In this sermon, the speaker continues their study of the book of Esther, exploring hidden elements within the text. They introduce the concept of codes and cryptography, explaining that the name of God is encrypted in the text of Esther. The speaker also mentions that there are two basic forms of cryptography. They conclude by expressing gratitude for the supernatural organization of the Bible and the simplicity and directness of God's Word, which reveals our redemption in Jesus Christ.

We're going to continue our study of the book of Esther. We have gone through now, in the previous sessions, the book itself, from verse 1 to the last verse, to examine superficially, and yet in some depth perhaps, the narrative itself, the text itself. And one of the things that we've set aside tonight to do is to explore other things that are hidden in the book of Esther. And this will be a review for some of you, because we've covered some of this material before in some other contexts, but it did seem appropriate for us to deal with this. In order to cover rather complex material, we're going to use these graphics, and a summary of them will be in the notes that will accompany the tape, so don't try to copy each slide, that's the hard way to deal with this. As probably most of you can guess, a large measure of this has been excerpted from our hardback book, Cosmic Codes, Hidden Messages from the Edge of Eternity. But tonight, what we want to do is focus specifically on the text itself, on the book of Esther, and we're going to take some excerpts from the book and take a look at the whole idea that there are hidden codes in the book. Now, as most of you know, the book of Esther has quite a controversial history in the church, because there were those that were arguing against it. And Martin Luther, among others, wanted it removed from the canon, because one of his primary arguments was that the name of God does not even appear in the book of Esther. And that was his argument. Well, turns out he was wrong, you see. Typical Gentile, he didn't have an Old Testament background. So, the first interesting observation is that the name of the book, Esther, Hadassah is the Hebrew name, but the name of Esther, according to Gesenius, who's one of the experts on Semitic languages, means something hidden. And you know me well enough to know when I encounter something like that, that gets my antenna right up there to find out, oh, what's that all about? And so, it turns out we're going to discover that hidden in the text, within the text, or underneath the text, if you want to put it that way, are at least eight hidden messages. And the first five of these are called acrostics. They're very well known. I didn't discover these things or invent these things. I just came across them in the literature, in the Talmudic literature. It's well known among rabbinical scholars. First of all, what is an acrostic? Well, acrostic is simply the repetition of letters within a text, which can have a significance of its own. That's all it really boils down to. What are some examples? Well, Psalm 37, Psalm 111, Psalm 112, and Psalm 119 are well known in that they follow the Hebrew alphabet. Most of you, even in your English translations of Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Book of Psalms, each line of each verse starts with the same Hebrew letter, and there's 22 clusters of these for the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. And so Psalm 119 is not only a very interesting psalm for lots of reasons, every verse deals with the Word of God itself as a subject, but it also happens to be very tightly organized around the Hebrew alphabet. And so it's an acrostic. These other psalms, and there's a number of others too. Proverbs 31, a major chunk of that, is an acrostic, in the sense that each line deliberately starts with the next letter of the alphabet. You've seen things like that in English. There are also what are called mnemonic acrostics. They're also called acronyms. We don't say the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, we say NASA. We don't say the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, we say NATO. And during World War II, they developed a system, which is radio detection and ranging. It quickly is called radar. They become labels in their own right. These are called acronyms. Also, they're a form of acrostic. By the way, it may surprise you to know they follow mathematical laws. They've discovered... Well, a guy by the name of George A. Zipf, Z-I-P-F, he was a lexicographer, and he discovered that if you take any large body of text and you make a list of all the words that appear there and organize them in the frequency of their use, the rank order times the frequency of its use is a constant. It not exactly, but almost follows that curve. If you take five times the fifth word or three times the third word, it's always a constant. In other words, the number of times the third word on the list occurs, multiply three by that, whatever times it's used, in other words, the rank order times the frequency of use happens to approximate a constant. We also discovered, in thinking about that, that if you depart from that, it's less efficient. So they call this the principle of least effort. In a society, when you start using a new term enough that's complicated, you tend to abbreviate it, and it turns out the point at which you do that is when it needs to do that to fit into that frequency formula. So if you're in a government project and there's some buzzword going around, it isn't long before you use its alphabet or its initials or something else, or a slang for it. In phonetic communication, the same thing happens with phonemes. You will adopt those to follow that. Now it turns out the Old Testament term in Hebrew is the Tanakh, but that's an acrostic or an acronym of the Torah, the Nebim, and the Kethubim, which are the various sections of what you and I would call the Old Testament. They make an acrostic out of that and call it the Tanakh. It's just another example. Well, in Esther chapter 1, verse 20, we came across a verse which says, And when the king's decree, which he shall make, shall be published throughout all his empire, for it is great, all the wives shall give to their husbands' honor, both great and small. You may recall that in the introductory portions of the book of Esther. When you look at that in the Hebrew, it looks like this, which of course isn't important to you and I, but we want to call your attention to these letters that I've highlighted in white. You notice the first letter of these four words, let me just take that to the next slide. If you take those four letters, those four letters happen to spell the tetragamaton, the unpronounceable, the ineffable name of God. Now, in this particular case, it's using, remember Hebrew goes from right to left. Remember all languages flow towards Jerusalem. Do you know that? Nations that are west of Jerusalem, their languages go from left to right. English, French, German, Latin, you name it, right? Nations that are east of Jerusalem, their languages go from right to left. Not only Hebrew, but Arabic, Sanskrit, the Oriental language. So