Philip Mauro
Philip Mauro (January 7, 1859 – 1952) was an American lawyer and author. Mauro was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a lawyer who practiced before the Supreme Court, a patent lawyer, and also a Christian writer. He prepared briefs for the Scopes Trial. He was the friend and lawyer of such men as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, the great inventors of their day. God gives different gifts to different men, and to Philip Mauro the famous Lawyer he gave a gifted mind. Although Philip Mauro is not well known today he has left a legacy of great Christian literature. His works include The Gospel of the Kingdom (1928)’ and ‘The Seventy Weeks and the Great Tribulation (1923)’ should be required reading for anyone serious about studying God’s Word. Mauro was a creationist and authored an anti-evolution book entitled Evolution at the Bar (1922). (Quoted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Mauro and https://www.philipmauro.net/)
What Philip Mauro has to say about prophecy
“It is greatly to be regretted that those who, in our day, give themselves to the study and exposition of prophecy, seem not to be aware of the immense significance of the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, which was accompanied by the extinction of Jewish national existence, and the dispersion of the Jewish people among all the nations. The failure to recognize the significance of that event, and the vast amount of prophecy which it fulfilled, has been the cause of great confusion, for the necessary consequence of missing the past fulfillment of predicted events is to leave on our hands a mass of prophecies for which we must needs contrive fulfillments in the future. The harmful results are two fold; for first, we are thus deprived of the evidential value, and the support to the faith, of those remarkable fulfillments of prophecy which are so clearly presented to us in authentic contemporary histories; and second, our vision of things to come is greatly obscured and confused by the transference to the future of predicted events which, in fact, have already happened, and whereof complete records have been preserved for our information.”
James, Thanks for sharing Philip Mauro’s insightful views regarding fulfilled prophecy. If scholars today would only take them to heart, there would be a revival of faith in God’s Word. However, the magnitude of the folly is shared by those today who claim “belief” in the sacred Word when they attempt to apply unfulfilled aspects of Old Testament prophecies physically in the future when the New Testament writers viewed them typo-logically. The book of Revelation is full of references to Old Testament prophecies which had an immediate (in the times they were written) fulfillment. In reading Jeremiah’s prophecy concerning the coming destruction of Babylon it seems quite obvious from the context that the main thrust of the prophecy for God’s people who had been taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar was that their captivity would would end after 70 years and they would be free to return to return to their homeland. The prophecy was so important that Baruch was instructed to pen a copy of the prophecy, send and have it read it to the captives in Babylon, after which the messenger was instructed to take the copy and drop it in the Euphrates river. This prophecy, which is found in Jeremiah 50 and 51, had a dramatic fulfillment with the invasion of the Medes and Persians under the leadership of Cyrus, even to the drying up of the river Euphrates (or rather the diversion of its waters which allowed the invading armies access under it’s walls). Having said all that, there are aspects of the prophecy which did not find any fulfillment at that time but will find fulfillment at the end of time “to spiritual Babylon” depicted in Revelation 17,18, and 19. And some aspects of the prophecy such as the drying up of the river Euphrates will have a “typo-logical fulfillment, again at the end of time. It took several hundred years for the utter extinction of physical Babylon to be covered by the sands of time (literally) but the “spirit of Babylon” lived on in the succeeding empires of Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, and the Papacy and is alive and well today. (five “heads” have fallen and one “is” at the time of fulfillment of the vision of Revelation 17.