(Ver 1.2)  This is Part 9 in a series of advanced Bible lessons on the complex methods that God has used to conceal spiritual information in the Bible for us to find.  If you like solving challenging puzzles, riddles and mysteries then you should enjoy studying the Bible.  The Bible is full of God’s hidden spiritual wisdom using words that we can plainly understand and I call this “Hiding the Truth in Plain Sight”.  Not too many people have studied this subject primarily because they did not know that God had done this.  But, by learning of the existence of these technical methods, what they are and how they work, we should greatly increase our ability to understand the truth of God’s Word.  Hiding the truth using standard plain text writings is a very complex system to recognize and to understand and it clearly demonstrates the extreme intelligent design of a God who is capable of doing these things using the words placed in plain view where any man has the opportunity to break the encoded messages.   Since I am a former computer programmer with over 25 years of experience and training I understand complex system design better than most laymen.  I have worked on and developed some very large and extremely complex computer systems which would have been a challenge for anyone to learn.  But, to introduce any new novice programmer to them it would have been overwhelming for them to try to learn and to understand them, much less to change or to maintain them without breaking the system.  Now if you are not a computer programmer, you would be more than overwhelmed with trying to figure out how the system works externally, much less trying to figure out how it works internally at the code instruction level.   This is why very few people understand the Bible when reading it.  You see the Bible has an external message using words that anyone can read, but it also has an internal spiritual message that only Christians can come to understand.   When I read the Bible, I can see God’s intelligent design using a series of complex system word components and concealing techniques that while He makes the words plainly readable, the underlying truth is completely hidden from the view of naturally minded men and women.   You have to be extremely intelligent to design a system like this and I believe God definitely qualifies for the job.   To me, learning about how God hides information in the Bible has furthered my beliefs that He is the author of this book.   Hopefully as you read and study these techniques you will be able to recognize these methods also and learn how to decipher the hidden spiritual meanings behind the words that you are reading.   I have covered a lot of subjects already in this series of lessons and I will not be repeating the information previously given in any detail.  So, if you have not read this series from the beginning I would strongly suggest that you go back and start your reading with “Part 1“.

Technique 9: Speaking in a Third Person Style of Writing about Yourself

This next technique for concealing the truth in the Bible is intermixed randomly in several different books, chapters and verses and it is often very difficult to find and recognize unless you know what to look for.   I call it God writing or telling a story about Himself from a seemingly unknown, unnamed or anonymous third person view point or perspective.   In other words in this style of writing God speaks about certain people, events or actions all the while referring to Himself as a nameless man who does something natural like sow a seed in a field, get a wife for his son, cut down a tree or some other physical action that portrays or reveals a greater hidden spiritual reality to us.   Authors in our world who write fictional books utilize this technique frequently when telling a story.  This writing style allows greater creativity and multiple viewpoints to be established and it greatly complicates the landscape when you want to conceal information.  I believe that God uses the anonymous third person writing style predominantly all throughout the Bible.   I want to start by teaching you examples of what it is, then how it works and finally give you some specific hidden examples of it in the Bible.   Let’s start at the beginning and read in the Book of Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1 that is written as if Moses was a witness to the creation events.

Gen 1:1  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Gen 1:2  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Gen 1:3  And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

As you can read in these first three verses of Genesis there is someone watching or observing what is happening during creation who is never named directly.  The observer is clearly an anonymous hidden personality.  God is named directly by name in this example, but God is not the first person speaker or observer.  What you can see is someone else is watching what God says and then telling us about it.   Since Moses was not there to witness creation, we can assume that God is describing the events and He uses Moses to record them.   Therefore, God is using a third person perspective for the references to His personal point of view, but every name, place and event is mentioned is that of a real person place and thing that actually exists and happens.   In other words God names, names and describes actual events that transpired without saying “I saw the darkness” and “I did this”.  God is directly quoted saying words, but God is not speaking directly.  The words are heard as if someone was there to watch God create the world.   This is a very complex tricky way of telling you something without telling you something directly.  The writing style conveys implied and hidden information that is not directly mentioned.  I hope you understand this simple example that I just gave you because it does get more complicated than this as we go forward.