it's kind of interesting. I don't know what you do with that piece of information, but it's a... But Hebrew goes from right to left, and so these four letters are the first letter of those words, and it happens to spell Yahweh. Now, it happens to spell it backwards. It's forward as we would look at it, but that's backward from a Hebrew point of view. Okay? Now, why is it backwards? Well, we're using the initial letters. It's been suggested because the event there described was an initial event, but it's written backwards because God was going to be turning back the counsels of man. Also, the speaker in this case was a Gentile, and they do go, from a Hebrew point of view, backwards. Follow me? Bear with me. We're just looking at the first of a few of these. In Esther chapter 5, verse 4, your English Bible has something the equivalent of, And Esther answered, If it be good unto the king, let the king and Haman come this day unto the banquet that I have prepared for him. And again, we find a group of letters that I'm just extracting that portion. If we take the initial letter of each word, it again spells Yahweh. And this time, it does it forward. The initial letters, again, because in this case, God is initiating an action. It's going forward because God is ruling and causing Esther to act. That's one rabbinical view of it. It also happens that in this case, a Hebrew was speaking. Queen Esther was Jewish. So we notice this construction is there. But we also notice, I'm going to summarize this later. You'll see this is a part of a rather elegant design. But in any case, we have an acrostic tucked away in the text that, again, pronounces the ineffable name of God. Now, let's just get to more, and then we'll try to summarize this. Another form of acrostic is the last letter of each word. In this case, we have the last letter in Esther 5.13. It again spells the name of God, Yahweh. It uses the final letters of each word. In this case, in this verse, Haman's end is approaching. The letters are backwards because God was overruling Haman's gladness in this verse and turning back Haman's counsel. Now, Esther 7.7, again, we have, I won't take you through all the details, but again, you have final letters spelling Yahweh because by the time you get to Esther 7, you've got Haman's end had finally come. And these letters are, the name is spelled forward because God is ruling and bringing about the end that he determined. Now, what's interesting is the first verse we looked at was a verse pronounced by a Gentile, Menuhkin. Then Esther said the second one, Haman the third one, and the writer of the book wrote the seventh one. And so it's interesting, if we look at the pairings of these, the first two used initial letters, the last two used the final letters. And it's been conjectured or observed that in the first two cases, the facts involved were the initial, initiating facts, and in the last two, the facts are final. They're also paired another way. In the first case, we saw that it was spelling the name of God backwards. The second one, it was forward. The third one was backward. The fourth one is forward. Those places where it is spelled backwards, Gentiles were speaking. Those cases where they are forward, Israelites were speaking. Now, the question that this sort of raises, was this just an accident of circumstance? See, some would argue that these kinds of things could just happen by accident. But see, the whole story of Esther is a story of coincidences. Why was Esther picked to be queen? You can go through chapter by chapter, we did that, and notice again and again, it's one coincidence after another, and it ends up ironically turning against. And one of the teachings, I believe, in the book of Esther, is that God's hand was upon His people. Because of the whole episode of the book of Esther, the nation Israel was spared. The decree had gone out to wipe them all out. All out. God did not openly intervene. There's lots of reasons for that. To understand that, you've got to study the book of Hosea, where God instructs through Hosea, that they are not my people for a while. They're set aside. That doesn't mean He's abandoned them. He's just set them aside. The church has been teaching for 1900 years that Israel is over. They rejected their Messiah, so all the promises devolved upon the church. That's commonly taught in many denominations. It happens to be very non-biblical. Because the promises in the Old Testament are unconditional. And Paul, in his definitive statement of Christian doctrine, hammers away for three chapters in the book of Romans. Chapters 9, 10, and 11, that God is not through with Israel. They have a destiny. They have a critical destiny. One reason so many churches are confused about eschatology, or study the end times, is they haven't understood where Israel fits in. The book of Revelation, most of it, all but two chapters, have to do with the period in which God is dealing with the planet Earth through Israel. Yet future. The only chapters that really directly affect you and I are chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 4 on, it goes weird. It's a different thing altogether. And I'm going to start on that lat here. But the point is, in the book of Esther, God is not openly protecting Israel. He's doing it invisibly. Through circumstances. Someone is very cleverly quipped that coincidence is when God is working undercover. Are there coincidences in your life? Examine them carefully and see if God's fingerprints are not all over those things. For your instruction or your correction or whatever. Now, it's interesting to me that we see, even hidden under the text, God's fingerprints. His name. And we're just getting started. But here are four classic acrostics. You'll find this in the ancient rabbinical literature. There's some other things here. There's also the structure demonstrates. We've shown how it showed pairings and how it showed alternation. It also has what they call introversion. The first words were spoken concerning a queen. The second one was words spoken by a queen. The third one is words spoken by Haman. And the last words are words concerning Haman. So there's a... If you study rhetoric, you can see what they call introversion going on here. There's one that... Those four... The first four we looked at. The name of God that is tucked away in the text. I would say encrypted in the text. Now, I didn't get into this, but you should understand that in cryptography, there are two basic forms of cryptography. One is substitution and one is transposition. We're looking at really a mixture of those where you embed a secret message in another message that looks innocuous. It's shocking to discover that that seems to be very, very evident in our Holy Scriptures. There are several forms of encryption, other forms of encryption, I won't take you through all that tonight, that are well known if you're a student of cryptography, if you employed at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, or if you're in cryptography as a professional and you've studied the history of cryptography, what's called to your attention is that there are two classic forms of transposition in the