The first hypothesis to be subjected to the scientific method is that the Bible is the inspired word of God. This experiment will not only show that the Bible is inspired, but who provided the inspiration.
What I mean by inspired, and what I believe those who believe it mean, is that the authors of the books of the Bible were scribes, not the originators of the text. They were the hands that held the pens that wrote the words. The originator of the text was a singular author who was writing the story, who knew the end from the beginning.
I will identify and authenticate the author using the standard protocol used on the internet to authenticate parties. This protocol is recognized in a court of law to validate the content and the parties involved in contracts transacted over the internet.
The Hypothesis
I will state the hypothesis once again as a formality.
The Bible is the inspired word of God.
This hypothesis has two components: that is inspired, and it is of God.
This hypothesis does not include the claim of the inerrancy of the text. I am not challenging this claim, but this exercise does not include proof of inerrancy. I believe that the science will provide proof that the Bible is sufficiently accurate for all intents and purposes.
The Test
Colossians 1:26the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints.
The Bible speaks of a mystery that had been hidden for ages and generations. Details of this mystery were written about in the Old Testament, yet the authors of these texts had no knowledge of what was to happen in the future.
Hebrews 1:1Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets,
This verse claims that it was God who spoke to our fathers by the prophets. This supports the hypothesis, but does not provide proof. The essence of this verse is that it was delivered to the prophets piecemeal. There were may parts.
As I peruse the Greek, and I am not a Greek scholar by any means, I must admit that the inerrancy of this translation is suspicious. Instead of at many times and in many ways, a more accurate rendition would be in many parts and in many modes. Perhaps an example of a mode would be Isaiah walking around naked for three years. Many parts means that no one prophet had the whole story. But together all the parts integrated into the whole.
The authors, separated by hundreds of years, had no chance to collaborate and align their parts of the story. They wrote about things that would happen in the future with accuracy, even without having any knowledge of those things.
This claim is supported by the Bible, but the claim has not yet been authenticated. First, let us look at the evidence of things that were predicted, things that were not known by the prophets at the time they were written.
The Evidence
There are many passages in the Bible that predict the future with accuracy. If these passages were all written by the same person, you could perhaps say that the author somehow attained this knowledge. But where there were many authors that had no opportunity to align their stories, what was their source? What was their inspiration? Here are some examples:
Isaiah 53:8By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? 9And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. 10Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
Seven hundred years before Jesus fulfilled these prophesies, Isaiah described in detail how Jesus would die being cut off. Cut off means he had no progeny, no children. Yet, after he died, he saw his seed, his offspring. Isaiah could not have dreamt of this, never mind that it actually came to pass. The Messiah would be able to conceive children after he died?
Although Isaiah had no knowledge of this mystery, he was able to articulate it.
Another example:
Jeremiah 31:31“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Jeremiah wrote of a New Covenant. This was directly connected to the mystery that had been hidden, even from him. Yet it came to pass hundreds of years later with Jesus arrival.
Ezekiel 36:26And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
Ezekiel added details to the things that were to come. There was no way Ezekiel could have known these things.
None of these authors had the complete story, only their piece of the whole, yet everyone’s pieces fit together. Someone told these people what to write. That person was the one who inspired their writing. Who could that have been?
Secrets
Jesus talked about the secrets of the kingdom of heaven. He spoke to “them in parables” to disclose the secrets to his disciples, but at the same time to keep them hidden from others. Since Jesus is the one who knew what had not been known from the beginning of time, Jesus is a viable candidate for our mystery author. Or was he just another middleman author who had been given more of the story to share at the appropriate time?
And how could the secrets have been hidden from so many for so long? And, in their disclosure, how could they be revealed to some but kept from others?
Let’s look at how secrets are kept in our day and age. This is according to those who invented the security protocols on the internet.
Back in the early 70’s the internet was just coming online and there was a group of academics who recognized the need for secure communications. Without secure communications there could be no commercial transactions on the internet. Who would put their credit card information on the internet where everyone could see everything, and trust that it wouldn’t be stolen by a bad actor?
Although the need for encryption on the internet had been identified, there was also a competing need for lack of secrecy. Governments needed the ability to monitor all communications for national security reasons. It was the government that controlled the technology of cryptography. This technology was categorized as a weapon, under the control of ITAR, International Traffic in Arms Regulation.