I want to stop here and make another point that is important for you to know about.  Just because God uses this writing style in Genesis 1 does not mean that God does not also utilize other techniques of concealing information in this same chapter.  For example, I have discovered that the book of Genesis is widely symbolic information especially in the first three chapters.  This use of symbolism allows God to hide the true identity of Satan as being the deceiving serpent for instance.   Satan is later revealed to be this ancient serpent in Revelation 12, but you would not really know that by just reading Genesis.  So clearly the serpent was a symbolic hidden reference name to conceal the identity of Satan.  Then there are hidden analogies found in Genesis that are clearly much greater complex spiritual truths that hide this information and makes it very hard to find.  This is just a small part of the complexity of the Bible and a demonstration of the intelligence of the design of God’s Word.  God can use multiple methods of hiding information in the same book, chapter or verse of the Bible and you have to become smart enough to recognize them all to get the real meaning.  Today’s lesson is about technique number 9 and I’m not convinced that I am done writing about them all.  So reading the first three chapters of Genesis you might encounter seven of the nine techniques used to conceal truth in the Bible intermixed.  For example:

1. Widely dispersed Truths: Gen 3:1  The serpent is not revealed until Revelation 12.  Adam is first mentioned by name in Genesis 2, but he is also mentioned in the New Testament and many other places in the Bible.
2. Symbolism:  Genesis 1:16, The Greater Light to Rule the Day, revealed to be Jesus the Sun of Righteous in Malachi 4:2 and other scriptures.  The serpent is clearly a symbolic reference in Genesis 3:1.
3. Referring to the Same Thing Using Multiple Names or Titles:  The woman in Genesis 1, 2 and 3 is called “Adam” or “man” in Gen 1:27,  “help meet” in Gen 2:18,  “woman” in Gen 2:22,  “wife” in Gen 2:24,  “Eve” in Gen 3:20, “Mother” in Gen 3:20.
4. Calling Multiple Things by the Same Name:  This is found in Genesis 2:20 where God names the man “Adam”.  This name is also given to Jesus the Last Adam in 1 Cor 15:45.
5. Types and Shadows:  Adam and his wife are shadows of Jesus and his wife the Church.  Just as Eve was the Body of Adam, so the Church is the Body of Christ.
6. Telling a Story Without Any Explanations:  There is clearly the story of creation in Genesis 1 without any explanation of how it was created or when it was created.  Genesis 2, God creates the woman from the man, but never explains why.
7. Third Person Writing Style:  As I have pointed out you can see in Genesis 1 an unknown or unnamed witness to creation is narrating the events that occurred.  This clearly has to be God’s point of view but it is not spoken of or revealed to us directly.

This is the complexity of understanding the Bible.  If anybody told you that the Bible was easy to understand they lied to you intentionally or they were heavily deceived into thinking they knew more than they actually knew.  In just the first three chapters there are clearly seven or eight different concealing techniques intermixed to make the truth unrecognizable to the casual reader.  I did not attempt to list every example or to even explain them in any great detail.  So you either saw them or you didn’t.  I have learned that Bible study is like digging for gold; you might get lucky on the surface, but to really strike it rich you have to dig deep.  You must dig very deep and study for countless hours to come to the knowledge of the truth or you have to read the blogs of someone who has done this already and you will save yourself a lot of valuable time.  Let’s continue our study of the third person writing style and discover some other ways God has used this technique to conceal information in the Bible

Some modern day fictional writers have copied what God has done in writing about a seemingly unknown or an anonymous man when they are actually writing about themselves in hidden terms.  This technique is very similar to when Jesus would speak to us in parables describing new complex spiritual things in a story about a man who had a field.  Let me give you a quick review of a parable and how Jesus used it to describe Himself:

Mat 13:31  Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field:

