Well, welcome to our excursion called "Learn
the Bible in Twenty Four Hours." It's ... one of the most exciting adventures
I've ever had, and we certainly hope it will be for you, too, and whenever we take on something
like this of course, the first thing we should do, is take it to prayer. So let's bow our hearts
for a word of prayer. Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we come
before You this day in awe and thanksgiving for the opportunity to discover the extremes
that You have gone to on our behalf. We acknowledge our need to learn the real
truth about You, the real truth about Your creation and the real truth about ourselves. We seek and solicit Your Holy Spirit to open
Your word to us and to open us to your word and to guide us as we explore this adventure
between the miracle of our origin and the mystery of our destiny. May Your will be accomplished in each of us
as we listen to these words and seek Your eternal truth. As we commit ourselves into Your hands, in
the name of Yeshua, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. You know they say, no person's education is
complete if they do not know their Bible, and this essential completeness has been outlawed
in our government schools. Many of our children are actually in enforced
paganism, so it's a real challenge before us, and one of the things we need to do is repair
our own illiteracy about the Bible, and to assist those around us to really understand
how far God has gone on our behalf. You know, George Washington said, "It is impossible
to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible." The veneration of the word of God characterized
the earlier leadership which established our precious heritage. Abe Lincoln also said, "I believe the Bible
is the best gift God has ever given to man. All the good from the Savior of the world
is communicated to us through this book." You know, it's sobering to really acknowledge
the preciousness of our heritage that has come to us at such a high price and yet, how
tragically we have fallen. Patrick Henry said, "The Bible is worth all
the other books which have ever been printed," and for the past two thousand years, it is
a treasure that millions willingly died for, and yet we all tend to take this for granted. Even Napoleon said, "The Bible is no mere
book, but it is a Living Creature, with a power that conquers all that oppose it." See, even secular leaders have acknowledged
it's uniqueness. In fact, Napoleon was technically correct
if you look at Hebrews 4:12. It is alive and powerful. You know, there's another quote that is so
often misquoted, many of us have heard the phrase, "Jack of all trades, master of none." That's attributed to Ben Franklin but it's
actually a misquote. That's not what he said. He actually said, "Jack of all trades, master
of One." His whole concept of education was that a
cultured person is one who knows something about everything, and everything about something,
and for a Christian, of course, his specialization has to be the word of God, the Bible itself.
And your presence here in this project is a key step in correcting our Biblically illiterate
times. Daniel Webster said, "If we abide by the principles
taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper, but if we and our
posterity neglect it's instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may
overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity." We are on a treacherous precipice, more treacherous
than we can possibly imagine. You know, we do have authority crises, take
your pick - whether it's parental authority, marital authority, political authority, academic
authority or ecclesiastical authority. Do your own analysis and assessment. You know, if we look at the leading cultural
indicators of the past thirty years, population has increased forty one percent, gross domestic
product has increased by three hundred percent, social spending has increased by five hundred
percent, and yet, there's been a five hundred and sixty percent increase in violent crime,
four hundred percent increase in illegitimate births, four hundred percent increase in the
divorce rate, a three hundred percent increase in single parent homes, a two hundred percent
increase in teenage suicides and a seventy five percent drop in SAT scores. Why? What happened? Since 1963, the divorced rates, the break
up of family units, the acceptance of homosexuality, the teenage pregnancies, the murder of inconvenient
babies and crime rates have all escalated off the charts. What happened in 1963? Up until then, these things were improving,
pretty much, but from that point on, they've all taken a ... sharp move to catastrophe. In 1963 we outlawed the Bible from our schools. Well, what's ahead? What's in front of us in this project, is what
I call the ultimate literary adventure, and we hope that this brief excursion will result
in a practical grasp of the entire Bible, a perspective from which you will be able
to navigate your personal adventure through the rest of your life time and more. We're going to reach far beyond the earth's
prehistory, behind the myths of legend and folklore, to discover the greatest drama of
all time and of all literature. We're going to encounter the greatest evils,
betrayals, revenge, deceptions and the ultimate Prince of Darkness. We'll also encounter the greatest good, the
highest achievements, the noblest courage, the most demanding sacrifices. In fact, the ultimate sacrifice, the Kinsmen
Redeemer of all mankind. We're going to find ourselves in the greatest
romance, a courtship between a sovereign God and his rebellious offspring. We will also explore the ultimate ironies
of all literature, with hidden surprises on every page. We will experience the rise of great empires,
as well as their fall through dreams, visions and secret encrypted messages. Great leaders
will discover letters written to them personally from extraterrestrial sources outlining their
careers and achievements in advance, and giving them instructions as to how to proceed. We will thrill to heroes seizing victories
against impossible odds, betrayals of thrones and retributions and vendettas and conspiracies
tumbling proud empires. We will probe the greatest mysteries ever
to confront mankind, the nature of time, the paradox of predestination and free will, the
purity of God and the frustrations of man in the search for good amidst the reign of
evil and the nature of evil. Where did it come from and why? We will discover this ancient record anticipates
the very latest scientific discoveries of particle physics, cosmology, of hyperspaces
and time travel. The discovery that we are dwelling within
a virtual reality that is transcended by a larger one. And we will stagger in awe of the
biography of an actual superman, His origin, His mission and His manifest destiny. His understated powers, His betrayal which
was even under His own control by which He was to accomplish His mission impossible. The creator Himself entering His creation
to repair the damage introduced by a dark intruder who had previously ruled the planet
Earth. We'll discover that we are, in fact, in a cosmic war. We are in possession of an integrated series of messages from an extraterrestrial source that describe the
origin, the career and the destiny of super beings which are behind the scenes of our
physical universe. A universe which scientists now discover, is
