There are many aspects of God's word that prove it to be true; one of the most convincing to those who believe the Word is the accuracy of Bible prophecy. Let me share a little of what I read in Grant Jeffery's book The Signature of God.
 

   Those who know their Bible history are aware that the Jews were captives in the Babylonian empire for 70 years.  This was prophesied by Jeremiah during the 40 years of his ministry, and in the spring of 606 B.C., the Babylonians conquered The Northern Kingdom.  Exactly seventy years later, in the spring of 536 B.C., the Jews were freed by the Persian king Cyrus (whose birth and name were foretold decades before he was born), who had conquered the Babylonians.  About fifty thousand or so of the captive Jews went back home to Jerusalem, but the great majority remained in Persia as colonists.
 

   During this period, there were three prophets among the Jews who were contemporaries.  Jeremiah was an old man when Jerusalem was captured, and he was allowed to remain in the land of Israel, but Daniel and Ezekiel were hauled away to Babylon.  Before this, however, God gave Ezekiel a prophetic revelation that looked far beyond the 70 year captivity in Babylon.  Let's have a look at a passage in Ezekiel:

    "Now you, son of man, get yourself a brick, place it before you, and inscribe a city on it, Jerusalem.  Then lay siege against it, build a siege wall, raise up a ramp, pitch camps, and place battering rams against it all around.  Then get yourself an iron plate and set it up as an iron wall between you and the city, and set your face toward it so that it is under siege, and besiege it.  This is a sign to the house of Israel."          

Ezekiel 4:1-3

  God  had Ezekiel build this living model to provide a prophetic illustration  for the Jews.  They would come under siege according to God's discipline for their moral and spiritual failure to worship Him.  Pagan idolatry and flagrant disobedience marked their relationship with God, and as a result, He would give them into the hands of the Babylonians...

    "As for you, lie down on your left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel on it; you shall bear their iniquity for the number of days that you lie on it.  For I have assigned you a number of days corresponding to the years of their iniquity, three hundred and ninety days; thus shall you bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.  When you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the iniquity of the house of Judah; I have assigned it to you for forty days, a day for each year."                                Ezekiel 4:4-6

    Israel represented the northern kingdom, and Judah the southern kingdom.  Remember that these split after Solomon's reign, but both kingdoms were God's people.  The sign that God gave through Ezekiel indicated the number of years Israel could expect to be punished.  That number was 390 + 40, or 430 years.   Seventy years of this punishment were completed in Babylon, but another 360 years remained to be seen.  This 360 years began in the Jewish month of Nisan in 536 B.C.  History does not record the Jews re-establishment of an independent nation at  the point in time 360 years after 536 B.C.

Why? 

Well, what history does record is that the Jews did not repent of their sins at the end of the 70 years they spent in Babylon.  In fact, the ones who did return to Jerusalem at this time did so with little faith, according to the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.  The result was that 95% of the Jews remained in pagan Babylon.  Over the years, travelers such as Benjamin of Tuldela reported that many thousands of Jews still lived in several of the cities of present day Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.  

    Let's look at the 360 years again, starting in the spring of 536 B.C.  God revealed a divine principle to Moses in Leviticus 26.  God said in this chapter, beginning in verse 14, that if the Jews did not obey God and carry out His commandments, that He would punish them "seven times more" for their sins (see verse 18).  When this principle is applied to the 360 years prophesied by Ezekiel, we come up with a seven-fold multiplication of this 360 years...

    In ancient times, the Jews arranged their calendar around the phases of the moon and the sun, and, using this principle, they came up with twelve months of 30 days, or a year 360 days in length.  According to articles on Chronology in the Encyclopedia Britannica and Smith's Bible Dictionary, Abraham used a 360 day year.  According to Genesis, Noah's flood lasted 150 days, or from the seventeenth day of the second month to the seventeenth day of the seventh month.  Both these statements are given in the Genesis account, indicating a 30 day month was used.   Sir Isaac Newton said:

    "All nations, before the just length of the solar year was known, reckoned months by the course of the moon, and years by the return of winter and summer, spring and autumn; in making calendars for their festivals, they reckoned thirty days to a lunar month, and twelve months to a year, taking the nearest round numbers, whence came the division of the ecliptic into 360 degrees."

    Therefore, to understand the precise timing, we need to calculate using the same 360-day year they used.  John describes period of 1260 days in Revelation 12:6 as "a time, times, and half a time" where "a time" represents a Hebrew year of 360 days.  This period is also described as "forty two months."  All these things establish the years Ezekiel referred to as being 360 days long.  When we take the 360 remaining years and multiply this number by the factor of seven from Leviticus 26:18, we get 2,520 biblical years, or 907,200 days.  To convert this into our years, we simply need to divide 907,200 by 365.25, which is the length of our present calendar year.  This gives us a total of 2,483.8 of our calendar years.
  

 Consequently, the time ordained by God as the "times of the Gentiles" (Luke 21:24) was to last exactly 2483.8 of our calendar years after 536 B.C.  When we calculate that there was only one year between 1 B.C and 1 A.D., (there was no year zero), and we add all this up, we come up with the figures below:

(End of Babylonian Captivity)    536.4 B.C.
            Minus             
(The years of Israel's           - 2483.8
captivity from
Ezekiel 4:3-6)________________________
                       Equals          1947.4
Adjust 1 year due
to the absence of
year zero between                   +  1
1 B.C. and 1 A.D.     _______________
                                         1948.4
The rebirth of Israel as
a nation happened on    May 15, 1948

   On the afternoon of May 14, 1948, the Jews proclaimed the independence of the reborn state of Israel.  As an old rabbi blew on the traditional "shofar," (a ram's horn), the Jewish people celebrated the end of their tragic worldwide dispersion and captivity in precise fulfillment of the prophecy made thousands of years earlier by the prophet Ezekiel.  At Midnight as the day of May 15, 1948, began, the British Mandate officially ended and Israel became an independent nation.  This was the first time Israel had been a united, independent nation since Solomon.  

   The point is that God is the Lord of history, and there is nothing that escapes or surprises Him, not even the Jewish holocaust.  Nobody except God understands why He allowed it to happen, but in 1948, Israel's dispersion as laid out in the Scriptures was over, and Jesus indicated that the restoration of Israel as a nation was one of the signs of the end times (Matthew 24:32).  We've also seen an increase of knowledge in the last hundred years that's been unparalleled in all of human history; we went from horses to supersonic flight and space travel in less than a lifetime (Daniel 12:4).
 

   Without this increased knowledge and advanced technology, it's hard to understand how many prophecies be fulfilled.  One of these is the mark of the beast (microchip technology?) mentioned in Revelation 13; another is the mention in Chapter 11 of all nations  looking at the dead bodies of the two witnesses for 3" days (satellite TV??).                      R.W.M.