Here we have a statement that God is speaking a parable about some powerful spiritual truths using natural recognizable descriptions of some things that were found easily on the earth.  Most of the people that Jesus was speaking to understood farming concepts and where food came from and how it worked, however few to none of them understood how to transfer this information into the spiritual realm and determine what it meant.  So here in this verse Jesus is speaking using the technique of parables that I have covered before using encoded symbolic descriptors about the Kingdom of Heaven.  We therefore understand what to look for in the statement by knowing these two important facts.  Remember that a parable is almost always given to us in a statement that says “something” is like “something else” and this alerts us into a mental transition on how we think about the statements that are given next.   Here in this parable Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed a grain of mustard seed in his field.  We know from this information that God is speaking of spiritual things using symbolism in a third person anonymous writing style.  In this chapter it just so happens that Jesus is telling the story about an unnamed man and this is the reverse logic we found in the first Chapter of Genesis where we saw an unnamed person telling a story of what God says.   However, this unnamed man in the parable is clearly God.  Therefore, we must make the mental transformation to see the man who sows the seed to be a hidden reference to God and what He will do or has done.  It further goes to say that God has a garden which is a place to plant seeds.  We can understand that the field is symbolic, the seed is symbolic, “sowing” is symbolic as well as the man is symbolic and we must convert these into their spiritual meanings in order to understand the story correctly.   If you have read my series of lessons on “Understanding Seeds” in the Bible you will better understand what is being taught.  So I will not go through and attempt to re-explain all of the elements in the parable in this lesson.  What I want you to see is my key point that God is speaking of Himself as being a symbolic unnamed man that sows a symbolic seed into His field and that these natural things reflect much greater hidden spiritual truths.

That last example wasn’t too hard to figure out since maybe you already understand the parable concepts that I taught earlier.  However, what if God took away the information about this is a parable and that something is like something else and He only told you the story?  Could you be smart enough to put it together and recognize what God is talking about?  By removing this information it would dramatically make it more complex to figure out what is being taught.  If you would allow me I’ll change this one verse and omit those introductory facts so can see how it might change it if God would have chosen to do this:

Mat 13:31  A man took a grain of mustard and sowed in his field:

You see without the key information given that this is a parable which is conveying spiritual things about the Kingdom of Heaven, how would you ever figure out what God is talking about?  I think you would not be able to put the two realities together without this information even though the information can still be determined by using some logical assumptions.  It just makes it significantly more difficult to come up with the correct interpretation if God would do this and guess what?  God has done this numerous times in the Bible.  Here is a good example of this found in a statement that Jesus makes in Matthew 19:

Mat 19:4  And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,

Mat 19:5  And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

Mat 19:6  Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

Here is Jesus speaking again of marriage and the fact that God created them male and female in the beginning.  However, did you notice what Jesus said and how He said it?  Be precise and pay very close attention to every word spoken.  In verse 4 Jesus says “Have you not read” and then He says “that he which made them”.  Who was he that made them?   It was the speaker of the question, “he who made them” was Jesus.  The creator God is doing the speaking and He calls Himself an anonymous pronoun of “he”.   That is a prime example of an anonymous “third person” reference to Himself using the personal pronoun of “he”.  Think with me and see what is happening here in this statement.  God is not lying or fabricating information, He is just not revealing everything that He could have.   Jesus could have said “I created them male and female”, but this would have gotten Him stoned for claiming to be God.  God is using this style for several reasons, but you can see that it is very clever to speak this way.  It gives the information that you want to provide without revealing things that you do not wish to reveal.  Next, Jesus is basically quoting from Genesis 2:24 and this is a prime example of how God is writing something about a physical man who we can all relate to, named Adam and it directly applies to the spiritual man named Jesus (the Last Adam) also.  Remember that in Matthew 13:31 Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a “man” who sows a grain of mustard seed in a field.  I have concluded that the symbolic man being referred to is God.  Therefore, if you read this verse in Matthew 19:5 you will see another unnamed “man” being spoken of.  You can assume that Jesus is only speaking about Adam or you can open your eyes and see that Jesus is revealing more than you know right now.   Because Jesus does not name the man, the man is open to being a greater spiritual truth.  Jesus of course called himself the “son of man” frequently.  So Jesus was definitely a “man”.  Therefore, we can make the jump that Jesus could be talking about himself in this verse leaving His Father in heaven and coming to the earth.  We also know from studying the Bible that Jesus will soon be formally married to His bride and you can read about that in Revelation 19:7.  Therefore we can see very clearly how the church becomes the body of Christ since it is by the law of marriage given to us in Genesis 2:24 that make this possible.   God clearly tells us that the two shall be joined to become one flesh (body).  Finally, in verse 6 of Matthew 19, Jesus makes this statement “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder”.  This statement is not a quote from Genesis 2:24 and we must conclude that Jesus is associating this statement with Genesis 2:24 for a purpose.  God is using some more cleverly designed words to hide spiritual information in this verse.  Here, God is speaking and He says what God has joined together meaning God joined someone together by the law of covenant marriage.  Again if you only think that He is speaking of Adam you are limiting your perspective to a natural pattern that does not take into account the spiritual information being concealed in it.  Then Jesus says “Let no man put asunder”.   When Adam was created there were no other men on the planet to put them asunder, so you can obviously see that Jesus is not talking about Adam and Eve in this statement.  Who is Jesus speaking of here?  Wow, that is a very tough question to answer much less to see.  You see Jesus has come to the earth and taken on the form of His creation in the body of a man, for what purpose?   I personally believe that Jesus is the man that came to put asunder Satan from God.  I know you do not have enough information or knowledge to affirm what I have just told you.   We have to understand the law of marriage that Jesus is speaking of in Genesis 2:24 and see that when Jesus is joined to His bride, according to the law of marriage He must leave his Father and his mother and become one with His bride.   So covenant marriage is a dividing force that creates a new spiritual family.  The Son of God is in the process of creating a new spiritual family for God in order to eliminate the old family members of God which include Satan and his angels.  These are new concepts for many people, but if you study your Bible you will see that they are true.