actually a digital simulation contained within a much larger reality. The field of particle physics has totally
altered our conceptions of reality. Scientists now tell us that our universe consists
of at least ten dimensions. There are some investigators who believe that
much of what we call paranormal phenomena are simply trans-dimensional episodes intruding
from a larger reality. And we find that each of us are both the pawns
and the prize in this cosmic warfare. Yet, this isn't fictional entertainment, it
will be the determinant of our own personal destinies. This is our ultimate adventure. It's the ultimate love story, written in blood
on a wooden cross that was erected in Judea some two thousand years ago. We're going to undertake the ultimate adventure
involving each of us, in this interval, between the miracle of our origin and the mystery
of our destiny. If this series is successful, it should ignite
a passion, perhaps even an obsession that will inflame a lifetime of adventure, excitement,
insight and satisfaction not available through any other pursuit. This excursion is intended to be an enticement
and a broad background against which, to undertake detailed studies, with a verse by verse commentary
of each book, in a lifetime hobby that is the gateway to eternity. We've presumed to take on this ambitious project
because of our unique advantage. That's based on two discoveries. We have sixty six books that we call the Bible,
and even though they're penned by over forty different people who didn't even know each
other, over a period of virtually two thousand years. We discover are an intricate, skillfully designed, integrated message system,
and I don't simply mean that the theme of the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New. No, much more than that. We discover every number, every place name,
every detail in the text is there by deliberate design, and once you discover that for yourself,
that leads you to the second discovery, and that is, that this design, you can prove had
to have it's origin from outside our space time, that is outside our time domain. You say, "you can't prove the Bible?" Yes, you can when you discover it's the ...
the integrity of it's design, and then recognize that it had to have it's origin from outside
the dimensionality of time altogether. One integrated design. The New Testament is in the Old Testament
concealed, and the Old Testament is in the New Testament revealed. Now, a few caveats before we go on. We do have to recognize that the word of God
is inexhaustible. You can't learn everything about it in twenty
four hours. Twenty four years would be insufficient, but
we do hope you can gain a navigational, strategic view of it all, and the truth is in the details. The difficulty of a survey like this is, we
need to have a grasp of the details to understand the integrity of that design. Every detail in the Scripture, every place
name is connected with every other. Our goal is a strategic grasp of the entire
design. We hope that you will gain a conceptual grounding
in the major truths, but also have a navigational awareness so you can fit it all together. We have some advantages that were not available
in the past. Many of the skeptical theories that pervade
our culture have been disproven. The historicity of the patriarchal accounts
is now well established. People have denied there was writing in Moses
day, that's nonsense. We have substantial evidence of it being established
much earlier. The Gospels and the Epistles have been dated
to the Second Century, nonsense. The recent discoveries have made them contemporaneous with the Apostles. Much to be ... learned by the refutations
that come from archaeological discoveries, recent documentary discoveries, and competent
analysis of that which we have, so the facts and the science and the evidence is on our side. Some preliminaries. First, one of the things we always have to
do in undertaking a ... study like this is to blindfold our prejudices. We somehow need to shed the baggage of our
preconceptions and our misconceptions that we can be bringing to the table here. The only sure barrier to truth is the presumption
you already have it, so you want to set aside the myths and legends that have misled us,
and ... go at this with a fresh look. Twentieth century science has vindicated the
Biblical perspectives of reality. The more you know about the frontiers of science,
the more comfortable the creation account in Genesis reads, and we'll show you some of
that. See, we know today that we live in a finite
universe. That's the great discovery of twentieth century
science, is that we ... the universe is finite. We also are indebted to Doctor Einstein and
other discoveries in discovering that time is a physical property. The discovery of the nature of time is an
essential foundation to really understand much of the Biblical truth. And the realization of hyperspaces. That there
are spaces of more than three dimensions we directly experience. That's been proven in the laboratory, and is
fundamental to really understanding much of what the Bible has to say. We have finite boundaries. We know that the universe had a beginning. That's what leads scientists to speculate
in what the so called Big Bang models and so forth. Scientists also know that it's all winding
down. Ultimately, our thermodynamic universe will
eventually wind down and they have, they speak of what they call a heat death. So they see
the universe as having started at the singularity they call the Big Bang, and it goes to an ultimate
wind down. We are in a finite universe within a finite
span of time. I want to talk a little bit before we get
into the actual study, some background things about the nature of reality, and I want to
give you a quick glimpse of what we call in mathematics, a hyperspace. Let's go back and recall what we may have
learned in high school or college in trigonometry. You may recall that when we had a triangle
that had three angles, if we added up the angles of a triangle, it added up to what? A hundred and eighty degrees. No matter what triangle we took, it was always
the angles would add up to a hundred and eighty degrees. Well suppose we were confronted with a triangle in which the angles add up to more than 180 degrees. What would you conclude? That we had an error? No, not necessarily. That simply means we have encountered the curvature of the earth. If we go out into a large field, and layout a very large triangle and we bring in the figures, and we add up the angles that we measured, and we discover that they add up to more than 180 degrees, your first reaction might be that, gee, we've made a mistake. No. No, we simply have encountered the curvature
of the earth. This little rule that we all learned, that
angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees is only true for a universe
of two dimensions, and when you find a rule like that being violated, it's a hint that
we may have encountered an additional dimension. And that's exactly ... for an example, if you take a course in navigation, part of that course will include some elements of spherical trigonometry, in which you can have ninety degrees in each of the angles. In fact, you can also, if you encounter a
triangle that has less than 180 degrees, you've encountered a hyperbolic
paraboloid. Now, most of us aren't going to be concerned
with that, but the point is, these little rules are true of a universe of only two dimensions. That's why they call it plane trigonometry
