Witness 1 Apologetica Sermon Series: Final Edition

The following is the sermon I gave at our real-life ministry last Sunday. It is the final one in my apologetica series, which has taken me about a year to get through all the way.

In this series, I covered the Messianic prophecies, prophecies of our time, deductive and inductive arguments for the truth of the Bible and the reality of the Christian God, independent attestation of the Bible, and historical or archeological evidence that supports the Bible.

For this closing sermon, I cover all other fulfilled prophecies in the Bible, along with the Bible Codes, or ELS (Equidistant Letter Sequence) codes found placed within the text supernaturally, essentially comprising literary sacred geometry that proves without a doubt that the Bible was supernaturally authored by God. I also cover examples of knowledge in the Bible that seemingly would not have been possible for the authors to know at the time unless it was handed down by God.

In this format, I don't provide my sources, as it was presented live. It is largely adapted from my book, The More Rational Worldview, so if you want to see my sources for all of this or engage in a debate with us then check it out here first and skip ahead to Section II, where every assertion or claim in this sermon is documented through well over 100 sources, none of which are The Bible itself.

I began with a rant.

Witness 2 and I attended a local church recently, and the experience was quite shocking. Bibles, prayer, and the name of Jesus were all conspicuously absent from the service.

Rather, it was more of an hour-long worship service of Donald Trump, the lying, thieving, cheating, adulterer who calls himself the “chosen one”, the “second coming of God”, the “King of Israel”, who claims to have never repented to God once in his life, and can’t even name a single Bible verse when asked for his favorite.

In this sermon, we heard some of the most ridiculous nonsense that I’ve ever heard in my life, including the infamous, and totally debunked, urban legend that schools are “putting litter boxes in schools so kids can identify as cats”.

At first, I thought it must be a joke, but the tone and reaction showed that these people are clearly serious.

We couldn’t believe what we were hearing and seeing.

These people stand for nothing, and they will fall for anything. There is a verse about them, which I will read.

Isaiah 58: 3-8

They seek me daily

and delight to know my ways,

as if they were a nation that did righteousness

and did not forsake the judgment of their God;

they ask of me righteous judgments;

they delight to draw near to God.

‘Why have we fasted, and you see it not?

Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?’

Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure,

and oppress all your workers.

Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight

and to hit with a wicked fist.

Fasting like yours this day

will not make your voice to be heard on high.

Is such the fast that I choose,

a day for a person to humble himself?

“Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of wickedness,

to undo the straps of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry

and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover him,

and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

What happened to this in the church today? Where has the church gone? They have become weak, cowardly, disgusting, and despicable in the sight of God.

Modern Evangelical Christianity is an abomination, a cancerous tumor that has perverted and dirtied the word of God.

"True religion is this - to care for the widow and orphan in their distress"

Maybe someday the unbelievably wealthy pastors like Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland will open their wallets and start sharing their tens of millions of dollars with the truly impoverished and needy, but we aren't holding our breath.

The American church is too caught up in bullshit political culture wars and other nonsense, worshipping anti-Christ's who lie, cheat, abuse, and steal, so we are doing our best to fulfill Jesus's commandments in the ways that we are able to.

And of course, these false pastors and snakes are too busy stashing cash and checks inside their walls - a totally normal thing to do.

It’s easy to lose track of a few hundred thousand dollars when you’re worth over 50 million - we’ve all done it, right?

Of course, that’s chump change compared to the real earners, like Kenneth Copeland, the “richest pastor in America”

These are the people Jesus warned us about, the modern day Pharisees, and yet the American Christian public seems to love nothing more than swallowing their lies, worshipping the ground the walk on, and giving money to them, rather than people who actually need it.

It really boggles the mind.

So, let’s get to the meat of my sermon now. This will be my last long sermon for the foreseeable future, as I hope to finish my apologetics series today.

I have covered two main topics in my sermons: Epistemology and Eschatology - the study of "knowing", and the study of "going".

These questions cover such broad topics and questions as - Where do we come from? Where are we going? Why are we here? How do we know things? How can we trust that what we know is true? What is the meaning and purpose of human life on Earth?

So far in my apologetics series, I have covered deductive and inductive arguments of Christianity, as well as independent attestation of the Bible and archeological evidence that aligns with the Biblical narrative.