Crypto, by Steven Levy, is a fascinating book which hosts a tour through those years where secure transactions on the internet were birthed. Here is my favorite quote in the book.
This book tells the story of the people who asked those questions and created a revolution in the field that is destined to change all our lives. It is also the story of those who did their best to make the questions go away. The former were nobodies: computer hackers, academics, and policy wonks. The latter were the most powerful people in the world: spies, and generals, and presidents. Guess who won.
– Steven Levy, Crypto –
Although they attempted to get clues from the experts in the NSA, National Security Agency (also known as the No Such Agency), their efforts were thwarted at every turn.
This was fortunate, however, because the NSA technology would have provided the wrong foundation for what they needed. Using their methods and following their guidance, it would have delayed the solution indefinitely. When you start down a wrong path, the tendency is to continue to push in that wrong direction. You can wander in the wilderness, continually circling the terrain, and never arrive at the destination. Not having insight from the NSA seemed like a curse, but they were spared because they were forced to begin with a blank slate.
Their ultimate solution violated one NSA essential rule of cryptography: you never reveal an encryption key. Yet this violation was the cornerstone of their solution. Their system featured two keys, a public key and a private key. The public key would be available to everyone, but the private key was available only to its owner. You could encrypt with either key, but you would need the matching key to decrypt the text.
If you are interested in the incredible features this arrangement offers, read the book by Steven Levy, Crypto. One feature is of particular interest to this discussion. It is the feature that the one who owns the cipher key authenticates the author of the text. When you receive an encrypted message and successfully decrypt it with a person’s public key, you can be sure that the author of the text is the owner of the key. This is of particular interest in our situation.
How these keys are generated is also of particular interest, because the Bible uses a similar approach to encryption, making it impossible to crack the code without the cipher key.
Here is a brief synopsis of how encryption works on the internet. The public key is the inverse of the private key. You multiply the message by the private key and get cipher text. When you multiply the cipher text by the public key, you restore the message to plain text. The product of the public and private keys is one. When you multiply anything by one, the result is what you started with, plain text.
Here is the challenge they were faced with: it must be impossible to derive the private key from the public key. Yet it must be possible to generate the pair of keys in the first place.
This is accomplished using a one-way function. A one-way function allows you to calculate easily in one direction, but it is impossible to reverse the process. For example, multiplication is not a one-way function because division can the used to reverse the process. The process they settled on was to take two large prime numbers (100 digits), multiply them to get a composite number, then use the three numbers to generate the keys. The reasoning was that it would take millions of years to factor a two-hundred-digit composite number.
This is interesting, but why is it relevant to the task at hand? What does this have to do with the secrets of the kingdom of heaven?
As it turns out, there are two such one-way functions in the Bible, and these were used to keep the secrets hidden. Both functions were instrumental in ciphering the text of the Bible, and both are needed to decipher it.
I must further take a short detour to voice my astonishment at the requirements of such a scheme. For the secrets to be hidden in the Bible using encryption, it would have to work across languages and be independent of the translation used. And I must laugh as I write this, the fact that it is encrypted must also be hidden. The text of the Bible must look like plain text to the casual observer, giving no hint that the text is encrypted.
Do I expect you to believe this? Of course not. After all, this is preposterous. But humor me.
Let’s begin with a clean slate. I ask you to push all your theological essentials to the side for the moment. Don’t worry, this is not a blue-pill-red-pill moment where you must now decide which way to go. This is not an irreversible decision. However, for this exercise, you must not comingle your current theological understanding with the findings revealed here. After all, if the cipher text was no different than the plain text, why the secrets? And what is the fun in that?
The Meaning of Words
Genesis 2:19Now out of the ground the Lord God had formedevery beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. (ESV)
Words get their meanings from the things they are to represent. Adam assigned names to the animals God showed him. When you teach words to a child, you show him the cup, then say the word, “cup”. Now you say it. “Cup.” Good job!!! The child associates the word, cup, with cup, the object.
This works well for things that you can see. It works well for concepts you understand. But for things you cannot see and concepts you do not understand, there needs to be a different process.
