The Church Meeting in Jesus’ Name

602 Oak Knoll Dr.

San Antonio, TX 78228

Epistle

January 2018

Event Calendar

February  2 – 11         Revival Meeting with Corey Riggs

April 14                       Women’s Meeting

June 18-22                 Vacation Bible School

July 15-22                   Mission Conference

October 12-13             Men’s Meeting

 

Endless Genealogies

 4 Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do.        1 Timothy 1

I don’t think having your DNA tested by Ancestry.com, and researching your family tree is prohibited by this verse, even though probing your family tree is nearly endless. You are actually not very distantly related to everyone on the planet. Binary exponentials and the explosion in cross-breeding since Columbus statistically connect everyone on earth within a few generations back. I assume, however, that Paul is not referring to your ancestry, but to an obsession by believers over that portion of the Bible occupied with genealogical lists, and traditional fables related to these people. The ancient Jews were fascinated with these stories and unwritten traditions. Of course, the genealogies listed in the Bible are important for a number of reasons, mostly informational. But according to Paul their usefulness is limited. They certainly do not minister godly edifying, or deal with real issues such as charity, conscience and faith. Unfortunately, some real believers get caught up focusing on the minor, or even on pure nonsense, which causes them to lose focus on reality.

We’ve all seen it, and participated in it to some degree. Explorers in the Columbian age went everywhere looking for the ten lost tribes, and countless times claimed to have found them. Mormons and British-Israelites still think they found them. Clarence Larkin seemed curiously curious about the measurements of the Great Pyramid. Medieval crusaders fixated on the Holy Grail, of all things, and other equally meaningless relics. People are still looking for Noah’s ark, and the Ark of the Covenant. I came upon a new one recently. I had heard of it before, and discounted it, but someone mentioned it to me recently, and insisted I read the book for him, and let him know “what I thought.” I warned him it would be negative. He said, “that’s ok.” I guess he’s used to me being negative.

The book is “Cracking the Bible Code” by Jeffrey Satinover, M.D. It follows the concept an earlier book “The Bible Code” by Michael Drosnin. Satinover’s book is valuable because it details the historical attempts by fundamentalist Jews beginning millenia ago at finding crypto-codes in the Torah. His research into historic Judaic superstition is useful. Other than that the book is total bunk.

The Bible Code

The idea behind the Bible code is that the Torah, or the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible, were dictated by God, and preserved in such a way in the Masoretic Text that even the letters are divinely assigned. Bible decoders use cryptology to decipher significant words God supposedly hid in the text to prove his authorship. Kids used to send coded messages to each other in elementary school, in which every third letter would count, or every fourth, but when the text is looked at normally it doesn’t make sense. In the case of the Bible, the normal text makes sense, but the claim is that God has hidden within that text letters which, taken at regular distances, form significant words. One example is that in the opening chapter of Leviticus the word “Aaron” is found 25 times using various “equidistant letter sequences” (or ELS). The claim is that statistically in a random text it should only have been found 8 times. The difference is supposedly a statistical 1 in 400,000 improbability.

Many people, even educated people, are impressed by these hidden words in the Hebrew Torah, especially when related words are found near each other, words like Abraham and Elohim, or Eichman and gas, or missile and Tel Aviv, etc. When significant pairs of words don’t turn up, the Bible de-coders use a technique they call “clustering.” Clustering simply means if it’s close we count it. Words that don’t appear using a distance of 4 between letters sometimes appear if we fudge the numbers and accept a distance of 5 or even 6 on occasion. I shouldn’t have to point out the stupidity of all this. But unfortunately it is necessary. Paul’s warning to Timothy is especially relevant here. Focus on the text itself. I suggest a few introductory considerations culled from studying the Bible normally:

1. God is not interested in secret messages or hidden text. He speaks expressly. What we hear in the ear we are commanded to shout from the rooftops. Even his parables are straightforwardly defined. God wants everyone interested to know what he thinks.
2. God demands reading and understanding, not computing equidistant letter sequences. There is no reason for any “hidden text” in the Bible, especially meaningless text, and there is no need or permission to read between the lines, or the letters. We read it as it is and understand what God said to us.
3. God is not obsessed with news headlines nor famous leaders, much less celebrities. He would never include hidden text about trivial events or people in his word, not Saddam, not Princess Di, not Yitzak Rabin. What God deals with is the stuff that matters, righteousness, faith, kindness, etc.
4. God looks for people who think like him, about real life choices, like good and evil, the kind of thinking that has no use for calculators, and goes way beyond the most complex math.
5. God would never give educated intellectuals with computers an advantage over simple uneducated laborers with a desire to know the truth, and the willingness to follow it. In fact, the gospel is designed to appeal to the poor in spirit, not the sophisticated and proud.
6. God demands faith. Many evidences abound that confirm the existence of God, and the inspiration of the Bible, but no empirical proof. Anyone who demands that God prove himself empirically is being unreasonable.