I have also covered two subsections of prophecy: the Messianic Prophecies, and prophecies that point to the modern time as the End Times spoken of in the Bible.

I’m only going to recap the Messianic prophecies briefly today in the interest of time, as these would each be their own sermon. Rest assured that the Messianic prophecies have been covered extensively by myself and others, and research on them is widely available.

The Bible describes the birth, life, and death of Jesus Christ of Nazareth to a staggering, incomprehensibly accurate degree, predicting hundreds or even thousands of years before the events happened that Jesus would:

Be born in Bethlehem
Be of the line of David and the tribe of Judah
Be preceded by a messenger in the wilderness
Enter Jerusalem on a donkey
Betrayed by a friend
Have his hands and feet pierced
Be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver
This betrayal money would be thrown into the temple and then used to buy a potter’s field
He would be silent before his accusers
Crucified with thieves
People would gamble for his garments
His side would be pierced
No broken bones
His body would not decay
Buried in a rich man’s tomb
A descendant of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob
Rejected by his own people
Speak in parables
Praised by children
Given vinegar to drink
Pray for his enemies
Darkness would cover the Earth at his death

These are the most credible and well-sourced Messianic prophecies that I have found, and even the atheist has to admit they are extraordinarily accurate and descriptive.

Today, however, I am going to look into two further areas: all other prophecies in the Bible, which I call the historical prophecies, and the Bible Codes.

First, though, I want to start with one more, final, area that I believe indicates that the Bible was supernaturally authored by God - advanced knowledge that is only possible through divine revelation.

I will give two examples. First, the dimensions of Noah’s Ark. In Genesis 6, God gives the dimensions of the 1.5 million cubic-foot ark he commanded Noah to build. 4,500 years ago, God instructed Noah to build the ark with dimensions of 300:50:30, or 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall.

Now, imagine that you are a sustenance farmer living in the middle of the desert thousand of years ago. You’ve never seen an ocean, you’ve never seen a ship that large, you’ve never seen anything even remotely like it.

However, somehow, these exact dimensions are the perfect, ideal size to create a virtually unsinkable cargo ship. The largest cargo ship in the world today, the MSC Gulsun, is built to dimensions of 400:60:33, an almost exact replica of Noah’s Ark. It’s really difficult to see how Noah could have known this if God didn’t really tell him.

One more example is the extremely advanced medical treatise laid out in Leviticus. Moses also seems to have supernaturally advanced knowledge about germ theory, contamination, and how bacteria spreads and causes disease.

You might assume that he learned it from the Egyptians, but this would be incorrect. Luckily, we understand quite clearly how they practiced medicine around Moses’s time, thanks to a discovery called the Ebers Papyrus.

The Ebers Papyrus reveals a quite primitive level of understanding, including potentially toxic, “mixture of opium and fly-dirt-which-is-on-the-wall to soothe a crying baby”. For “failing of the womb”, the papyrus prescribes, “film-of-dampness-which-is-found-on-the-wood-of-ships and froth-of-beer”, or to “protect against anything”, a “mixture of Scrapings-of-a-statue and Mint-of-the-mountains, cooked in oil and wax, to be taken for four days.”

This was the level of medical discourse among the most educated classes of society at the time of Moses.

How, then, did Moses come to understand modern medical practices so well that Leviticus acted as the only medical document in the world that was able to protect the Israelite tribe through commands on sanitation including:

Washing pottery and discarding it when broken (Lev. 6: 28)
Covering open vessels of food (Lev. 6: 28)
The ability of animal carcasses to spread disease (Lev. 11: 35-39)
Not eating an animal that died from disease or by itself (Lev. 7: 24)
Washing clothes and hands (Lev. 15: 13)

Keep in mind that the importance of hand washing was not re-discovered until the 19th century, 4,000 years later.

Finally, we have the red heifer sacrifice and the waters of purification. In the cleansing ritual laid out in Numbers 19, the priest is commanded to burn a red heifer to ashes while mixing it with the hyssop plant:

"The priest is to take some cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet wool and throw them onto the burning heifer…A man who is clean shall gather up the ashes of the heifer and put them in a ceremoniallyclean place outside the camp. They are to be kept by the Israelite community for use in the water of cleansing; it is for purification."

This medicinal herbal mixture would have created a potent antibacterial mixture through the hyssop and cedar plants, and there is no way that the Israelites could have just guessed this.