or plane geometry. Well, it was those kinds of insights that
gave Doctor Einstein his insight when he was, ... grappling with the nature of space. His special theory of 1905 dealt with the
relativity of mass, velocity, and time, relative to the velocity of the observer. That's the special theory of relativity, but
that led, ten years later, to his general theory. The general theory of relativity by Doctor
Einstein is that there's no distinction
between time and space. That we don't live in three dimensions, we
live in at least four, one of those is time. We call it the theory of relativity, but it's
been confirmed over fourteen different ways to nineteen decimal places, so for practical
purposes, it's ... well established. But we need to understand the nature of time
because it will undergird so much of what we're going to encounter as we get into our
Bible studies. Let me give you another example. There are atomic clocks that are accurate
to better than one second in a million years. There's one of these located at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology at Boulder, Colorado. There's an identical clock, virtually identical
clock, at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England. Both of these are very elaborate, scientific
devices that are incredibly accurate. They are accurate to better than one second
per million years. I'm always reminded, whenever I encounter this,
when I was on the board of a company that was acquiring a company that made cesium clocks in Boston. When we were in this acquisition, the proud
President was presenting to our board the, ... fact that they made these clocks that
are this accurate, and I asked ... "I only have two questions as an acquiring director. How do you know? (laughter) and who cares?" Well, the way you know is from the resonance
of the cesium atom and I won't get into that all here, but as to "Who cares?" The accuracy of your measurement of time determines
the accuracy of your navigation, and these clocks, this kind of clock, makes the global
positioning satellite system possible. But the point is, these two super clocks in,
... Boulder, Colorado and at Greenwich, England, are differing every year by five micro
seconds. The one at Boulder is five micro seconds a
year faster than the identical clock at Greenwich. The question is, which one is correct? The answer is - they both are. The clock's are not inaccurate. Time is different. You see, Boulder, Colorado is at fifty
four hundred feet altitude above sea level. In Greenwich, England, it's eighty foot above
sea level and time is actually different at those two ... places because of a difference
in gravity among other things. These atomic clocks ... If I had an atomic clock
here on the platform, and raised it one meter, it would speed up by one part in ten to the
sixteenth. In other words, ten with sixteen zeroes after
it. Not much, not enough to change your schedule
but it's predictable and it is measurable and they actually did this. They sent aircraft around the world eastward
with such a clock and one at rest at the Observatory and they also sent one around the world westward
and they gained and lost exactly what Einstein's theory would have predicted due to the relative
motions and so forth. But another example that perhaps will get
this across, if you read a physics text book in this area, they almost always talk about
two hypothetical astronauts, and ... we're going to leave one right here and we're going
to send the other one to the nearest star. If you go out to the night sky, there is a
star called Alpha Centauri. It's four and a half light years away. A light year's a measurement of distance. And
we're going to send one of these imaginary astronauts to Alpha Centauri and back. Well, Alpha Centauri is four and a half light
years away, so if we send him there at half the speed of light, it'll take nine years
to get there and nine years to come back, it's an eighteen year deal. That's on earth time. If he takes a clock with him, he'll discover
something strange. On his clock, his clock because of the ... travel and so forth will speed at a different, ... rate and since he's traveling at ...
fifty percent of the speed of light, you can apply the Lorenz transformations to make that
correction, and you'll discover that when he gets back, he will end up being two years,
five months younger than his twin brother. Here are two astronauts, born at the same
instant. One goes on this trip, and when he gets back,
he'll be more than two years younger than his twin brother, and if that doesn't bother
you, you weren't listening carefully. This is an example of what we call the dilation
of time. Time is a physical property. It varies just as length, mass and other things
vary, due to Einstein's theory of relativity and so let's dramatize this further. Suppose we could send him, assume we could
send him at almost the speed of light, say 99.99 percent speed of light. Four and a half light year trip, round trip
would be nine years on our clock. On his clock, it would be thirty three days,
so that gives you a feeling for ... It should help you understand that time is not an
absolute, it's a variable. It's not uniform. Time is a physical property. It varies with mass and acceleration and gravity
among other things, and this is an insight that is profoundly useful as we approach some
of the subjects we're going to talk about in this study. You and I, we now know, exist in more than
three. In fact, the experts tell us we live in ten
dimensions. See, all of us think of time as being linear. When we were in school, the teacher went to
the blackboard and wrote a line starting at the left and going over to the right. The left end of the line was the birth of
the famous person, the founding of an empire, what have you, and the right end of that line
would be the death of that person, or the fall of that empire. All of us have made timelines in school. Well, because of that background, it's natural
for us, when we encounter the concept of eternity, we tend to jump to the conclusion that it's
sort of like a line that starts at infinity on the left and goes to infinity on the right. In other words, we think of eternity as having
lots of time. Well, that's good poetry, makes a nice verse
in Amazing Grace, the fourth verse and what have you, but it's ... bad physics. Because ... Let me ask you a question, "Is God
subject to the restrictions of mass or acceleration or gravity?" Hardly. He is not simply somebody with "lots of time"
as we tend to imagine eternity, but He's rather outside dimensionality of time altogether
and that is His uniqueness and He uses that to authenticate His messages to you. That's what Isaiah means when he says, "Thus
sayeth the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity." Now, since God has the technology to create
us, He certainly has the technology to get a message to us. The challenge is, how does He authenticate
His message? How does He let us know that the message is
really from Him and not some kind of contrivance or a fraud of some kind? Well, one of the ways He authenticates it,
and there's several ways, one of the ways, He declares the end from the beginning and
from ancient times, the things that are not yet done. In other words, He writes history before it
happens. We call that prophecy. Many people ask me, "Chuck, what do you, what's
