
What’s amazing about human prophecies is how often they end up being incorrect.
Many years ago, at the beginning of a new year, I asked an adult Sunday school class attended by about 60 people or so to write down a prediction of something that would take place that particular year. I too wrote something down. At the end of the year, I then asked everyone to review what they had written down to see if any of them had predicted anything that actually happened. And there was no one who prophesied something that took place. No, not one. Including me.
Have you ever noticed how often the “experts” get it wrong? For example, consider these “prophecies” made by various people:
- “There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear] energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” – Dr. Albert Einstein, 1932
- “‘Gone with the Wind’ is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. I’m just glad Clark Gable will be the one falling on his face and not Gary Cooper.” – Gary Cooper, 1938
- “I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing, and he seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed.” – Mahatma Gandhi, May 1940
- “You ain’t goin’ nowhere … son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.” – Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Old Opry, firing Elvis Presley after one performance, Sept. 25, 1954
But in contrast to all this, the Old Testament – which the Jews call the Hebrew Bible – contains many prophecies which Jesus Christ fulfilled. That includes promises that touch on the original Christmas. When you look at the Old Testament, we see different statements about the coming one who will be the Savior.
A holiday favorite is Handel’s “Messiah.” This beautiful concert, first performed in 1742, resonates with many hearers, and it has throughout the ages. The fascinating thing about “Messiah” is that all the lyrics are Scripture. They all point to Jesus as the Christ, meaning “The Anointed One” – ultimately the Messiah.
Joel Woodruff of the C.S. Lewis Institute says this about Handel’s “Messiah”: “The libretto includes 81 Bible verses from 14 different books of the Bible, with the most coming from the book of Isaiah (21 verses).” 46 verses come from the Old Testament, while 35 come from the New. The Old Testament was completed c. 400 BC. 21 of the prophecies about Jesus in “Messiah” come from Isaiah, which was written about 700 to 750 years before Jesus.
Former skeptical journalist (Chicago Tribune) turned pastor and professor, Lee Strobel, once gave an analogy to the detailed predictions of Christ’s suffering and crucifixion in Isaiah 53, written 700 years before the event: “That’s like my trying to predict how the Cubs will do in the year 2693.” (Lee Strobel, “Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry & Mary,” 1993, p. 36).
One source shows 350 Old Testament predictions about Christ, fulfilled in the New Testament.
Consider just a few examples this Christmas season:
- Writing about 700 B.C., Micah the prophet stated: “But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.”
- Luke 2 explains how God arranged the circumstances in the lives of Mary and Jesus’ step-father, Joseph, to get them to Bethlehem for the fulfillment of this prophesy.
- Writing also about 750-700 B.C., Isaiah, prophesied, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”
- Isaiah also wrote, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
The vast majority of the prophecies about Jesus in the Old Testament focus on His death for our sins. If you have heard “Messiah,” perhaps you remember the stirring choral number, based on this verse, also from Isaiah: “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. And the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all.”
There are several reasons I believe the Bible is the Word of God, and fulfilled prophecies is one of those. Only God knows the future. Only God could have written the Bible.
Christmas is a grand miracle. And to think, it was all foretold hundreds of years before it came to pass. Merry Christmas!
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
