Post Two: Bible - The Word of God

 

Hello friends, here I am again with another post on The Bible - God's Special Book. With God's help I'm trying to help you see that the Bible is no ordinary book written by some wise or religious man offering people advice on how to live a 'good'  life, in the hope of  attaining salvation - but what salvation - from who and to what end? They have no answers.

Man's greatest fear then is death, precisely because no one knows what lies ahead. Nor can they offer any solution – being temporal and mortal – created beings themselves! Even Socrates, five centuries before Christ was born, wrote to Plato saying, “It may be that the Deity can forgive sins, but I don’t see how.” Socrates recognized the problem. What he didn’t know was that God had indeed made a way to forgive sins - with somebody else paying the price! And the one who paid the price and died in our place – the one who died that we might go free is Jesus Christ. For this He surely deserves our love. Only the perfect and unspotted blood of Jesus could atone for the sins of all mankind, for all time. It was the way God planned it. “For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.” (Hebrews 10:4) For this great sacrifice God honored him and made him the sole doorway into His presence and to Heaven. As Jesus himself says in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” and Acts 4:12 says, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” NO OTHER NAME! Neither Peter nor Paul nor John nor any other name - of persons or things in Heaven or earth or under the earth can save us except the name of Jesus. And to prove that his word is true, he himself went through death and rose again so that he might become the first of many millions upon millions of his disciples who would also rise from the dead like he did. He came to show us what God had in store for those who believe in him. Christians visit the Holy Land to walk where Jesus walked. They don’t go there to visit Jesus’ grave. There is no Samadhi for Jesus! He rose from the dead. His tomb is empty. It was sealed with a stone so heavy it required several strong men to move it. Yet it was moved by the power of the Holy Spirit - Not for Jesus to come out but that we might go in!
Do you want to live forever – as a person, with the same shape and form like you are in now but with the sweet, gentle nature of Jesus and in a new and glorified body that never grows old or weary – a body that will allow you to enjoy all the goodness of God for all eternity – with your family, your friends and ALL your loved ones? Jesus never came to make bad men good but to give dead men life! Eternal life – that no one else can offer. And he offers you that life today. All you have to do is receive it by faith. This is the greatest promise God has given us in His Word – The Bible.                                                               
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That brings us back to the point: How do we know the Bible is really from God? Well God puts His Signature to His Word in ways that are absolutely tamper proof!
Last week we dealt with what I called Fact 1 where we found that God revealed and watched over His Word for over 40 centuries of human history! Yet all the writings set forth one truth and one doctrine, on which account they mutually expound one another, and Scripture explains itself by Scripture.  40 centuries! This is surely tamper proof! This week we’ll show another way God puts His Signature to His Word and authenticates it in such a way that puts arrogant men in their place. As He says in Isaiah 55:9, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”
We’ll designate this set as Fact 2: In this method God places Hidden Messages within the text of the Bible.
Rabbi Moses Cordevaro in the 16^th century recorded that, “The secrets of the Torah (the Hebrew term for the five books of Moses or what is also referred to as The Law) “are revealed in the skipping of the letters.” There are lots of hidden messages in the Scriptures but for now we’re just going to focus on one called Equidistant Letter Sequence. Here again the Scripture explains itself by Scripture and confirms that there are secrets hidden in God’s word: “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but it is the honor of kings to search out a matter.” (Prov 25:2). See also Job 12:22; Dan 2:22 and others. It must be noted that these hidden messages are found only in the Hebrew  text in which the Bible was originally written and only in the writings that were ‘God- breathed’ or ‘God- inspired’! Nowhere else! The messages have to be found by knowing what spacing to use. Nowadays, with a computer it is easy to try various spacings to find out if there’s a message there and that’s exactly what they have done. Dr. Chuck Missler shared with us a discovery, rather a re-discovery by Rabbi Weismandl who, between World Wars I and II, made a rediscovery of things that the ancient Rabbis knew long before. While studying the Hebrew text, Weismandl noticed some footnotes in some ancient documents. He chased them down and discovered something very interesting. In the book of Genesis he found the word TORH (In English we pronounce it as TORAH but the Hebrew word is also made up of 4  letters equivalent to our spelling of it: TORH). If you go to the first Hebrew letter which is like our ’T’ and then count 49 letters, you come to the next Hebrew letter which operates something like an ‘O’. After another 49 letters we find the third Hebrew letter equivalent to our ‘R’ and then again 49 letters from there we get a Hebrew letter that’s equivalent to our ‘H’ -  all equivalent to our way of speaking it: TORAH – the English transliteration that would be TORH in the Hebrew. It must be remembered though, that Hebrew reads from right to left so it may appear backwards to us. Any way, you may think it’s just a curiosity, an accident, it could have happened in many other ways. Okay, so we go to the next book, Exodus and discover that the same thing happens. We get to the first ‘T’ and then count 49 letters and we get an ‘O’, another 49 letters and we get an ‘R’, and again after another 49 letters we get an ‘H’. And once more it spells TORH. Now we begin to see that it is really a little more than coincidence. The chances of that happening by chance start to become astronomically ridiculous! And it becomes better. You look for it in the third  book, Leviticus but it’s not there. We go to the next book, Numbers and something stranger happens. We find that again at 49 letter intervals we find the word TORH but this time its spelt backwards: HROT! And in the 5^th and last book of Moses, Deuteronomy, again at 49 letter intervals we find the word spelt backwards: HROT. So we stand back and think, “That’s strange, forward, forward – backward, backward! But why isn’t it in Leviticus? And what can it mean? So we take a closer look at Leviticus and find, not at 49 letter intervals, but at 7 letter intervals we find a ‘Yot’, a ‘Heh’, a ‘Wav’ and a ‘Heh’, the Hebrew letters that spell the unpronounceable name of God: YHWH. (Do remember the numbers 7 and 49. they have a special significance which will be explained later). But for now, putting this all together, it makes sense!

 Now we can understand how God speaks to us not in just the words and stories of the Bible that we see on the surface but in messages hidden in the text – way beyond man’s ability to duplicate or erase! And so He leaves us indisputable evidence that He and He alone authored the Bible. We believe too, that God arranged it so that when man first learned the art of writing, all major languages (writing scripts) flowed towards Jerusalem, towards Himself and His holy abode on earth. Therefore languages West of Jerusalem flow from left to right: English, German, Greek etc. while languages East of Jerusalem flow from right to left: Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit etc. It also shows that consciously or unconsciously - knowingly or unknowingly – willingly or unwillingly - man follows the plans and purposes of God!

We’ll look at some more of these hidden messages in my next post. Meanwhile, God bless you all.