Secret Mysteries Hidden In The Bible
Secret Mysteries Hidden In The Bible
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The secret things belong to Adonai our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever—in order to do all the words of this Torah.
—Deuteronomy 29:28 (TLV)
Have you noticed that so much of what people are teaching in “Christianity” today, including—perhaps even especially—in Messianic and the more controversial Hebrew Roots Movement circles, is some type of secret code or hidden mystery? Many of the most popular “Christian” books published today have the words “code” or “mystery” in the title.
Now please don’t misunderstand me here, some of those books do provide good insight into a variety of topics. But is there a need to spin them as revealing some type of “code” or “mystery” or any other type of esoteric knowledge? Really, as you will see through this message, many of these things are nothing more than Gnosticism revived and divination blended with Scripture.
In this message I am going to evaluate several methods used by people who claim to find “hidden codes” and “secret messages” in the text of The Bible. As I do you will see that they simply do not hold up to actual scholarship and certainly were not anything that any ancient Israelite, including and especially the earliest followers of Yeshua, would ever have used.
One last thing before diving into this: If you are a person who embraces any of these alleged codes, you have a choice to make. Do you want to know the truth about them, or are you going to choose to follow these things in ignorance? I have to ask because I know people invest a lot of time and create a lot of teachings based on this stuff, and it can be very difficult to find out that something you have put a lot of time into studying and teaching is completely wrong. But even if you are skeptical and think this is just going to be a “lack of faith” message I do hope you will take a chance with it. If you read it and just are not convinced, you have lost a brief moment of time in reading an article. On the other hand, if this message does convince you think of all the time you will no longer be wasting by chasing after a lie.
Equidistant Letter Sequence Codes
In the 1990s a trend began to be popular know as equidistant letter sequence (ELS) Bible codes. The concept basically says that you take a portion of the Hebrew text of Scripture, choose a letter as a starting point, and count a certain number of letters—we’ll say ten for illustration purposes here. That tenth letter is your next letter. Then you count another ten letters and get the next letter until you have a complete word. Then from there you can create a whole sentence—once you have found enough random words that you can put together using this “method”—and you have found a secret code hidden in The Bible. Amazing! Isn’t it?
One of the most well-known figures in the Bible code phenomenon is Michael Drosnin, a reporter who has worked with such publications as The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Bible Code,The Bible Code II, and The Bible Code III. Of this topic he says: “For 3000 years a code in the Bible has remained hidden. Now it has been unlocked by computer, and it may reveal our future.”
In the year 2000, at the height of the Bible code craze, a Messianic Jewish pastor/rabbi named Yacov Rambsel partnered with the Trinity Broadcast Network to publish a book titled The Genesis Factor. Using the ELS method they found in the biblical text: TBN, Paul and Jan Crouch, Satellite, ‘the photo image’ (TV), film, and praise (the name of the signature program of the Trinity Broadcast Network). Amazing! The people who were about to publish and sell a book found all those things about themselves in special secret Bible codes using a computer program!
Now, look, I am not doing this to mock or ridicule anyone. I really do find the idea of potential secret codes hidden within the Hebrew text of The Bible fascinating and would love for it to be true. The problem is that when you begin to dig a little deeper and look to the work of qualified Hebrew and ancient Semitic language scholars, you find out that these things are not all they are cracked up to be.
The first place we find serious problems with ELS codes comes from the Hebrew text used to find them. Those who look for these “skip letter” codes primarily use the 1966 Koren Edition of the Masoretic Text. The original Masoretic Text was first developed around 100 A.D. when Jewish scribes pulled together all variations of biblical texts and sought to create a single “official” volume, but as you will see this would not have been the same as the versions in use today.
In the first century there were numerous variations of The Bible, just as we have today with the many English versions. Unlike today’s Bibles that vary widely through translation methods, the differences in first century texts were more with things like spelling issues that would not affect the plain reading of Scripture but do cause a huge problem for something that relies on exact spacing between letters.
To make matters worse for proponents of ELS codes, the Masoretes developed a system of vowel markings using dots and dashes, which is still in use today. Prior to this, vowel sounds were signified with certain letters that served as both consonants and vowels, much like the letter “Y” in English does. We know this was the case in the first century through at least two witnesses: The Dead Sea Scrolls, which we will look at in a moment, and the works of Josephus, a first century Jewish historian who stated that the four letters of the Tetragrammaton name of God are four vowels.
What this means is that the Masoretic Text used for ELS “Bible codes” is not even the same as the original, nor does it match with other ancient texts. In addition to the evidence I will bring up from the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is the Septuagint—a Greek translation of the Tanakh (“Old Testament”) dating to the third century B.C. It is very clear, according to the testimony of scholars in ancient Semitic language, that the Hebrew text used to develop the Septuagint was not the same as either the manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Masoretic Text.
This all means that using the Masoretic text for something that is supposed to be “divinely inspired” like these “Bible codes” is already sketchy, because it’s clearly not going to be 100% true to the original documents penned by the actual author. Even if there was an exact match to the originals in circulation in the first century, it would have become only a part of the collection of texts used to create the Masoretic text. While Hebrew scribes are known for their meticulous accuracy and rigid standards of copying Scripture—meaning that deviations were not as vast as the difference between the King James Bible, The Message Bible, and The Tree Of Life Version of The Bible—there were still differences enough to say that any “codes” in the Masoretic text can’t truly be called divine.
Avigdor Aptowitzer (1871-1942) was a Jewish scholar who set out on a study to review the Masoretic Text throughout history. His findings revealed that the initiative behind the Masoretic Text being the sole “official” version of Scripture in the Jewish communities was not successful. Variations continued to be used and other new variations developed. This further causes problems with the use of the 1966 edition of the Masoretic Text and with ELS codes altogether.
The second major problem for ELS codes is the evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls. As already noted, the text found on these documents used the older system of vowels, which added more actual letters. Speaking on the problem caused by the Dead Sea Scrolls texts to ELS codes, Dr. Michael Heiser, a highly regarded scholar in the area of ancient Semitic language, says:
The fundamental premise of all Bible code research is that the every-letter sequence of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament has remained unaltered since God prompted the biblical authors to compose their documents. The actual manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, however, inform us very plainly that no two manuscripts are identical, different versions of biblical books exist in those manuscripts (sometimes involving thousands of letters), and the scribes who transmitted the Hebrew text at times made mistakes in transmission, and left notes in their copies about suspect readings in the manuscripts. These data testify unequivocally that the preservation of the every-letter sequence of Hebrew letters is uncertain. The author introduces the English reader to these phenomena so as to visually demonstrate that the certitude of the every-letter sequence required for the Bible code to be real is a demonstrable myth.