your profession?" I say, "I'm a history teacher." I teach history in advance and of course,
I'm being a ... only a little bit facetious there. The geometry of eternity - If I take this line that
we have on the screen here, and if I bring it out to you in three dimensions, imagine
this curved line as coming out at you from the screen. It's a line, and we are at a point in this
line that we'll call the present. Behind us is the past, ahead of us is the
future. For us, life is a sequence of events. We can move forward and we can look back. We can't look forward or move back, but that's a whole 'nother discussion for another time. For someone who is outside the dimension of
that linear length of time, say in eternity. That person that's outside that line can see
the past, the present and the future simultaneously. Let me give you an analogy. Suppose you're watching a parade, the Rose
Parade at the first of the year or whatever your hometown might have. For you as you're sitting on the curb, around
the corner comes the marching units, the bands, the floats, the whatever's or. For you, the parade is a sequence. They come around the corner, they go by you,
they go around the next corner. So that's like life is, it's a sequence, but
for someone who is not in the plane of that parade's existence, say in a helicopter above
the parade, they can see the staging area where all the floats are get, getting prepared
ready to start. They can see the whole parade route, and they
can also see the other end where they disband. They can see the beginning and the end simultaneously. A clumsy analogy but it gets the idea across
I think. My favorite quote from Doctor Einstein says,
"People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between the past, the
present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion," and indeed it is. So the point I want to get across with all
this, is it's important for you to really understand that the nature of time, it's a physical
dimension, and it varies with mass, acceleration and gravity. As a footnote, I'd like to add here a little
bit about some architecture. I'm obviously using a computer here that consists
of micro circuits and a memory and all kinds of hard wire, wires and resistors and all
kinds ... of electronic parts. Also, inside the computer is software. There's an operating system, there's ... all
kinds of languages and messages going around and so forth. If you knew everything there is to know about
every piece of hardware in this computer, could you predict it's behavior? And the answer
is of course not. It's ... simply an environment within
which the software operates. It's behavior, how it responds to things is
a function of the software that's in it. Now let's talk a little bit about software. You see, the physical equipment is equivalent
to ... our physical bodies, our flesh, bones, our circulatory systems and all of that, but
that's all what I'll call hardware. Our real self, call it soul, spirit, mind,
thoughts, whatever, we use those words pretty loosely, as I look out at the audience here,
my frustration is I can't really see you. It's not because the lights are so bright,
I can't see you because I can only see the temporary residences that you're in. The real you, as I say, call it soul, spirit,
what have you, that's vocabulary, is software, not hardware. Now here's the point, let's talk a little
bit about software. If I take a little diskette, you all have
seen one of these little diskettes in our current computer age, if I take a blank cassette
and put it on a postal scale, it will weigh about seven tenths of an ounce. But if I load that blank diskette, I spend
over, I've spent hundreds of dollars and load it with a million bytes of software and then
put it on that postal scale, what will it weigh? Seven tenths of an ounce. In other words, software has no mass. A light switch weighs the same whether it's
on or off. It carries one bit of information but a
computer registers the same thing ... the information in it doesn't have weight. It has no mass. In fact, I could even send it through the
airwaves. The big thing today is wireless because these
messages do not require embodiment. They can exist in their own right, so software
has no mass. Now what does that mean? If time is a physical property, and software
has no mass, it has no time dimension. What that really means is the real you, the
real you is eternal whether you are saved or not. The issue is, where are you going to spend
it? I want to talk also, a little bit more about
hyperspaces. That's just a fancy word mathematicians use
for spaces of more than three dimensions. Most of us have been brought up in school
with what we call Euclidian geometry but one of the most important lectures in mathematics
was given on June 10th of 1854 when George Riemann invented a thing called metric tensors. It took sixty years for ... until Einstein could
use that mathematics to develop his four dimensional space time ... that underlies the theory
of relativity. Einstein went to his death frustrated because
he couldn't resolve some other issues which if he'd gone to one, another level up, they
would have yielded and Kaluza and Klein did that in 1953 by using more than four dimensions
and reconciled light and super gravity in the field of physics, and in 1963, Yang and
Mills, another duo, resolved electromagnetic and both the nuclear, both the weak and strong
nuclear forces, by recognizing the additional dimensions, and since about 1984 onwards, people
in this, that the deal in these things, are now exploring the ... apparent ... reality
of super strings. That we now live ... we begin to understand
we live in ten dimensions. I always find that rather interesting because
there's an ancient Hebrew sage by the name of Nachmanides who wrote in the 12th century. Nachmanides by simply studying the Hebrew
text of Genesis chapter one concluded that the universe has ten dimensions. In his vocabulary, only four were knowable,
the other six were, in his terms, not knowable. I find that rather interesting, because we've
spent millions of dollars on atomic accelerators that have caused particle physicists to conclude
that we live in ten dimensions. Four are directly measurable, the three spatial
dimensions we know in time. Six are curled and less than ten to the minus
thirty three centimeters and thus are inferrable by only indirect means and I think that's
fascinating that the leading frontier of quantum physics is now caught up to where Nachmanides was
in the 12th century. There are only two kinds of people that seem
to be able to deal comfortably with hyperspaces, spaces of more than three dimensions - and
that's mathematicians with special training and small children. If I was going to try to communicate to you
aspects of four dimensional or five dimensional space, we'd both be having a tough time because
it's outside our direct experience, but we can get some feeling for hyperspaces by going
down a dimension. Let's, as three dimensional people, let's
examine a two dimensional universe with two dimensional people living in it. I want to introduce you to two friends of
mine, Mr and Mrs Flat. I want you to be kind and compassionate here,
because they have a very serious handicap. They only live in 2 dimensions. ... Mr. and Mrs. Flat live in a two dimensional world. We are three dimensional beings. I want you to notice some of the advantages
that we have over Mr. and Mrs. Flat. First of all, we can, no matter where Mr.
