You will find in the following that my approach to these questions is an oriental one, somewhat different from the western "black or white" mentality. It is interesting to note that in mathematics there is a field called Fuzzy Mathematics. In the study of God's Word, we should also allow some room for Fuzzy Theology. Not because God did not have the capability of giving us His Word precisely, but because of our own limitation in reaching His level of precision.

First, let's ponder on the issue using an example that could happen to us in real life:

You walk on the sidewalk and spot four coins being scattered randomly on the ground, your immediate impression will naturally be: "Oh, someone has dropped some coins here."

Let's look at another scenario: You walk on the sidewalk and spot four coins forming a certain pattern, say, a square with each coin on the corner. What would be your first response in this case? "Hummm... it is so interesting that four coins have dropped here and formed a regular pattern!" While you might think that it was a coincidence, you cannot rule out the possibility that someone has deliberately put the coins there and arranged them in the square pattern.

Let's consider a third scenario: What if you find out that all four coins are piled up one on top of the other? What do you say this time? Coincidence? Well, although we cannot be 100% sure, it is very hard for us to believe that they are that way by accident..

This principle of regularity or law is the very basis for all that scientists are doing today. They are trying to find regularities and repetitions in the physical realm. Similar to this, readers of the Bible are trying to find regularities and repetitions in the spiritual realm of God's Word. All in all, God's Word and Creation are in the greatest of harmony.

Let's consider what is Bible Code -- I call it the "Letter Code" in order to distinguish it from the "Number Code" found in the Bible. Bible Code refers to the phenomenon that has been observed in the Hebrew Bible when a rule called "Equidistant Letter Sequence" (ELS) is applied to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

In order to illustrate what is ELS, I produce an English text below. In this plain English text, I DELIBERATELY encoded two messages: (1) "MEET AT 8" at a skip distance of 10 and (2) "OLD" at a skip distance of 1. The two codes made my encoded message complete: "Let us meet at 8 o'clock, the old place." Here is the final text:

After finishing this, the man now walked toward the door and into the big stadium that stood to hold 80,000 fans for sporting events.

To remove the spaces and punctuation marks, it becomes:

Afterfinishingthisthemannowwalkedtowardthedoorandintothe bigstadiumthatstoodtohold80000fansforsportingevents

These two codes can be made more visible by using capital letters and colors:

AfterfinishingthistheMannowwalkEdtowardthEdoorandinTothe bigstAdiumthatsToodtohOLD80000fansforsportingevents

To make the codes even more pronounced, we could rearrange -- without changing the order of the letters -- the above like the following so that each line contains 10 letters:

If we rearrange it again so that each line contains 11 letters -- again without changing the order of the letters -- then the pattern of the encoded messages will look like this:

Now we see clearly the "toe to toe" pattern of the two original codes. In this way, the codes are revealed to our physical eyes. Note that I did not change the letters or the order of these letters in all of the above processes. What I did was simply rearrange the letters as if they are elements of a matrix.

This example illustrates the basic rules and principles behind the so-called Bible Code. Note that the original Hebrew text was not altered in any way during the code study; what people did was that they took out the spaces and punctuation marks (Orthodox Jews believe that they were not there in the first place) and then rearranged the letters in the text without changing their order as if they are element of a huge matrix. Then a program could be written (counting manually is tedious, even impossible when the number of the codes is large) so that the so-called "Equidistant Letter Sequence" rule (the one we just used in our example above) can be executed in scanning the text for hidden messages.

This "manoeuvring" should not surprise us as it is a common place practice in our daily lives. Think about it, most of the signals we receive now, music, TV, telephone, etc., even the words on this screen you are reading, come to us as encoded messages. The reason we could receive them is that we all play them by the same law: We use the same rule to encode a message and the same rule to decode it.