To take one example of how the manuscript evidence entirely undermines the foundational premise of a Bible code, the Dead Sea Scrolls, our closest textual witnesses to the original Hebrew Old Testament, have a markedly different way of spelling. In just a few verses there might therefore be dozens of letter differences due only to spelling convention (recall in English the word “color” vs. “colour”). The Hebrew text used by Bible code researchers is much younger than the Dead Sea material, and does not account for the ancient spellings. The significance of this can be dramatically illustrated. One Bible code proponent, Grant Jeffrey, claims to have found dozens of coded names associated with Jesus in Isaiah 52:13-53:12, the Old Testament prophecy of a suffering Messiah. In just these fifteen verses, there are 115 letter differences between the text Jeffrey uses and the Dead Sea Great Isaiah Scroll because of spelling differences.
Heiser has also stated that ESL codes are dead on arrival when the Dead Sea Scrolls are factored in.
The Dead Sea Scrolls sometimes align with the Masoretic text, and sometimes with the Septuagint (and subsequently the Hebrew text that would have been used to create the Septuagint). Again, the Dead Sea Scrolls were written when Hebrew was still using full letters as vowels. The Masoretic Text transitioned to the use of dots and dashes as vowel markings. These added vowels in the older form would have created a lot of added letters to the text and since ELS “Bible codes” rely on exact letter spacing, this becomes a huge problem—essentially it’s the death-blow to the entire concept.
Some portions of the Tanakh are so drastically different between the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Masoretic text—between spelling variations, words included in one but omitted in the other, and mismatches in the sequential order of the text—that it would be impossible to know if you are using the “correct” text with all the letters and all the sequencing to ensure you are getting the right codes. For example, let’s say using the Masoretic text you find an ELS code of “TORAH”. If you take an older text with even one vowel letter in the way, using the same starting point and the same skip distance, your code might change to something like “TJIDLW”. If these codes were truly valid and divinely placed in the text, the only legitimate place to find them using the ELS method would be in the actual original documents written by the actual original author of a given biblical book. The moment there were changes in spelling, wording, sentence structure, or anything else is the moment any codes found with this “method” are completely invalidated.
The third problem with ELS codes is that there is no definitive set of rules for how this is done. The person deciphering codes essentially chooses where they want to start a search, the direction they will go (forward, backward, up, down, diagonal), the number of letter skips, and so on. Then after they find a word they do not follow the same pattern for the next word in the sequence, but simply find another word anywhere else in the text. Then when enough words are found they seek out some historical event or something that it closely enough matches for gullible people to believe and say that these secret “Bible codes” predicted it, hidden in The Bible from the time it was written. One way I have heard this described is like taking a gun, shooting a hole into a wall, then drawing a target around the bullet hole and claiming you shot a bull’s-eye.
The fourth problem with ELS codes is my absolute favorite. Contrary to what I have heard people claim in the past, this method of finding random words through a series of skip distances is not exclusive to the Hebrew Bible or ev
only have people found “encoded words” using ELS in secular writings like Moby Dick, there is a particularly interesting code found using the King James Version of The Bible.
Setting out the text of Genesis 26:5-10 from the King James Bible in a block form used to create these ELS “Bible codes” the words “Bible” and “Code” can be found within this portion of Scripture. Does this mean that a King James Bible has some sort of divine inspiration above all other English Bibles and even some versions of the Hebrew text that may predate the Masoretic Text? I know some people who seem to think the King James Bible is the only valid Bible, but that’s another whole theological error.
What I find most fascinating about this is that these two codes are in a portion of text that tells a story about Isaac lying. Think about that, often these codes are paired with the immediate text they are taken from to create some secret message. So if we applied ELS, where more often than not the rules are made up as you go along, we can put this all together and say that “Bible codes” are a lie. That may be the most accurate “Bible code” of all. Thanks, King James!
In an article titled Bible Code, Revisited published in the March 2019 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, author Jason Wilson sums up this matter of ELS codes quite well in saying:
There are sophisticated, active Bible-code communities today in both Judaism and Christianity. Due to academic criticism, the sensationalism has been successfully cleared from the field. Proponents find themselves forced into affirming an awkward theological stance, and their current practices are subject to the charge of both data snooping and “wiggle room.” As a result, they have moved out of the academic arena they once occupied and propagate their views primarily online. While I applaud their sincerity and their faith, and I do not question their personal integrity, nevertheless when the evidence is put into the light of the broader statistical fallacies, I find that I cannot embrace the code, no matter how much I might wish that it were true.
Data snooping (manipulating data or analysis to artificially get statistically significant results) and “wiggle room”? These really do seem to be at the core of not only so-called ELS codes, but also everything else that will be addressed within this article. Those who claim these codes exist make up the rules as they go along and only use data that supports their ideas—discarding anything that would be problematic, let alone destructive, to their claims.
Ancient Pictograph Hebrew
Have you ever heard that Hebrew was originally written in an ancient pictograph script, each “picture” has a special meaning, and if you put together the meaning of each letter in a word you can find an encoded message? This has become another popular teaching, particularly in the Hebrew Roots Movement.
Like ELS codes there really are no specific rules on how one comes to “discover a code” aside from starting with the assigned “meaning” of the pictograph version of the Hebrew letter. From there, as you will see, one can seemingly infer and read into the “code” whatever message they want. One of the more popular “resources” for this method is the book Hebrew Word Pictures by Frank T. Seekins, where the author states: “The word pictures are only valid when they agree with Scripture.” Recall what I just mentioned about data snooping and “wiggle room” used in these methods. This proponent of the so-called pictograph Hebrew codes literally just said that this is what needs to be done in order to find these alleged codes. If they don’t work out, just discard them, but don’t consider them as problematic to the method or part of any statistical analysis as to how often they “work” and how often they don’t.
Dr. Heiser has something to say about this “method” of finding hidden codes in Scripture as well: “I can only say it one way to capture what this really is: it’s divination. This is taking the sacred text and divining a hidden meaning from it. It’s a new kind of Bible code that is just as erroneous.” Divining means to discover something by guesswork or intuition, and as you will see that’s exactly what this method of finding so-called hidden messages does. The revealed text of The Bible is divine; the divined “codes” people come up with are demonic.