And Mrs. Flat are within their two dimensional universe, we can be more intimate with both
of them simultaneously than they can be with each other. I could put my finger in theory one millionth
of an inch away from Mr. Flat and one millionth of an inch from Mrs. Flat, no matter where
they are, I can have intimacy with both independent of their spatial relationships, because I enjoy
that extra dimension. Furthermore, if I should thrust my finger
through their two dimensional universe, the only thing that they would be sensitive to,
they would see what? Not my finger. They would see a ring. They would see a circle. They would see a two dimensional representation
of this three dimensional person that's intruded into the universe. If a sphere tumbles through the universe,
they would see it as a point that would expand to a circle and then shrink to a point as
it disappears. So we begin to realize that the communication
of a three dimensional object to the two dimensional people has some challenges. How would we go about that? How would you communicate a three dimensional
object to these two dimensional people? By a two dimensional projection is one suggestion
so we could try to project say a three dimensional cube to get it into two dimensions to help
them understand it. That would probably be less than satisfactory. How would we see a three dimensional representation
of a four dimensional hyper cube? There are such things, and you can go on the
internet and see them and play with them, but the more you play with them, the more you realize
there's no way you'll understand them from a three dimensional vantage point without
special tools. It's not very useful. Another way you might unravel a three dimensional
object in a two dimensions to communicate to Mr. and Mrs. Flat, would be to unravel it. We take our three dimensional cube and flatten
it and that would be one way, but again, it wouldn't be too useful. That's actually been done with a four dimensional
cube. A four dimensional cube that's unraveled into
three dimensions is called a tessaract, or hinton cube. There's only one place I've ever encountered it
as being useful, and it came in, and I found it in a very (laughter) surprising place. Salvador Dali uses a hypercube in his ...
famous painting Corpus Christi. I was actually astounded to discover that
Salvador Dali was that sophisticated mathematically to really understand the implications of a
four dimensional cube in a three dimensional space, but ... we'll move on here. Ephesians. I have to call your attention to Paul's writing
in Ephesians. Ephesians, chapter three, verse seventeen
through nineteen. Paul says that, "Christ may dwell in your
hearts by faith that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend
with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height and to know the love
of Christ which passes knowledge that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God." A familiar passage, but I want you to notice something. I want you to notice something. How many dimensions is Paul talking about? "With all saints what is the breadth and length
and depth and height?" In the Greek one of those terms is the term
for time by the way. We got four dimensions here. Four dimensions in the text, I think that's
fascinating. I'm not necessarily insisting that was Paul's
intention, but I'm fascinated at the Holy Spirit in guiding him kept him physically on his
toes. We find examples of that all through the scripture
in some ways that will surprise you. Jesus goes on to give us some further instruction about understanding the text When I first, I should mention something,
when I first visited Israel, I remember a rabbi pointing out to me. He says, "We really won't understand the
text until the Messiah comes, but when the Messiah comes, he will interpret the passages. In fact, he'll interpret the very words, the
very letters. In fact, he'll even interpret the spaces between
the letters." When I first heard that, I dismissed that
as a colorful exaggeration until I read once again Matthew five, verse 17, 18
where Jesus himself says, "Think not that I come to destroy the Torah or the law or
the prophets. I come not to destroy but to fulfill for verily
I say unto you, 'till heaven and earth pass, one jot, one tittle shall in no wise pass from
the law 'till all be fulfilled. A jot or a tittle. See, a jot is one of the twenty two Hebrew
letters that you and I would mistake for an apostrophe. It looks like a little blemish on the paper,
just a little mark. A tittle is the little decorative hook on some
of the letters. This is a Hebraic way of saying, as we might
say, not the crossing of the T or the dotting of an I. Not one jot or one tittle shall pass from the law. I take this as a call to taking the text literally,
and now that leads to another area that I want to just touch on because it will give
us ... we're not gonna try to get into too much detail here, but I want you to have a respect
for some of these topics that are in themselves perhaps pretty controversial. Are there hidden messages in the Bible? Well, the Bible says there are. In Proverbs 25:2 it says, "It is the glory
of God to conceal a thing and it's the duty or honor of kings to search out a matter." Rabbit Cordevaro in the sixteenth century
records that the secrets of the Torah, that's the Hebrew term for the five books of Moses,
are revealed in the skipping of letters. There are lots of hidden messages in the scriptures
but we're gonna just focus on one, called the Equidistant letter sequence. What on earth is an equidistant letter sequence? Well, let me give you a contrived example
here to get the idea across. Ripps is one of the scientists in this area
by the way but anyway, Ripps explained that each code is a case of adding every fourth
letter to form a word. Now in this particular contrived example,
if you take every fourth letter, an R, an E, an A, a D, a T, H, E, C, O, D, E. It spells
a message itself. It says, "Read the code." Now in this case, it's just a simple contrivance,
but to get across the idea that you can have a message embedded in another message that
is hidden. It has to be found by knowing what spacing
to use and so forth. Now with a computer, that's easily, you can
try all spacing to see if there's a message there, to see if ... something's going and
that's exactly what they've done. I want to share with you a discovery, I should
say a re-discovery by Rabbi Wisemandell who was between World War I and World War II. He made some discoveries in his study of the
Hebrew text, which is the rediscovery of things that the ancient rabbis knew long before. He noticed some footnotes in some
