The Strand Study Bible

MATTHEW MATTHEW * Take the entire book of Genesis, which contains 78,064 Hebrew letters. In 1994 a team of researchers selected the names of thirty-four of the most prominent rabbis and Jewish sages during the thousand years leading up to AD 1900, with the longest biographies in the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel . Incredibly, the computer program found every single one of the thirty- four names of these famous rabbis embedded in the text of Genesis. The mathematicians calculated the odds against these particular names and dates occurring by random chance to be one chance in 775 million. Scholars at the Statistical Science Journal who reviewed this experimental data were naturally astonished. They demanded that the scientists run the computer test program again on a second sample searching for the next thirty-two most prominent Jewish sages listed in the encyclopedia. To the astonishment of the skeptical reviewers, the results on the second set of famous sages were equally successful. The staggering results of the combined test revealed that the names and dates of the birth or death of every one of the sixty-six famous Jewish sages were coded in close proximity within the text of Genesis and that the mathematical probability of these sixty-six names occurring by chance in an ancient text like Genesis was less than one chance in two and a half billion. * Take Genesis 1:1. Starting with the 5 th letter of the first word and counting forward every 521 st letter you will read the phrase “Yeshua Yakhol” meaning, “Jesus is able.” The beauty of this discovery is that it proves what has always been proclaimed –that Christ is indeed the common theme of the entire Bible, and that woven into all the Scripture is the perfect portrait of God’s beloved Son ( Lk 24: 25- 27 ). * Take Isaiah 53:10. Isaiah said concerning Christ: Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him ( CHRIST ); he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand . Starting with the second letter “yod” and counting forward every 20 th letter, you will read the phrase “Yeshua Shmi” meaning, “Jesus is my name.” The odds of that phrase occurring within this one passage is 50 quadrillion to one. Dr. David Kazhdan, chairman of the mathematics department at Harvard University, notes: The phenomenon is real. What conclusion you reach from this is up to the individual. 2 Ever hear of Professor Haim Shore from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev? He is an engineer with a PhD in Statistics from Bar llan who recently discovered that the names and numerical value of the colors in the Hebrew Bible – red ( adom ), yellow ( tzahov ), green ( yerakon ), blue ( tchelet ), and purple or magenta ( argaman ) relate directly to their established wave frequencies. Shore’s book Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew offers dozens of incidents in which the Hebrew words in the Bible offer hidden information about the objects or people they represent, information which, in many cases, couldn’t have been known or measured until modern times. For example: * Take the Hebrew word for pregnancy ( heraion ). It has the same numerical value as the duration of human pregnancy, 271 days. Coincidence? Shore doesn’t think so. NOTE – For more information on the “hidden” codes beneath the Hebrew text, read Grant Je ffrey’s books called The Signature of God 3 and The Mysterious Bible Codes , 4 Yacov Rambsel’s paperback called Yeshua, 5 Michael Drosnin’s book called The Bible Code, 6 and watch The History Channel’s Bible Codes II : Apocalypse and Beyond . 7 5:19 a Note the words “ least ” and “ great .” It appears in Scripture that Christians will receive either and A ( great ) or an F ( least ) at the JUDGMENT SEAT OF CHRIST . There appears to be no C’s given out in Heaven ( I Cor 3:14 and II Cor 5:10-11 ), and for good reason. God doesn’t grade on a curve because He’s already given us all the answers as to how to enjoy Heaven . 5:19 b Note the order. First we do , then we teach (Ezra 7:10). 5:20 The righteousness that our Lord was describing here was a righteousness that far exceeded our human practice of religion. Indeed it was His own righteousness that He was describing here (II Cor 5:21 and Rom 3:21-26 & 10:1-4). According to the Bible, we have no righteousness in and of ourselves (Rom 3:10,21-31, Isa 64:6, Titus 3:5, Rom 4:1-8,13,20-25 & 7:7-13 and Gal 2:21 & 3:6-12,21-24). What Christ was essentially saying to the Pharisees was, “As good as you are… you’re still not good enough to get to Heaven.” 5:21 Jesus said, “ Ye have heard… But I say unto you .” In other words, you’ve heard something called biblical counsel; now hear the “right kind” of biblical counsel. Just because someone who is “religious” says it’s so ( Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time ), doesn’t mean it’s so. Learn to know what God says (vs 22 and I Cor 2:13 ) and you’ll learn to know whom to believe. 1494

1 Pink, Arthur W. An Exposition of Hebrews , Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Book House, 1954. Print. 2 David Kazhdan (Internet article) 3 Jeffrey, Grant. The Signature of God , Nashville, TN, W Publishing Group. 1998. Print. 4 Jeffrey, Grant. The Mysterious Bible Codes , Nashville, TN, Word Pub. 1998. Print. 5 Rambsel,Yacov. Yeshua , Toronto, CAN: Frontier Research Pub. 1996. Print. 6 Drosnin, Michael. The Bible Code , Austin, TX, Touchstone, 1998. Print. 7 The History Channel. Bible Codes II: Apocalypse and Beyond . 2004. (Video)