Anyone who has come across this concept has almost certainly heard about the Tetragrammaton name of God, Y-H-W-H, being assigned a pictograph Hebrew secret code meaning of “Behold the hand, behold the nail”. This is because H=“behold”, Y=“hand”, and W/V=“nail”. So then the claim is that the name of God refers us to the events of the cross where Yeshua’s hands had nails driven through them. From there all sorts of theories evolve.
Let’s see what happens when I apply this “method” of searching for special codes in Hebrew pictograph letters to the name of the devil. Lucifer in Hebrew is represented by the letters H-L-L (הָלַל). So you have the H, which is assigned a meaning of “behold”, and the L, which is represented as a shepherd’s staff. A commonly known aspect of Hebrew language is that if a word is repeated it is to give emphasis, like when we read “Verily, verily…” in the biblical text it would be more like in English where we might give all capital letters, bold type, and/or italics to indicate this: “VERILY!!!” So with this we could make up a secret pictograph Hebrew code that says Satan’s name means “Behold, the true shepherd”. Of course, this would not align with Scripture so according to the author of Hebrew Word Pictures we should discard this code as invalid, because we certainly cannot afford to have a secret Hebrew pictograph code that tells us Satan is the true shepherd.
Let’s consider a little deeper the popular “behold the hand, behold the nail” code made from applying this “method” to the Tetragrammaton name of God. This name appears thousands of times in Scripture. If you inserted this “code” into every passage the name appears, in place of the name, would the passage of Scripture still make sense? How about if we “decoded” every word in any given verse that the name appears? Would the whole verse read in a way that makes sense, every time the name appears? These “methods” of finding “secret codes” in The Bible only work if you make up rules like: “It’s only a valid code if it makes sense and sounds like what The Bible says anyway.”
You see, when people come up with this kind of nonsense they have to create these plans of escape so that when they encounter a problem with their system they can defer back to their made up rule. Oops, that code didn’t work, can’t have that one, so we’ll just make it a rule that when we get a bad code it must not really be part of the “divine” hidden message within the biblical text. This is not a legitimate academic scholarly practice, as Dr. Heiser stated, it’s divination, taking Scripture and divining it through esoteric knowledge and secret codes. And many today are more interested in chasing after these fictitious codes than following the clear commands of The Torah.
Seekins is reported to have an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree for his work in Hebrew Word Pictures, but none of the bios on him that I looked at report the university that gave him the degree. My question is: How does one get a Doctorate degree, honorary or not, for writing a whole book on a completely bogus concept? When did we go from giving people credentials for actual education to handing out doctorate degrees to people with a wild imagination? And what kind of university takes someone’s wild theory—whether on Hebrew language or anything else—at face value and without running it past any actual language experts, such as Dr. Heiser, gives him or her a doctorate degree? Really, I want to know, I have some actual credible research and scholarly writings to submit to them!
All jokes aside, the plain fact of the matter is that the symbols of the ancient form of Hebrew, despite being recognizable pictures, were letters and nothing more. To see this, let’s first turn to the book Early History Of The Alphabet by Joseph Naveh, who says:
Initially, pictures were scratched on tablets to designate various words. In time they improved their writing: the pictographs gave way to wedge-shaped linear signs which were impressed by a stylus on the wet clay, and many signs came to indicate syllables.
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“Hieroglyph” is a Greek word meaning “sacred carving”. When the Greeks occupied Egypt they were impressed by the monumental inscriptions engraved on the walls of the Egyptian temples. However, hieroglyphic writing was used not only for engraving texts, but also—and primarily — as a pictograph script consisting of drawn pictures. As in Sumerian writing, each pictograph initially designated a word, and later there evolved a series of syllabic symbols.
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The turning point that marks the beginning of modern research on the origin of the alphabet was [Flinders] Petrie’s discovery in 1905 of the temple at Serabit El-Khadem on the Sinai peninsula. In this temple, dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Hathor, and in the turquoise mines nearby, there came to light about a score of relatively short inscriptions in a formerly unknown script. The script consisted of pictures, but these pictographs numbers fewer than thirty. It was soon realized that this was an alphabet—albeit pictograph—script. The first step towards its decipherment was made in 1916 by Gardiner, who pointed out that in these so-called proto-sinaitic inscriptions a certain series of pictures recurs several times: ox goad — house — eye — ox goad — cross. He suggested that these pictographs have acrophonic values of the equivalent Canaanite words lamd-bet-ayin-lamd-taw, i.e. each picture symbolizes not the depicted word, but only its initial sound.
From the moment this now earliest known form of the Hebrew alphabet was discovered, it was also known that this was not a pictograph language but simply that pictures instead of symbols were used to represent the sounds of the letters. Look also at these words from John F. Healey from his entry in the book Reading The Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet:
[The creation of the alphabet] …is essentially the insight that writing would be most easily organized if each distinct sound of a particular language were represented by a single distinctive sign. Since the number of separate sounds in most languages is rather small, the number of signs needed is also rather small – about forty at most. If we compare this with the writing systems already then in existence (though it seems unlikely that the inventor of the alphabet was an expert in any of these older systems) it implies a glorious simplification. We may note also that the idea of isolating individual sounds has stood the test of time and is still basic to modern linguistics.
Healey points out that the earliest Ancient Near East alphabets consisted of only consonants and it wasn’t until the A.D. era that vowel letters began to come into common use, but notes: “There were some earlier attempts to represent vowels, since in Aramaic and then in Hebrew script certain consonants, particularly h, w and y, came to be used in limited circumstances to represent vowels, i.e. as vowel-letters.” This is what we see when comparing the older Dead Sea Scrolls with the Masoretic Text used to find the alleged ELS codes. What this all comes down to is that ancient pictograph Hebrew was nothing more than an alphabet and those who actually used this alphabet would never have read into the words some kind of secret code or esoteric messages based on the so-called “meanings” of each picture-letter.
Actual ancient pictograph languages like those of Egypt and China had thousands of characters, or pictures, used to depict various words and ideas. When language developed into things like cuneiform it was reduced from thousands of characters to hundreds. An alphabet uses typically between twenty and forty symbols, each to represent a particular sound, that when put together with other symbols with their sounds and syllables form a word. The oldest form of the Hebrew language did use recognizable pictures as these symbols, but they represented the sound of the letter, nothing more. We don’t need to follow the wild claims of people with fake credentials they got for making stuff up, we would do better to take the advice of those with real credentials—actual experts in language—like Dr. Heiser, and not engage in witchcraft under the guise of “studying The Bible”.
What’s In A Name?