Then one may ask this question, a legitimate one: Were all the codes found using ELS intended by God in the first place? Not likely. Let me explain below using my own example:

Having found the two codes there in the surface text and rearranged it so that they can be seen more easily by our naked eye, I then examined the block and, you know what, I found several other words like "port," "his," "sat" "toe," "nor," etc. which were NOT intended in the surface text . They can indeed be called "codes." HOWEVER, these "codes" -- if one insists that they are -- were NOT the original codes in my mind in the first place!!! What should we call them then? "Random" codes indeed. These codes may or may not relate to the original codes at all. Therefore, finding them there does not strengthen the original codes nor mean that they themselves are illegitmate.

How can we know which codes are real and which are "random" or "accidental" in the first place? Attempting to answer this question is like attempting to answer another: Is the physical universe we see indeed made by God? That is something that happened in the past. There is no way we could reverse the process in reality now. Therefore, we cannot prove it or disprove it objectively like we can to other reversible processes. An irreversible process can only be studied by the method of implication or by proposing a hypothesis.

Let us say it again: Finding random codes in a certain text neither proves that they were purposely intended there in the first place, nor invalidate them altogether -- the latter has been one of the tactics someone used to disprove the Bible Code.

Can there be an absolute assurance from anyone other than the originator? Not really! As only the ORIGINATOR of the ORIGINAL text has absolute assurance, only he is absolutely sure what codes he put there in the first place. An outsider cannot claim that he could prove or disprove the validity of the code he finds as he does NOT have a 100% confidence that this code is exactly the code God inserted there in the beginning. Having said all this, however, there are ways for us to have relatively high confidence which codes are LIKELY genuine in the first place.

Let us approach this issue from another angle by asking ourselves these questions:

(1) Are there hidden things in the Bible?
(2) Is there a need for God to hide these things in the form of ELS?
(3) Should God's intended codes scatter everywhere in the Bible?
(4) How was the Bible Code misused by Michael Drosnin and others?
(5) What are some precautions in finding and using codes in the Bible?

(1) Are there hidden things in the Bible?

The Holy Spirit reminds us that there are indeed hidden things in the Bible. For example, God asked Daniel and John specifically not to write everything they saw, but only those that He commanded. In the case of Daniel, in order to seal the meaning of visions and dreams he saw and experienced (including the dreams of the king), the Lord had to give Daniel more partial visions (a Ram and a Goat) so that the interpretation of these visions are made impossible until the last days (Daniel 12:4, 9).

All serious readers of the Bible know that God does not reveal to us everything, but only that which are needed before the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus. There are many mysteries in the Bible. Some of these mysteries can be understood by a serious reader at a certain time under the help of Holy Spirit, but certainly not everyone can understand (Daniel 12:10b). However, some mysteries, e.g. those future events in the book of Revelation, can only be fully understood shortly before and when the events are occurring. Yes, we can perceive them under the help of the Holy Spirit, but our perception cannot be 100% accurate unless the events have happened or are happening. Other mysteries, for example, the mysteries of Christ and Church, can only be understood by believers of Christ; not by non-believers.

Certain things, especially spiritual things, CANNOT be proved OBJECTIVELY (at least not the objective way that fallen man claim to prove), but only subjectively. If anyone seeks to prove or disprove these things objectively, he is certainly on the wrong path. Paul says it well in 1 Cor. 2:10-16

"...but God has revealed it to us by His Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words (direct translation from Greek: "SPIRITUAL matches SPIRITUAL"). The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment: 'For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?' But we have the mind of Christ."

We have come to such an era that most people have strongly this mentality: If we cannot not prove anything objectively, it is reasonable to reject it altogether. Our mode of thinking is always "black or white." It is sad indeed. With such a mentality, how can we possibly know the will of God? Granted, there are certain truths that are absolute and solid; they allow no room for fuzziness and for us to contemplate. However, for certain other things, we have been given the opportunity and freedom to seek the guidance of the Spirit of God.

(2) Is there a need for God to hide things in the form of ELS?

Yes, not the least of which is for the Jewish people. We know that unbelieving Jews stumble on their own Scriptures because they do not perceive that Jesus is in fact their Messiah!

