Hope for the Best

No one who hopes in you will ever be put to shame, but shame will come on those who are treacherous without cause.

– Psalm 25:3

These days, anyone with a smartphone has easy access to websites full of offbeat news stories, celebrity gossip, and believe-it-or-not photos. But before the days of the internet, the infamous checkout line newspaper — The National Enquirer — was for millions of readers the go-to resource for such need-to-know content. And to close out each year, the tabloid published a special issue featuring predictions for the coming year as prophesied by America’s leading psychics.

Why was this annual issue always such a fan favorite? Let’s consider some of The Enquirer’s can’t-miss predictions from years past:

• Nuclear missiles will be used to break up a giant asteroid found to be hurtling toward Earth.
• O.J. Simpson will become a minister after confessing during testimony in a civil suit that he killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
• The King of Pop — Michael Jackson — will be trampled by an elephant and injured seriously while making a TV plug for an animal-protection organization.

NOTE: One Enquirer soothsayer did foresee a romance between Jackson and Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie. The couple married in 1994 and divorced two years later!

The National Enquirer’s predictions were fun to read, but their accuracy was almost always off the mark. On the other hand, the prophecies found throughout the Bible are remarkably precise. For example, God promised in the Old Testament’s Book of Amos that the Lebanese city of Tyre would be destroyed due to its harsh treatment of Israel. This seemed unlikely because of Tyre’s impregnable fortifications. However, the armies of Alexander the Great succeeded in leveling the city. God also promised to one day gather his scattered chosen people (the Jews) from around the globe. For centuries this made no sense because Israel had long been erased from the map. But in a miraculous series of events, the State of Israel was proclaimed shortly after World War II. And thousands of Jews soon ventured there from distant nations to claim citizenship from their ancestral homeland. 

J. Barton Payne’s Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy also lists more than 1,800 other promises from God through Scripture. No doubt the Creator’s greatest was fulfilled — again, as predicted centuries before the fact — through the birth of the world’s Savior in an obscure outpost of the Roman Empire. It was then that God came to Earth in the flesh to live among us in the person of Jesus. And the Bible’s prophecies don’t end there. It’s in the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel and the New Testament’s Book of Revelation that we can read about international events that are unfolding today before our eyes. 

In all fairness to The National Enquirer, some of their legitimate cover stories have scooped the so-called Mainstream Media. But its record is still dismal when compared with Scripture, which was inspired by our Creator, who — unlike the celebrity psychics — knows the future. 

What lies ahead for us in these uncertain times? We won’t find the answer in any tabloid newspaper. Instead, our ever-faithful source of hope is as close as the Bible.