Another method I have seen people use to dream up “secret hidden messages” from The Bible is through using the names of people in Scripture, taking the meaning or definition of their names and formulating a phrase or sentence that sounds spiritual and/or prophetic in nature. One often-used example of this comes from the book Cosmic Codes by Chuck Missler where he takes the sequential names of Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah, digs out the “meaning” of their names, and formulates this phrase:
Man (is) appointed mortal sorrow, (but) the Blessed God shall come down teaching (that) His death shall bring the despairing rest.
Isn’t that just incredible? Here in the Book of Genesis by putting together all of the primary patriarch figures from Adam to Noah we get this amazing “hidden message”. But like all other proposed “secret codes” in The Bible there are problems with this one as well.
First, if this were true then it’s actually evidence against the literal view of the early events of Genesis. There are those who would have us to believe that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are not literal history, but rather are “poetic language”. Dennis Prager provides a good response to this in his book Genesis: God, Creation, and Destruction, in saying:
One of the most common rejections to taking the Torah seriously, let alone as a divine text, is the seeming impossibility of taking some of the stories literally. Aside from creation in six days, probably the most frequently cited example is the Garden of Eden story. Only religious fundamentalists, the argument goes, could possibly believe there was an actual Garden of Eden, actual people named Adam and Eve, and a snake that spoke.
I have never been troubled by this issue.
If there is a God who created the universe, He could surely create a serpent that could communicate. Therefore, for those who accept the God of Genesis 1, there should be no issue here. And for those who reject the Creator of Genesis 1, there is also no issue here: Since there is no God, there was also no Garden of Eden, no revelation at Sinai, and none of the other non-provable events described in the Torah.
Such a logical and rational approach to the Genesis record tells us that those who reject these early portions of the narrative as being literal history are also, essentially, rejecting God and His Torah. This, then, would also be true of dreaming up hidden messages in the biblical text—whether through so-called ELS codes, so-called pictograph Hebrew messages, using a list of names from people in The Bible, gematria and numerology, or anything else. These things are against The Torah, which I will prove to you toward the end of this article.
For each of these names to be perfectly aligned in a list that is meant to be an encoded message supports the view that the earliest parts of Genesis, at the very least, are not depicting literal history. While there are indications that some people were given a particular name for prophetic purposes within the biblical narrative, nothing indicates that to be the case here. In those places where this happens the meaning of the name is given within the text, you don’t have to search it out to find a “hidden message” or “secret code”. So if these names were chosen to conceal such a “code” it would indicate that these early portions of Genesis were a fictional record being used to conceal something.
But if the early parts of Genesis are not literal, then we have two major problems, along with numerous other lesser problems. First, it would mean that the fall of man record is also not literal. If this event is not literal, then we really have no actual origin point for sin and nothing to base the need for redemption on. Why do we need to repent if sin is a fictional concept to begin with? Second, it would mean that the opening pages of The Bible are a lie with no actual indication that they were being used as some form of parable. Among other problems are that there is credible evidence that there was a literal global flood at some point in the history of the earth and there is no real explanation as to why Genesis 1-11 would not be literal history but suddenly in Genesis 12 the text transitions and is telling the truth. So before getting excited and thinking that there is some “secret message” in Genesis 5, think about what that really means for the actual revealed text of the overall Genesis record.
To show the next problem with this “method of finding Bible codes”, let’s do a little experiment. If we take the meaning or definition for the names of the 12 disciples—Matthew, Thomas, James (2), Bartholomew, Philip, Judas, Simon, Thaddeus, John, Andrew, Peter—we can arrange them to come up with the phrase:
The gift of God is twin supplanters rich in lands and lovers of horses, praised to be heard for their courageous heart, graced by God as a strong stone.
Isn’t that amazing? No not really. I just completely made that up the same way people are making all of this other stuff up. After all, while it’s likely these twelve were divinely chosen and not just random people Yeshua encountered, there is not one thing to suggest that they were chosen because of the meaning of their names. And even so, wouldn’t this seem problematic with Judas?
Oh, but there is an easy solution, right? Judas was replaced by Paul becoming the twelfth apostle. Paul’s name means “humble” so we can just replace the word “praised” in this made up sentence with “humbled”. Because, after all, only God is to be praised so it makes more sense to say the twin supplanters were humbled to be heard.
You might ask how I would know that the names should be ordered in this way to make a sentence that halfway sounds like some kind of fascinating prophetic utterance. The answer is easy: Every “secret mystery Bible code encrypted messages” system comes with a clause where you get to play with the words, the arrangement, and anything else you need to until you can concoct a “hidden message” that seems grammatically correct and has some type of “prophetic tone” to it. As the old saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.
Another “secret message” I have come across regarding the Tetragrammaton name of God is that the four letters in the name are derived from the Hebrew words: hayah, hoveh, yihyeh. These words make up the phrase: He who was, He who is, He who will be (or is to come). Take a look at this illustration of how people come to this conclusion.
This too has problems with it. First of all, the way those promoting this claim come to this conclusion is by taking the name and rendering the code into it backwards. Remember, Hebrew reads from right to left. So while English would render the four Tetragrammaton letters as YHWH or YHVH, that’s actually backwards from the Hebrew rendering or arrangement of the letters. Thus, if the Tetragrammaton is an abbreviation for this phrase, it should be yihyeh, hoveh, hayah—He who is to come, He who is, He who was.
The second problem comes from the use of this phrase in The Bible itself. First it should be noted that this phrase is not found anywhere in the Hebrew text of Scripture, called the Takanh—what “Christians” wrongly call “The Old Testament”. The phrase appears in the Book of Revelation, let’s take a look.
The four living creatures, each having six wings, were full of eyes all around and within. They do not rest day or night, chanting,
“Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh Adonai Elohei-Tzva’ot, asher haya v’hoveh v’yavo! Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts, who was and who is and who is to come!”
—Revelation 4:8 (TLV, emphasis added)
Here we see this phrase as presented by those who read it into the Tetragrammaton name of God to reveal some secret hidden meaning. But remember, this is backwards from the way this would appear in the letters of the Tetragrammaton name. Then there is the problem of two other places where we find another variation of this phrase. In Revelation 1:4 and 1:8 the phrase is said this way: “…who is and who was and who is to come…” The order is switched. Just like every other method of “finding hidden codes” in Scripture, the only way to come to this one also involves making up special rules or completely disregarding actual rules of language to arrive at the intended conclusion.
