(Ver 1.1)  Today I’m going talk about a subject that I have taught before.  This is a very important subject found in the Bible and it helps us to explain many of the challenges we are faced with in the church today.   This subject helps us to understand why there are literally thousands of church denominations in the world and why some believe so radically different than others.  So today I am going to talk more about the hidden mysteries of the Word of God.  Do you like to solve puzzles?  To me the more difficult the challenge the more interested I am in trying to solve it.  This doesn’t mean that I am the most intelligent or the highest I.Q. person in the world; I just like to solve problems.  But, maybe that is just me as a problem solver type personality that comes from my computer programming experiences.  As a computer programmer, I was constantly challenged with difficult problems to come up with solutions for writing computer programs.  If you did not know it, computer programming is simply a computer programmer’s attempt to solve a very specific definable and repeatable problem.  Sometimes we are creating new solutions and sometimes we are just inventing fixes for existing older problems.  Problem solving is a Godly principle that makes humans vastly different from the rest of creation.  Humans generally want to learn and are curious to want to know things and how they work.  People also generally like a challenge and whether it is just doing a simple puzzle or solving a complex riddle we like the sense of accomplishment that comes with solving these types of enigmas.   Did you know that God is a problem solver?   If we are made in the image and likeness of God then we have His problem solving ability built within us in a lesser degree.

Problem solving can either be positive or negative.  If you create a code system it is different than if you figure out how to break the code.  However, both of these actions are creative problem solving abilities from a different perspective.  You can see this in a computer hacker’s mentality.  People are constantly trying to invent a new more complex code but, that just becomes a greater challenge for someone else to try to break into it.  So let’s shift gears and talk about the Bible code system.  God has actually come up with an ingenious system of message hiding in a plainly written word arrangement.  I believe this was a demonstration of His ability to create an ultimate encoded word system that hides many spiritual truths using natural ideas, words, symbols, types and terms in the Bible.

An enigma is of course a strange word that some may not understand what it means.  It means a perplexing or mysterious coded puzzle; something that is difficult to understand and almost impossible to explain on the surface.   Did you know this is how God designed and wrote the Bible?  God purposely designed the words in the Bible to hide a vast amount of spiritual information that we in the church still fight over daily trying to figure out what they all mean.  Why do we fight over this information so much?  It is primarily because too many men and women want to take natural things spoken of and try to interpret these words with their own natural human understanding.  This method will not work and will only result in confusion since God is not writing at a man’s natural level.  I guess I should rephrase that statement, I believe that God is writing about highly complex spiritual things at the level that a natural man cannot understand.

I believe that natural people do not understand spiritual things until their spiritual eyes of their understanding have been opened to see it by the Spirit of God.  This is one of God’s guarantees of making His Word known at the exact right time that He wants it to be known.  Did you know that God has thrown down a challenge for all humans on the earth?  I guess technically it is not a challenge to every human, only those who want to know the truth.  There are many, many people in the earth who are not interested in the truth; they are too consumed with their version of reality to care about what is really true.  So you must decide today which category of people you fall into.  Are you one that wants to know the truth?  If so then here is God’s challenge to us in this verse:

Pro 25:2  It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.

You can clearly see that God has purposely hidden and concealed information in the Bible for us to find before He comes back to the earth.  Are you diligently looking for it already?  What does it mean to “search out a matter”?  It means you have to “WORK” to find it.  It also means it is not easily found.  It also means you don’t know it already.  Uh oh?  That goes over really big with a lot of religious theologians who think their doctorate degrees give them an advantage over the rest of humans.

I believe these concepts of God hiding information in the Bible for us to find with all of my heart.  Jesus when He walked the face of the planet close to 2000 years ago told us that if we would continue to study the Word of God that we would eventually come to know this truth that God has hidden for us (John 8:32).  Verses like these two that I just mentioned tell me that we do not know all of the things that God has hidden yet.  Here is another statement that Jesus made that had direct bearing on our subject today:

Luk 8:17  For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.

You can clearly see that Jesus is speaking of hidden and concealed secret heavenly information.  This has to be valuable spiritual knowledge for us to know before we go to be with the Lord.  This has to be something that will help us now in our spiritual battle against Satan.  You may recall that I did a blog on “Understanding Spiritual Warfare”.  In this lesson I told you that the battle was over the Word of God.   Satan is doing everything that he can to keep you from knowing what God wants you to find out.  Satan thinks if he can stop you from finding the truth, he has a chance of survival and I think that is a partial truth.  Fortunately for us we have God on our side who is our guide and teacher, so we cannot fail.  Here in Luke 8:17 Jesus said everything that God has concealed will be made known.  The deep spiritual secrets of God will be revealed so that we can understand them.  I strongly believe that the time is very short for us to find these hidden truths but, that God is also doing things in the earth to help us to see and know these hidden truths, like the invention of computers.  I am convinced that computers are a tool given to us by God for His good and His purpose of learning and spreading the truth to the world.