Paul did not see this in the beginning neither. How was he able to see it? Not by his own effort (his was to persecute those who believed!), but by the revelation of the Lord Himself to him. Otherwise, it would be impossible for him to be saved, not to mention that he would not be able to give us most of the New Testament. What Paul did after he got saved was to prove that Jesus is the Christ (Acts 9:22). How did he prove that? "...he reasoned with them from the Scriptures..." (Acts 17:2-3) What made him different now from the unbelieving Paul? The indwelling Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is always the AUTHOR and the INTERPRETER of the Scripture.

God knew that Jews would deny their Messiah in His First Coming, but God prophesied that the remnant among them would all get saved at His Second Coming. God also says in Revelation that certain number of them will get sealed so that they could withstand the terrible persecution of the last Antichrist and the Great Tribulation. Who are these people? I believe that they are not Jewish Christians (they will be raptured together with Gentile Christians), but rather, Jews who believe the accuracy of the Old Testament (including with the support of ELS) but have not yet received Jesus. They will hold to the faith of their forefathers til the last hour.

Think about the current situation, many of the Jews who have moved away from the Old Testament teachings are now like Gentiles: some do not believe in the God of their Scriptures at all; some are simply pure atheists who believe in evolution and other theories that try to remove God totally from our earthly knowledge. Based on this leading, I believe that there is a need for God to speak to Jews in this secret way so that they can hold fast to God in these last days.

What about Christians? Well, as Christians, on the one hand we should be fully content with our Lord and Saviour as revealed by the Father to our hearts, on the other hand, we should seek opportunities to identify or even pinpoint things God prepared for us in the current age so that we can know His will and act according to His will. Once we achieve this, we can find many many ways to express and live out our faith as a testimony to unbelievers.

To answer the question from another angle, we know that the Bible is the Word of God written in words on paper, and that His Son Jesus is the Word made in flesh on earth. Since the incarnate Word is as mysterious as the biggest riddle on earth, so is the written Word. Did Jesus' disciples fully know who He was when He was on earth? No! They knew gradually through a progressive revelation. Does anyone now dare to claim that he fully knows Him? No! He still remains a mystery. But perhaps we at the present age should know Him on a deeper level, we who should have grasped all the revelations God has deposited in the Church for the past 2000 years.

Like what the Paul says in Colossians 2:2, "My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." and 2:9 "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form..." (NIV) Christians, do we see that all the fullness of God's Message in the Bible is to testify about Jesus our Lord (John 5:39)? Can we say with confidence that the Word written is as mysterious as the Word incarnate?

(3) Should God's intended codes scatter everywhere in the Bible?

We believe the central message of God is hidden and revealed everywhere in the Bible, like the same DNA sequence of a person is embedded in every cell of his or her body. However, in the case of a specific hidden message in the Bible, if there is indeed such a special message, we should not expect it to occur everywhere evenly in the Bible, just like we should not expect to find a specific internal biological organ to exist everywhere inside our body. Yes, ELS may indeed be one of the general rules that can be used to encode certain messages in the surface text. But it does not mean that these hidden codes are everywhere or evenly distributed in the whole Bible. If we expect it to be so or if that is a fact, then this fact itself disproves that there are codes in CERTAIN places at all. It should be easy for us to see this. The Chinese have a saying:

"It takes more than ten people to find a thing hidden by one person."

In fact, it appears that there is NO reason for God to hide these codes EVERYWHERE because He knew He would gradually reveal these hidden things in the surface text. After the greatest mystery of God -- His Son Jesus Christ (Col. 2:2) was revealed to mankind, God could speak plainly and directly to those who are willing to listen.

Let us back off a little bit: Even if God's hidden messages are everywhere in the Bible, we should not expect them to be encoded always in the same way. It is quite possible that God could have encoded them according to different rules other than ELS. Among devout Jews, there is indeed a strong belief of this sort.

(4) How was the Bible Code misused by Michael Drosnin
and many others?

The problem with Drosnin was that he is not a Christian at all. As he says himself, he does not have "preconceived beliefs". How could we expect such a person to explain his and others' findings correctly and in line with the Holy Spirit?