If this phrase is to be connected with the sacred Tetragrammaton name of God, then it would be sacrilege to render it any other way than that which would be correct. But what is the correct way to render the phrase? If we use the rendering derived from reading it backwards into the Tetragrammaton, we have a problem. If we apply the correct order to the Tetragrammaton, the phrase doesn’t make a lot of sense. And then we have direct Scriptural evidence that this phrase is not set to a specific order. If we reversed the process and applied the rendering from Revelation 1, then the Tetragrammaton would be WHHY or VHHY, and that is clearly wrong.
This is yet another “secret hidden code” and another “method” of finding esoteric messages that fails upon even the most basic of scrutiny. What’s in a name? Apparently not “special Bible codes”.
Gematria And Numerology
Numerology is the idea that numbers hold a divine meaning and as such can reveal some type of esoteric knowledge. It is heavily associated with witchcraft and astrology. Gematria is a Jewish idea that assigns numerological values to each letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It was used by medieval Kabbalist Jews to read into sacred texts mystical insights or to try and find new interpretations from the texts.
While gematria is essentially intended as a number system, it is clear that Kabbalists and others building on their use of it have transformed it into more than that. Consider this statement regarding gematria published by the Yale University Library:
Gematria is a Jewish form of numerology in which the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are substituted with corresponding numbers. The first ten letters are given number values that increase consecutively from 1 to 10. The next eight letters are given number values that increase by a factor of ten from 20 to 90. The final four letters are given number values that increase by a factor of one hundred from 100 to 400. In Hebrew, gematria is often used as an alternative to Arabic Numerals when recording numbers. Hebrew dates are generally written using gematria.
In addition to its use as a number system, gematria can also be used as a form of bibliomancy in order to obtain a more spiritual understanding of Biblical texts. While many scoff at using this "cute word play" as a means of explaining the Bible, many Kabbalists -- Jewish mystics who find great power in the spirituality of words -- see it as a valid form of Biblical interpretation. An example of Biblical exegesis using gematria can be found in the fifth of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:12) where the Children of Israel are instructed to "honor thy father and mother". How does one honor his parents? By examining the gematria of the Hebrew word for honor, כבד (kabed) we find that it has the value of 26 ([כ=20, ב=2, ד=4, [20+2+4=26). The gematria of the thematically similar word for love אהבה (ahavah), is 13 ([א=1, ה=5, ב=2, ה=5, [1+5+2+5=13). Because the gematria of כבד (kabed) is double that of אהבה (ahavah), it was concluded that one honors his parents by showing them a double portion of love.
Do you notice that word: bibliomancy? It was the first thing that jumped out at me when I read this statement. The suffix –mancy is typically used to denote a type of divination or witchcraft. The word bibliomancy, by definition, is the use of a book—most often The Bible—for the purpose of divination, foretelling the future, fortunetelling by interpreting a randomly chosen passage. This is what a lot of so-called prophecy within modern “Christian” religion is, but it also applies to gematria, numerology, and everything else we have looked at with these claims of “Bible codes”. Every bit of it is nothing more than a form of witchcraft, using The Bible.
Some would say that biblical numerology is simply a study of numbers used in The Bible. But it’s much more than that, and when you add Kabbalist Jewish gematria into the mix you have a deadly combination of demonic divination. I was speaking with a friend recently who said, “You know, it seems like Christians will make up any excuse they can to justify practicing witchcraft.” Apart from the celebrations of Christmas, Easter, and Halloween in their churches—all of which are holidays created by the pagan Roman Catholic religion and all of which have direct connections with witchcraft rituals—I am not sure there is a bigger example of this than alleged “Bible codes” through divining Scripture and most especially when they get into numerology and gematria, which is nothing but outright witchcraft and psychic fortunetelling—no different than using Ouija boards and tarot cards.
One of the most regarded works in this area of “Bible codes” is E.W. Bullinger’s Number In Scripture. Now, I am not going to say everything in his book is wrong. I have cited a statement he made regarding The Sabbath in the past, though in that case he was citing a medical doctor’s observations and the statement did not seem to be directly tied to the numerology and gematria he applies elsewhere in his presentation. However, let’s consider this statement that does have a lot to do with these things:
But it is when we come to Gematria that the most wonderful results are seen. These results may be stated thus, briefly: That the names of the Lord’s people are multiples of eight, while the names of those apostatised, or rebelled, or who were in any sense His enemies, are multiples of thirteen. This statement, if it be proved, is one of the greatest evidences of verbal inspiration which the world has yet seen.
Did you catch that statement: if it be proved? This book was originally published in 1895, so there has been a good amount of time and technology development since then. Certainly today someone can use a computer program to test Bullinger’s theories.
In an article published by The Christadelphian (December 2018), titled Bullinger’s Numerical Gematria by Christopher Kelly, it is proposed that we could agree with Bullinger’s findings only if: Corresponding gematria patterns can be verified to apply to other biblical proper nouns beyond a normal random frequency, disconfirming evidence is absent, and the calculation method is applied consistently. Kelly goes on to present a series of evidence against Bullinger, and subsequently gematria and numerology in general, leading him to this conclusion:
It is only coincidental that the summation of gematria values sometimes suggest apparent patterns. For Bullinger to have been correct about the nonrandom significance of gematria in genealogies and other proper nouns, he would have needed to supply not only confirming examples but also to have shown that disconfirming examples either did not exist or were so few as to be trivial. Instead there are many disconfirming, and in a few cases contradictory, examples which Bullinger omitted to explain. Plus he made arbitrary changes to his formulas by sometimes including additional words, spouse names or hard coded numbers to force the summation to equal a desired result.
Once again we see that when someone takes the time to question these so-called phenomena alleged to be found in The Bible they fail. I could go into more examples, but at this point, why? Trying to find codes or patterns or connections between things based on numbers is also divination and Gnosticism, seeking esoteric knowledge instead of what The Bible reveals through the plain text. Just because there were twelve tribes of Israel and twelve disciples of Yeshua doesn’t mean the two are connected. Just because there is a Father, Son, and Spirit and people were given a body, soul, and spirit doesn’t mean the number three has magical powers. I have shown repeatedly that every claim to find “codes” and “hidden secret messages” in The Bible fails the test of scholarly research. It’s like the “date-setters” who come out claiming to predict the end of the world or the day Yeshua will return. How many times do these things need to fail before people will stop entertaining them and just follow the plain text of The Bible?
Just How Absurd Does It Get?
Do you want to know just how ridiculous all of these so-called codes and mysteries and the like are? This is an excerpt from the book Grace Revolution by the hyper-grace pastor Joseph Prince.
