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. And
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 16th 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 5th 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!
