The Mysteries of Creation (Part 1)



Have you, like countless others, ever wondered how the world began? Stephen Hawking, the famous British theoretical physicist, wrote: “We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from?”1
Practically all cultures on earth have a cosmogony -- a creation myth of how the world came into being. These traditions present a broad variety of scenarios that range from the death of a god or animal, whose body parts became the land, sea, and sky; to a primordial sea, from which gods and the world emerged; to eggs that hatched creator-gods; to struggles among gods, who produced offspring through incest or self-fertilization; to men springing forth from the tears of gods or even fleas from the skin of a dead god. The numerous tableaux had been limited only by the ancients’ imaginations.
Under scrutiny, however, all of these stories of origin are nothing but continuations of previous circumstances, built on things that already existed. On the other hand, the Genesis account of creation in the Bible tells of a universe that emerged from nothing.

Science confirms Scripture
In great steps, advances in modern science are confirming the Biblical account. While science textbooks have to be revised or updated from time to time in the past 200 years to accommodate new discoveries and theories, in 3,500 years nothing ever needed to be changed in the Bible. Rather, many mysteries in the Scriptures have become clear and well established facts in the light of increasing scientific knowledge. 
Astronomer Hugh Ross remarks: “Instead of another bizarre creation myth, here (in the Bible) was a journal-like record of the earth’s initial conditions – correctly described from the standpoint of astrophysics and geophysics – followed by a summary of the sequence of changes through which Earth came to be inhabited by living things and ultimately by humans. The account was simple, elegant, and scientifically accurate.”2
Science writer Fred Heeren notes: “Hebrew revelation is the only religious source coming to us from ancient times that fits the modern cosmological picture. And in many cases, 20th-century archeology and myth experts have also been forced to turn from older views that treated the Bible as myth to ones that treat it as history.”3
The convergence of Biblical teachings and scientific findings is truly amazing. Let us begin with the first few words and verses of the Bible to see for ourselves this growing harmony between science and Scripture.

A beginning
 “In the beginning …” (Gen1:1).
The Judeo-Christian Scriptures unfold with the story of the birth of the universe. Ancient men generally believed in so such thing. The Greek philosopher Aristotle taught around 2,300 years ago that the world was eternal – it had always existed. Indeed, the starry sky we see on a clear night seems to be unchanging. Albert Einstein, considered one of the most brilliant scientific minds in modern times, tried to prove that we live in a static, unchanging universe. As late as the early 1960s, two-thirds of the leading American scientists surveyed professed their belief in the steady-state theory of the cosmos.4
In 1917, though, after Einstein published his theories of special and general relativity (1905 and 1915), Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter saw an oversight in Einstein’s equations. He pointed out that if the density of the universe were low enough, it would not be static, but expanding at nearly the speed of light.5 In 1922, Russian astronomer Alexandr Friedmann found a hidden mathematical prediction in Einstein’s equations: The universe was finite, not infinite. Anything that is not infinite must have had a beginning.
In 1927 American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that, based on the observed redshift (wavelengths of light lengthening or turning red when moving away from the observer), all the other galaxies were speeding away from the Earth. The farther away they were, the higher their velocity – as fast as about 25,000 miles per second!6
The law of inertia states that a body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by some outside force. Hence, the galaxies have once been close together before a force caused them to move away from each other. Ergo, the universe had a beginning. The editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica express their agreement: “The observed expansion of the universe immediately raises the spectre that the universe is evolving, that it had a beginning…”7
In addition, the science of thermodynamics dictates that heat must flow from a warm body to a cold one. If the universe has always existed, its temperature should be uniform throughout. However, observations indicate that the cosmic temperature is still cooling down. Therefore, the universe has not always existed – it had a starting point.
Robert Jastrow, founder and former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, concludes that “the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are alike in one essential respect. There was a beginning, and all things in the Universe can be traced back to it.”8

A Beginner?
“In the beginning God…” (Gen1:1).
The law of causality, or cause and effect, declares that nothing can happen or exist without a cause. The universe, being an effect, must have had a cause. What caused the universe to come into existence?
Scientists are able to analyze and explain the observable universe; but they remain in the dark as to its cause. Paul Dirac, the Nobel laureate from Cambridge University, said: “It seems certain that there was a definite time of creation.”9 Aside from accepting a cosmic beginning, Dirac implies, by the word “creation,” the hand of a creator.
The Encyclopedia Britannica admits the implication: “…the notion that the Cosmos had a beginning, while common in many theologies, raises deep and puzzling questions for science, for it implies a creation event -- a creation not only of all the mass-energy that now exists in the universe but also perhaps of space-time itself.”10 Stephen Hawking is of the same mind: “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.”11

Empty space created
“In the beginning God created the heaven…” (Gen 1:1).
If the universe had a beginning, then “space” has not always been there. There was once a state or condition when the emptiness of space did not exist at all.
As most people today know, “heaven” is the empty space above and surrounding Earth in all directions, where the stars and the planets are. How did space come into being? Jewish mystics have long been familiar with this mystery: The Ein Sof (the “Infinite Nothingness”) contracted Itself to make room for space. The “contraction” is known in Kabbalistic terms as the tzimtzum.
Can you imagine what empty space is like? It contains nothing, not even light or darkness. Yet, surprisingly, scientists have discovered that the vacuum of “empty space” is not absolutely empty. Space possesses electromagnetic qualities, dielectric permittivity, intrinsic impedance, and immense “zero-point” energy that helps keep all the electrons in the cosmos in their orbits around atomic nuclei!12

A cosmic “air pocket”?
Perhaps we can use an analogy, although inadequate, to imagine the relationship between the Ein Sof and space: If the Ein Sof were the atmosphere that is everywhere around us, then space would be an “air pocket” (which air travelers are quite familiar with). An air pocket forms when a mass of air cools, becomes heavier, and sags as one distinct body. The air pocket is still very much a part of the atmosphere, but for the time being has acquired a separate identity of its own.

Matter materializes
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen1:1).
After creating “heaven” (space), God went on to create the “earth” in the emptiness He had just brought forth. Here, “earth” may mean something else other than the planet Earth, because the next passage says that the earth was still “without form, and void.” The Hebrew word used was 'erets (from a root meaning “to be firm”). We could thus take “earth” in the passage to mean “solid matter.”
The first law of thermodynamics states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Something cannot be created from nothing. If so, how did the first speck of matter materialize? Paul says God created the physical universe from invisible materials: “…what is seen was not made out of things which are visible” (Heb 11:3b, NASU).
A medieval Jewish sage in Spain, Moses Ben Nachman, also known as Nacmanides or Ramban, wrote: “In the beginning, from total and absolute nothing, the Creator brought forth a substance so thin it had no corporeality, but that substanceless substance could take on form.”13
All things from “nothing”
Cosmologists generally believe that in the beginning there was nothing. Then, all of a sudden, from out of that nothing, the universe was born. Jewish sages are in complete agreement. They just differ in their concept of “nothing.”
Scientists arrive at a mathematical “zero.” Stephen Hawking says that “the total energy of the universe is exactly zero.”14 Paul Davies wonders: “Astronomers can measure the masses of galaxies, their average separation, and their speeds of recession. Putting these numbers into a formula yields a quantity which some physicists have interpreted as the total energy of the universe. The answer does indeed come out to be zero within the observational accuracy. The reason for this distinctive result has long been a source of puzzlement to cosmologists. Some have suggested that there is a deep cosmic principle at work which requires the universe to have exactly zero energy.”15
In contrast, by “nothing” Jewish philosophers mean the Ein Sof – the “Infinite Nothingness” -- God. It appears He was that “deep cosmic principle at work” in the beginning.