The Hebrew alphabet is made up of twenty-two letters, from aleph to tav. And each Hebrew letter has a picture, numerical value, and meaning.
The Hebrew word for repentance is teshuvah, which is made up of five Hebrew letters—tav, shin, vav, bet, and hei. The first letter, tav, has as its pictogram a cross. The last letter, hei, is the fifth letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and the number five in Bible numeric represents grace. Sandwiched between tav (cross) and hei (grace) are the letters shin, vav, and bet. These three letters form the word shuv, which means “to return.” Putting it all together, teshuvah or repentance means this: “Because of the cross of Jesus, return to grace”!
Isn’t it amazing that hidden in the Hebrew letters we just saw are God’s heart and explanation of what true repentance is? Repentance is all about returning to God’s grace because of His goodness demonstrated at the cross of Jesus. It is not about returning to the law of Moses. It is about turning to the cross and returning to His grace. His grace is your source of power and strength over every sin.
What’s amazing is that this is a pastor who has a theology that is the complete opposite of what most people dabbling in these mysterious codes and such do, and yet he used this same “methods” to create a secret magical code from a Hebrew word that supposedly supports his teachings on grace. So, do we defer to the Hebrew Word Pictures book and say that this doesn’t align with Scripture so the code is not valid? Or do we admit that all of this code stuff is nonsense?
Do you know where Pastor Prince came up got his information from to put this together? He cited his source as the Hebrew4Christians website. Do you know what they have built their teachings on? They cite the Hebrew Word Pictures book.
Now, the Hebrew4Christians website has produced some useful information. As one example, they have a wonderful article that compares statements made in the Tanakh (“Old Testament”) made about Yah, The Father, with statements made in the Apostolic Writings (“New Testament”) of Yeshua, The Messiah. But putting out good and useful content does not validate the trash pseudotheology found in ELS codes, pictograph codes, numerology, gematria, or any of the rest of it.
Pastor Prince concocted a secret mystery code hidden within the Hebrew word for repentance by applying the pictograph claims to one letter, numerology and gematria claims to another letter, and then finding a word within a word—maybe Ezekiel’s wheel within a wheel (Ezekiel 1:16, 10:10) is some kind of justification for that, as well as proof of this as another “method” of finding secret hidden mystery codes in The Bible and Hebrew words—all applied to the same Hebrew word to concoct a secret code that “validates” a popular but totally unbiblical theological view.
Notice that Pastor Prince makes it a point to speak against The Torah, which he errantly refers to as “the law of Moses” the way most antinomians do. The thing is, if you study out Titus 2:11-12 it tells us that grace teaches us to abandon ungodliness and worldliness and embrace righteousness. Ungodliness and worldliness are alternate words for sin, and 1 John 3:4 defines sin as breaking The Torah. Deuteronomy 6:25 defines righteousness as obeying The Torah. So grace teaches us to return to The Torah. No “hidden codes”, no “secret messages”, no making stuff up—and then getting an honorary doctorate degree for it—just the plain revealed text of Scripture, telling us the exact opposite of what Pastor Prince’s make-believe code says.
Where does it end? When you have people using multiple methods of deciphering alleged codes and you have “rules” that say if the code fails or doesn’t fit what The Bible says you can just discard it, there really is no end to how far people can stretch their imaginations to make stuff up with things like this. And the gullible masses of religion who don’t take time to study much of anything or even read their Bibles swallow it all up, and all too often while being led away from important and essential Bible truths. We simply do not need to divine “codes, secret messages, or esoteric knowledge” from Scripture—we need to follow the revealed message of The Bible.
Proponents of so-called Bible codes are not proving The Bible to have some kind of divine or supernatural authorship. What they are really doing is coming up with creative ways to make people think their theologies and doctrines, whether biblical or not, are divine in nature. When some people allegedly find codes and messages that they feel support a Torah-positive theology and others find codes and messages that they feel support an antinomian hyper-grace theology there is a real problem with the system. Alleged Bible codes do not prove The Bible true, they create pseudo-Bibles where people can make up whatever they want and claim it supports whatever preconceived belief system they hold to prior to searching for codes—it’s just another way religious deceivers manipulate and control gullible and ignorant “Christians”. And remember, one of the big rules of “Bible codes” is that if the code does not harmonize with Scripture it is not valid. This really just means that if the code does not harmonize with the way people want to interpret The Bible it can be tossed out. The problem is that The Bible is not to be interpreted any more than it is to be divined. The Bible is to be read, studied, believed, and obeyed.
To Do What The Torah Says
Do you recall the passage of Scripture I opened this message with? Deuteronomy 29:28 (TLV) says: “The secret things belong to Adonai our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever—in order to do all the words of this Torah.” As this is in The Torah, it is to be treated as a commandment. We are, per the commandment of God, not to chase after “secret codes, hidden mysteries, esoteric knowledge,” or any other such thing. In other words, we are not to approach Scripture through divination.
And I do not think this is limited to just the types of theory-chasing I have presented in this message thus far. Let me ask a question: Do you know anyone who committed their life to both the pursuit of following Yeshua The Messiah and living according to The Torah (Revelation 12:17, 14:12) as a result of theories in eschatology (the end-times)? How much time has been wasted with debates, arguments, and theories over whether or not there will be a rapture, if there will be if it will occur before, during, or after a seven year tribulation, and other such things? While I understand that The Bible does say things that lead into some of this, we have to remember that, per the commandment of God in Deuteronomy 29:28, any mysteries behind those statements in Scripture belong to God and the portions revealed are solely for us to follow The Torah.
Think about the most used books from The Bible to build “end time prophecy” theories from: Revelation, Daniel, and parts of Isaiah. What if we approached these books from the perspective of obeying the commandment to leave the secret things for God and focus on the revealed things for the sole purpose of obeying The Torah? In Revelation we have a series of messages given to seven of Messiah’s communities of Believers sent by a letter courier all telling the people to follow The Torah. We have numerous passages in the text emphasizing Torah, like Revelation 12:17 and 14:12, as well as Revelation 22:14 that says it will be those who keep The Torah that will have a right to the Tree of Life. In Daniel we are warned of a coming deceiver who will change times, seasons, and God’s Laws—just like “Christianity” has done by replacing biblical Feast Days with pagan holidays, moved The Sabbath, and chants their mantras “nailed to the cross” and “not under the law”. In Isaiah 66, widely viewed as speaking of the future return of Messiah, we also see emphasis on following the food laws and keeping The Sabbath.