When I was a computer programmer many years ago I remember a time that I was faced with a difficult challenge.  It seems one of our system’s programs was missing the source code and therefore we could not make any significant changes to this program.  You might not understand computer programming, you always first start coding and create a source language file and this is compiled into the machine’s object language code and this is what the computer uses to execute the instructions that you wrote it to do.  Programmers never write programs using the machine’s language anymore like they did with very early computers.  Today’s computer programming languages are much higher level than machine language.  A single line of program code can be compiled into a whole bunch of machine instructions.  Back to my story, we lost the source code to a key part of our system.  But we were fine without the source code as long as we did not want to make any major modifications to the programmed operations that we previously used to create the executable.  I’m going to show my age a little bit here and tell you we use to do something called “ZAP” the object code to make minor modifications to it.  You could change the machine’s operation by changing instructions or addresses or eliminating the instructions all together with NO OPERATION replacement codes.  So I would do this to our IBM main frame operating system so that it would not roll over the date when midnight came along, for example.  You see IBM didn’t give us their source code so if we wanted to change it from rolling over the date we had to change the executable machine codes and that is what I did.  It amazes me what we could get away with back then.  If auditors would have been smart enough to understand the power that we had they would have had a cow!  Today is of course a little bit better and different more secure world to some degree.  So back to my story about losing the source code, this was a challenge to me and I was bent on solving it.  So I took the object code and reverse engineered it back to the original source code as best as I could make it out to be.  Of course I had learned a few things about the programming standards that were in place so that made it easier to reverse engineer it back to the original source code.   This of course would be a much more difficult operation in our modern world, since most programmers only use very high level object oriented languages that are not as easy to create source from the executable programs.

So why did I tell you a story about old time computer programming and solving problems?  God taught me so much from my computer programmer experiences that applies to the Word of God that it is incredible.  You see God knows computers better than we know computers.  I am convinced that God gave man computers for a purpose of the end times.  Therefore, God knew that we would have computers in these final days before He returns and we could use them and their principles in our attempts at understanding the Bible.  So I believe that God used computer laws and principles to help hide information in the Bible.  One principle that I have blogged on before is that there are established spiritual laws that govern everything that God does.  I called this a “Rules Based Approach” to Bible interpretation.  God implemented and created the laws that govern correct Bible Interpretation and we are required to first discover them and then to follow them in order to understand what is written correctly.  Another computer design principle used in any valid application development is called “Application Standards”.  These are generally speaking repeatable patterns that occur in a uniform fashion or approach that can always be counted on to be followed.  We live in a world full of standards.  They make standard bolts and nuts, the large portion of the world has adopted weights and measurement standards around the metric system, there are also standard bar code systems that are used in our grocery stores to help speed out check out and other inventory control systems and we could go on and on about standards and that they are around us everywhere.  In my early programming we had “Naming Standards” and other standards that are probably too technical to talk about in a Bible study that goes out to many who are not that computer literate.  However, the concept of standards is a design concept that is also encapsulated or employed by God in the Bible.  For example, there is the Bible concept of Types and Shadows found predominately in the Old Testament stories and the Gospels.  These are real stories of real people, places and things in the world that exhibit a view into a spiritual reality that we cannot observe with our natural eyes.  The Bible is full of repeatable patterns in many aspects and dimensions.  Take the concept of “seeds” if you have not read my blog on “Understanding Seeds” you should.  Seeds are repeatable standard found within the Bible that applies across the board to many aspects including complex spiritual things that you did not know of.

So if you are a computer programmer, today I challenge you to begin to study the Bible using computer science laws and knowledge.  Examine the Bible using object oriented concepts of encapsulation, inheritance and abstraction.  Take your computer knowledge and apply it using God’s methods and knowing God understands computers better than you do.  See if you cannot find new things by using this new approach to Bible study.  If you are not a computer programmer fear not, do not be downcast or feel inferior, I believe that God will use what you have and what you know to get you to see new things also, maybe even things that I do not see.

Today’s lesson was a reminder to you that God’s word contains many, many hidden spiritual secrets.  That is the most important thing that you need to take away with you today.  Then you need to figure out how God has hidden these things in the Bible.  God did not use an unreadable code system like governments do to try to guard secrets, so that means that God used some very difficult different methods to conceal the truth in plain sight.  I started writing a series of blogs of “Hiding the Truth in Plain Sight” which reveal some of the techniques used by God in hiding information in the Bible.  If you have not read this series I would suggest that you go and read them as an introduction to some very basic techniques used by God.  These are not a complete list, so do not expect them to tell you every secret utilized.  If I knew them all I would already know everything that I need to solve every Bible debate that exists today and no one is at that point yet.  However, I am a firm believer that before Jesus returns the church will make herself ready and will become one in harmony like Jesus prayed and asked to happen.  If you are interested in making this happen then stay in the Word of God and continue to study to find the truth.   God Bless!