Scripture. Now, to someone who is a student of cryptography, that's just a historical oddity. But to someone who has the insight to realize the Bible is supernatural in structure, the fact that the Holy Spirit has encryption there, I believe is a signpost to look further. But getting back to Esther, in Esther chapter 7 verse 5, there's an interesting verse, this is where we have that big scene, it's the second banquet that Esther has organized, and this is the scene where she announces that she's Jewish, she's going to confront the whole situation and try to undo this malicious plot of Haman. And when the king learns about this, he is so incensed, he said, Then the king Ahasuerus answered and said unto Esther the queen, Who is he? Where is he? That there's presume in his heart to do so. And so he's looking for an identity. And of course the identity that he's begging in effect is Haman because of her accusation. But it's interesting to notice that we take final letters here in this passage, namely these four, and they spell IHYAH, which is the famous I AM statement, when Moses was before the burning bush, and he says, Who shall I say sent me? And God, from the burning bush, says, Ihyah Ahasuer Ihyah, I AM that I AM. This is the same identity of God that is used here. It's the same identity that Jesus Christ uses seven times in the Gospel of John. Gospel of John is organized around seven specific miracles which give rise to seven discourses and also include seven I AM statements. I am the bread of life. I am the living water. I am the door. Anyone that comes through me as a thief and a robber, those statements. The Gospel of John is structured. John wrote the Gospel. He also wrote the Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation is clearly heptatically structured, structured around sevens, and it's clearly mystical in many ways. The same writer did the Gospel of John. You don't pick it up in the Gospel of John because it reads such a narrative until you start putting the pieces together and study. It is just as structured as the Book of Revelation is. Anyway, we published some of this in our news journal some years ago, just as a little tidbit about Esther and Crodes and so forth. And in March of that year, 96 I think it was, I got a letter from a person who later became a very dear friend from San Antonio, Texas, a Rabbi Yaakov Ramsel. Dropped me a little note. He says, enjoyed your article, Chuck. That's well known. You're absolutely right on target. But let me give you a few more you'll find interesting. Since then, of course, and I might mention the technique he was calling my attention to isn't the usual form of acrostic where you take the first letter of each word or the last letter. He introduced me to a thing called equidistant letter sequences. Now, they have become very controversial in our society for reasons I'll come to. But it's interesting if you go back into the Renaissance period in the peak of the Talmudic era, the so-called Hebrew sages, their golden era, you'll find that there's a long history of conviction on the part of the rabbis that the secrets of the Torah are hidden in the skipping of letters. Cote d'Ivoire, in the 16th century, is one that's often quoted. There are others. The secrets of the Torah are revealed in the skipping of letters. Now, I want to introduce you, if you haven't seen this before, to a technique called an equidistant letter sequence. It's a form of encryption. It's the simplest form of encryption you could find. Now, let me just take a sentence here, and the sentence I'm using is one that Elihu Ripps uses to explain equidistant. It just works out so well I've decided to use it. Ripps explained that each code is a case of adding every fourth letter to form a word. Really? Well, let's take the R and count three over, and the next one is an E, the fourth letter from there is an A, the next letter is a D, the fourth one over is a T, then an H, then an E, and then a C, and then an O, and then a D, and then an E. In other words, we're taking every fourth letter, right? And what does it say? Read the code. Now, one way you can send a secret message to a confederate somewhere is to construct a message so that your message is every nth letter, and then build around it something else that sounds like a love letter or a bill of lading or whatever, and your confederate needs to know how to count and so forth, and you can do that, except it's not a very secure way. Those things turn out to be easily broken, but that's what we call an equidistant letter sequence. It turns out that this whole thing started, well, it actually started centuries ago, but in the modern era of these things, there was a guy by the name of Weissmandel. When he was 13, he got a copy of the Torah, studied it, came across some ancient commentators, some allusions they made, which caused him to rediscover some things that had long been lost, and he wrote a lot of things between the two world wars, but the most interesting thing occurred after the second world war. He actually was on a train heading for Auschwitz, managed to escape, and spent a good part of his life trying to create Schindler-type rescues of Jews heading for Auschwitz, but his writings, I'll show you some of the things he discovered here in a minute. Michelson wrote an article in 1987 in a Jewish journal that created quite a stir, but the big, big stir in our society occurred in 1994 when three Hebrew scientists, Doron Whitson, Elihu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg, published an article called Equidistant Letter Sequences in the book of Genesis, but they published it in the journal of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. What makes this so significant, this is what's known as a refereed professional journal. You submit your paper, and a group of peer scientists will examine it to see if it's eligible for production. They studied this for six years, and finally, reluctantly, let it go for production. Jeffrey Satanova also wrote an article in 1995. So from 1994 to 1995, this whole thing has exploded to be a big controversy. What are we talking about? Well, if you look at the book of Genesis, this is something that Weissmandel surfaced. Now this is the first verse of the book of Genesis, and if you go to the first tau, which is sort of like our T, and count 49 letters, and you come to, after 49 letters, the next one is above. It operates here sort of like our O does. You count 49 letters more, and you count those, and you come to a Resh, which is sort of like our R, and you count another 49 letters, and you come to a He, which is sort of like our H. Take those four letters, that spells Torah. Now bear in mind, Hebrew goes backwards, sort of from our point of view. There's a tau, a vav, a resh, and a he. Which in our, if we were to transliterate that, that is not translated, but try to put it in our alphabet the way approximately it's pronounced, and we're going of course from left to right, the tau is like a T, the vav like an O, the resh like an R, and the he like an H. So this happens to spell the name of the most venerated part of the scriptures, namely the Torah, to a Jew. This is a big deal. So how