Hyssop oil, produced from burning and storing the ashes of the resulting solution, contains a significant amount of carvacrol, an anti-fungal and anti-bacterial agent still used today in holistic medical practices.

These commandments were given supernaturally by God to protect the Israelite tribe from the scourge of disease. Remember that up until the 20th century, disease killed more soldiers than fighting in war, and was an unavoidable issue that would have surely killed the Israelites off in the desert without this knowledge.

Now, let me get back to epistemology - the study of knowledge and how to know or come to believe something.

I will easily, and freely, admit that nothing I have laid out, in any of my apologetics sermons, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Bible is true. You can explain them away, and there is always a reasonable enough way for the atheist to discredit them.

“Lucky guesses”, “Knowledge that was widespread and yet went uncovered by archeologists”, “the Bible was doctored between then and the present day and these alleged alterations went unnoticed and left no record”.

The real question here is this: is it reasonable to think that these people had this knowledge without divine intervention when no one else around them seems to have understood any of it?

That’s why I want to take it a step further. Epistemologically speaking, the next two areas I will cover are different.

If there are real prophecies that can be explicitly shown to predict the future, or if there are codes within the Bible only possible through divine intervention, then the Bible must be true.

Essentially, if what I am going to cover in the next few slides is true, then the Bible must be true. If these prophecies and codes are real, there is no easy way out for the atheist. These two arguments cannot be simply ignored, and there is literally no other way to explain them except by admitting that the Bible was supernaturally authored by God.

After all, that’s what we would expect from the Word of God, right?

So, let me get into the meat here. In the ways through which we can observe the historical record, there exists a fairly precise dating system to accurately and conclusively date the origin of the Biblical text to within several years, or at most, decades, of when they were written. This means we can easily compare the known dates of authorship to events that occurred later, and see if the prophecies are fulfilled. I want to note that everything I say here has a corresponding extra-Biblical source which I have found. This is adapted from a book that I wrote, and this section along has well over a hundred sources which aren’t the Bible. For this format, I will simply assert my findings and my evidence and sources are available upon request.

Let’s start by looking at Israel’s three exiles. Israel’s exiles are as follows: the first exile in Egypt, which lasted 430 years, the second exile of 70 years of captivity in Babylon, and the final worldwide dispersion of the Jews that ended in 1948.

The date of the rebirth of Israel on May 15, 1948, was foretold exactly by the prophet Ezekiel more than twenty-five centuries before it occurred, in a dual prophecy involving both the modern creation of Israel, and their 70-year captivity in Babylon. The second captivity was prophesied by Jeremiah to be 70 years, while Ezekiel adds another layer of complexity to it, creating an expanded, dual prophecy

In writings dated to the seventh century B.C., Jeremiah predicted approximately 100 years before its fulfillment that the duration of the captivity of the Jewish exiles in Babylon would be exactly seventy years. We read in Jeremiah 25: 11, “These nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years.” This prophecy is confirmed to be true.

The prophet Ezekiel in 590 B.C. knew of Jeremiah’s prophecy that the Jews would be able to return to their land from Babylon after seventy years, in 536 B.C., which was fulfilled by King Cyrus. However, Ezekiel received another prophecy that looked much further into the future, revealing exactly how long it would be until the Jews would finally reestablish their nation in the last days. This prophetic expansion of Jeremiah’s 70-year prophecy is found in Ezekiel 4:3–6:

For I have laid upon thee the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days…and thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days:
I have appointed thee each day for a year.

This adds up to a total of 430 prophetic day-years of punishing exile for Israel given in Ezekiel, using a Biblical 360-day year.

70 years of that was spent on Babylon, leaving us with 360 years of punishment until the prophesied return to Israel. Nothing happened at that time, so what’s the deal?

Going back to Leviticus, we read about a seven-fold punishment for unrepentant Israelites. Leviticus 26: 8, among other examples:

And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.”

What we find in the historical record and the Bible is that the majority of the Jews had adapted and grown comfortable under King Cyrus, a liberal and respected leader, and chose to remain there rather than return to Israel when freed, clearly unrepentant of their actions and punishment.

This means that we multiply the remaining 360 prophetic years of punishment by seven, giving us 2,520 biblical years, or 907,200 days of punishment. Let’s convert this into our years:

Simply divide 907,200 by 365.25, and you end up with 2,483.8 years of our modern years.