We must keep in mind that it will not matter what happens when it happens—how the end-times will play out and whatever theories (if any currently entertained) may have been correct—if you are not properly prepared for it. And the way we are prepared is through following The Torah. God did not place eschatological passages in The Bible for us to try to figure out what’s going to happen. He put it there to let us know things will happen and we are to be prepared by following both The Torah and Yeshua The Messiah. The commandment is to do The Torah and follow Yeshua. There is no commandment anywhere in The Bible to try and divine The Bible and seek out hidden messages and esoteric knowledge. Neither is there a commandment to try figuring out what the future holds. The commandment is to follow The Torah and Yeshua so you can be ready for whatever the future holds.
The same is true of things like Trinitarian and Unitarian debates. These are popular attempts to try and “figure out” God. I once even heard a preacher give an entire sermon presenting God from the perspective of secular astrophysics, which you can read my response to in an article I wrote titled: Is God Defined By String Theory? Should we be focused on these kinds of things though? Or should we simply be satisfied with the fact that there is The Father, who created the world and gave us His Torah to live by, The Son and Messiah, who became our living example of how to walk in The Torah (1 John 2:6), and The Spirit of Holiness given to us for the purpose of causing us to follow The Torah (Ezekiel 36:27) without the need to chase theories?
How does all of this happen? How did the bulk of “Christian” religion come to focus primarily on chasing mysteries?
I think the biggest factor may be when a form of “Christianity” developed in the fourth century under the emperor Constantine where pagan temples were repurposed into “Christian” churches and pagan philosophers were converted into “pastors”. The method of the philosophers was to seek out “hidden wisdom” and try to be the most appealing so they would get the largest crowd. This transferred over and became the role of the “pastor”. This is why most “pastors” today are primarily diviners of Scripture, looking for “new revelation” and “the next big thing” while using things like heaven and hell as tools to force their congregations into unquestioning obedience to “the angel of the house” (a gross misrepresentation of statements made in Revelation 2 and 3, which are actually references to the aforementioned letter couriers, not a deification of “pastors” into some type of demi-gods over their “churches”). It’s also what’s behind “sermonizing” where ministers are taught to select a text from The Bible and create a message that usually has nothing to do with biblical context and living by The Torah, but rather seeks to provide some type of culturally relevant inspiration. This too is divining Scripture and utilizing witchcraft methods of religious control.
The modern “pastor” likely isn’t even aware that they are doing this, trapped in a system of paganism and witchcraft, because it has been the “norm” of their religion for the last 1,700 years. But make no mistake, this is exactly what the “Christian pastor” does instead of just teaching people to follow The Torah through what is revealed like Yeshua did and like the apostles did and like the prophets did and like the patriarchs did.
Do you want to know how to understand The Bible? It’s easy. There is The Torah, the commandments from the God who created all life and the whole universe, then after that the rest of The Bible gives examples of what happened when people obeyed The Torah, examples of what happened when people did not obey The Torah, and a series of anointed men and women who told people to repent of their sins (breaking The Torah) and return to obeying The Torah. That’s it. Unless you are going to be a legitimate Bible teacher, that’s about all you need to know about Bible hermeneutics. If you follow that simple pattern when reading The Bible, you can understand the whole thing because the whole thing points us back to following The Torah. There are no “hidden mysteries”, no “special codes”, just the clear commands of God that are easy to follow (Deuteronomy 30:11-14, 1 John 5:3).
I was watching the movie Heaven Is For Real, the alleged true story of a young kid named Colton Burpo who says he was in heaven during a surgery. In watching it I remembered a report that this story may have been revealed to be untrue, but it was actually a similar story where the young man who made his own claim of “going to heaven” lied—Burpo appears to maintain his story is true. Alex Malarkey, however, in an open letter stating that his story was a lie, says these words:
I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible.
I do think it’s a little funny that the young man’s name is malarkey, but all jokes aside about the odd coincidence he makes an amazing point here. We are supposed to read and follow The Bible alone, and that for the sole purpose of following The Torah—because even when it comes to following Yeshua, The Messiah, this is only truly possible in a biblical sense when we follow The Torah. Our Messiah lived every day of His life according to The Torah and we are told in no uncertain terms to walk as He walked (1 John 2:6), as well as being told that true faith requires both following the faith of Yeshua and living by The Torah (Revelation 12:17, 14:12).
Let me add that I am not saying that it’s impossible for a child or anyone else to have a real experience with heaven—whether it be “out of body”, a dream, a vision, or anything else. But there are some things we should consider in regard to such claims.
1. Scripture records “a man” having such an experience and the apostle Paul said that it was not permissible to speak of the details of the experience (2 Corinthians 12:2-4).
2. Yeshua said that it’s an evil and perverse people who seek after signs (Matthew 12:39).
3. It’s entirely possible that these experiences people have, if they are real, are actually demonically inspired deceptions.
Think about it. If these experiences people describe are real, why was Paul prevented from sharing the details of “a man’s” experience with the third heaven? And if they are real, why are they so often more in harmony with Americanized “Christian” concepts of heaven (or hell) instead of what The Bible actually says? It is entirely possible demon spirits are showing gullible “Christians” and little kids these things and they simply don’t know any better, so they think their experiences were real and “from God”. People seem to have no problem believing in the supernatural—which I am absolutely not opposed to—but can’t seem to believe the clear and simple truth of God’s commandments. Why is it that so many are willing to believe without reservation someone’s account of a supernatural experience but find it so impossible to believe that God meant it when He said, “don’t eat things like pork and shellfish,” or, “remember the seventh day, The Sabbath, to keep it holy”?
If you are not a Torah-keeper, you are out of covenant and your mind is already susceptible to demonic influences. I know that’s a hard thing to hear, especially for those who have had intense religious experiences. But it’s the plain fact of the matter. And if you are dabbling in the types of witchcraft and divination I have described in this article, your mind is that much more open to demonic influences—and for the committed “Christian” those influences will usually come in the form of biblically-sounding dreams, visions, prophecies, and other such things the undiscerning and gullible religious mind easily falls for.