curious it is that the four letters that spell Torah are distributed, when you go first T in 49 letter intervals, you spell Torah. You say, well, that's curious, that's interesting, but that could be just coincidence. But what did we learn from the book of Esther? Coincidence is when God's working undercover. Well, let's go to the book of Exodus, and we're startled to discover the same thing happens. This is Exodus. There's the tau, the vav, the resh, and the he. 49 letter intervals, and again it spells Torah. The probability of that also happening by accident starts to go out the window. If you know anything about combinatorial analysis, the probability of that many things concatenated gets more and more extreme. Well, we go to the book of Leviticus and nothing happens. Oh, okay, we relax, it doesn't work. But you go to the next book, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and you notice something even stranger. You find again the he, the resh, the vav, and the tau. You spell Torah, but it spells it backwards. See, from Hebrew terms, that's backwards. It's forward from our point of view, but see, in Hebrew terms, it's the he, resh, vav, tau. It's like we spell Torah backwards. Follow me? Now, the first question you're probably asking is, how on earth did they find this? Someone must have had time on their hands. You go to the book of Deuteronomy and the same thing happens again, backwards. So where do we stand? Genesis, Exodus, it spells forward. Numbers, Deuteronomy, it spells backwards. Leviticus, it doesn't work. It doesn't have this 49-letter interval, but it has something else. So we examine Leviticus, and this time, instead of using 49, which is 7 squared, we'll use 7, and we discover here again is the yot, the he, the vav, and the he, which we learned last time spells what? Yahweh, the unpronounceable name of God. Now, we put this all together, Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Numbers and Deuteronomy backwards. Genesis and Exodus forward. So we find that the Torah always points to the name of God. And so you look at this thing, wait a minute here. Did these guys design the structure of the letters themselves? And the answer is, I don't think this was done by human ingenuity. If I had only this to look at, I could allow that as a remote possibility. But the more you get into this, it goes beyond any possibility of human contrivance, as clever as this might seem. It's interesting, and this of course is one of the reasons we've tried to collect these things into a book called Cosmic Codes. Now, I want to point out something before I forget. There's huge controversies going on about these equidistant letter sequences. And I'll come back to that, so we don't lose sight of it. I want to point out something. They, to me, are the least interesting of all the different forms of encryption in the scripture. There are all kinds. We wrote a book of 515 pages that has 25 chapters. Only three of those chapters are on equidistant letter sequences, because they're so controversial. There are lots of other things which are microcodes, and I won't try to get into all that here. The most exciting ones are macrocodes, codes which you can prove come from outside our time domain. So the ELSs are interesting, very controversial, because the skeptics are really unglued over this thing. But what's really going on here, the whole field of cryptography, if you study that, has its roots in the ancient Kabbalistic rabbis. When the Hebrew sages copied the scriptures, they didn't have Xerox machines or carbon paper. When they wanted to make multiple copies of one of their precious books, they did it by hand. And they adopted elaborate schemes to make sure it was done without error. And one of the things they did, every letter in Hebrew and in Greek, only those two languages to my knowledge, are alphanumeric. That means every letter also has a numerical value. All 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet have a numerical value. You say, well, Roman only has six of them that happen to be used for numbers, not the whole alphabet. And they don't use it alphanumerically. The Hebrews and the Greeks did, which means that every word has a numerical value. And if you copy a page, the page, you can add up all the letters and get a number. And they did that. If the number didn't agree, they burned the page and started over. They never corrected. And they didn't have erasers, but that was also, they felt they had such a high view of the text, they felt that if they made an error, it would have catastrophic cosmic results. Out of these scribal traditions, they developed all kinds of things. And they started, they also discovered all these intricate, hidden techniques behind the text. When you get to the Renaissance period, the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th century, in that region, that's where the field of cryptography blossoms. Prior to that, the kind of codes you run into in ancient history are pretty simple, pretty primitive. In the Renaissance period, you discover in most of the major courts of the major countries, they had a group of people that were the experts on, that's where cryptography progressed. What you don't, may not realize, since you studied this, most of the innovations came from where? Converted Jews. Some not so converted, but I mean, they were in court, but they were, they had the rabbinical background. So it's the Kabbalists' textual traditions that led to the field of cryptography of the Renaissance. And the field of cryptography, especially as they started going to auto-keys and sliding codes, where the key changes at each slider, that sort of thing, they developed mechanical aids, cipher wheels and such. From those cipher wheels, came the Enigma machines of World War II, the so-called unbreakable Nazi codes built by the Enigma machines. It turned out, of course, that during the war, Alan Turing in London and John von Neumann in the United States collaborated to build machines to break the Enigma codes. So the advent of the computer was motivated by two high-pressure jobs, one of the atomic codes for the atomic bomb, but also to break the codes for Enigma, which they did. The Germans, unknown to us, had broken the American code called Black. We didn't know they had broken it. When we found out they'd broken it, we took steps. And that led to the Battle of Alamein. And prior to Alamein, as Churchill pointed out, we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat. And the secret are codes. Now, the Japanese took the Enigma machines, made their own innovations, and did a thing which we codenamed Purple. The Japanese didn't know that we'd cracked it. And there's a great story. William Friedman ran through Washington that Sunday morning having broken the code of the attack at Pearl Harbor. He knew exactly when and where it was going to happen. He couldn't convince his superiors. He couldn't convince his superiors that he'd cracked the code. But anyway, interesting thing. But the point is, it's interesting. From the Kabbalists, we get cryptography. From cryptography, we get the Enigma machines. And from that, we get the computer. And now it's the computer