A thought in God’s mind?
In Space-Time and Beyond, Fred Alan Wolf wrote: “The quantum physicist calls the ‘pre-matter’ phase, the quantum wave function. The quantum wave function is very well calculated, but it is not matter! It is not anything, really… As fantastic as it sounds, the mathematical models for such things are very well defined and, mathematically at least, well understood… the quantum wave represents where and when something is likely to occur; in other words, it is a measure of the probability of an event taking place… this probability not only exists in our minds, but also moves in space and time. In other words this wave is both in our minds and out there in the world.”16
Before matter first appeared, was it merely a probability in the mind of God? Paul Davies muses, “it seems that the entire universe may be nothing more than a thought in the mind of God.”17 James Jeans, the knighted British mathematician, says: “The world looks more like a great thought than a great machine”18 and adds: “If the universe is a universe of thought, then its creation must have been an act of thought.”19

From wave to particle?
In 1906 English physicist J.J. Thomson won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that electrons were particles. In 1924 French physicist Louis de Broglie (who won the Nobel Prize in 1929) proposed that all matter, including light, possessed a quality called “wave-particle duality” – that is, they can appear as either waves or particles.20 J.J. Thomson’s only son, George Paget Thomson, likewise became a Nobel laureate in 1937 by proving that electrons were waves! Both father and son, as well as de Broglie, were correct – they established the wave-particle duality common to all subatomic entities.
Quantum physicists now know that when an atom is broken down to its subatomic components, particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons surprisingly lose their characteristics as particles. They may sometimes still behave like particles, but they no longer have dimensions. Thus, a subatomic entity, such as an electron, can appear as a particle or a wave. Amazed physicists found that if we assume that a quantum entity is a particle, it will appear as a particle. Assume it is a wave, and we will observe it as a wave! We see matter the way we believe it exists. In theory, all matter, including humans, has this property of duality.21
Was the wave-particle duality principle responsible for a thought of God morphing from a wave into the first particle of matter?

Infinitesimal speck
Advocates of the Big Bang Theory hold that the universe began as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, and incredibly compact point called a “singularity.” It contained all the matter of the universe. This hews closely to what Jewish sages have taught for centuries.
In his exegesis of Genesis in the 12th century, Moses Maimonides said that the entire universe had been created from something smaller than a mustard seed.22 Nachmanides corroborated that: “Now this creation was a very small point and from this all things that ever were or will be formed.”23 Later, in 1930, Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaitre described the primal atom as a super dense “cosmic egg.”
Astronomer Edwin Hubble’s discovery of an expanding universe implies that all the particles that make up the universe were indeed once tightly packed together. The supremely hot and compact speck suddenly exploded and dispersed at close to the speed of light, eventually forming the stars and the galaxies.
Fellow astronomer John D. Barrow of the University of Sussex, in England, speculates: “If the universe is expanding, then when we reverse the direction of history and look in the past we should find evidence that it emerged from a smaller, denser state – a state that appears to have once had zero size. It is the apparent beginning that has become known as the big bang.”24 Advocates of the Big Bang Theory are fond of saying: “First, there was nothing. Then it exploded.”
  
“Quantum fluctuation”
The NASA posits that the creation of the universe was the result of a “quantum fluctuation.” Quantum what?
Edward Tryon first proposed the idea in a Nature magazine article in 1973: “Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?”25 Scientific writer Andrew Chaikin remarks: “Quantum mechanics says that matter and energy can appear spontaneously out of the vacuum of space, thanks to something called a quantum fluctuation, a sort of hiccup in the energy field thought to pervade the cosmos.”26
Physicists have realized that even the supposedly empty vacuum of space has “things” swarming in it. As author Richard Morris (The Edges of Science) points out: “In modern physics, there is no such thing as ‘nothing.’ Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy.”27 The spontaneous appearance and disappearance of virtual particles in space is what scientists call a “quantum fluctuation.”
Law of parity. An article in The New York Times (August 21, 1990), entitled "New Direction in Physics: Back in Time," explains that “the vacuum's totally empty space is actually a seething turmoil of creation and annihilation, which to the ordinary world appears calm because the scale of fluctuations in the vacuum is tiny and the fluctuations tend to cancel each other out."28
In other words, as soon as a virtual particle appears, its closely following antiparticle twin collides with it, destroying both of them. The process of mutual destruction is part of the “law of parity.” (The “virtual particles” are pairs of matter and antimatter, such as quarks and antiquarks, which form the atoms that make up all things in the universe. An antiparticle is identical to its particle partner in every way, except that its charge or spin is the exact opposite.)
The Encarta Encyclopedia sheds further light on the matter: “In physics, the seemingly inviolable law of parity holds that the conversion of energy into matter produces equal amounts of matter and antimatter that then annihilate each other.”29

A quark of nature
Until the 1950s physicists believed there was always perfect balance and symmetry in the creation and mutual annihilation of matter and antimatter. Yet, if that was the case, the universe could never have materialized. All matter would have vanished almost as soon as it had appeared. But a quirk of nature happened. Every so many collisions left one extra particle or quark surviving intact.
Matter-antimatter imbalance. In 1964, James W. Cronin of the University of Chicago and Val L. Fitch of Princeton did experiments which showed that every so often an extra particle survived the matter-antimatter annihilation: two in each 1,200 decays of a particle produced a survivor that violated the law of parity. For their achievement, Cronin and Fitch shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1980.30
Physicist Gerald Schroeder speaks of even greater odds: In the first 1/100,000 of a second of the Big Bang, more quarks than antiquarks were produced – 10,000,000,001 particles for every 10,000,000,000 antiparticles -- establishing a numerical edge of matter over antimatter. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg wrote: “The one part in ten billion excess of matter over antimatter is one of the key initial conditions that determined the future development of the universe.”31
The extra quarks left by the matter-antimatter imbalance in the quantum fluctuations accumulated and bonded together to form the elements that gave birth to the stars and the galaxies, and, later, all living organisms. What caused the imbalance?
Astrophysicist John Gribbin comments that, although scientists can describe in detail what happened after the creation, they cannot explain what started it all. The “instant of creation remains a mystery… maybe God did make it, after all.”32

1
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988, p. 171
2
Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, 1993, p. 15
3
Fred Heeren, Show Me God, 1997, Preface; quoted in “The Beginning of the Universe,” Does God Exist?, 2000, p. 12
4
Gerald Schroeder, The Science of God, 1997, p. 23
5
De Sitter, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)
6
Robert Faid, “The Factual Scientific Accuracy of the Bible,” Mysteries of the Bible Now Revealed, 1999, p. 136
7
Cosmos, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition
8
Robert Jastrow, Journey to the Stars, 1989, p. 47
9
Quoted by Grant Jeffrey, The Signature of God, 1996, p. 117
10
Cosmos, op. cit.
11
Hawking, op. cit., pp. 140-141
12
“Why ‘Six Days’?,” Personal Update, November 2003, p. 11
13
Quoted by Schroeder, op. cit., p. 184
14
Hawking, op. cit., p. 129
15
Paul Davies, God and the New Physics, 1983, pp. 31-32
16
Fred Alan Wolf, Space-Time and Beyond, 1987, pp. 128-129
17
Quoted in “Whence Our ‘Reality’?,” Personal Update, Dec. 2003, p. 4
18
Quoted by Schroeder, op. cit., Introduction
19
James H. Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, revised edition, 1932, p. 181
20
De Broglie, Louis Victor, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)
21
Schroeder, op. cit., p. 160
22
Cited by Schroeder, op. cit., p. 58
23
Quoted by Schroeder, op. cit., 1997, p. 184
24
John D. Barrow, The Origin of the Universe, 1994, pp. 3-5
25
Cited by Schroeder, op. cit., p. 62
26
Andrew Chaikin, “Are There Other Universes?”, Science Tuesday, 05 February 2002, Internet
27
Richard Morris, The Edges of Science, 1990, p. 25
28
“New Direction in Physics: Back in Time,” The New York Times, nytimes.com/1990/08/21/science, Internet
29
1980: Nobel Prizes, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004
30
Ibid.
31
Steven Weinberg, “Life in the Universe”; quoted by Schroeder, op. cit., pp. 188-189
32
John Gribbin, “Taking the Lid Off Cosmology,” New Scientist, August 16, 1979, p. 506

(Excerpted from Chapter 3, Conundrums of Creation, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)


Secrets in the Scriptures



Now, for the secrets that Jewish sages and mystics have endeavored to pry from the Scriptures for ages. By the 12th century, rabbis believed the sacred texts could be interpreted on several levels of meaning.