The Babylonian captivity ended in the spring of 536 B.C., or year 536.4 B.C.

When we subtract 536.5 from 2,483.8, accounting for the year zero not existing, we end up with 1948.4, or May, 1948, as the prophesied return of the Jews to Israel.

This obscure and often overlooked prophecy works. It stands as the shining example of an undeniably divinely inspired prophecy. It’s a little complicated, but the math adds up and no one can deny that it adds up.

The 430 years exile in Egypt is also prophesied in Genesis. Thus, there is a clear prophetic picture laid out of every single time the Jews would be exiled from their home, from the 70 year period, the 430 year period, and finally the 2,483.8 year exile that just ended last century.

Let’s continue on to Daniel, one of the major prophets of the Bible.

Daniel outlines a complex series of visions involving various “beasts” which can be seen to accurately represent the kingdoms of the Earth that came after his time, itself a remarkable prophetic feat. These beasts, the same as mentioned in the imagery of Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue, are as follows: the Babylonian-Chaldean empire, the Medo-Persian Empire, the Greek Empire, and the Roman Empire.

This is already an amazing prophetic feat, but there is a sub-prophecy within it.

Daniel speaks of a “Little Horn”, which is understood to represent the Holy Roman Empire. He says that it will rule over God’s people for a “time, times, and half a time”, or a year, plus two years, plus half a year - 3.5 prophetic day-years in total.

Multiplied by a 360 day Biblical year, this gives us 1260 years.

The Holy Roman empire lasted from its foundation in 538 B.C. all the way up to Napoleon's time in 1798, when one of his generals imprisoned the pope, marking the end of it’s brutal, and often blasphemous and heretical reign over Christianity.

This gives us exactly 1260 years, again a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.

Finally, we can examine his prophet of 69 prophetic weeks given in Daniel 9:25:

"So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks of years and sixty-two weeks of years”

In Nehemiah, we find that this decree was given in March of the year 444 B.C.

Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem was when he was finally revealed as the promised Messiah, coming in the year 33 B.C.

Now let's compare the date of the decree in March, 444 B.C., with the date of Jesus' declaration of being the Messiah in March, 33 A.D. Recalling that the Jewish prophetic year had 360 days, not 365 days, when Daniel states 69 weeks of seven days, or prophetic years, each, the equation is as follows: 69 x 7 x 360 = 173,880 days. To convert this into our years, we simply divide 173,880 by 365, giving us 476 years. Remembering that 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. is only one year, the time span from 444 B.C. to 33 A.D. is 476 years exactly.

Again, these prophecies do work as stated and the math does add up. No one can deny this.

Additionally, in Nahum 1:10, written around 614 BC, the prophet Nahum predicts the condition of the Ninevites at the time of their demise, when he states, "They will be entangled among thorns and drunk from their wine; they will be consumed like dry stubble.” In this passage, and once again in Nahum 3:11, the prophet said that during the final hours of the attack on Nineveh, the Ninevites would be drunk.

The account of Diodorus Siculus in his work, Library of History, concerning the fall of Nineveh confirms this prophecy extra-Biblically - the Ninevites were drunk when their city fell, it was burned, and it never rose again.

Furthermore, in Jeremiah 49:16, written sometime from 626 to about 586 BC, the prophet Jeremiah states that Edom will be toppled, which was fulfilled hundreds of years later. The verse reads, "The terror you inspire and the pride of your heart have deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rocks, who occupy the heights of the hill. Though you build your nest as high as the eagle's, from there I will bring you down,' declares the Lord.”

Edom's capital city, Petra, was carved out of a mountain side, as the verse states, and had great natural defenses. However, it was destroyed and the kingdom of Edom no longer exists, as today Petra is part of Jordan.

Another enemy of the Israelites, the great island city-state of Tyre, has its own series of unlikely prophecies in Ezekiel 26 that were fulfilled.

