Ezra 1:1-2 “Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and also put it in writing, saying, (2) Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth the Lord God of heaven has given me. And He has commanded me to build Him a house at Jerusalem which is in Judah.”
Eventually the king, Cyrus by name, which God prophesied about, became King of Persia in the year 600 BC; a full 100 years after God had spoken His prophetic word through Isaiah. Although the above passage of scripture refers to the prophetic word given by the prophet Jeremiah, which was that God would restore Israel to her land at the end of seventy years of exile in Babylon, the point that I wanted to highlight from this passage is that we see in this passage, the actions taken by King Cyrus, in fulfilment of the prophetic word spoken a hundred years before by Isaiah the prophet. And so, the reason that God could be so specific about the name and actions of a king that would only be born nearly 100 years later, is because God had predestined Cyrus’s life, including when and where he was to be born into the earth.
Michael E.B. Maher
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