Levels of meaning.
1.      Peshat, the literal or plain meaning. The literal meaning may be lost in translation if some significant words are omitted. For instance, in the opening line of the Bible (Gen 1:1), “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Bªre'shiyt bara' 'Elohim 'et hashamayim wª'et ha’arets.), the translators left out the word et (which indicates that the verb action is on the object, not the subject).
2.      Remez, the esoteric or allegorical hint of something deeper. In the same example, the word et, spelled with the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet (aleph and tav) alludes to the eternal nature of God. Hence, “'Elohim 'et” means God is “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last” (Rev 22:13b, etc.).
3.      Derash, the homiletical or practical application. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a meaning. The aleph in et stands for “bull,” known for its power, while the tav symbolizes a “sign, mark, or cross.” Combined, they can mean “power of the cross or mark of God.”
4.      Sod, the mystical or hidden meaning. The first letter of the first word, “Bªre'shiyt,” is bet, represented by a “house.” A married man builds a house for his wife. So, when God created heaven and earth, He was building a house for His “bride.”
The first three methods are closely similar to those used in Christian hermeneutics. The rabbis used the acronym PaRDeS (“Paradise”) as a mnemonic device for remembering the four levels.54 There are even more methods in the mystical Jewish Kabbalah. Practitioners hold that there are “seventy gates” of wisdom, that is, 70 different means of interpreting the text of the Torah.55

God keeps secrets.
Paul says that God, even before He created the universe, reserved secrets for us. “No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began” (1 Cor 2:7, NIV; cf. Eph 3:9). The LORD often spoke through the prophets, but owing to the people’s disobedience He sometimes blinded them to His messages. “For the LORD has poured out on you The spirit of deep sleep, And has closed your eyes, namely, the prophets; And He has covered your heads, namely, the seers” (Isa 29:10, NKJV).
God had revealed to Daniel many of His secrets. Oddly, at the outset of the 6th century B.C., the angel Gabriel told Daniel to hide the secrets already given him. “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end…  And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end” (Dan 12:4a,9; cf. Isa 29: 10-14)). The secrets were to be revealed again only at the “time of the end.”
Meantime, seeking to know some of God’s secrets is not forbidden, but, rather, an honorable endeavor: “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter” (Prov 25:2). Surprisingly, to gain spiritual insight, all we have to do is ask: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (James 1:5; Luke 11:9).

Secrets will be known.
Christ said all secrets would eventually be uncovered. “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known” (Luke 12:2). However, God’s secrets cannot be discerned through men’s insight or intelligence alone. “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation” (2 Peter 1:20). God Himself will reveal His secrets: “But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets” (Dan 2:28; also 2:22,47). Since the Scriptures have been inspired by the Holy Spirit, they can best be explained by Him.  “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come” (John 16:13; also Eph 3:5; 1 Cor 2:10,12).
God usually reveals secrets – to enable men to do His will. “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut 29:29). Or to warn us about coming judgments. “Surely the Sovereign LORD does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7, NIV).
The secrets of God will continue to be revealed until the end of the present world order at the Second Coming of Christ. “But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets” (Rev 10:7).

Only for a few?
God reveals His secrets only to the worthy: “So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God” (1 Cor 4:1-2, NIV; also Ps 25:14; Prov 3:32). Christ revealed secrets to only a few of His closest disciples, not to all people. “He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given” (Matt 13:11). Why? “Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matt 7:14, NKJV).

Biblical prophecies
Many of God’s secrets are in the form of prophecy. Prophecies are found in just one holy book: the Bible. They are absent from the texts of other religions. This sets the Judeo-Christian faith apart from all others. Bible scholar Wilbur Smith, wrote about the Bible: “It is the only volume ever produced by man, or a group of men, in which is to be found a large body of prophecies relating to individual nations, to Israel, to all the peoples of the earth, to certain cities, and to the coming of One who was to be the Messiah.”56 Bible prophecies primarily concern God’s chosen people, Israel, but many times include the whole world.

Nature of prophecy.
Most people are under the impression that prophecies are purely predictions of future events. Those are predictive prophecies, which are simply the best known kind. Basically, a prophecy is any Spirit-inspired utterance of God’s divine will by a prophet. Some prophecies may be past events in retrospect. For instance, Isaiah 14:9-15 and Ezekiel 28:12-19 speak of Lucifer’s corruption in a much earlier time.
There are straightforward prophecies, framed in plain language, and “veiled” prophecies, couched in symbols and mysterious metaphors.
Prophecies are usually “in context,” that is, part of a prophet’s discourse on a given topic. Other times, though, prophecy may be “out of context” – distantly or even totally unrelated to the subject spoken about. In Isaiah and Ezekiel’s prophecies above, the subjects are the kings of Babylon and Tyre, when almost unnoticeably the message shifts to Lucifer’s sins and judgment.

Predictive prophecies.
It is predictive prophecies that conclusively prove the omniscience of God. The all-knowing Creator declared some 2,750 years ago: “Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them” (Isa 42:9; also 46:10). Predictive prophecy is “history told in advance.” Since God is outside space-time, He knows the beginning and the end, and everything in-between.
The Holy Scriptures contain at least 1,817 predictions concerning 737 topics in 8,352 verses.57 These prophecies represent 27% of the 31,093 verses in the Bible. Some prophecy teachers used to think that the Bible was around 33% prophecy. Around the end of the 20th century, the estimate rose to 50%. Today, some prophecy analysts claim the Bible is likely 75% prophecy, since many actual historical incidents and stories in the Bible are “types” or prophetic models of future events.
A predictive prophecy is fulfilled in several ways. It may occur as plainly foretold. Or it may have a partial or staggered fulfillment -- with one or several parts of the prophecy occurring first, then the other parts later. Daniel’s prophecy of the 70 “weeks” of years (490 years -- Dan 9:24-27) is a well-known example. The first 483 years had been fulfilled precisely until Christ, but the last 7 years are still in abeyance. There may also be multiple fulfillment – with the same prophecy coming true several times at various periods under different circumstances. Hosea 11:1-2, which predicted Israel’s fall into idolatry, also came true in the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt and return to Nazareth (Matt 2:14-21). Jeremiah 31:15-16 foretold the Jews’ return from Babylonian captivity, but it also prefigured Herod’s slaughter of innocent children (Matt 2:18).

Fulfilled prophecies
A prophecy cannot be true unless fulfilled. Although most Biblical prophecies foretold events far beyond the lifetimes of the prophets -- hundreds, even thousands of years in advance, many prophecies, astonishingly, have already been fulfilled! Authors Norman Geisler and William Nix wrote: “No unconditional prophecy of the Bible about events to the present day has gone unfulfilled… As a result, fulfilled prophecy is a strong indication of the unique, divine authority of the Bible.”58 Let us examine a few fulfilled Biblical prophecies.

Egyptian bondage.
The LORD told Abraham on the 14th day of the first month (Abib) in 1921 B.C. that his descendants would be persecuted in a foreign land for some 400 years. “And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years” (Gen 15:13). The Israelites left Egypt in the Exodus led by Moses in 1491 B.C. “And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt” (Ex 12:41).

Babylonian captivity.
God had said the Jews would be held captive in Babylon for 70 years. “For thus saith the LORD, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place” (Jer 29:10-11). History recorded that in 606 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar invaded Judea for the first time and took Jews captive to Babylon. About 100 years earlier, Isaiah had prophesied that Jerusalem and the Temple would be rebuilt at the command of a certain Cyrus. “That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid (Isa 44:28). Amazingly, after Babylon fell to Media-Persia, Cyrus the Great issued a decree for the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem in 536 B.C. – precisely 70 years after the first Babylonian captivity of the Jews!
Some skeptics say these ancient events are false history made up by biased writers to affirm the veracity of the Bible. Let us consider one of the greatest prophecies in the OT that, although highly improbable, has been fulfilled beyond any shadow of doubt in our very own time.