The prophecy paraphrased in list form reads as follows:

1. God will “bring upon Tyre Nebuchadnezzar,” the king of Babylon (verse 7).

2. God will “cause many nations to come up against Tyre, as...waves...come up” (verse 3).

3. Enemies will destroy the walls of Tyre and “make her like the top of a rock” (verse 4).

4. The destroyed city will be “a place for the spreading of nets” (verse 5).

5. Tyre’s enemies will lay the destroyed city’s debris “in the midst of the water” (verse 12).

6. The original city of Tyre will be “built no more” (verse 14).

7. The ancient city will “never be found again” (verse 21).

While all of these prophecies can be confirmed through archeological and non-Biblical sources, in the interest of time, I will focus on the most enigmatic and specific of these prophecies - that Tyre’s debris would be “in the midst of the waters”.

Unusually, Ezekiel predicted hundreds of years before Alexander the Great exactly how he would conquer and destroy the Island fortress. According to Live Science, Alexander the Great’s army took the rubble of stone and timber from the destroyed mainland city of Tyre and cast it into the sea to create a causeway to enable his army to approach the satellite island city. The causeway, measuring two hundred feet in width, stretched across a half mile of sea so Alexander’s army could invade the island city, and is still extant today.

The diagram below shows the extent of the land bridge constructed by Alexander out of the rubble of the Old City of Tyre, fulfilling Bible prophecy.

We can also examine one more historically accurate prophecy made by Ezekiel involving a contemporary empire, the Egyptians. Paraphrasing the prophecy about Egypt from Ezekiel 29, we read:

“Therefore, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will bring a sword against you and kill both man and beast. Egypt will become a desolate wasteland... I am going to give Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon... It will be the lowliest of kingdoms and will never again exalt itself above the other nations. I will make it so weak that it will never again rule over the nations.”

This was a bold prediction, as at the time of Ezekiel, Egypt had been a world power for centuries, dominating many nations, including Israel. However, he accurately predicted their downfall at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, and for most of the past 2500 years, Egypt has been controlled by foreign powers, including the Romans, Ottomans, and Europeans

These prophecies that predict the permanent desolation of the great empires that were once enemies of Israel are often taken for granted, but were bold and unlikely predictions given the strength of these civilizations compared to the small tribe of Israel, which at many points consisted of simple nomadic desert tribes at a great disadvantage to the surrounding dominant world powers.

Next, let’s take a look at the book of Joshua, the fall of Jericho, and another seemingly accurate prophecy. We recall from my archeological sermon that, according to John Garstang and other archeologists involved with surveying the site, the fall of Jericho to the historical Joshua happened in approximately 1400 B.C. The walls did indeed fall down outwards, in contrast to the usual way walls are found when cities are besieged.

Another interesting phenomenon is described in Joshua 3: 16, when the Israelites crossed the Jordan River: “The water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down to the Sea of the Arabah (that is, the Dead Sea) was completely cut off.” This extraordinary account can actually be explained by the same supernatural, seismological event, which is on a known fault line, happens periodically, and temporarily dams the Jordan River when it does.

In the book Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, we read the following:

Historically, the banks of the Jordan at Adam/Damiyeh have been liable to being undercut by the current more than at many other places. Earth dams created by landslides (some triggered by earthquakes) have occurred in AD 1160, 1267, 1546, 1834, 1906, and 1927; they have stopped the Jordan’s flow from 16 hours up to two days

In this book of Joshua, the author prophesied that Jericho would be rebuilt by one man, and that the man’s oldest son would die when the reconstruction began, and that his youngest son would die when the work reached completion. Joshua 6:26 reads:

“Cursed before the Lord is the one who undertakes to rebuild this city, Jericho: At the cost of his firstborn son he will lay its foundations; at the cost of his youngest he will set up its gates”

We find the scriptural fulfillment of this in 1 Kings 16: 34, “In Ahab’s time, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. He laid its foundations at the cost of his firstborn son Abiram, and he set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub.” King Ahab’s reign historically is in the 9th century B.C.; thus, there is a scriptural fulfillment approximately 500 years after the time of Joshua.

However, this isn't good enough for me. I don't consider a prophecy fulfilled is the only evidence of it is in the Bible itself, there must be extra-Biblical evidence to support it as well.

So, is there extra-Biblical evidence that this happened? When we examine the sociocultural lens through which this prophetic curse was given, we can discern its dual meaning as both a literal prophecy and as a hidden Messianic prophecy, and forensically discover its fulfillment.

There existed an abominable practice of child sacrifice in the Biblical region during this time, as shown through King Ahaz, the King of Moab, and others. As seen in the book, Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel, this was an existing practice at the time, and it is a known fact that surrounding cultures, such as the Carthaginians, regularly practiced the same ritual.