that's rediscovering the codes that caused it all in the first place. You see how the loop is closed. I think it's very provocative. As we got computers in Israel, obviously, some of the Israeli scholars, drawing upon Weissman Dell's discoveries of the 49-letter thing and some other things in the Torah, they said, gee, he did that by hand. The device that can look for these things automatically is a computer. You get the text of the computer, the computer can search, not for every second letter, every third letter. You can make that a variable, look from 1 to 100 and see what you find kind of thing. Well, the first thing they decided to do is let's take the name Israel. That ought to appear in the Torah, huh? And what they did is told the computer, take the first 10,000 letters of Genesis and take intervals from minus 100 to plus 100. When they say a minus interval, they mean backwards. So they treat a word that's spelled backwards as a negative interval. Just an easy way to summarize that. Typical mathematical approach. So they search for the name Israel in the first 10,000 letters of Genesis and search all intervals from minus 100 to plus 100. And they discovered something that startled them, that the name Israel is encrypted only twice. Now, you can argue from statistics that it might occur more often than that, but it only occurs twice. But what startled them was the intervals that it occurred. It occurs once at an interval of 7 and another at 50. And furthermore, it turns out that occurs in Genesis chapter 1, verse 31. The end of Genesis, the beginning of the second chapter. End of the first chapter, beginning of the second chapter. Both of these occur at intervals of 7 and 50. Now, the reason that shocks a rabbinical scholar is that's the passage that gives you the Kaddush that every Friday night over a glass of wine they celebrate Shabbat, Sabbath. Sabbath, of course, 7 suggests to a Jew what? The Sabbath, right? And 50 also is linked to the Sabbath because you have not only a Sabbath for man, 6 days you work, the 7th day is holy. The land, 6 years you plow it, the 7th year is holy. When you take 7 of those, you got 49 years. The next year is a jubilee year. And all of this, of course, is in Leviticus 25. The point is, to a Jew, 7 and 50 are linked logically. And so here's the label Israel encrypted in the text these two times and only these two times. So they decide, gee, let's look further. And I'll cut through a lot of the other stuff. But in Genesis, at the end of chapter 1 and the early part of chapter 2, Genesis 1.29 through chapter 2, verse 9. 1.29 reads as follows. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed and to you it shall be for meat. And it goes on. And we get to chapter 2, verse 9. It continues to the end of the chapter. We get to the early part of chapter 2. It goes on. It says, Out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That's familiar to you if you've read the book of Genesis, right? Well, here's something that startled the researchers because they discovered between these two verses is encrypted the name of 25 trees that are listed in the Bible. And here they're listed. These are the names in Hebrew. And some of these are intervals of only two or three. Some are a little longer. The tamarisk, the terebinth. There's another thick or dense forest expression. The citron, the acacia, the almond, the wheat, the date palm, the cedar, the aloe, the grape, the boxthorn or bramble, the acacia, the pomegranate, gopher wood or fir, thorn bush, olive, pistachio nut, hazel, the fig, the willow, the oak, the vine, barley, chestnut, poplar. These are just a list between just a few verses encrypted behind the text in Hebrew. You find these. Now, question. Is that accidental? Is that a coincidence? See, and by the way, so you don't misunderstand, there's another issue. The fact that these words happen to show up is not the point. That may sound strange. You can take Moby Dick. You take a huge corpus of text and search for a word on this basis. You'll find these words scattered. They occur accidentally, statistically, in any body of text. What makes this noteworthy is they're clustered behind the relevant passage. You follow me? So there's something that's very elusive statistically. It's called clustering. The naive critic will say, gee, I can find these same trees in the Encyclopedia Britannica or something. You know, I'm using a bad example. Or some novel. That's not the point. Are they clustered in ways that are communicating something that is relevant to the plain text, the term for the base text we're talking about. Now, anyway, what these scientists did, that Doran Whitson, Elihu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg, they took a list of rabbis. There's a standard biographical encyclopedia in Israel. And they took the top 32 rabbis. And they defined top by how many column inches they had in the biography. They took those rabbis, their place and date of death and place and date of birth and had the computer look at how many of those are encrypted in the Torah. Answer? All of them. Along with their, I think it was their date of death. It was the original study. It was done, the good news, it was done with such rigor as scientists that they submitted it to the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. They appointed, I think, six referees. Eight referees. And I think they studied it six years. They couldn't accept the results because how on earth could the prominent Hebrew rabbis be encrypted in a book that's thousands of years old? Doesn't make sense. And yet, there it was. And so they asked them to take the next 32 rabbis and try that. All of them were there. And so they finally, reluctantly, put it for, excuse me, 34 for the first group. And by the way, their dates of birth and death, all were found in the statistics imply that this has one chance in 775 million of occurring by accident. And so they did the 32 additional and they were all found, so the article went published. And after the six-year review, and by the way, every one of those reviewers became convinced that the codes are real. Now, that starts, these articles get published, people talk about it, and then people start looking. And then you encounter all kinds of examples, and I won't bore you with all of them, I'll just mention a couple so you're used to wearing them. The so-called Holocaust codes. It turns out in Deuteronomy 10 and 31, 32, and 33, you find the name of Hitler, Auschwitz, Holocaust, the crematorium for my sons in Poland, plagues, the Fuhrer, Eichmann, king of the Nazis, genocide, Auschwitz, Germany, Hitler again in numbers, and Mein Kampf in numbers 22. This starts to get very, very controversial among scientists. There are good minds attacking this thing, and there are many people that feel this is just a natural outbreak of the nature of the Hebrew language. And what they mean by that is that Hebrew, because it only has 22 letters and no vowels, is already bandwidth compressed to allow this kind of thing to occur. All cryptography hangs on redundancy. So if you're trying to encrypt a message before you transfer it, you want to squeeze out the redundancy. And English, by