Diaspora and regathering.
God many times foretold that, as a punishment for their sins, He would disperse the Israelites across the face of the earth (the Diaspora). “And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other” (Deut 28:64a,25; Jer 8:3,34:17; Ezek 4:13; Mic 5:7; etc.). Moreover, their land of “milk and honey” would become desolate. “And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste” (Lev 26:32-33; etc.).
In 70 and 135 A.D. Roman legions suppressing Jewish revolts razed Jerusalem About a million Jews were massacred, over 100,000 were taken as slaves, while other survivors fled to far-flung places. Rome gave Judea the new name Palaestina, and Jerusalem, Aelia Capitolina. They plowed the city with salt before bringing in new settlers to the land.
Over 1,800 years of successive Roman, Arab, Crusader, Mameluke, Turkish, and British rules, the once flourishing Holy Land truly became desolate. In 1267, Jewish philosopher Nachmanides saw Jerusalem as “deserted and laid waste.”59 The Turks taxed trees, so the Bedouin inhabitants, who hated any form of tax, cut down the remaining trees.60 British author George Sandy counted less than 1,000 trees in the whole land in 1610, noting that, “The country is a vast empty ruin.”61 In the 1880s Mark Twain described Palestine as a “a blistering, naked, treeless land.”62 Rainfall had dwindled. Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), Dutch minister of state, said: “Only God can check the blight of the incoming desert. Only a miracle can save the Holy Land!”63
Regathering. Yet, God had also promised to regather Israel. "But, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers” (Jer 16:15; Ezek 39:25-28; 37:21; Deut 30:4; Isa 43:5-6; etc.).
After centuries of persecution and pogroms (massacres) in their host countries, the Jews began to dream of aliyah (“ascent”) or return to the land. In 1882 Jewish youths in Russia formed the Hoveve-Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) promoting aliyah. In 1897, Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl organized the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Soon, Jewish settlements of returnees began sprouting in Palestine.
At the end of the 15th century, there were just about 4,000 families in Jerusalem, 70 of them Jewish “of the poorest class, lacking even the commonest necessities.”64 In 1845, around 12,000 Jews resided in all of Palestine. The number rose to 47,000 in 1908. In 1914, the Jews nearly doubled to 85,000. By 1948, immigrants from some 70 countries had swelled the Jewish population to 670,000. On May 14 that year, the modern state of Israel declared its independence – fulfilling Biblical prophecy. The following year, the Jews numbered over 1,000,000. The figure kept rising. In late 2010, with a growth rate of 1.8% for the 7th consecutive year, the population of Israel (including Arabs) stood at 7,645,00065 – with over 40% (6 million plus) of the estimated 15 million Jews in the world. No less than 50,000 continue to arrive each year. Today, however, 71.7% of Israelis are native-born sabras, including 161,042 babies born in 2009.66
Restoration. The Lord had also sworn: I will also cause you to dwell in the cities, and the wastes shall be builded. And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by. And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, and are inhabited (Ezek 36:33-35, Amos 9:14, etc.).
The Jews built new homes and buildings outside the old walls of Jerusalem. Incredibly, the configurations of the new city followed the lines prophesied in Jeremiah 31:38-40!67 Along the Mediterranean coast, beaches became the streets of modern Tel Aviv.
Millions of trees were planted. The swamps of Galilee were drained to become tropical farms that made Israel the “California of the Middle East.” As the new trees grew, rainfall increased over 10% every decade (Joel 2:23; Isa 35:7).68 By the end of the 20th century, Israel had 350 million plus fully grown trees.69 More than 80% of Israel’s fruits and vegetables are exported to neighboring Arab and European nations (Isa 27:6). Israeli factories manufacture chemicals, fertilizer, processed food, textiles, paper, plastics, electronic and military equipment, scientific instruments. From just $6 million in 1948, exports have risen to over $80.5 billion in 2010, 35% of which are high tech and R&D products. Cut diamonds, a traditional industry, grew from $2.8 million to $8.9 billion in the same period. In all, Israeli exports multiplied by 13,400%!70
The dispersion and regathering of the Jews after some 1,800 years is Biblical prophecy fulfilled right before our parents’ and our very own eyes. It constitutes an astounding miracle that proves beyond any doubt that the Bible is truly the Word of an eternal and all-knowing God.

Messianic prophecies.
No prophecies presaged the coming of any of the founders of other religions in their holy books. On the other hand, hundreds of prophecies foreshadowed the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven of the Messiah (including His yet future Second Coming). Christ had been so clearly foretold in the Scriptures that the people expected Him long before He was born. Christ, unlike the founders of other religions, did not create a new calling for Himself. He came to assume a calling that had been described much earlier by the prophets.
Inventor-evangelist Martin Hunter observes that “Christ fulfilled 333 prophecies out of 333 prophecies in the Old Testament… According to the theory of probability in mathematics… Christ overcame mathematical odds of 1 over 84 as a fraction with 97 zeros then following that 84. That means it required odds of infinity… certifying that Jesus Christ is the authentic Son of God.”71 Let us take a look at a few of those 333 OT prophecies that the Messiah fulfilled in the NT:
From the tribe of Judah: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh (‘peace-maker’/’Prince of peace’) come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Gen 49:10/Matt 2:2; Heb 7:14).
From the family of David: “And when thy days be fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build an house for my name, and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom for ever” (2 Sam 7:12-13/Luke 1:32).
Born of a virgin: “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (‘God with us’)” (Isa 7:14/Matt 1:18).
Born in Bethlehem: “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” (Mic 5:2/Matt 2:1).
Sold for 30 pieces of silver: “And I said unto them, If ye think good, give me my price; and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver” (Zech 11:12/Matt 26:14-15).
Money paid for potter’s field: “And the LORD said unto me, Cast it unto the potter: a goodly price that I was prised at of them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the LORD” (Zech 11:13/Matt 27:5-7).
Nailed to the cross: “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet” (Ps 22:16/John 20:25; Luke 24:39).
Counted among criminals: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors” (Isa 53:12b/Matt 27:38).
Lots cast for His garments: “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture” (Ps 22:18/John 19:23-24a).
Gall and vinegar to drink: “They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink” (Ps 69:21/Matt 27:34).
Darkness at noon: “And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord GOD, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day” (Amos 8:9/Matt 27:45).
No bones broken: “He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken” (Ps 34:20; Ex 12:46b/John 19:33)
Buried in rich man’s tomb: “And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death” (Isa 53:9a/Matt 27:57-60a).
Raised from the dead: “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Ps 16:10/Luke 24:4-6a).
Incredibly, for every prophecy about Christ’s first advent, there are approximately eight more predicting His Second Coming. The Messianic prophecies yet to be fulfilled are those about the “Rapture” (catching up of the elect); His victory at the last great battle on earth at Armageddon; His reign as King of kings during the Millennium; His role in the Last Judgment and the Kingdom of God -- some 2,345 prophecies more (2,025 in the OT and 320 in the NT).72

Symbols and similes
Many times, Biblical prophecies are clothed in symbolic language – to conceal their meanings from the profane. The interpretive method Jewish sages, Bible scholars, mystics, and other researchers use is called “hermeneutics,” the science of explaining hidden meanings in Scripture.
As we know, no man can interpret prophecy on his own (2 Peter 1:20-21). That is probably why God placed many of the keys and clues to interpreting prophecy in the Scriptures themselves! In short, the Bible interprets itself.
Below are some of the most significant similes and metaphors in both the OT and NT, together with their meanings. Although they often have several meanings, this list is limited to the few prophetic ones:

Metaphors and meanings.
Beast: kingdom, government (Dan 7:3-7; Rev 13:1-18).
Blood: life, death (Lev 17:11; Deut 12:23: Isa 34:3; Ezek 14:19).
Cloud: multitude, angels (Ezek 38:9; Matt 24:30; Heb 12:1; etc.).
Dogs: wicked men (Ps 22:16; Matt 7:6; Rev 22:15; etc.).
Dragon: Satan (Rev 12:3-4,7-9,13-17; 13:2,4,11; 16:13; etc.).
Earth: mankind (Gen 6:11; etc.); desolate land (Rev 13:11).
Field: the world (Matt 13:38).
Fig tree: Israel (Jer 24:1; etc.; Nah 3:12; Matt 21:19; etc.).
Fire: destruction (Ps 18:8; etc.); Holy Spirit (Matt 3:11; etc.).
Fish: the Church, believers (Matt 13:47-48).
Flood: invaders (Isa 8:7-8; Jer 46:7; Dan 11:22, etc.).
Garments: salvation (Ecc 9:8; Isa 52:1; Luke 24:4; Rev 3:4; etc.).
Grass: people, mortality (Isa 40:6-7; Ps 103:14-15; 90:5-6).
Hail: God's wrath (Isa 28:2; Ezek 13:13; Hag 2:17; Rev 8:7; etc.).
Hand: labor, work (Prov 10:4; Ecc 9:10).
Head: mountain, kingdom (Dan 2:38-41; Rev 17:9).
Horn: king (Rev 17:12).
Lamp: guide (2 Sam 22:29; Ps 18:28; 119:105; Prov 6:23).
Light: truth, holiness (Rom 13:12; 2 Cor 4:6; Eph 5:14; 1 Peter 2:9).
Moon: idolatry (Deut 4:19; Job 31:26-28; etc.).
Mountain: kingdom (Isa 2:2; Jer 51:25; Zech 4:7; etc.).
Oil: God’s Name (Song 1:3); Spirit (1 Sam 10:1,6; Isa 61:1; etc.).
Rock/stone: God (Deut 32:4; Ps 18:2; etc.); Christ (1 Cor 10:4; Ps 118:22; Eph 2:20; 1 Pet 2:4-8, etc.).
Sea/waters: multitudes, nations (Rev 17:12).
Star: angel (Judg 5:20; Job 38:7; Ps 147:4; Rev 1:20; etc.).
Sun: glory (Ps 84:11; Matt 17:2; Rev 1:16; etc.).
Sword: war (Lev 26:25; etc.); Word of God (Eph 6:17; Heb 4:12).
Tree: enemy of Israel (Ezek 31:3,18; Dan 4:20-22).
Wilderness: place of refuge (Ex 15:22; Isa 35:1; Rev 12:14).
Wind/whirlwind: war (Jer 18:17; Dan 11:40; Amos 1:14).
Woman: church, religion (Jer 6:2; 2 Cor 11:2; Rev 17:5; etc.).

Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.
Let us examine one famous prophecy filled with symbols. Babylon’s king Nebuchadnezzar dreamt of a strange image: “This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth” (Dan 2:32-35).
Daniel, then a Jewish captive in Babylon, explained the meaning of the king’s dream (Dan 2:38-44). The first four parts of the image signify four successive kingdoms that subjugated the Jews, as history bears out. The “head of gold” stands for Nebuchadnezzar and his wealthy kingdom of Babylon. The “breast and arms of silver” mean the unified kingdoms of Media-Persia. The “belly and thighs of brass” correspond to Alexander’s homeland Macedonia and Greece, famous for its brass artifacts. The”legs of iron” symbolize Rome, which conquered the then known world with its iron implements of war; the two legs portending the empire’s later division into the Western and Eastern halves. The “feet, part of iron and part of clay” with their ten toes seem to be an end-time coalition of ten nations that once belonged to the Roman Empire, united with peoples denoted by clay. (These look like the ten kings in league with the Antichrist in Rev 17:12.) The “stone cut out without hands” is Christ, who will defeat the forces of Antichrist (“smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces”) at Armageddon. That “the wind carried them away” means war would expunge all these kingdoms. The eternal kingdom of God (“great mountain”) will then reign over the world (“filled the whole earth”).

Biblical “types”
Closely related to prophetic symbols are “types” in the Scriptures. Persons, objects, places, and incidents serve as prophetic models that foreshadow future events. Hundreds of “types” are in the stories of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joshua, Caleb, Job, Joseph, Ruth, David, Solomon, Elijah, Samuel, Samson, and many other Biblical personages, including objects and articles in the text of the Bible.

Abraham sacrificing Isaac.
A most detailed example of Biblical “typology” is when God tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac to Him: “And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of” (Gen 22:2). Abraham as a “type” personifies God, who sacrificed His Only Begotten Son, typified by Isaac, nearly two thousand years later at Golgotha.
“And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him” (Gen 22:3). The two young men represent two groups of spiritually saved people God will take with Him.
“Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.  And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you” (Gen 22:4-5). The “third day” means Christ would be crucified in the third millennium from God’s first covenant with Abraham. Abraham’s instruction for the young men to wait prophesies Christ’s return (Second Coming) to His waiting followers.
“And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together” (Gen 22:6). As Isaac carried the wood for the sacrifice up Mount Moriah, so would Christ later carry a wooden cross to Golgotha (the same hill?) to be crucified. The “knife” and the “fire” suggest the wars and destruction that God would inflict upon the Jews for rejecting and killing His Only Begotten Son.
“And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together” (Gen 22:7-8). Indeed, God Himself would provide the “lamb” for the offering – Christ, “the Lamb of God.”
“And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son” (Gen 22:9-10). Isaac’s quiet acquiescence prefigured Christ’s stoic acceptance of His death on the cross.
“And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son” (Gen 22:11-13). The thicket around the ram’s horns presaged the crown of thorns on Christ’s head. The ram that replaced Isaac was a “type” of the Lamb of God who substituted His life for sinful humanity. Isaac was spared from death on the third day, prophetic of Christ’s resurrection from the dead on the third day.

Objects and things.
On occasion, inanimate objects may prophetically represent persons, things, even units of time. Such is one prophecy of “types” in an incident that took place nearly 3,500 years ago: “And they commanded the people, saying, When ye see the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, and the priests the Levites bearing it, then ye shall remove from your place, and go after it. Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand cubits by measure: come not near unto it, that ye may know the way by which ye must go: for ye have not passed this way heretofore” (Josh 3:3-4).
The “ark of the covenant” is a “type” for Christ, whom the people must follow “two thousand cubits” behind. “Cubit” is a “type” for “year,” the veiled prophecy connoting that after 2,000 years faithful believers are to follow Christ to where He went (“ye have not passed this way heretofore”). Where? Paradise! Several other veiled prophecies in the Bible strongly suggest that the elect would go to meet Christ some 2,000 years after His ascension (Hos 6:2; Est 5:1; John 2:1; 2 Pet 3:8; etc.).

Prophetic Psalms
Editor-publisher J.R. Church (Prophecy in the News) revealed in his 1983 book Hidden Prophecies in the Psalms his startling discovery that the Psalms, besides poetry and wisdom, contain year-to-year messages to the Jews. He had realized that in the Psalms, the 19th book of the Bible, Psalm 1 is a prophecy for the year 1901 (19+1=1901), Psalm 2 for 1902, and so on. Each psalm prophesies events in the national life of the Jews or simply reflects their sentiments for a given year. Let us take a closer look at two of the most telling prophetic psalms.

Liberation of Jerusalem.
Psalm 17 seems to picture events in Jerusalem in late 1917, towards the end of World War I. “Keep me as the apple of Your eye; Hide me under the shadow of Your wings, From the wicked who oppress me, From my deadly enemies who surround me” (Ps 17:8-9, NKJV).
The Turks, who ruled over Jerusalem, were surrounded by the big guns of the British forces under Gen. Allenby. It looked like most of the holy places in the Holy City would be destroyed. Asking London for instructions, Allenby received a verse from the Bible: “As birds flying, so will the LORD of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending also he will deliver it; and passing over he will preserve it” (Isa 31:5). The general had the verse read to his troops in the hills around Jerusalem.
On Dec. 10, Allenby had all available aircraft do a reconnaissance flight over Jerusalem. The Turks, many of whom had never seen a plane before, were terrified by the flying machines, which dropped a note from General Allenby demanding their surrender. The Turks were further frightened by the name Allenby; they thought they were being asked to give up by Allah-beh, the son of God! (beh is Arabic for “son.”) The Turks abandoned the city without firing a single shot.73,74 Quite literally, God saved Jerusalem from destruction, ”under the shadow of Your wings” – the wings of the British planes, as prophesied in Psalm 17.

