The Prisoner Part 6--Recovering the Word
America is in decline. For all its talk of separation of Church and State, it has adopted “Wokism”, a form of secular humanism, as it's state religion. This is the case throughout the Western world. Speak out against anything WOKE and you can find yourself in prison. A Finnish Parliament Member, Päivi Räsänen, has been denied entry into the UK for her Christian beliefs[1]. Also in England, police are looking for someone who painted “White Lives Matter” graffiti on a wall[2].
It is being pursued as a “hate crime” and the perpetrator faces many years in prison. Many conservative and Christian groups in the US are persecuted by the government. Alexis de Tocqueville praised America and its religious roots, but now it seems to be pursuing a path to totalitarianism. It is immolating itself. How could this happen?
Secular voices have always been a part of life. Some of the framers of the US Constitution were admirers of the French Revolution and wanted to use those as founding principles. The Democratic Party members were ardent followers of the principles of the French Revolution and want to replace the US Constitution with one built on the secularism of the French Constitution. There has always been this tension, but throughout, the religious principles upon which the nation was founded have always prevailed. What is different this time?
The difference is the church. The western church is beset with problems.
We are to be salt and light, and one problem is that the light is dimming. Teachings like “Prosperity Gospel” are diminishing the light. God wants His people to prosper, but the focus is on material prosperity which is carnal in nature. In fact, the church today is called the most carnal church in recent memory.
The second problem is that the light is being hidden under “a bushel” and, as a result, we are losing our saltiness, our ability to preserve the culture. With the vitriolic attacks on biblical principles and the injunctions added by the Johnson Amendment in 1954, pastors are reluctant to speak out on social and political issues. Ravi Zacharias. in “Deliver Us From Evil”[3], talked about the church closing its doors (so to speak), looking inward, wagging its finger at the decay outside the door, but doing nothing to stop the slide.
Syncretism abounds. Theologians have been integrating the world into the church since its birth. The apostle Paul wrote many times, speaking out against Judaizing, license, unfaithfulness, exhorting the church to holiness. Thomas Aquinas integrated the writings of Plato and Aristotle into Catholic doctrine. The seeming disparity between the Bible and science lead to things like the School of Higher Criticism. Today, the United Methodist Church in the US celebrates LGBTQ Pride. The Bible has nothing good to say about these teachings and those who promote them
How do we know that it was the church, or more specifically, the clerical hierarchy that was to blame? The clearest example is when prayer and bible reading were removed from the morning exercises in public schools in the US and Canada in the 1960s. These had been a part of school life for over a century and in one act, it was gone. One court case dismissed centuries of tradition. This was the time for the church to rise up and speak out. The silence was deafening.
What has happened to the church? The simple answer is unbelief. When unbelief comes in, miracles stop happening. When miracles stop happening, unbelief grows. It is a vicious cycle. Unbelief comes from the abandonment of scripture as authoritative. It is no longer viewed as God-breathed, but rather as a collection of myths stitched together. The tip of the spear is Genesis 1, the seven days of creation. How does one reconcile the 7 days of creation with the acknowledged age of the universe of 15.4 billion years? Young earth creationists claim that the universe was created in seven days, and then began the 6,000 years of recorded history in the Bible. As someone with a physics background, this makes very little sense to me.
With unbelief comes a loss of the supernatural, a loss of the deep mysteries of God. You end up in the world of Nietzsche who said "God is dead". Since the supernatural is dead, since scripture is dead, then God is dead and church becomes irrelevant. I remember back in the 1960s, the Anglican ministers would talk about how to make the church relevant to young people, as they were facing an aging congregation. Fast forward to today, and we find "seeker friendly" churches, darkened inside like a nightclub, providing "Christian" entertainment[4], more carnality. As a result, we have abandoned preaching on sin and repentance.
Further erosion came with the discovery of a cache of early Greek texts. The text used for most translations had been Erasmus' Textus Receptus, which was based on Greek texts dating from the 10th century. These earlier texts were deemed as more authoritative since they were older. But were they?
We need to regain a proper respect for scripture, for the whole counsel of God. The bible is supernatural in nature. It possesses characteristics not found in any other book. Author Grant Jeffries covered many of these points in his book, The Signature of God[5].