And this process has become the norm. This process is described below, according to Google.
Quote:
Words get their meaning from how they are used in a discourse, rather than from a dictionary definition. Words acquire meaning through a variety of mechanisms, including:
Associations: Words acquire meaning through associations.
Pattern detection: Words acquire meaning through pattern detection.
Feature matching processes: Words acquire meaning through feature matching processes.
Distributional hypothesis: The distributional hypothesis is a computational theory that suggests words that appear in similar contexts have similar meanings.
Context: In writing, the context of a sentence can help determine the meaning of an unknown word.
Words can also grow new meanings over time. For example, the word “face” has multiple meanings, including a body part and an action, a noun and a verb. Scientists have identified algorithms that humans have used to give words new meanings over the last thousand years.
Unquote.
Interesting. Words can grow new meanings. Cup can now be a verb, it can be a unit of measure, it can be a mug. But mug can also be a verb, which is not anything like cup, the verb. A word can mean a number of things depending on its context. We have become so familiar with this concept that we have lost sight of the original concept, where words represent things. To us, a word is now defined by its usage in the language. Not only do we generate definitions that way, but we also expect to understand words in the context in which they are used. We also use the same words in different contexts in our communications.
When I had a job as a programmer, there was a problem with my timecard. I emailed my supervisor, and he replied telling me that I had to resign. After a few more exchanges, I finally understood that I needed to sign my timecard again. Whew. Glad we cleared that one up.
There is also an inherent problem with our process for assigning definitions to terms. To derive that meaning of a word from the context of its usage in the discourse, it is necessary to understand the text. When the text involved the kingdom of heaven, and the kingdom was still a mystery, the meaning of the text had to first be assigned. From that, we derive the meaning of the terms in the text. Having assigned definitions to all the terms, we can then determine the meaning of the text. This, if you had not noticed, is circular reasoning.
The concept of hermeneutics, where text cannot mean today what it could not have meant to the the original audience, is fallacious, because not even the prophets knew what they were writing! They were providing clues to the mystery that God had intentionally hid from everyone.
When God wanted to divide the people to cease work on the tower of Babel, he confused their language. Our language is confused. Is it any wonder that the church is divided?
We must clear up this confusion by straightening out our language. We can do this by returning to the concept of words representing things, assigning words to the things they are to represent, not assigning definitions to words. But there is an obstacle.
John 3:3Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (ESV)
You cannot assign a term to represent something in the kingdom of heaven that you have never seen. The concept is that you see something, then assign the term. You cannot describe the meaning of a term to be something you have never seen, or never understood.
The kingdom of heaven is nothing like the kingdom of this world, yet we regularly allegorize the kingdom of heaven from things we understand in the kingdom of this world. We say, the kingdom of heaven is like, and then refer to something in this world that we are familiar with. When Jesus prefixed a parable with that statement, what he referred to was in contrast to the things in the world that we are familiar with. For example, what farmer would sow seed in his driveway? All farmers I know begin by preparing the soil. They don’t waste seed by sowing it in places where it cannot grow. Jesus would use parables to underscore the differences between the two kingdoms.
So, this is the first one-way function found in the Bible. (Recall that one-way functions are used to keep secrets.) You must first see the thing before you can assign a term to represent it. When you use the term in a sentence, the person reading your sentence must be familiar with the object being represented by the words you have used. When you say “cup”, the reader must be familiar with a cup, not an abstract description of the cup.
Where do we begin?
Matthew 6:33But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
To get on the right track, we must travel the right way down the one-way street. In Genesis 2, Adam assigned names to the things he saw. The name he gave an animal represented the animal. We must first seek the kingdom of heaven and become familiar with the animals. We must see how things work in the kingdom. Only at that point are we ready to assign names to the things we see.
I promised we would use the scientific method. Let’s put our strategy in terms of the scientific method. We have a vocabulary of theological words to choose from. As we tour the kingdom, when we see something that could use a name, we hypothesize what that name could be. We then test our hypothesis by examining everywhere the word is used, making sure that the name works in every context. If it passes, that name is temporarily assigned its place in the kingdom of heaven. If the assignment causes a conflict in the future, the assignment can be challenged. Fear not. We will walk through this together. Once you see it done a few times, you will catch right on.