the way, is about 65% redundant. And I won't get into all that here in detail except to point out that one of the things you do if you're a professional in English, you just drop the vowels, and it really compresses the bandwidth, and it's adequate. Well, Hebrew already has the vowels out of there. They don't have vowels in Hebrew. They added those later. They're inferred. And in our book, we go into the whole background of what is an ideal characteristic for a language of extraterrestrial communication. And as you list those requirements, the scientists have determined Hebrew fits them all, strangely. Everybody says, well, gee, Hebrew is designed to facilitate this kind of thing. That's the point. What was the first language on the planet Earth? Genesis 11 tells us it was all of one speech. The original language was Hebrew or its forebear. And what no one notices is, is it possible that God applied the same principles He does in the physical universe? He's designed the physical universe for us. The distance of the earth to the sun. A little closer, too hot. A little further out, too slow. It's spinning at just the right speed. There are thousands of parameters. If you try to make a model of what we know about the universe, it turns out you can't change any of them and still have life exist. There are parameters that we observe in our physical universe. If they're changed in less than one part in 10,000, the universe doesn't happen. They've called that the anthropic principle. It's as if everything is designed for us. No kidding, Dick Tracy, you see. Well, why do we not consider the possibility that the nature of the Hebrew language is also designed to facilitate the kind of communication we're discovering? It shouldn't be a surprise. In any case, the controversy starts over the last few years. So the big guns start to... Now, who's the biggest gun, so to speak, as a gunslinger, of encryption? The senior mathematician at the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, Dr. Hal Ganz. And he heard about all this, and he decided to check it out for himself. This can't be. It's absurd. So he personally programmed his own personal computer to calculate the probabilities on this statistical science article. His program ran for 440 hours, 19 days. And when he got the results, he was surprised, but very pleasantly surprised. The computer concluded that there's less chance at one in 62,500 that this could have been due to chance. That doesn't mean that's the probability. It's less than that by some factor. So these are inequalities we're dealing with. So all eight referees, after their six years' review, have become believers in the codes. But now the exploitation starts. All of you have heard of Michael Drossin's book, The Bible Code. Well-promoted book. It is very contrived. The people who are in favor of the codes and the people who are against the codes both attack his book because it's a bad book. It doesn't bear scholastic scrutiny. Very well-promoted, very popular, but it's very contrived, and he was not a believer. He was just exploiting the opportunity. Jeffrey Satanova, Dr. Satanova, wrote a book called Cracking the Bible Code. Much better book. Very interesting. It sees it strictly through Jewish eyes. He has some blind spots, but a very bright guy, a very worthwhile book. And John Weldon wrote a book against the codes, but a very competent book in many ways, decoding the Bible Code. Can we trust the message? He's arguing very much that these codes are dangerous. And in a sense, he's right, but some of his arguments, unfortunately, unravel. While all this is going on, now in Israel, can you imagine the Fuhrer when they discover that, gee, there's hidden codes in the Bible that prove the Bible is of divine origin? And that grum got thumped for several years until Rabbi Yaakov Ramsel, San Antonio, Texas, raises, hey guys, if you're looking for names, why don't you look for the name Yeshua? Jesus. Does that show up in the Old Testament? Well, take a look. And by the way, the results of this, he published a book called Yeshua, and then Jesus is my name. Grant Jeffrey has picked up on that, helped him with his book, and also incorporated stuff in his own book, The Signature of God, and The Writing of God, and some others. Now, I should point out to you in fairness that it shouldn't surprise us that Yeshua occurs in the codes. Why? Well, because the name Yeshua incidentally appears over 5,500 times in the Old Testament. I'll show you why. But Jesus warned you that it would. In Psalm 40, he says, the volume of the book is written to me. He challenges. I think it's John 7, he says, Search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life. They are they which testify of me. Boy, do they! In candor, if you look at some of the most common letters in the Hebrew language, in the Tanakh, are in his name. So his name only consists of four letters, two of which are most frequent letters. So it's not surprising to find it a lot. So that in itself is a controversial thing. But does his name occur? Well, behind Genesis 1.1, the creation of the world, it says Yeshua is able. In Genesis 3.27, where Adam and Eve have to abandon their aprons of fig leaves and take on coats of skins because God is teaching them by the shedding of innocent blood they'd be covered. And what's hidden behind that? Yeshua, which is He will save. Ruth, this incredible prophetic little book in the Old Testament, opens with a five-interval sequence, Yeshua. Daniel 9, the 70 weeks, has a 26-letter interval, Yeshua. And it turns out every major Messianic prophecy has Yeshua hidden behind it in encryption. But the real climax of all of this is Isaiah chapter 53. Those of you that know the Old Testament know the book of Isaiah. Many scholars consider Isaiah 53 as the peak, the pinnacle of the Old Testament. This is the chapter where Isaiah describes the crucifixion in terms that are more precise, more eloquent than probably all Paul's epistles put together. It is so dramatically focused on the Messiah that the Ashkenazi Jews had it removed from their copy of Isaiah for many years when they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. Guess what? There's several full copies and fragments of another 20. And you can go to the shrine of the book in Israel where they're displayed and right in the middle of Isaiah, the scroll of Isaiah, guess what? There's Isaiah 53. But more to the point, you find in Isaiah 53, Yeshua is my name. And you find Messiah, Nazarene, Galilee, Shiloh, Pharisee, Levites, Caiaphas and Annas, both the high priests, the legitimate one and the appointed one there, the Passover, the man Herod, wicked Caesar Parish. You find that evil Roman city, let him be crucified, Moriah, which is where it occurred, the cross, in fact it was pierced, the atonement lamb, bread, wine, and Obed Jesse, and on and on it goes. But more, even more to the point, you find the name of all the disciples that were at the foot of the cross. Peter, Matthew, John, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, two Jameses. There are four Jameses in the New Testament, only two at the foot of the cross. There's two Jameses here, interestingly enough. And