Rebirth of Israel.
The rebirth of Israel in 1948 – a major world event of the 20th century – is in Psalm 48:4-8. (Note the numbers.)
On May 14, 1948, as the British mandate over Palestine expired at midnight, the Jews unilaterally declared an independent state of Israel. From here on, Psalm 48:4-8 reads like a newspaper report: “When the kings joined forces, when they advanced together…” (Ps 48:4). Within 24 hours, neighboring Arab countries -- Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Transjordan, (three of them ruled by kings) – with Palestinian guerillas, attacked the tiny newly born state.
“…they saw [her] and were astounded; they fled in terror” (Ps 48:5, NIV). One interesting anecdote tells of how the ragtag, ill-equipped Israeli fighters overcame the numerically superior and heavily equipped Arab forces. At one point, when the odds looked formidable, the Israelis gathered all available motor vehicles – cars, taxis, buses – and removed the exhaust manifolds that kept the engines quiet. At dusk, they drove their clattering vehicles toward the enemy lines. In the half-dark, the Arabs thought the Israelis had launched a massive armored attack and fled, abandoning their modern tanks.
“Trembling seized them there, pain like that of a woman in labor” (Ps 48:6, NIV). The verse speaks of childbirth -- the rebirth of Israel.
“You destroyed them like ships of Tarshish shattered by an east wind” (Ps 48:7, NIV). “Tarshish” means the lands at and beyond the western end of the Mediterranean Sea: the British Isles among them. The “ships” were thus those of the Royal Navy, which transported British troops to war zones. The British, their resolve broken by years of war and Arab-Jewish terrorist activities (“shattered by an east wind”), had earlier turned over the Palestine problem to the United Nations in 1947 and preferred not to intervene in the new conflict.
“As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the LORD Almighty, in the city of our God: God makes her secure forever” (Ps 48:8, NIV). The verse affirms the permanent establishment of the state of Israel, with the holy city of Jerusalem as its eternal capital.

Fig tree prophecies
The number “48” seems to be a Biblical milestone not only in the OT, but also in the NT, wherein Christ strangely demonstrated the likeness of Israel to a fig tree: “Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away” (Matt 21:18-19).
The fig tree was like Israel, which produced no fruit for the Messiah. Apart from a little over a hundred disciples, the Jews as a nation rejected Christ. Thus, the Jews, like the accursed fig tree, were destined to wither away as a people. It came to pass in 70 A.D. and 135 A.D. in the hands of the rampaging Roman legions.
In three gospels, Christ spoke metaphorically of the rebirth of Israel – as a fig tree coming back to life with new leaves: “Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh” (Matt 24:32; Mark 13:28; Luke 21:29). If we add the chapter and verses numbers, divide the sums by 3 to get the averages, round them up, then add the quotients, the prophetic number “48” comes up again!

Book
Chapter

Verse

Total
Matthew
24
:
32


Mark
13
:
28


Luke
21
:
29



58

89


Divide by:
3

3



19*
+
29*
=
48
*(Rounded)






Biblical landmark.
Furthermore, the significance of the number “48” is manifest not only in the book of Psalms and the Gospels, but is also apparently a landmark for the entire Bible itself. 
The Open Scroll writer-publisher Bob Schlenker points out that the book of Psalms is the 19th book from the beginning of the Bible, Genesis. Counting backward from the last book of the Bible, Revelation, we find that Psalms is the 48th book. Put the two numbers together (19+48), and we get “1948” – the year the nation of Israel was reborn!

The Bible Code
Scholars, mathematicians, and computer scientists are discovering hidden messages in the Bible that leave them stunned. Secret words, phrases, and even whole sentences appear to be encoded in the original Hebrew text of the Scriptures. The codes can be read by taking letters at regular intervals: every 7th letter, 49th, 153rd, 862nd, name it. Researchers call the arrangement “Equidistant Letter Sequencing” (ELS).

Centuries-old technique.
Jewish mystics are known to have painstakingly extracted messages  encrypted in the Torah letter-by-letter since the 12th century. Rabbi Moses Cordevaro wrote in the 16th century: “The secrets of the Torah are revealed… in the skipping of the letters.”75
Early in the 20th century, as a 13-year-old lad in Slovakia, Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, guided by a 13th-century book by Rabbeynu Bachayah ben Asher of Saragossa, Spain, began looking for words hidden in the Hebrew Scriptures. He found that from the first letter tav (t, “T”) in Genesis, thence every 49th letter, Torah (“TORH,“ hrwt) is spelled out. In Exodus, the 2nd book of the Bible, Torah is again found at the same interval. The phenomenon does not repeat in Leviticus, the 3rd book, but instead the Name of God (“YHWH,” hwhy) appears every 7th letter. In Numbers and Deuteronomy, the 4th and 5th books, Torah appears again, although spelled backwards (“HROT,” twrh).76 It is as though the Torahs in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th books, two on each side, are paying homage to the Name of God in the 3rd and middle book (TORH > TORH > YHWH < HROT < HROT)!76
The 18th century Gaon (Genius) of Vilna, Lithuania (Eliyyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman), regarded as a master of the code, taught: “The rule is that all that was, is, and will be unto the end of time is included in the Torah, from the first word to the last word. And not merely in a general sense, but as to the details of every species and each one individually, and details of details that happened to him from the day of his birth until his end.”77 That means everything and everyone, even you and I, are secretly encoded in the first five books of the Bible!

Faster with computers.
The advent of computers has exponentially expedited the search for encoded words in the Bible. A computer program capable of millions of calculations per second can examine millions of possible combinations of the 304,805 Hebrew characters of the Torah in minutes, something no man can accomplish manually even in a lifetime.
The Torah codes first attracted widespread attention in August 1994 with the article “Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis” by Israeli scientists Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg in the Statistical Science Journal. Six years earlier, the authors had submitted the work featuring the names of 34 prominent 9th-18th century Jewish men, encoded in the Torah with their respective dates of birth or death. The editors were incredulous and demanded that the authors add 32 more Jews from the same period. The scientists complied and came up with the same results -- for a total of 66 Jewish personages, complete with their dates of birth or death!78 The editors subjected the data and methodology to rigorous and repeated peer reviews and analyses, and eventually printed the article. The authors ended their article with these words: “We conclude that the proximity of ELS’s with related meanings in the Book of Genesis is not due to chance.”79

Bible Code: the book.
Michael Drosnin, a former reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, following interviews with Eliyahu Rips, conducted his own computer search and in early 1997 came out with a book, The Bible Code, which became an instant best-seller. The popularity of the book has led countless other investigators of diverse backgrounds to join the hunt for hidden messages in the Scriptures.
To date, thousands of encrypted messages have been brought to light, about such varied topics as:  World Wars I and II; Hitler and the Holocaust; the atomic bomb; the Lincoln, Gandhi, Kennedy, Sadat, Rabin assassinations; Apollo moon-landing; Watergate and Nixon; Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War; the American Revolution; the Napoleonic wars; Shakespeare; Bach, Mozart, Beethoven; Rembrandt, Picasso; Edison, Marconi, the Wright brothers; Newton, Einstein; terrorist activities; and untold others.
Rips speculates: “Theoretically, there is no limit to the amount of information that could be encoded… In the end, the amount of information is incalculable, and probably infinite.”80

