“But he said, “I am not mad, most noble Festus, but speak the words of truth and reason.” (Acts 26:25)
Christians through the ages have provided logical and rational answers in the defense of the Gospel of Christ. Christians are encouraged to provide logical and rational defenses of our faith (1 Peter 3:15).
In conclusion to our brief studies on the Equidistant Letter Sequencing codes of Isaiah 52-53, what shall we conclude?
“While many of the shorter ELSs we discovered in Isaiah 53 could reasonably have occurred by chance, the large number of long, topically relevant ELSs regarding Jesus Christ that we found in this text is far beyond the workings of coincidence. We have estimated that the odds of chance occurrence of the collection of long ELSs located in Isaiah 53 are so incredibly remote that the only rational conclusion is that this text was intentionally encoded. In the next chapter, we will describe how we arrived at this conclusion. What we are talking about here is nothing short of a proof of the miraculous that directly challenges the wisdom of our scientific age, a “wisdom” that denies all miracles. While the combined probability of this mega-cluster will vary depending on a few key assumptions, any choice of reasonable assumptions results in odds that are astronomically beyond chance. Most of them had to be intentionally encoded within this prophetic passage of the Old Testament.” (R. Edwin Sherman with Nathan Jacobi, PH.D, and Dave Swaney, Bible Code Bombshell: Compelling Scientific Evidence That God Authored The Bible, 1335-1343 (Kindle Edition, emphasis added, M.T.); Green Forest, AR; New Leaf Press).
Chuck Missler provides the following testimony regarding a former skeptic of these “Bible Codes” (particularly the ones found in the Book of Genesis) who is certainly capable of seeing through deception!
“After that, the big guns in cryptography got interested. The senior mathematician for the National Security Agency (NSA), Harold Gans, decided to do Bible ESL research on his own computer. He spent 440 hours of crunching the numbers over 19 days, and by the end of those 19 days, he concluded there was less than one chance in 62,500 that the codes were due to chance. He retired from the NSA and now teaches the Torah in Jerusalem. He ends a 1997 personal statement on the codes by saying, “After exhaustive analysis, I have reached the conclusion that the only information that can be derived from the codes discovered in Genesis is that they exist, and the probability that they are mere coincidence is vanishingly small.”[ 51]” (Dr. Chuck Missler, The Fulcrum of the Entire Universe Isaiah 53: The Pivot Point of All History, 1125-1128 (Kindle Edition): Coeur d’Alene, ID; Koinonia House)
It is also worthy pointing out that these “codes” have been searched for in other religious texts besides the Bible, and they have not been found.
Why would God put these “Bible Codes” into Scripture? Author Grant Jeffrey provides one possibility:
“When I first heard about the codes during a trip to Israel in the late 1980s, I was naturally quite skeptical. However, after more than fifteen years of careful evaluation of the phenomenon, I believe that there is powerful evidence that the code is genuine. Additional research during the last six years has provided more evidence that God placed these codes in the Scriptures. They provide fascinating details about historical events that have come to pass thousands of years after the biblical text was written. The Bible Codes provide a new type of evidence that supplements the many other types of evidence that prove the Scriptures are supernatural. This discovery may provide a last measure of incontrovertible evidence to our skeptical generation that the Bible is the inspired Word of God….There is no question that the Bible Codes represent an astonishing new claim that demands a high level of validation before we should accept it. By nature I am a skeptic. When I first heard about this, I thought that the claims of the code researchers seemed unbelievable. That is why I am not offended in the slightest when someone tells me that they cannot accept the Bible Codes as genuine. However, after almost a dozen years of research, I am more convinced than ever that God placed the Bible Codes within the text of the Bible to prove to this skeptical generation through this remarkable new evidence that He inspired the human writers to record His revelation to humanity in the Word of God…With powerful apologetic evidence, Christians can challenge the skeptics in our generation to seriously consider the claims of the Bible that it is the supernatural Word of God. The Lord commands Christians, in the words of 1 Peter, to be prepared to explain and defend the reasonableness of our faith in the Bible and in Jesus Christ. We need to be prepared to persuade men and women to turn from their unbelief to seriously consider the claims of Jesus Christ. “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). In light of God’s command to defend our faith to our generation of unbelievers, I find it natural that we should from time to time discover new types of evidence in both the text of the Scriptures as well as in the world of science and archeology. I found an interesting quotation from the Christian writer, Joseph Butler, in his The Analogy of Religion that illustrates this point. “Nor is it at all incredible that a book which has been so long in the possession of mankind, should contain many truths as yet undiscovered.” (Grant R. Jeffrey, The Signature Of God: Conclusive Proof That Every Teaching, Every Command, Every Promise In The Bible Is True, 224-227 (Kindle Edition); Colorado Springs, Colorado; Waterbrook Press).
Friends, there are several reasons to believe in the existence of God, the inspiration of the Bible, and the Deity of Jesus Christ. We have only shared a few of these here in these articles. Please, won’t you believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God Who died for your sins, was buried, and arose from the dead on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:1-8)? Won’t you today repent of your sins and be buried with Christ in the waters of baptism to have your sins forgiven and be added by God Himself to His church (Acts 2:37-47)? If you are an erring Christian, wont’ you today repent of your sin and confess it to Him in prayer to be forgiven and restored (1 John 1:9-2:2)?
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