you find Simon, Thaddeus, and Matthias, three Marys. There are three Marys at the foot of the cross. How interesting this is. Salome and Joseph. And by the way, in 15 verses, you find 40 names encrypted. Now the point is not the names. You can find those, yes, but they are relevant to the text. Let me give you another interesting observation. There's another name that statistically should occur, because it's a very short name. It doesn't occur here. Judas is not here. What a coincidence. Professor David Kashdan, chairman of the Department of Mathematics of Harvard, a couple of years ago, said, the phenomenon is real. That's not a dispute. What it means, of course, is up to the individual. Rabbi Yaakov Ramsel, he called my attention to the fact that there's an ... if using it level ... By the way, Ramsel does all this manually. He doesn't have a computer. He's made all these discoveries on his own. In Esther chapter 1, verse 3, there is an equidistant letter sequence that has gone unnoticed by most, and that is the word Mashiach, the Messiah. In Esther 1, 3. There's another one, in Esther chapter 4, verse 7, equidistant letter sequence of 8, interval of 8. We look at this, and we find it is Yeshua, or we would anglicize it as Jesus. Using an equidistant letter sequence of 7, in Esther 4, 2, we find El Shaddai, the Almighty. What a coincidence. You know, we've talked about five acrostics and three equidistant letter sequences. I have one more that we can squeeze in that you might ... He says, Chuck, you'll love this one. In Esther chapter 3, starting about verse 10, from verses 11 to 12, this is the way it looks in the Hebrew. And if you take ... Now, if you're looking for interesting intervals, the number 6, what does that suggest to you? Hiss. When we studied Esther, you remember I told Orthodoxy, whenever you mention Haman's name, what do you do? Hiss. Hiss and stamp your feet? Yeah, okay. 6 is an interesting number. Let's see what happens at an interval at an equidistant letter sequence of 6, Eless of 6. This is what shows up where you see it in the Hebrew there. More to the point, what does that say? Haman v'Satan re'ach. Or Haman and Satan stink. Is that statistically relevant? I don't know. I wouldn't set it forth as some profound proof, but I do think it is amusing. So much for Esther. Let me share one with you that is from the New Testament. Just as a final close here, you may recall that when Jesus was crucified, in John 19, we have recorded how Pilate himself wrote a titlon. The official, you know, when someone's crucified, their indictment was posted. That was the whole point. This very slow death. Invented by the Persians, adopted by the Romans, and widely used by the Romans. The whole idea was to make him an example. So they always had a titlon, an official declaration of why is he hanging there? Well, as you know, in John 19, Pilate himself wrote one. In John 19, verse 19, it says, and Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross. And the writing was, Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews. This title then read many of the Jews, for the place where Jesus was crucified was night of the city, and it was written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Now that's the first thing that strikes me, is I can understand why someone in Pilate's position would know Latin, that's the official language of the Roman Empire. He certainly would know Greek, because that was the real international language that everybody used. But that he knew Hebrew impresses me. That's interesting. But I would suggest to you, he apparently knew a lot more about Hebrew than we might give him credit for. Because then said the chief priest, now by the way, whenever you and I run the risk of missing a point, the Pharisees and the chief priests come to our rescue. Whenever they're upset, that's a way the Holy Spirit uses to underline something we might miss. And you've heard me give many examples of that. Here's another one. Then said the chief priest of the Jews to Pilate, write not the king of the Jews, but that he said I am the king of the Jews. In other words, they didn't like the way it was stated. And we can adopt several conjectures at what was bothering them, but something obviously was bothering them. But I want you to notice Pilate's response. He answered, what I have written, I have written. I always visualize Ewell Brenner in that role, you know. Well, the question is, what was bothering them? The problem is, we have a Greek text here in the New Testament, not the Hebrew. But we know what it said in Hebrew, and this is what it looks like. Remember, you're going from right to left. Yeshua, ha-Nazarei, v'melech, ha-Yehudin. Which means, Yeshua, Jesus, ha-Nazarei, the Nazarene, v'melech, the king, ha-Yehudin of the Jews. But if you look at that in Hebrew, you'll notice the first letter of each word is four words. A-Yot, a-Heh, a-Vav, and a-Heh. Which spells what? Yahweh. Now, no wonder, he's feeding them exactly the kind of thing they're experts in. These acrostics and Kabbalistic things. So he writes this, no wonder they're englued, because this dumb guy, Pilate, has put the name of God up there in the acrostic. Now, get the picture. The personal representative of the ruler of the world has already declared him innocent. I find no fault in this man. Tried every bureaucratic trick he could find to get him off the hook. Didn't work. So he finally washed his hands, and okay, he did it. Now, he puts his title up there, and he builds an acrostic labeling him Yahweh. No wonder these guys are unglued. You could argue, validly, assuming he did do it deliberately, that this is not an accident, that maybe he's just doing this to put the needle into these guys. Because he knew that they had delivered him up for envy. And he obviously resented being put in the administrative spot that he was put in to have to deal with this. So this might have been just his way to set their clock, right? Except what happens tomorrow morning? They come to him and say, hey, that deceiver said that he would rise on the third day. We want to put a watch on the tomb so that our second error won't be worse than the first. Interesting phrase. They're admitting it was a gigantic mistake. Earthquakes, dark sky, I mean, come on, you don't get serious. So they ask permission to set a special military guard on the tomb, right? And it's interesting to hear Pilate's acquiescence to that. He says, you have your watch, make it as sure as you can. Do you hear the cynicism there? I don't believe Pilate was startled Sunday morning. I don't think he was surprised. You know that a group of disciples didn't outmaneuver a combination temple and Roman guard at that tomb. But it's empty. If they could have produced the body, all the problems would be solved. No, no. You got an empty tomb, it's empty today. Go there and look. But when I get to heaven, I will not be surprised if I find Pilate there. Because I sense that in that traumatic confrontation that he left that very disturbed. And I hear in my own mind at least, an echo in his voice that he wasn't surprised. That there's more here than they realized they were dealing with. It wouldn't