Unbiblical codes.
Equidistantly spelled words have also been found in other lengthy texts, such as the Hebrew translations of War and Peace, Moby Dick, the penal code. And even in short ones: “Rabin” is seen in the software license on envelopes of Microsoft software products.81
However, the words found in secular works are scattered in no particular order, whereas in the Torah the words are clustered. It is only in the Bible codes that related words and phrases about the same topics are grouped together in close proximity, showing coherent relationships.
God’s own code?
Some people say the Bible Code is the discovery of the millennium. The system is so simple, yet so comprehensive that it is beyond Moses, or any man, no matter how intelligent, to have woven hidden messages about the future into the narrative text of the Torah. Investigator Jeffrey Satinover remarks, “The code points to one thing and one thing only: the authorship of a document in which it is found.”82 The Code looks like God's own handiwork – undeniable proof that the Creator is truly the Author of the Bible.
Rips observes that ELS “is only the first, crudest level of the Bible code… It is almost certainly more levels deep, but we do not yet have a powerful enough mathematical model to reach it… It is probably less like a crossword puzzle, and more like a hologram. We are only looking at two-dimensional arrays, and we probably should be looking at three dimensions, but we don’t know how to.”83
Ancient Jewish tradition tells of seventy gates of wisdom or methods of deciphering the Torah. The Bible Code, according to Sefer HaZohar (“Book of Splendor”), is only one of those – in fact, the fiftieth.84
Unpredictable future.
The Bible Code cannot be used for predicting the future. Doron Witztum, creator of the ELS mathematical model, says: “It is impossible to use Torah codes to predict the future.” Rips adds: “All attempts to extract messages from Torah codes or to make predictions on them are futile and are of no value.”85
For instance, Drosnin in his 1997 book showed two future years linked to an atomic holocaust: 2000 and 2006. There were jitters when the second intifada or Palestinian revolt erupted in 2000. Next, heavy fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip broke out in 2006. Yet, none of these sparked the much-dreaded nuclear war. Drosnin notes: “The Bible Code may be a set of probabilities. Every future event appears to be encoded with at least two probabilities.”86 One message he found declares, “Five roads, five futures.”87 He concludes: “There are many possible futures, and the Bible Code can reveal each one of them. It is up for us to choose.”88
Drosnin’s remark echoes ancient Jewish wisdom. “Everything is foreseen, but freedom of action is given,” thus intones the Talmud, the medieval commentary on the Torah.

Altered letter spacing
The original script of the Hebrew Scriptures consisted mostly of consonants – with no vowel markers, upper case (capital) or lower case (small) letters, punctuation marks, and even spaces between words. The reader himself had to mentally provide the missing indicators to make sense of the text. According to mystical tradition, secret messages can be brought to light by altering the spaces between the letters of the text.

Rabin assassination.
On Nov. 4, 1995, as part of their annual Torah reading schedule, Jews in their synagogues around the globe read Genesis 15:17-18, wherein God gave Abraham and his descendants all the land from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in modern Iraq. God and Abraham sealed their covenant or agreement with the sacrifice of several animals cut into pieces: “And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces. In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.”
When the spaces between the letters in the passage are altered every second or third letter, “lamp that passed between those pieces” can be read as “A fire, an evil fire into Rabin, decreed by God.”
In the evening of that fateful day, a gunman assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The Jewish leader was killed at night -- “when the sun went down, and it was dark”. Prophecy analyst Bob Schlenker noted that the mention of the word “fire” twice foretold the two bullets that were fired into Rabin.89
The tragedy seems to have stemmed from the “land-for-peace” deal Rabin forged with then U.S. President Bill Clinton and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Sept. 13, 1993. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) would recognize the state of Israel in return for the creation of autonomous Palestinian enclaves within Israel. The pact divided Israel: some hailed Rabin as a peacemaker, others labeled him a traitor for handing over parts of their God-given land to the enemy.

Watergate and Nixon.
Another example of a hidden prophecy found through altered letter-spacing is the infamous Watergate scandal involving then U.S. President Richard Nixon. The encrypted prediction is in Numbers 3:24“And the chief of the house of the father of the Gershonites shall be Eliasaph the son of Lael.”
According to Drosnin, in the entire Bible the word “Watergate” in Hebrew characters can be found only in this passage. When the spacing is rearranged between the letters of the Hebrew words “And the chief of the house of the father of the Gershonites…” the clause can be read in English as: “President, but he was kicked out.”90

Biblical numerics
Many believe that the study of symbolic or mystical use of numbers originated with the Jews. Some experts on Bible numerics note that one out of every five verses in the Scriptures contains a number.91 Christ Himself spoke of numbers a number of times. For instance… “But the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt 10:30).
Greek philosopher-mathematician Pythagoras (ca. 580-500 B.C.) adopted the Jewish tradition to explain the origin and phenomena of the universe.92 He and his followers taught that numbers were the essence of all things – the universe was built on and could be explained by numbers. (Incidentally, that is exactly what theoretical physicists are doing today.)
In the Bible, numbers have spiritual meanings attached to them. Multiples – by doubling, tripling, squaring, etc. – usually have the same meanings of the cardinal numbers, but intensified.93

Meanings of numbers.  
Let us look at the meanings of some numbers in the Bible. Caution: Biblical numerics should not be confused with occult numerology, a form of divination that is abominable to God (Deut 18:10-12).
1 – “oneness, beginning”: one God; one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism; creation; Only Begotten Son; one lost sheep; etc. 
2 – “division/opposition”: heaven and earth; light and darkness; man and woman; good and evil; heaven and hell; Old and New Testaments.
3 -- “completeness”: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Christ is the way, the truth, and the life; who is, was, and is to come; crucifixion in the third hour: three hours of darkness; resurrection on the third day; etc.
4 -- “the world”: north, south, east, west; spring, summer, fall, winter; four rivers in Eden;. clean animals for sacrifice (bullock, sheep, goat, turtledove); four gospel portrayal of Christ (king, servant, man, God); four soils (wayside, stony places, thorns, good ground); peoples, kindreds, tongues, nations; four horsemen; etc.
5 -- “grace of God”: for atonement of sin (burnt offering, peace offering, sin offering, trespass offering, meat offering); five ministries for God’s grace (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers); etc.
6 -- “man/weakness”: man created on sixth day; six days of work; the land planted for six years; Hebrew slaves served for six years; etc.
7 -- “fullness/perfection”: the Creation week; seven Spirits of God; seven colors of the rainbow; seven holy days; seven branches of the lampstand; seven gifts of the Spirit; seven last years before the end; etc.
8 -- “new beginning”: eight persons in Noah’s Ark; male infants circumcised on the eighth day; Christ resurrected on the eighth day (first day of the following week); in music, eighth note begins new octave, etc.
9 – “finality/fruition”: nine fruits of the Spirit; nine gifts of the Spirit; nine beatitudes; Israel ate of the new harvest in the ninth year; etc.
10 – “law/responsibility”: ten patriarchs before the Flood (Adam to Noah); Ten Commandments; tithe is one-tenth of a man’s increase; high priest uttered God’s Name ten times on Day of Atonement; ten virgins; the universe was created with ten words, according to the rabbis;94 etc.
12 – “organizational completion”: twelve months in a year; twelve signs of the Mazzaroth (Zodiac); twelve tribes of Israel; twelve judges who ruled Israel; twelve apostles; twelve foundations and twelve gates of New Jerusalem; twelve kinds of fruit of the tree of life; etc.
13 – “disobedience”: man’s life span decreased to 1/13th (900+ to 70 years) after the Flood; Nimrod, who defied God, was 13th man from Ham, son of Noah; “dragon” is found 13 times in Revelation; the 13th sin of Israel in the Exodus was their refusal to possess the land; etc.
14 – “salvation”: events on the 14th day of the month -- God made His covenant with Abraham; the Passover lamb that saved the Israelites from the last plague in Egypt was killed; Christ was crucified; Paul and others on the ship were saved from the storm; etc.
17 – “triumph”: Noah’s Ark landed in the mountains of Ararat and the Israelites crossed the Red Sea on the 17th day; Jacob lost his 17-year-old son Joseph, who later cared for him 17 years in Egypt; etc.
18 – “oppression”: years Israelites served Moab and Israel oppressed by the Philistines and Ammonites; sum of the number of the beast (6+6+6), who will oppress the saints at the time of the end; etc.
24 – “priesthood”: David divided priesthood among 24 descendants of Aaron; 24 elders around God’s throne; Christ, as High Priest in heaven, will do 24 things for the saints (Ps 72 = 24 x 3); etc.
40 – “trials/testing”: 40 days and nights of rain at the start of the Flood; Moses spent 40 years in Egypt, 40 in Midian, and 40 in the wilderness; he was 40 days with God on Mt. Sinai; God gave Nineveh 40 days to repent; the devil tempted Christ 40 days; etc.  
42 – “the coming of Christ”: 42 generations from Abraham to Christ;  the beast will continue in power 42 months; Jerusalem will be trodden by Gentiles 42 months; the “woman,” (remnant of Israel) will hide from the dragon 1,260 days or 42 months; the end will come after “a time, times, and an half” (3-1/2 years or 42 months); etc.
70 – “probation”: average life span of man is 70 years; Israel’s council of 70 elders since Moses; Jews captive in Babylon for 70 years; Jews given 70 “weeks” of years to restore relationship with God; etc.