ancient documents he looked at, chased them down and discovered something interesting. This is the Book of Genesis, the opening passages
of the Bible. Now realize that the Hebrew goes from right
to left. We would look at it as going backwards. You should understand that all languages flow
towards Jerusalem. Countries that are west of Jerusalem go from
left to right. Greek, English, German, Russian, whatever. Countries that are east of Jerusalem go from
right to left. Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit and others, but the
main point is, ... I don't know what you do with that piece of information I just threw
out 'cause I think it's colorful. But the word for Torah, the Torah, the law
in Hebrew, it's four letters. One letter, it's equiv- it's, it's equivalent
to our T-O-R-H. If you go to the first tau, which is like
their T and then count forty nine letters, you come to a vav which operates sort of
like an O, and then you count forty nine letters and you, again, you get a resh, and then you
count forty nine letters again and you get a heh. That's tau, vav, resh and heh which is equivalent
to our spelling it T-O-R-H, that English transliteration of that would be torah. And again, the Hebrew goes from right to left,
English goes from left to right. Now you say, "Gee, that's curious. Uh, forty nine letter intervals. That's a, it's curious," and then you don't
make much of that. It's just a ... many people argue, "Well,
that's just an accident of statistics. It could have happened any number of ways." Okay. You go to Exodus, and you discover the same
thing happens. You go to the first tau, and then you count
forty nine letters. You get a vav, count forty nine letters, you
get a resh and then you get forty nine letters and you get a heh, and again, it spells torah
and you say, "Well, that's really a little more than coincidence 'cause it obviously
seems to be designed, it happens again in Exodus." The chances of those happening by chance start
to become astronomically ridiculous. You go to Leviticus and you're sort of relieved
when it doesn't happen at all, but you go to Numbers, something even stranger happens. You go, you find a heh, a resh, a vav and
a tau. You find torah spelled backwards. (laughter) I don't know how they discovered
this. This sounds like they had time on their hands,
but the point is, again we have forty nine letter intervals spelling out torah, but backwards
this time. And you go to the next book, Deuteronomy. You have essentially the same thing again
occur with forty nine letter intervals. Well, so you stand back from all of this and
say, "That's kind of strange. Forward and forward and then Leviticus ... Let's
take a look at Leviticus a little more closely." And we notice, not forty-nine which is seven
squared, but seven letters we find a, at intervals of seven, we have a jot, a heh, a vav and
a heh and the jot, heh, vav, heh is the unpronounceable name of God in the Jewish community. And now you stand back from this whole design. You've got Genesis and Exodus going forward
and Numbers and Deuteronomy going backwards and you discover that the torah always points
to Yahweh or Jehovah or jot heh vav heh. is the way some rabbis would deal with that. Interesting. Now, the question is, did this all happen
by accident? Hardly. Is this evidence of design? Yes. What does it prove? I'm not sure, but there's so many of these
things that are so profound, that increasingly, they've come to be regarded as authentication. You try to draft some text with these kinds
of properties, you'll discover it's getting, ... it's nearly impossible. It's much more difficult than it looks to
contrive these things. Let me shift to another ... since we're talking
about information sciences in effect here. I want to ... acquaint you with another parallel
that's rather provocative. There is a thing called holography. It's a
form of lensless photography. If we take a ... three dimensional image and,
arrange a photographic plate in such a way that a laser illuminates that plate, and that
same laser illuminates the three dimensional object, so what the plate ... records - there's
no lenses here - and in the sense that it's not like a camera here. That plate will record the interference
between the direct light and the reflected light, and what gets on the plate is something,
that when you develop the film, looks like a darkroom mistake. It's cloudy, indistinct. It looks like something
you'd throw in the waste basket. Looks like a mistake. Yet, if you illuminate that developed plate,
by the laser that created it in the first place, you get a three dimensional window into the
space that was in front of it. We call the image on there a Fourier transform. It happens to be a mathematically Fourier
transform of the image. It has some very peculiar properties I think
you'd be, I think you might be interested in. If we take that plate, it's as if, if we have
a, some objects out there, no matter how you look through that window, it's as if you're
looking into that three dimensional space. Let me give you an example. I have a tie on. Let's assume it was a tie with a distinct
design of some kind. If I held my Bible up and you took a photograph
of me, you couldn't tell what kind of a tie I'm wearing. If you took a holograph of it, you could move
your eye and look around my Bible and see my tie. In other words, you've captured in a hologram
a three dimensional space, not just a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional
space. That's what makes the hologram rather provocative
for many reasons, but it's a Fourier transform.First of all, it requires proper illumination. It's useless in natural light. It has no form or comeliness that
you would, you would desire it. The information that it contains is spread
over the entire surface. It's not like a photograph where I could cut
a part of that photography out. If I had a photograph of three people, I could
cut one of the people out and give you two of them. If it was a hologram, you could look around
the hole and see all three. See, the information, all the information is
spread over the entire surface. There's no loss from dropouts. In other words, ... if you cut it,
or if I cut two holograms and give you both, you both have a complete copy. It may not be as sharp as the earlier one,
so it's resilient to specific interference. It's as if it anticipates hostile jamming. Now what's interesting, the Bible is like
a hologram. It has some Fourier transform properties. It is transcended to parallax and some other