surprise me. I don't know any of history. I know there's all kinds of crazy legends and stuff, but who knows. Just to tie this off since I have a couple minutes, I'll mention, yes, Chuck, you're writing a book just to exploit the codes because everybody's interested. No, that's not the reason you wrote the book. As I mentioned, only three of the chapters of 25 deal with the issue that everybody's arguing about. What's interesting to me, let's just take the equidistant letter sequences first. What's interesting to me about the equidistant letter sequences is that they defy statistical analysis. There's aspects of them that are absolutely mind-blowing. I've just given you a few of the superficial ones here. But as I look at life, not just the Bible, I find some interesting things. I discover you and I have life because of the DNA. The great discovery in recent years is the whole miracle of microbiology and the DNA molecule. The DNA molecule is coded with a three out of four error-correcting digital code. A digital code. What is a digital code? Let me give you an example of one. Paul Revere's ride. Remember? At the Old North Church? He's across the river, he's watching the Old North Church. Oneth by land, twoth by sea. The British could have had a hundred Cray computers not crack that code. Because that's not a cipher, it's a real code in the sense that it's by prearrangement. Why does one mean the British are coming by land and twoth by sea? Only because it was previously agreed to. A digital code is a symbolic code. A digital code depends on definitions that are arbitrary. They don't evolve. You don't evolve a language that involves a machine that can process it. They have to be very skillfully coordinated. And our body is built around a digital code and machinery that is breathtaking. There is no such thing as a simple cell, that's a whole other thing. But here's where I'm getting to. When the DNA is processed, do you know how it's processed? By equidistant letter sequences. I think that's interesting. I see the fingerprints of God all over that thing. So what we do in the book, of course, is build a whole background in cryptography and extraterrestrial communication and how this all fits together. It would be classified as a book in hermeneutics. Why do we believe the Bible is the word of God? Because it's supernatural in its structure, it's supernatural in its origin, and you can prove it. And you don't prove it by ELSs, and you don't necessarily prove it by microcodes, though fascinating as they are, what proves it is that there are macrocodes. How many of you have ever done a word processor? Can I see, have a computer and do a word processor? How many of you, any in here have ever programmed a computer? Then you know what a macro is. In word processing, just to use that as a more familiar example, you have certain codes that change the font, make it bigger, make it smaller, set a tab, there's hundreds of things you can do to your text, right? And those are specific tasks to set the tabs here or whatever. But you also have, you can put together a whole bunch of codes together to do some function. You can tell it this is going to be a fax rather than, say, an email or something. And what does the computer do? Well, it organizes. It knows where the margins are, it knows what your heading should be, it knows all kinds of things because you told it this is going to be a fax. You follow me? That's a macrocode. Now, a macrocode is a collection of codes to accomplish some broader purpose than some specific. You're not moving a tab or some detail, you're doing a collection of things. So we call those macro. In computer programming, we do that too. You do a certain task, you do it once, and you know you're going to have to do it a hundred times again so you don't program it by hand each time. You create a macro, you call the macro every time you want that collection of things done. Well, those are called macrocodes. The Bible is full of macrocodes and here's the point. Those codes describe, in advance, things that haven't happened yet. You've got Abraham's offering of Isaac, which is a macrocode of the whole crucifixion. And all the details are there. You look at the book of Ruth, and it's a macrocode of the whole redemption plan. And the more you know about the text, you begin to realize there are things brought out in those texts that the people acting it out didn't know. There are aspects where the text itself has been manipulated so it fills a larger purpose. You find macrocodes all through the Bible and they're breathtaking. And you don't need a computer to find them. That's really what we're dealing with and we're running out of time. Because we're in the book of Esther and it has so many of these things, I wanted to leave one night in our series on Esther. So I wanted to have one session on this, but next session we're going to have one more session on Esther and that's going to probably surprise you. Because we're going to deal with one of the strangest forms of macrocodes for the book of Esther. And we're going to look at the... If you're new to this study, you need to read the book of Esther. It's not hard, not long. To get a feeling for the narrative. And we'll review that broadly next time and show you a possibility as why the book of Esther focuses directly on your life and mind day to day, week to week. That you and I are walking books of Esther and in a sense you find the whole thrust of the book of Romans encapsulated in the book of Esther. That's a preposterous conjecture and you'll have to come to your own conclusions after we explore that next time. I'll call tonight a microcode look at Esther and next time will be a macrocode look at Esther and then that will finish Esther. Okay, let's stand for a closing word of prayer and let's bow our hearts. Well father, we just praise you for who you are. We thank you father that you have given us your precious word. And father, we thank you for these evidences as they point to the supernatural organization. Things that are absolutely inexhaustible. We thank you father for the simplicity of your word. We thank you father for its directness. Above all father, we thank you that it lays out our redemption in Jesus Christ and Yeshua HaMashiach our Lord and Savior. We thank you father for these precious, precious gifts. And yet father, we also come before your throne in his name asking you through your Holy Spirit to guide our thoughts and our investigations of your word. We pray father that you would indeed illuminate the path before us. That you would highlight these elements of encouragement, these elements of counsel. But also father, we pray that you'd also give us discernment in all our decisions. And help us father to understand what you would have of us in times such as these. We thank you father for the challenges on the horizon because we know there are opportunities and we're close. We pray father that you would help us to be responsive to your will in our lives. That we might be more effective stewards of all your gifts father. As we come before your throne in the name indeed of Yeshua our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. God bless you.