There are numerous examples in the Bible of this technique of writing indirectly about yourself that God uses and I will give you another classic example found in Isaiah 53.  This chapter should be very familiar to you because it is often referred to in many circles to be all about Jesus.  However, not one time is the name of Jesus directly mentioned and most of the references to Him are in a third person style of writing where a certain man is being described externally and anonymously.   I am not going to go through every verse in this chapter, if you desire to you may stop and read the entire chapter to verify that the name of Jesus is never mentioned.

Isa 53:2  For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

Isa 53:7  He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

Isa 53:9  And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

Isa 53:12  Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

Chapter 53 of Isaiah is a very complex chapter to study.  The viewpoint of the writer seems to change from an unknown and unnamed group of people who are observing to the viewpoint of another unnamed individual at the end of the chapter.   This would appear to create a shifting landscape to how we should interpret these verses.  These are just a few sample verses found in this chapter of Isaiah.  You can clearly see a nameless man is being spoken of.  This is the common theme of the entire chapter regardless of the changing perspective.  In the beginning of the chapter, a group of people are mentioned as the observers.  There are numerous pronoun references of “our” and “we”.   Nowhere in this chapter is there the name of this primary individual being spoken of or the observers who are watching so clearly you can see a technique of concealing information by omitting some key details.

We could assume that the observing people are the natural nation of Israel, but you might be able to see that this group could also be the spiritual people of God, the church.   Throughout this chapter, God is using prophetic words about an anonymous man who will come to the earth in the future.  God is using a technique of a third person descriptive story to talk about Himself in a hidden way.  God inserts several clues that any Christian today would clearly recognize is Jesus, but to the scribes and the Pharisees they missed it and did not understand that they killed their Messiah.  Jesus was the Lamb of God sacrificed for the sins of mankind.  Jesus was hung on a cross among criminals on either side of Him.  There are just too many descriptive words in this writing of Isaiah that makes it obvious to me, but I can see the one that I know personally and it is easier for me to recognize than for someone who does not know Him.   As you continue down the reading in this chapter you see a change of perspective taking place.  Now we have another viewpoint being given to us.  This viewpoint seems to be a singular view point of a person being referred to as “I” and “My”.  Changing perspective in the middle of a chapter is a tricky way to conceal information.  It can be easily overlooked and even ignored when you casually read the words.  We are never told who the observers are; we just have to recognize that the observer changed.  These are complex puzzles to try to solve, but God has placed these things in the Bible for a purpose.  If you look closely in the Old Testament you will find this writing technique repeated in a very effective way to conceal the truth.  God speaks about somebody and prophesies events in their life, but never says who it is and never says who is observing it.  Usually when this is done it is always a reference to God Himself in a hidden plain text technique.  Also the hidden perspective can also be from God’s point of view and this is what you should look for first.  As you read your Bible look for it and see it and you will better understand what you are reading.

These are some of techniques that God has taught me from the Bible and these are not all of them that I can talk about.  We will talk about more of them sometime in the future.  Keep studying your Bible and digging for the truth and we will all find it together.

If you would like to continue reading this series of lessons on understanding God’s spiritual hiding methods then please continue with “Part 10“.