things. Have you ever noticed in the Bible that there's
no chapter on baptism? There's no chapter on salvation? Every truth of God is spread through the whole
book, and that has a property. If you were a communications engineer
designing a communications system in anticipation of hostile jamming, one of the things you
do is spread your message over the entire spectrum. That is exactly the way the Bible is designed. There's some number of interesting parallels
between properties of light and the attributes of God. The light we're talking about is laser light,
has no parallax and it's as if it's located at infinity. It's velocity is constant which is suggestive
of a constant source of power. The photons lack locality. All photons are immediately connected with
all other photons in the universe. That sounds bizarre but they've just recently
discovered that. That's, it's astonishing. And, of course, light
is the primary means of revealing other things, and those are mathematically equivalent
to the primary attributes of God, as if He, He's infinite, infinite power, omnipresent
and omniscient so you can play with that a little bit. But it's interesting that these things are
intentional. We find even in James, "Every good gift and
every perfect gift is from above and cometh down from the Father of Lights with whom is
no variableness nor shadow of turning." That would variableness in the Greek is parallaxis
which is the term from which we get parallax for implying the very culmination that the
lasers have. So, just as a hologram needs to be illuminated
with the light that created it, it's useless in natural light, the information spread
over the entire bandwidth. There's no loss from dropouts, it's resilient
to interference. That's also true of the Bible. In natural light, it looks like a collection
of myths and folklore. When it's illuminated by the Holy Spirit,
it gives you an image. The image of the One that we have to do, Jesus
Christ. Incidentally, if you illuminate the hologram
with a laser of a different frequency, you get a false image, and if you illuminate this
with the wrong light, you'll get a false image there too. The information's spread over the entire Bible,
it's designed that way, and as if it anticipates hostile jamming, and that's exactly what Isiah
says in Isaiah twenty eight. "By the word of the Lord was unto them precept
upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line. Here a little, there a little and so forth." It's deliberately spread. Well, I've just touched on some of these things. You may find that interesting. It's not critical but I thought it's provocative to those of you that have an interest in those things. We've talked a little bit about the nature of reality, the nature of time. We put a little insert there about the nature of software. We'll talk a little more about that later. We talked a little bit about hyperspaces, because that's what we'll find ourselves dealing with, as we get into the scripture. We talked a little bit about the fact that there are some hidden codes. I will show you some astonishing ones as we go through not to get into the details, but to give you a respect for the total package. The hidden codes are not to establish doctrine, they're simply there as, among other things, as a means of authentication. And, of course, I talked a little about the holographic model. But now let's talk about an overview of where we're headed. The Old Testament, of course, is the story basically of a nation. ... to set the stage for the New Testament which is the story of a person - the person of Jesus Christ. And the Old Testament ... I want you to understand something that's very important ... that most people don't understand, the Old Testament is incomplete. The Old Testament is full of unexplained ceremonies. Sacrificial rituals that in and of themselves would seem to make no sense at all. It is full of unachieved purposes. The Covenants and so forth, many of which are yet to be fulfilled. The whole challenge in the Middle East today is the world's attempt to disavow the Abrahamic Covenant. We'll talk about that when we get there. The Old Testament is full of unappeased longings. The poetical books are full of these as just an example. And, of course, it's also perhaps paramount in importance it is full of unfulfilled prophecies. And those are ... we're going to be looking at those in some detail. These are all explained for you in John 5:39 where Jesus Himself challenges you He says, "Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me." And one of the secrets we're going to share with you is what do you do ... How many of you have read the Bible and found something that made no sense? Found something that seemed to contradict itself. Something that just was not understandable. How many of you have done that? Anyone that doesn't have their hand raised up has not been studying their Bible seriously. The next time you find something in the scripture that you don't understand, I want you to rejoice because you have an opportunity to conduct a laboratory experiment in the supernatural. I want you to get a journal. Go get a journal - you girls know what I'm talking about, the men have no idea. You go to a stationary store, you can buy bound books that are blank and it's called a journal. And what I want you to do is get one and vow that no one will ever see it but yourself And I say that so you'll be honest with yourself. No one's ever going to see this thing, it's your own private treasure - it will be when you're finished here. The next time you come across a passage that you don't understand enter it in your journal. Put the date down. Put the reference down and try to describe in your own words in ink - not in pencil - why its puzzling - why it doesn't seem to make sense to you. Once you've done that, I want you to go to prayer, go before your Father and remind Him that He promised that the Holy Spirit would teach you all things - not most things, all things. Lay claim on that promise. Say, here's a passage in Your word, Father, I don't understand, and I commit it to you to illuminate my confusion. And commit it to the Lord, Jesus Christ in your own way. Now it won't happen necessarily in the next ten seconds, but I tell you what will happen. Something will cross your path that will make that clear. It might be a sermon you hear that Sunday. It might be something you happen to read. It might be a conversation you overhear in a restaurant. It might be something you hear on a radio broadcast while randomly tuning. I have no idea what'll happen, but ... what will happen is something will come across your path