We must remember, there is only ONE KEY to the correct understanding of the Bible: Jesus Christ! Knowing Him, the door to Grace can be opened for us; without knowing Him, what is left before every sinner is already there -- simply the door to death and destruction (Note: the latter is the main message of Drosnin's book). No wonder he focuses on these phrases as "last days," "atomic holocaust," "earthquakes," etc. To us Christians, these are not hidden codes at all; they are plainly said and/or implied in the surface text throughout the Bible.

As for those who are working hard to deny the Bible Code, many of them are unbelieving Jews or die-hard atheists. They come up with many ways in refuting the Bible Code. I should say that they are very smart indeed, but their wisdom is merely an earthly one. Certainly they are not smart enough to see that Jesus is their Messiah. And that is the very reason why they are now trying so desperately to disprove the Bible Code because accepting it would certainly mean that they should not ignore the Messiah codes either.

It is interesting to see a few books written by Christians on subject of the Messiah codes, e.g. Yacov Rambsel, Grant Jeffrey, Jeffrey Satinover, etc. The Messiah codes are codes found (also by the ELS rules) in the widely accepted Messianic passages of the Bible and which agree with the surface teachings of the Bible. I believe this is the correct way of using the ELS rule. What is more sure for us Christians than the fact that our Lord Jesus is real and with us every moment of the day? If there are any real hidden codes at all, they must be directly related to Jesus our Lord who is hidden for non-believers. As many of these Christian writers also agree, one should NEVER use it to PREDICT the future (it is prohibited by God for doing that), we can only use it to CONFIRM what happened in the past.

(5) What are some precautions in finding and using
codes in the Bible?

God is not a God of contradictions. If indeed there are codes that are biblically meaningful, they must NOT be in conflict with teachings of the whole Bible. Paying too much attention to the hidden codes while ignoring the teachings of the surface text is not the right way to study the Bible.

I propose a stricter test for biblically meaningful codes: They should be in line with the surface text where the code is found. If there are real codes in a certain passage of the Bible, these codes should summarize all spiritual teachings of that passage (including indepth teachings of that passage).

There is a lot of evidence for the fact that hidden codes cannot be used to predict future events as these codes only give us a possibility.

CONCLUSIONS:

(1) There are indeed hidden messages in the Bible. These hidden messages can only be revealed by the indwelling Holy Spirit in the heart of Christians because the KEY to these messages is a PERSON, Jesus of Nazareth.

(2) While it is possible that these messages could be encoded by God in certain places, it is hard for us to believe the need for doing so everywhere in the Bible. Bible Codes found using the rule of ELS appears to be a SPECIAL, rather than a GENERAL, phenomenon that occurs only in certain places of the Bible. Christians should be fully aware of this before we could use it the way God intended in the first place.

(3) Codes that are biblically meaningful must not contradict with the teachings of the whole Bible. A stricter test is that they should be in line with the surface text where the code is found.

(4) It is beyond our ability to objectively prove or disprove 100% accurately the validity of any hidden code in the Bible. Holy Spirit is the only true interpreter of anything that is true. Finding codes that are not in line with the teachings of the whole Bible does not prove there is no true code.

Compare: Can we prove or disprove objectively the existence of God? NO, as His existence is beyond our reason and proof. We could only worship Him because He is certainly not the object of our studies; we can study His Word, but never Himself directly. We approach Him through His Son, the Only Mediator.

(5) No new teachings have been found in the hidden codes claimed so far. This means that basic doctrines can be established without the help of the codes at all; Holy Spirit is the real helper in this regard.

(6) Hidden codes cannot be used to predict future events as codes only give us a possibility; they can only be used to confirm things happened in the past.

(7) The codes of Messiah should be the focus of our attention. If there are anything worth studying, Messiah codes are certainly the candidates. This might be the very reason why God hid codes in the Hebrew text in the first place if He indeed had done it because His Son is as mysterious as the spirit of the written words.

Must Read: "Do We Need Bible Codes?" by Bible Code Digest Online

Another Important Topic: Number Codes in the Bible? Click for details.

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Revised: 2003/10/7