If you agree, that should be enough to turn you away from such nonsense. But to be thorough, let’s consider the concept of statistical probability. According to Poker players, a Royal Flush occurs in one out of 649,739 hands. I am no statistician, but I can use a calculator, and according to my calculations, that is not the most unlikely hand. There are 311,875,200 distinct possible hands in Poker (52 to the 5^th power, or more precisely 52*51*50*49*48). Any specific hand you desire to be dealt has that exact unlikeliness factor. However, even with 300 million distinct hands you are dead sure to be dealt one of them every time. It is never remarkable that you are dealt a distinct hand in Poker. When any hand will do, it is going to happen every deal. Statistical probability when any hand will do is meaningless.

Now when you want one certain hand the statistical improbability becomes meaningful. In other words, you have only one chance in about 300 million to be dealt the same hand twice in a row. This is because on the second deal not just any hand will do. You want a certain hand. The specific hand is what is improbable, not just any old distinct hand. And of course, statistical improbability decreases if you give yourself more deals to accomplish it. If you try to deal a specified hand, but give yourself a thousand tries, you have one chance in about 300,000 of pulling it off. If you give yourself a million deals the improbability decreases to one in 300. And so on.

This useless Bible Code system obsessed over by fanatic Jews and way too many gullible Christians, gives itself literally unlimited deals to come up with literally unlimited hands. There are unlimited numbers of “significant” words to search for, and unlimited distances for equidistant letter sequences. (For brevity’s sake I will not even consider the concept of “clustering” among the failures to produce a “hit” that isn’t there. That is just a cop-out). Seriously, if you allow any distance between 2 and 100 you increase the probability of a hit exponentially. If that doesn’t work, you can just manipulate the distances, increase it to 200 (or even make negative distances – backwards searches) and sooner or later you will get hits. The fact that small words like “hitler” and “nazi” are found somewhere near each other with unlimited search criteria and within an enormous pool of letters is unremarkable. If “researchers” try 1000 significant words or word pairs, and find impressive hits for 100, the 100 doesn’t surprise me. It’s the 900 pairs that were not found that surprises me.

I must also point out that using this scheme to compare other books with the Torah in order to demonstrate the divine source of the Torah, and the profane source of all other texts, is absurd, or more likely outright fraud. Think about it. Their example of searching equidistant lettering for the word “Aaron” in one passage of Leviticus found it 25 times, when statistically it should only have turned up 8 times. But when they applied the same criteria to the same passage in the Samaritan Pentateuch it turned up only 9, so close to the expected 8 that it supposedly proves that the Samaritan Pentateuch is unexceptional.

But see the scam here. By “applying the same criteria” to both books they are not applying the same criteria. Remember, the first hand and the second hand are by definition different criteria. When searching the Torah the criteria was a distinct hand (any hand will do), but on the Samaritan Pentateuch the criteria was a specific hand (only this hand will do). Remember that statistical probability is meaningless when you can take any word, or any chapter, as in their Torah searches. But the improbability applies to the second hand because the first hand defined the criteria. The Torah was certain to produce a result, because any number of results would have worked. But the Samaritan text was unlikely to produce a result, because only that specific result was acceptable. The outcome of the comparison is totally unremarkable. It is, however, remarkable that they try to pass it off as significant.

The whole concept is bogus, and would be meaningless if it didn’t do any harm. But when people look at the Bible in that way, they don’t look at it in the intended way. So the Bible Code does some personal harm to anyone who spends even 30 seconds considering it, because that is half a minute they’ll never get back. But what is much worse, when real statisticians point out the deception in such scams, the real faith of real Christians is degraded, as if we also believe the Bible for such absurd reasons.

We should not look for any evidence in favor of the Bible other than the evidence the Bible claims for itself, and which it demands that we consider. First, the evidence of witnesses (multiple eye-witnesses and testimonies of the resurrection of Christ, for example). Second, the evidence of prediction (genuine prophecies vetted and published in their era, and coming to pass as predicted, such as the timing of the Messiah predicted by Daniel, and the destruction of Jerusalem predicted by Christ). Third, the evidence of spiritual life (a person transformed by accepting Christ and his sacrifice, and placing faith in God’s promises, such conversions being innumerable in history, beginning with such a wretch as Paul, all the way to our own generation). And finally, the evidence of benefit (such as the warnings about practices harmful to us, or sins, counsels concerning marriage and child-rearing, government endorsed as “public service,” principles of individual worth, including natural rights of life, property and liberty, the Bible’s demand for universal literacy, and even the crucial “evolution” of book publishing spurred by the demand for the Bible, which spawned the enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions, etc.).

All told, the Bible has been the single greatest beneficial influence in human history. It does not need computers to prove anything for it. If someone wants to ignore it he must do so by considerable stubbornness. And that is why we are told to focus on the real issues, what the Bible actually intends for us to understand and master, such as godly edifying, not nit-picking the genealogies or any other peripheral curiosities.