First, it is truth. Let us deal with Genesis 1. How do we resolve the 7 days of creation with 15 billion years of history? The answer came to Dr. Gerald Schoeder, a physicist and devout Jew. He prayed for an answer to this question and then he saw the answer in the inside cover of his relativity textbook, Einstein's cosmological constant[6]. He took 15 billion years, multiplied it by 365 days and divided by the cosmological constant and got about 6 days. He saw that the universe is both 6 days old and 15 billion years old depending one's point of view. This comes from the fact that the universe is expanding at a rate close to the speed of light, leading to large time dilation at the edge. Looking from the point of creation to the edge of time, you see 6 days. But, because of time dilation, looking from edge of time to the point of creation, you see 15 billion years. This leads to the conclusion that Genesis 1 describes the events of creation observed from the point of creation, while Genesis 2 covers the same events viewed from the edge of time.
Second, The Bible contains encoded information, the "Bible Codes". These are words encoded in the Hebrew and Greek texts using "Equidistant Letter Sequencing"[7]. By looking at letters using different spacings, other words emerge. The visual technique is to slice the text into finite strings and stack them one atop the other. Words appear vertically, as well as horizontally, and the words that appear vertically are relevant to the surface text. The technique can be expanded to slice the sheet into pages, and then stack them one on another, forming a cube. Words are discernible in all three dimensions. This technique has been tried on other Hebrew and Greek literature with no results. The Bible is the only book that exhibits this property.
Third, it can be analyzed using numbers. In ancient Israel and Greece. they used the alphabet to represent numbers, and these numbers can be used to interpret the text. In Hebrew, the technique is called Gematria. Del Washburn, in "Theomatics"[8], has expanded it to the Greek text, covering words, phrases and sentences. The numbers he extracted govern the overall theme of the passage. When he started, the only Greek text he could get was "Westcott and Hort", a text based on the older texts. He got reasonable results, but then he got a copy of Erasmus's Textus Receptus and the results were much better. This puts the lie that the older texts were better. A translator at the Wycliffe Bible Society said "One has to ask why these older texts were still around. Could it be that they were so flawed that nobody used them?"
The most famous of the gematria involves father, mother and child. A google search yielded the following diagram.
Father (Av - אב): Aleph (1) + Beit (2) = 3
Mother (Em - אם): Aleph (1) + Mem (40) = 41
Child (Yeled - ילד): Yud (10) + Lamed (30) + Dalet (4) = 44
As can be seen, the sum of the numbers representing father and mother is the number of child, just as a father and mother coming together produces a child. This is taken by some as a deep mystery. I view it evidence that Hebrew is a divine language.
Fourth, there a unity to the Bible. It comprises 66 books written by 40 authors, but the book retains a unity that is difficult to apprehend. Chuck Missler[9] is quoted as saying the Bible is "66 books by 40 authors, and we now find that it is an integrated message system from outside our time domain."
Fifth, there is unity of structure, a sevenfold pattern that governs the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. The pattern follows creation-tribulation-Calvary-faith-Armageddon-judgment-new creation. This pattern applies at all levels, from the seven major groupings in the bible, to the books in each section, to chapters, to verses. Each major category carries a number of different alternates, but they correspond to the overall category. Let us look at the 2 Chronicles 7:14. It talks of repentance and restoration.
If my people, which are called by my name, | Glory of God |
| shall humble themselves, | Tribulation |
| and pray, and seek my face, | Victory |
| and turn from their wicked ways; | Faith |
| then will I hear from heaven, | Victory/Feast of Trumpets |
| and will forgive their sin, | Resurrection |
| and will heal their land. | New creation |
You can see that the verse follows the order of the categories precisely. This is consistent over the entirety of the Bible. It is interesting to note that, according to Bullinger[10], the number 6 is the number of man, so in “The Prisoner”, Number 6, who will not bend “I am a free man”, is tormented by Number 2, which is the number of Tribulation.
The Bible is God's Word to us. It is supernatural in origin and to believers it is a living document. A born-again believer has the Holy Spirit dwelling within him. When reading the bible, the Spirit sometimes highlights passages. I have heard many people talk about reading familiar parts of the Bible, only to have something, something they had read many times before, suddenly jump off the page. This the Holy Spirit pointing out that at this time, the passage highlighted is important.
We need to return to Biblical truth, to Biblical morality. America was chosen by providence to reconcile liberty with law. Today liberty is license and law is irrelevant. We need to return to a Biblical understanding of liberty and the purpose for law. Donald Trump has given us an opportunity. He has opened the door. The church needs to seize the moment and take its rightful place in society.
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