Dear friends:

Below is Part 3 of my series, "The Authority of the Bible," taken from my recent book, "The Top Ten Mysteries of the Bible (PublishAmerica, 2006).

Jim
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Scientific proof of the Bible’s truth?
 

The Bible does not claim to be a science book, yet it contains scientific truth, revealed supernaturally to its writers centuries before modern science discovered those truths. 
 
For example, only in relative recent years has science understood the cycles of water, how it evaporates, then collects in the clouds, then comes back to earth as rain or snow.  However, God revealed this thousands of years ago in Job 36:27-28:

He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams; the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on mankind.

Another example is the biblical revelation that the earth is round, and not flat, as believed until recent history.  Some 2,700 years ago, Isaiah wrote, referring to God:

He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth.

   Another example is the actual life of our physical being in our blood:  

For the life of a creature is in the blood.

  When the Bible does address a scientific matter that may seem contrary to today’s understanding, it would be wise to believe it.  A contemporary example is the theory of evolution -- that man evolved from some prehistoric, random collision of molecules, then apes -- which even contradicts known scientific principles and the fossil record, but yet is foolishly taught as truth in our educational systems by those who do not want to acknowledge a moral God to whom they are accountable. 
 
As today’s children are taught that they descended from sea slime, then monkeys, and that life has no meaning, is it any wonder that many of them have no respect for life, either in the womb or in the streets, or even their own, as teenage suicide rates have skyrocketed in recent years? 
 
A recent study showed that more teenagers and young adults died of suicide than from other major diseases combined.  Society is paying a horrific price for rejecting God and His Word.
 
I have seen the actual statistical charts on this and other social breakdowns and, amazingly, the trend lines began to dramatically spike upward in the year 1962.  What could have happened in 1962?  That happened to be the year the U. S. Supreme Court declared God unconstitutional, and that He had no place in our public schools.  Violating two centuries of legal precedent and tradition, the Court delivered, with Engel v. Vitale, a ruling separating Christian principles from education for the first time in history, removing prayer from our schools.  The prayer that caused the great controversy was a simple, nonsectarian, 22 word prayer.  Take a look at it and consider what this nation has lost since its words were declared illegal and banned: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on thee and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.” 
 
America, and the world, desperately need an answer to that missing prayer!
 
The scientist Isaac Newton and the Bible.  Previously, we mentioned the brilliant Sir Isaac Newton, called by some the greatest scientist who ever lived.  Scientist Dr. Arthur B. Robinson wrote:  

Isaac Newton believed that the Bible is literally true in every respect.  Throughout his life, he continually tested Biblical truth against the physical truths of experimental and theoretical science.  He never observed a contradiction.  In fact, he viewed his own scientific work as a method by which to reinforce belief in Biblical truth.

Some who have studied his life claim that Newton held unorthodox views of Bible doctrine.  The matter is complex and cannot be explored or resolved in this small space; however, the claim has been disputed by astronomer Dr. James N. Hanson, who studied Newton’s works extensively and concluded:

In my reading of what Newton himself wrote, and by analyzing the claims of his biographer detractors, I find Newton to be a Bible-believing Christian who would be comfortable attending my small, semi-rural, blue-collar Baptist church.

Mathematical proof of the Bible’s truth?

 
Now here’s an intriguing mystery for you!
 
Possible mathematical proof of divine inspiration is one of the most mysterious subjects.  The field needs much more research and previous research needs recognition.  However, beginning at least as early as the 1,800s and through today, mathematically-gifted people have made exhaustive studies in the original Hebrew and Greek languages of the Bible manuscripts.  These researchers claim that results prove that the writings had to come from an omniscient Mind. 
 
One person who studied this phenomenon was a Russian immigrant and Harvard graduate, Dr. Ivan Panin, who spent 50 years and accumulated 43,000 pages of notes on the subject before he died in 1942.  A more recently published work on the subject is Theomatics, by Jerry Lucas and Del Washburn.
 
In both Hebrew and Greek, numbers are not separate characters but are represented by letters of the alphabet.  For example, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, and the first letter of the Greek alphabet, alpha are also the number one in both languages.  Panin and others have taken the original Bible manuscripts and have assigned the appropriate numerical value to each letter.  Then they looked for numerical patterns.  The results they report are mind-boggling­patterns of numbers that could not have been done by humans, and probability theory analysis shows such an elaborate accident as totally impossible.  For example, in just the first verse of the Bible, Panin found 30 different patterns of the number seven.  In English, this verse has ten words, but in the original Hebrew it has only seven.  The seven words have exactly 28 (4 X 7) letters.  The nouns in the sentence add to a combined 777 (111 X 7).  The two objects of the verb both have seven letters, and so on.  The chance of 30 combinations of seven in a seven-word sentence happening accidentally is described as 1 in 33,000,000,000,000! 
 
Lucas, a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, and Washburn report similar and numerous examples in the Greek New Testament manuscripts, and their book includes a 79-page chapter on just their statistical and probability methodology to satisfy sincere and serious doubters.  They state unequivocally that their study “scientifically proves that God wrote the Bible.”
 
Such patterns as discovered by Panin, Lucas, Washburn and others are said to appear throughout both the Old and New Testaments and reportedly have not been found in any other writing anywhere.  This is not numerology, an occult practice, but simply seeking the numerical equivalents of the letters that God put in His Word.
 
Surprise discovery in Israel.  In a startling announcement carried by the Associated Press, researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology have discovered a similar, but different, phenomenon.  Using computer analysis of the first five books of the Bible, or Jewish Torah, they have discovered odd patterns of hidden words with coded intervals, called “equidistant letter spacing” (ELS).  For example, in the Book of Genesis, the Hebrew word “Torah” (Law) is found repeated by letters at 50-character intervals and “Elohim” (God) at 26-character intervals.  The word “holocaust” is reportedly found at 50-character intervals in Deuteronomy, a book that predicts great future persecution for the Israelite people (chapters 28-31).  It would have been impossible for a mortal to have done this, and statistically such an accident would have been impossible, the researchers say.  “We need a non-rational explanation.  And ours is that (it) was written by God through the hand of Moses,” says computer expert, Menachem Wiener, of the Institute.
 
In all of this, it appears that the omniscient Creator left a most unusual and persuasive signature on His Word.  It makes the apostle Paul’s statement even more graphic and awesome:  

All Scripture is God-breathed….

Is the Bible trustworthy?  We have not even mentioned the reality of its truths that have been experienced by hundreds of millions of people over the centuries.  But the collective evidence that we have included overwhelmingly supports the fact that the Bible is God’s unique and, as it claims, exclusive and totally reliable message to the human race.  We must not ignore it.

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To be continued.  Next: Conclusions, and Understanding the Bible.