In this sacrifice, we find an example of deep inter-connections and thematic unity within the Bible, in which we see kings sacrificing their own sons as a sort of dark juxtaposition to God’s sacrifice on the cross for us.

Thus, we can see God casting a dark prediction of child sacrifice involved in the construction of Jericho, in which mankind would use its free will in order to commit one of the most heinous moral abominations possible, child sacrifice. Is there evidence of this at Jericho?

In the study How was the Curse on Jericho Fulfilled?, by the U.S. Secretary of the Palestine Exploration Fund, we read the following:

With accumulating evidence of the prevalence of the rite, we shall probably be led to see an instance of it in the case of Jericho, the foundation stones being laid with burial jars beneath them, as we see was done at Gezer, the jar under the beginning of the wall containing the body of Hiel's eldest son, and that under the last gate the body of his youngest son. Mr. Macalister speaks of " infants' bones built under or into ordinary house walls," saying that he has found six or eight instances, all in the Jewish strata which would give a period after Solomon (I Kings 9: 6), and of course before the exile.

The researchers provide an example of the type of small urn used to bury these child sacrifices within the foundations of buildings or cities at the time, in an attempt to provide sacrifices to their gods:

In the study, Jar-Burial Customs and the Question of Infant Sacrifice in Palestine, from the University of Chicago, we read, “At Jericho bodies of children in jars were found beneath the clay floors of the Canaanite houses.”

Thus, we can conclusively say that the prophetic Biblical curse of the rebuilding of Jericho being at the cost of the children of the builders was fulfilled.

Finally, we come to Isaiah - one of the Atheist’s least favorite prophets due to the accuracy of his predictions.

The prophecies in Isaiah present a unique problem for Bible skeptics, in that they appear to predict, by name, Cyrus the Great - over 100 years before he ruled.

Thus, we have specific evidence of a divinely inspired prophecy.

In order to circumvent this issue, Bible skeptics and atheists came up with a theory which they call the “Deutero-Isaiah” theory, in which they divide the book into two, or sometimes more authors.

Unfortunately, the divisions postulated by the so-called “divisionist” scholars indicate that there is no agreement between any of them as to where the division occurred in the book of Isaiah, and there is no scholarly consensus as to how many of these alleged future authors there are. There are also no proposed names of the future authors, no historical evidence that such an author existed, and no textual evidence suggesting later extrapolation or forgery.

In fact, textual evidence strongly suggests otherwise. My complete and total debunking of the “deutero-Isaiah” theory takes up almost ten pages of my book, so I can’t cover it all here.

However, I can say conclusively that the theory is weak, it is unsupported by studies and evidence, including a computer assisted study using modern forensic techniques to identify the author of a text, and the only possible way to arrive at this conclusion is to assume a priori, or beforehand, that the Bible cannot have supernatural prophecies, thus, there must have been a later author who altered the text. This is unusual, fallacious, and is not how any other text from antiquity is analyzed.

Isaiah also appears to predict the exact form in which King Cyrus would conquer Babylon. Rather than the usual military victories, in which the city would be besieged, and eventually attacked with destruction of the fortifications, as seen in Jericho, Isaiah predicts that Cyrus will, essentially, walk in through the gates of Babylon without resistance. Despite Babylon's strong defenses, which included moats, and walls that were more than 70-feet thick and 300-feet high, with 250 watchtowers, Cyrus was, in fact, able to enter the city through the gates and conquer it. Cyrus and his troops accomplished this by diverting the flow of the Euphrates River into a large lake basin, which enabled him to march his army across the riverbed and into the city.

Additionally, early in the book of Isaiah, the prophet states the following about Babylon in Isaiah 14: 23, "’I will turn her into a place for owls and into swampland; I will sweep her with the broom of destruction,' declares the Lord Almighty." At the time, this was a bold claim. Babylon had been a world power at two different times in history, and along with the Egyptians, would have seemed a sure bet over the small, fragmented Hebrew tribe of desert wanderers. However, after Cyrus conquered Babylon, the kingdom never again rose to power, and the buildings of Babylon fell into a gradual state of ruin during the next several centuries. According to the World History Encyclopedia, “Whatever early role the city played in the ancient world is lost to modern-day scholars because the water level in the region has risen steadily over the centuries and the ruins of Old Babylon have become inaccessible.” This demonstrates that Isaiah’s bold prophecy of turning Babylon into swampland in the middle of a desert has been accurately fulfilled.