Words used in the kingdom of heaven are not context driven. When you read a word, you should be visualizing the thing the word represents. This is what connects the dots in the scriptures. It’s like watching a movie where there are multiple stories happening simultaneously, and seeing the same people in the different scenes gives you insight into the characters and the plot.
Another observation:
The ability to encrypt the text without revealing that the text is encrypted is ingenious. Various methods can be used to encrypt text. The simplest method is character substitution, where each letter of the plain text is substituted with a different letter. There is the block cipher approach, where you encrypt a block of characters at a time. This is a more secure method. But the concept of encrypting at the word level, by scrambling the definitions, enables the encryption itself to go unnoticed. Who would have suspected?
But something is missing. Where do we find the things that are to be represented by the words?
And this is where the second one-way function answers the mail. I will need to set the stage with a little background. This background is interesting in its own right, probably something you have not heard of before.
A Second One-way Function
Two Priesthoods
Hebrews 7:11Now if perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people received the law), what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, rather than one named after the order of Aaron? 12For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well. (ESV)
There are two priesthoods mentioned in this passage: the Levitical priesthood, after the order of Aaron, and Melchizedek. This passage names them in reverse order. Melchizedek was the priest to whom Abraham paid tithes. The Levitical priesthood came years later, six generations after Abraham. So Melchizedek was the first priesthood, and the Levitical priesthood was the second.
Each priesthood had a law associated with it. According to Hebrews 7:12, when the priesthood changed, the law changed. The two laws were independent. The first law was associated with the first priesthood, and the second law was associated with the second priesthood.
The Bible includes the details of the second law. In fact, Deuteronomy, in the Greek, means second law. Many of the details of the second law are repeated in the book of Leviticus, which confirms that this law was associated with the second priesthood, the Levitical priesthood.
But the Old Testament never gave the details of the first law. Not a clue. We know that many in the Old Testament were justified by faith. Justification is a feature of the first law, but not the second, for we know that no one is justified by the works of the law of Moses. Faith also only applies to the first law. Nowhere in the law of Moses is faith mentioned. Everyone in the Old Testament that was “saved” was under the priesthood of Melchizedek.
But what determined what faith was valid. Cain’s “faith” when he made his offering to God, was probably no less authentic than Abel’s “faith”. Faith by which one was justified was determined by the law. But what law? The Old Testament never said. And what thing should the term “faith” represent?
Hebrews 11 includes a list of Old-Testament saints who, by faith, performed actions that were counted as righteousness.
From the list of things that were done by faith in Hebrews 11 that were counted as righteousness, there was no way to establish what the details of the first law were. Abraham left the land of Ur by faith. He offered his son on the altar by faith. Abel offered a blood sacrifice by faith. There were many more actions with seemingly no common denominator. The terms of the law were withheld intentionally.
This is the second one-way function. If I knew what the law was, I could determine whether a particular action was in obedience to the law, but I cannot determine the law by observing the actions that were identified as being obedient to the law.
OK, so we don’t know the details of the first law. But wait a minute. When Jesus came, he came after the order of Melchizedek. The first law was restored. under Jesus.
John 15:12“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
It was Jesus who revealed the details behind the first law. This is the piece that was missing from the Old Testament. As it turns out, this is the cipher key that authenticates Jesus as the author behind the scribes of the Bible. Is it not fitting that the Word of God was the inspiration behind the word of God?
Conclusion
Jesus said his was a new commandment, but it was only new in that it had never before been articulated. His was the commandment we had from the beginning.
John 15:1I am the true vine.
Jesus identified himself as being the true vine. This vine was true because it revealed the kingdom of heaven. True means to unhide. Jesus was the light that made things visible. He was the key that allows us to see the kingdom of heaven.
The owner of the key authenticates the author of the text. Jesus, having the key that decrypts the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, authenticates him as the author.
The Next Step
Now that we have the cipher key, we can use the key to see the kingdom of heaven. While we tour the kingdom, we will be able to recognize the things that the terms in our theological vocabulary represent. We can create our pictionary which will aid the reader of the scriptures. Without the reader’s ability to see the things represented by the terms, all is in vain.
Seek Ye First the kingdom of God
New Wine 