Biblical alphanumerics
Interestingly, the Hebrew letters were first used as numerals before they were used to sound words. Sages and mystics have gained new insights on the holy Scriptures from the numerical values of the letters. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, most of which are consonants. The first nine letters have values of 1 to 9, the next nine 10 to 90, and the last four 100 to 400. (See Hebrew alphabet, with symbols and values, in the Appendix.) Later, when sofits or word-ending forms for five letters came into use, the Hebrew numerals increased from 22 to 27 characters, with the five new letter-numbers having values of 500 to 900.
Similarly, the Greeks and the Romans used the characters of their alphabets for both numbers and letters. The Romans, however, used only six letters: I, V, X, L, C, and D for 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 and 500, respectively. (Incidentally, the six letter-numbers add up to 666.) The use of M for 1,000 came much later.

Exegetical methods.
Jewish mystics and rabbis use four major methods of exegesis or interpretation of the numerical values of the Hebrew Scriptures95:
1. Gematria. A corruption of Greek geometria or grammateia, this entails the substitution of numbers for letters. The values of letters in a word are added up to arrive at a total with a meaning.96
Hebrew words with the same values are considered identical to each other. For instance, in the mystical term for God, Ein Sof, Ein has a total of 61 (1+10+50), which is also the value of Adon (1+4+6+50), "Lord” or “Master.” Sof (60+6+80) has a value of 146, the selfsame total of Olam (6+30+70+40), “world” or “universe.” Thus, Ein Sof (“Without End”) is synonymous to Adon Olam ("Lord of the World” or “Master of the Universe”)! In addition, Ein Sof refers to God's “light.” Ein Sof has a total of 207 (61+146), which is also the numerical value of Ohr (1+6+200=207), which means "light."
In another example, the coming of the Messiah in Genesis 49:10 is cryptically phrased as “Shiloh come” (yabo Shiloh), with a gematria of 358. The Hebrew word for Messiah (Mashiach) has the same value (358). Shiloh, therefore, refers to no one else but the Messiah. 
In this connection, the name “Jesus” in Greek, Ihsous (“Iesous”), has a gematria of “888” (10+8+200+70+400+200). This inevitably brings to mind the number of the name of the end-time “beast” (the so-called “Antichrist”) in Revelation 13:18, which is “666.”
Gematria has seven variations of increasing complexity:
Ragil, the simplest, is what we have just discussed, the substitution of numbers for each of the letters.
Kolel is basically ragil, plus the number of letters in a word.
Katan means “small” or reduced value -- all tens and hundreds are added until they are reduced to a single digit (1-9).
Hakadmi consists of the ragil values, with the value of each preceding letter added.
Hameruba haklali means the total value of a word squared.
Hameruba haperati, a more complex variant of hameruba haklali, is the sum of the squares of each individual letter.
Miluy means the sum of the values of the names of each letter that forms part of the word (also called “filling”).
2. Notarikon involves acronyms in two ways. In the first, each letter in a word is taken as the initial letter of another word, so a word can be interpreted as a sentence. An example is the word Bereshith (“In the beginning”). From every letter (tyvarb, b-r-‘-sh-y-t) a new word is created, thus forming Bereshith Ra Elohim Sheyequebelo Israel Torah (“In the beginning God saw that Israel would accept the law”).
The second kind is the reverse of the first: the initial, or sometimes final, letters of words in a sentence are taken to form just one word.
3. Timurah means the substitution of a letter for another. Following certain special rules, each letter is replaced with another that follows or precedes it in the Hebrew alphabet, thus forming an entirely new word.
A variation of timurah is atbah, permutation of letters, wherein the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet is replaced by the last, the second letter is replaced by the second to the last, and so on. 
4. Tziru is a more complicated process. It entails the transposition or changing the places of the letters in the Hebrew words of the Torah.

The power of God.
Mystics believe that squaring a key number is specially meaningful. The Hebrew word for God, El (la), has a value of 31 (1+30). The first chapter of the Bible has 31 verses. The number 31 squared produces 961 – a number considered representing the power of God.
The letter h (hey. “H,” 5) is at times used as a single-letter Name for God. God added hey to the names Abram and Sarai. Their new names, taken together with that of their son Isaac, who had been miraculously given to them by God in their old age, point to the power of God:
AbraHam
(1+2+200+5+40)
=
248

SaraH
(300+200+5)
=
505

Isaac
(10+90+8+100)
=
208




961
(Power of God)
_______________
54
“The Tangled Tether,” Personal Update, April 2005, pp. 14-15
55
Jeffrey Satinover, Cracking the Bible Code, 1997, p. 250
56
Wilbur Smith, The Incomparable Book, 1961, pp. 9-10
57
J. Barton Payne, Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy; cited by Missler, op. cit., p. 219
58
Norman Geisler and William Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, 1986, p. 13
59
Ibid.
60
Gordon Lindsay, Signs of the Soon Coming of Christ, p. 15
61
David Allen Lewis, “The Miraculous Preservation of the Jews, People of the Bible,” Mysteries of the Bible Now Revealed, 1999, p. 67
62
Innocents Abroad, Vol. II, p. 234; quoted by David Allen Lewis, Prophecy 2000, 1990, pp. 121-123
63
Howard Fast, The Jews – Story of a People, 1968, p. 366
64
J.R. Church, “After Centuries of Exile, They Came Home!,” Prophecy in the News, October 2008, p. 6ff.
65
out-of-zion.com, Internet
66
Ibid.
67
Lindsay, op. cit., p. 14
68
Jeffrey, op. cit., p. 188
69
Lewis, op. cit., p. 68
70
Israel at 63: An Export Superpower,” Petah Tikvah, July-Sept. 2011, p. 58
71
Martin Hunter, “The Bible Is the Word of God,” Letters to the Editor, December 22, 1995, National Institute for Inventors, tract
72
Missler, op. cit., pp. 47, 476
73
Lindsay, op. cit., pp. 12-13 
74
J.R. Church, Hidden Prophecies in the Psalms, 1986, pp. 67-69
75
Quoted by Missler, op. cit., p. 133
76
Missler, op. cit., pp. 126-128
77
Michael Drosnin, The Bible Code, 1997, p. 19
78
Ibid.
79
Quoted by Missler, op. cit., p. 139
80
Drosnin, op. cit., pp. 44-45
81
Missler, op. cit., p. 145
82
Satinover, op. cit., p. 243
83
Drosnin, loc. cit.
84
John Weldon, Decoding the Bible Code, 1998, p. 100
85
Op. cit., p. 133
86
Drosnin, op. cit., p. 102
87
Op. cit., p. 163
88
Op. cit., p. 165 
89
Bob Schlenker, The Open Scroll, Vol. 2, No. 1
90
Drosnin, op. cit., pp. 218-219
91
Ed Vallowe, Biblical Mathematics, 1998, Foreword
92
Origen, Against Celsus, Book I, Chap. XV; cited in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1952, p. 402; cited by Missler, op. cit., p. 295
93
Vallowe, loc. cit.
94
Numbers, International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, 1996
95
Weldon, op. cit., p., 40
96
Gematria, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition

(Excerpted from Chapter 2, Secrets in Scriptures, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)