To conclude this examination of the prophet Isaiah, subjected to more scholarly attacks than any other Biblical figure, we can conclusively say that these attacks are unfounded, and are based in the prejudices and a priori assumptions of academics and scientists. The accusations leveled against Isaiah are unprecedented and unusual, as claims of later authorship, extrapolation, or forgery require significant evidence, and are usually postulated because of real reasoning or evidence, not simply because academics don’t want to believe what the text says is true. We find no evidence for the “deutero-Isaiah theory”, strong forensic evidence of a single author, and the historical record unanimously indicates a unified book, written by a historical figure who these same academics readily admit existed and wrote the first 39 chapters of his book. This is an intellectually bankrupt and brazen attempt to discredit the supernatural authorship of the Bible, attempts that are not conducted reasonably, or by normal good faith academic standards and procedures.

Finally, the Bible Codes.

Let me begin by explaining the concept of an ESL, or equidistant letter spacing Bible code.

Three brilliant Hebrew researchers, working for the Hebrew University and the Jerusalem College of Technology, Doron Witzum, Yoav Rosenberg, and Eliyahu Rips, noticed in the late 20th century that if you take the Hebrew text of the Bible placed on a grid and started at a certain point, you could spell out relevant words and phrases by counting an equal number of spaces out from that letter in multiple directions.

Their findings were published in a scholarly, peer reviewed journal called Statistical Science in 1994, titled Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis.

This study sent shockwaves through the mathematical and statistical analysis community, acting as some of the first hard, verified proof that the Biblical text was supernaturally authored. They are so complex and hidden that, although there were rumours and ancient traditions of codes within the Bible dating to at least 1200 AD, see also Weissmandl, it took the invention of the computer to really decode and discover them, and it is absolutely impossible to encode them by hand or accidentally.

Only God could have placed this “literary sacred geometry” within the text of the Bible.

In this experiment, the researchers used the ancient Hebrew Textus Receptus, the “received text”, and the ancient Masoretic Hebrew text used by the King James translators of the Torah. We will examine this study, some implications, and the alleged debunking of these claims, including some scientists who claim that the Bible Code studies have been debunked. However, the “official” debunkers, including Brendan McKay and Dror Bar-Natan, have conceded defeat, claiming that they are “harming their careers”, that they miss the “good old times”, and they “have better things to do than codes.” They conclude their attempt to debunk divine authorship of the Bible by stating, “It is a good time to quit.”

Once an equidistant letter sequence, or ELS pattern, has been detected, anyone alive can personally verify the existence of that particular Bible Code by using widely available Bible Code software, or by manually counting out the Hebrew and skipping the appropriate number of letters.

Therefore, the phenomenon is conclusively real; however, the scientific objections consist of accusations that the methodology in the study was “tuned”, a baseless and unsupported accusation the researchers deny.

Now, in any sufficiently large texts, words will be found at far-enough equidistant letter spaces, but these researchers, and several others, claim to have found extraordinarily significant meaning in these words. This means that the words found demonstrate compelling statistical unlikeliness involving the closeness of their spacing, how they fit within the context and meaning of the text, and sometimes contain prophetic material only discernible after events have occurred.

The best example of ELS codes can be found in Isaiah 53, itself a significant and prophetic chapter - the “Suffering Servant” chapter that predicts the life and death of Jesus Christ to an astonishing degree.

The following graphic lays out all of the ELS codes found within this one single chapter:

Now, this is simply extraordinary - absolute, undeniable proof of the divine authorship of the Bible. No other text, ever, has been found to contain this amount of dense, relevant language encoded into it through ELS codes.

While you can find words in other texts, like War and Peace, they are not applicable or relevant. In other words, the hard proof for the Bible here is that these codes are not random - they were placed there by intelligent design, meant for a modern generation like us that would be skeptical, and demand modern proof for a modern age.

Indeed, God has provided this to us, and even with a supercomputer, the ancient Israelites would not have been able to fake or intentionally insert these codes.

Now, this is a long, complicated story, and again my book contains an entire chapter on the Bible codes, the alleged debunking, and others who support it.