Supernatural experiences and miracles are amazing when they happen, but we have to remember that Satan is more than capable of doing those things too. I promise you that you will be better off when you stand before The Judgment Seat if you lived your life in obedience to The Torah, walking as Yeshua walked, and never once had a supernatural experience or saw a single miracle than to be around the supernatural and miraculous every day while not living by The Torah. Scripture tells us that obedience is better than sacrifice (1 Samuel 15:22), surely obedience then is more important than miracles and the supernatural. Matthew 7:21-23 is quite clear that the masses who experience miracles, prophecy, and many other such things done “in Yeshua’s name” will be rejected at The Judgment because of one thing: lawlessness, they didn’t live according to The Torah. And like it or not, the plain hard truth of it is that the only people in the history of the world that matches the description of that passage are “Christians” who claim all manner of experiences while believing that they do not have to keep The Torah. All of this “Torah was nailed to the cross, we’re not under the law” theology was started by Satan in Genesis 3 when he first posed the question: Did God really mean it when He said not to eat the fruit on that tree in the midst of the garden?
Back in the 1990’s when ELS codes became popular, the Trinity Broadcast Network made a movie called The Omega Code. The main character in the movie was a secular reporter who gained notoriety for his research into hidden Bible codes. One scene in the movie had this character on a talk show where he was asked how he could believe that there were secret codes hidden in The Bible and not believe in the actual Bible itself. His response was to mock actual faith in The Bible.
That question really does beg to have an answer though. Why do so many, whether in mainstream “Christian” circles or in Messianic and Hebrew Roots Movement circles, feel the need to chase after codes and mysteries and esoteric knowledge and sermonizing and fortunetelling and soothsaying, all of which is outright witchcraft, using divination to claim finding hidden secrets in The Bible, instead of just following The Bible itself? There is literally a commandment that we not look for any hidden mysteries but stick to the things revealed for us for the sole purpose of living according to The Torah—following the commandments of our God. Why do so many become fanatical about totally unbiblical “wisdom”, but if you talk to them about keeping The Sabbath or following the food laws or even that their favorite holidays of Christmas and Easter are connected with paganism and witchcraft, they will fight you tooth and nail?
You know, years ago there was a controversy with secular music having secret messages you could find by playing songs backwards. Typically the messages found would give some type of praise to Satan. Popular bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were literally demonized for the practice. The thing is, most of the bands involved in these accusations produced song lyrics that were already openly in opposition to a biblical way of life, nobody had to make up claims of hidden demon codes in them to show why a follower of Yeshua should not poison their mind with such music. In like manner, we don’t need hidden codes and secret messages to validate Scripture; we have the plain revealed text to follow and that should be enough.
A while back I saw a young lady claiming to have some “prophetic gift of dream interpretation” promoted by a well-known ministry. I looked up her information and she had all sorts of lists of things like animals and objects and what it “means” if you saw one of these things in a dream. That’s straight up psychic witchcraft. While we do see some examples of dreams being interpreted in The Bible, we see no instructions to use such methods or guides to predict dreams.
I have often wondered why “Christians” are so enamored with witchcraft. Why do so many of them love Halloween? I can see how they are ignorant of the witchcraft involved in Christmas and Easter… but Halloween? Why do so many of them love movies like Maleficent, Harry Potter, and Encanto that are openly pushing outright witchcraft on children? Why can’t they see that some of the symbols and images being pushed on their children—like unicorns, mermaids, and genies—are directly tied to witchcraft religion?
Just recently I had a “Christian” trying to tell me that there is nothing wrong with the movie Encanto because it teaches good family values. I told him that I do not need to watch a movie filled with themes of witchcraft to learn good family values or teach them to my children—we have The Bible for that. I then proceeded to tell him that we’ll see how it works out for him when he stands before God in judgment, if it comes up—would he be able to make the same excuse to God: “All witchcraft aside, the movie taught good family values”? Somehow I don’t think that will work when The Torah definitively tells us not to have anything to do with witchcraft.
But then you examine how it is through divination that “Christianity” approaches The Bible and how the role of “pastors” comes not from The Bible but directly from the pagan philosophers of Greece and Rome and how practices like “communion” come from the Greek mystery cults, replacing the biblical Passover Feast, and it all begins to make sense. For the most part, “Christianity” is nothing more than the world’s largest coven. Even the word “church” originates primarily from the Latin word circe, which is associated with both witchcraft and a spirit of entertainment. It’s really no wonder that “Christians” are in love with witchcraft, so long as it’s some kind of “Christianized” witchcraft.
Even the way “Christianity” approaches important aspects like prayer is often more related to witchcraft than any example we read in The Bible. Followers of the “Christian” faith are taught to used words and phrases like “in Jesus’ name” and “I plead the blood” as if they are some type of incantation that can invoke magical powers. These things come from a combination of twisting Scripture and blending it with elements of actual witchcraft. This is what happened to the sons of Sceva in Acts 19.
But some traveling Jewish exorcists also tried to invoke the name of the Lord Yeshua, saying, “I charge you by the Yeshua whom Paul preaches.” Seven sons of a Jewish ruling kohen named Sceva were doing this. But the evil spirit answered them, “I know Yeshua and I know about Paul, but who are you?”
—Acts 19:13-15 (TLV, emphasis added)
Are there “secret codes” and “hidden messages” in the text of The Bible? Perhaps, I would never rule out the possibility of it completely, though it seems pretty clear none of the “methods” of finding such things reviewed in this article would be among them. They have all failed the test. But the bigger question would be: Who cares? Do we really need to find a hidden message to validate The Bible or our faith? I would say that if you do, then you have a real problem with your faith to begin with.
We are commanded to obey The Torah and follow Yeshua—walking as He walked (1 John 2:6). We are told quite plainly that any mysteries that may exist belong to The Father and the things revealed belong to us for the purpose of obeying The Torah. That applies to everything else in Scripture—including The Gospel and faith in Yeshua as The Messiah; these too are a part of those things revealed to us for the purpose of obeying The Torah. 2 Timothy 3:16 tells is that all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for, among other things, training in righteousness. Deuteronomy 6:25 defines righteousness as obeying The Torah. All Scripture, whatever is revealed in the plain text without hidden codes and secret messages, is inspired for the sole purpose of training us to live by The Torah. Yeshua consistently taught that those who follow Him will keep the commandments (The Torah) and that loving Him is synonymous with keeping His commandments (The Torah).
Chasing after mysteries, theories, secret codes, and any other such thing is divination that violates the commandment not only of Deuteronomy 29:28, but also all of the commandments directly against being engaged in witchcraft, sorcery, fortunetelling, and soothsaying. The writers of Scripture were not busy creating secret codes; their entire focus was to lead people to return to obeying God’s Law. Just follow The Torah, as every person who wrote any part of The Bible did. If you need anything more, you have already abandoned faith in God.
Blessings and Shalom
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