that will make that passage that confused you, clear. I want you to go back to your journal. Enter the date. Document what it means. And you say, Chuck, that sounds exciting, but why all the paperwork? I'll tell you why. Because the days will come, when you'll traverse the valley of doubts. There will be times when you'll just go through a valley of despair. I want you to be able to pick up that journal and recount the footprints of the Holy Spirit as He taught you the scripture - not Chuck Missler or whoever your favorite Bible teacher might be. But the Holy Spirit. And that will become a treasure that will be unique to you that won't make sense to anybody else, but it'll be very important to you. Every time you find a passage in the scripture that you don't understand, I will predict that it will unravel to you. And when it does, it'll always involve some aspect of the person of Jesus Christ. His role. His mission. His accomplishments. His destiny. Some aspect. If you have a troubling area, put Christ right in the middle of it and watch what happens. And we'll show you examples of that as we go through this study. We're going to undertake a Panorama of all History. We're going to start from the Creation, to the Fall of Man, through the Flood to Abraham All the way to the Exodus. That's the Book of Genesis - a major portion of history that Genesis spans. Genesis ends and then, the Book of Exodus. And after Exodus, from there we'll get into the Monarchy, the Life of David, up to The Exile when the House of Israel is captive in Babylon The rest of the Old Testament will take you from The Exodus to The Exile There is a 400 year period between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. Some people call it the silent years. That's unfortunate, because those years are detailed for you in the Bible. They're in Daniel 11, in advance. Many people don't realize that. Then, of course, we have the New Testament. The Old Testament spanned virtually 2000 years. The New Testament spanned one lifetime. And many of the documents are contemporaneous ... they're scraps that we have are contemporaneous. Obviously, the nation Israel after the crucifixion of Christ, experienced the diaspora. But the Bible talks about, and we're watching the restoration, the beginning of the restoration of Israel. And people say, why are we studying the Bible now? Let me give you a big reason. I'm going to put something on the screen that I hope you will doubt. I want you to challenge this preposterous statement I'm going to put on the screen. We believe that we are being plunged into a period of time about which the Bible says more than about any other period of time in history including the time that Jesus walked the shores of Galilee and climbed the mountains of Judea. Now that's a preposterous statement. But we believe it. We believe that you and I are being propelled into a period of time about which the Bible says more than it does even about the Gospel period. Now, I hope you don't accept that. I'm counting on you to challenge that. To challenge that you got to do two things - you've got to find out what the Bible says. Not what Chuck Missler says or whoever. Find out what the Bible says. The second thing you've got to do is find out what's going on. And I'm going to suggest the more you know about what's going on in Israel, in Europe, in China, in technology, you name it. The more you know about what's going on on our strategic horizon, The more you'll see it dovetail with the classic Biblical scenario that was written thousands of years ago. Well, let's take a look at where we're headed. The Old Testament, of course, consists of the Torah. Some people would call it under the Greek, the Pentateuch. The Jews would call it the Torah. The five books of Moses. The first five. The most venerated part of the Old Testament to the Jewish community. It's followed by 12 historical books which really chronicle the history of Israel. Then, the literature of Israel. The poetical books. The Psalms, the Proverbs, and others. Five of those. Then we have 17 books called the Prophets. Writings that were inspired by God that talk about the future and God's plan in overview. It happens that 5 of those are large ones, that's why they're called major prophets. 12 of them are called minor prophets, but that's misleading, that's a librarian's designation. It has nothing to do with content. Some of the most priceless little gems are in the so called minor prophets. But in any case, we have 17 books, prophets, which add up to a total of 39 books making up the Old Testament. And, of course, the Torah is where we're starting. Genesis literally means the Book of Beginnings. Then the Book of Exodus which deals with the Birth of the Nation Israel. That's where it begins as a nation. The Law of that nation is codified in a Book called Leviticus. They Wander in the Wilderness for virtually 40 years called the Wilderness Wandering before they enter the land. And Deuteronomy is the last three sermons by Moses in which he reviews the laws and gives them guidance because he passes the baton to Joshua as they enter the land. So that closes the Torah. And the Book of Joshua follows, because Joshua is the successor. And handles the conquest of the land of Canaan. And, of course, in the next session, we will undertake a beginning of the Book of Genesis. We're going to devote a substantial portion of time to Genesis and also to Revelation - both ends - because everything in the Bible that has a beginning, begins in Genesis, and has its climax in Revelation - they're the bookends to the whole thing. So, the Book of Genesis, of course, covers all the way up to The Exodus. We'll be focusing next time on the Creation, and the predicament of mankind. And how that all started. We'll actually take, in the next hour, the first 3 chapters. The Creation itself and the Fall of Man. Then we'll finish what they call prehistory - we often regard the first 11 chapters of Genesis as prehistory as it's called by some scholars. The Flood, The Tower of Babel, and all that. We'll spend an hour on the patriarchs - the rest of the Book of Genesis. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph and why they are important to every one of us today. This is not just a question of Jewish history, it's a question of really understanding what God is doing and how He's doing it. So, we just hope you really enjoy this adventure I predict it will be the most challenging thing you have ever undertaken and the most rewarding, the most exciting thing you've every done. So, go at it prayerfully, and we'll see you next time.