One such supporter is Harold Gans, a retired senior cryptologic mathematician for the U.S. Department of Defense, and a researcher who mathematically examined sophisticated foreign government intelligence codes for the U.S. Army.

Upon reading the original Torah codes paper in Statistical Science, he thought it was “ridiculous”, and attempted to disprove the findings at the urging of his wife. As an intelligence specialist dealing with complex codes and computers, Gans had the technical ability to test the claims and data for himself, so in 1989 he created an original computer program to check Witztum’s data.

An example of his further study on the Bible Codes is shown here, highlighting the complex nature of proving this research:

His conclusion in this study finds that the odds of these codes existing are “smaller than can be attributed to chance”, and he has publicly stated that the odds of them occurring naturally are around 200,000:1. He has also spoken widely on them, and I will begin wrapping up this section by quoting from an interview with him.

Gans has said:

The Torah text concerns the sacrifices made in the Temple by the Kohanim, the sons of Aharon. The code consists simply of the word “Aharon,” which appears as an ELS in this section 25 times.
So the first thing I did was check the calculations myself. I got the same number. I then calculated the probability of observing 25 such ELSs when around 8 were expected by chance. The probability was significantly small: less than 1 in 500,000.
It was at that moment—sitting there with my calculator in hand—that I thought, “Hmm.” For the first time, I thought that maybe Torah Codes couldn’t be dismissed so quickly
Any text will produce a certain number of meaningful-looking patterns and word associations, even the back of a cereal box. Your subjective judgment may lead you to imagine relationships between words and to perceive meanings, where none may exist.
The computer enables us to look through millions of configurations in search of interesting or unexpected patterns. A mathematician can then calculate the likelihood that these patterns happened by chance, while a non-mathematician would be at a loss to evaluate them correctly.
[The debunkers, McKay, et.al] never claimed to have discovered real codes in those non-Torah texts. Their only “successful” results were obtained by deliberately rigging the experiment in such a way that the layman wouldn’t recognize the mathematical flaws.
The public does not understand that these critics openly admitted that their research did not result in the discovery of even a single valid code in any text other than the Torah.
There are strict mathematical criteria that determine the definition of a code. What is, and is not, a code? Appearing as an ELS is only one of several criteria. The most important criterion is that the configuration of ELSs found must have some well-defined mathematical or structural property that is highly unexpected. In other words, it must be highly unlikely that this so-called “code” occurred by chance.
This criterion is crucial. The standard scientific criterion for “highly unexpected” is that the odds against its occurring by chance are greater than, or equal to, 1,000 to 1. This must be determined by use of sophisticated software that executes what is known as randomization tests. Once one applies the criterion to the critics’ “codes,” a mathematician can see immediately that they do not qualify as codes.

So, he explains quite well why and how these codes can be understood as real and significant, and how any alleged debunking of them has fallen flat on its face.

Similar to all other arguments against supernatural authorship of the Bible, when we look closely at what they are saying, we can see that they admit that the phenomenon and arguments are real, but they simply will not allow themselves to believe it - due to their a priori prejudices and biases against the supernatural.

As we recall, the debunkers have publicly conceded this debate - tacitly admitting the existence and significance of these codes. It is not the mere existence of encoded words that is significant, it is the amount and meaningfulness of words found encoded within context that demonstrates unusual statistical significance.

The phenomenon is real; however, only what it means is up to the individual. The existence of a miraculous amount of extremely statistically unlikely ELS codes within the Bible stands successfully unrefuted, and therefore, this phenomenon presents conclusive evidence for supernatural authorship of the Bible.

Humans have long had an affinity for sacred geometry, but it turns out the best example of this was right in front of our faces the whole time.

Now, remember the epistemology of these findings - if these codes and prophecies are real, then the Bible must have been supernaturally authored by God.

If the Bible was supernaturally authored by God, then its statements on Jesus Christ, eschatology, and the meaning and purpose of human life must also be true.

Thus, the Bible is a reliable source of truth on the world, and through it, we can answer the greatest questions mankind has ever asked.

Where are we going? Why are we here? Why does anything exist at all?

If you want to know the answers to these questions, I have now conclusively, demonstrably, and irrefutably proven that all you need to do to find them is crack open a Bible.

May God bless you all.

-Witness 1