…..Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. John 17:17
Father, in Matthew 24:4, your Son warned us about the deception that would be so rampant in the last days before his coming. Strengthen us, and give us the wisdom to discern the path we are on as we patiently wait for Him to return for us. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Dear Friends,
Greetings in Christ.
In Part 1, I explained how the new world order is stepping up censorship as they continue to implement their long-term plan: A plan to control all media in order to manipulate the public. It was Orwell who said, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” I believe that is more or less where we are now, but it is more sophisticated and diabolical than that. As noted in this must-read COVID update at Technocracy News & Trends,
“The fact that we have no real independent press anymore has become painfully clear over the past three years. What we have are corporate-government propaganda outlets and censored alternative media. There’s not much in between.
“Certainly, you rarely ever find both sides of an issue covered by the same media outlet anymore. Media has become incredibly polarized and, with it, the population at large.”
This polarization is creating a division among the populace not seen since the Civil War. Instead of ‘conspiracy theory’, the new buzzword is ‘misinformation’. The maxim of every red-blooded liberal-minded American used to be, “I may strongly disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” If the trend to censor, cancel, fine, or imprison dissenting voices continues, we will be facing another time like the dark ages, pending the return of Christ. In fact, it looks like we may not only be facing a new dark age, but a trifecta of wars never seen before; a civil war, a worldwide technocratic war on humanity, and a kinetic world war, all taking place at the same time. To me, that sounds a lot like the great tribulation that Jesus spoke of. Therefore, we need more than just freedom of speech and freedom of the press. We need truth. The Bible says Jesus has prepared a great escape from the great tribulation period, but is the Bible true? The following is from Dragon Slayer Jesus Christ:
I recall my initial research after first committing my life to Christ in the mid-nineties. I started spending a lot of time at the library and in bookstores. I was obsessed with investigating the veracity of the Bible. I quickly learned that there is a wealth of manuscript evidence for the Bible, outstripping the textual evidence for all other ancient writings, by far. Consider for example, everything we know about Socrates is known chiefly through the writings of other philosophers, such as Plato. The oldest manuscripts we have from Plato, which are used to reconstruct Socrates, are written about 1300 years or more after Plato lived. There are only seven copies from this time period, circa 900 AD.
By contrast, we have fragments from the same time period of the New Testament writers. At least one of them may even be from the original document. We have more than 90 papyri. 35 papyri date within about 200 years of the original writings. We have several other manuscripts — cursives, uncials, and lectionaries — that were written anywhere from 300 to 1600 years after the original texts were written by the New Testament authors in the first century. When you add up all the Greek manuscripts you have more than 5200 ancient manuscripts from diverse locations such as Greece, Asia Minor, England, Ireland, Constantinople, Syria, Africa, Gaul, and Southern Italy. The vast majority of these manuscripts agree with one another in their texts, proving their authenticity. (The few that do not agree with the vast majority of manuscripts do not even agree with each other, and only come from one geographic location, Alexandria, proving them to be spurious.) Therefore, the manuscript evidence for the New Testament of the Bible far outweighs the evidence for any other ancient writing.
Then there is the vast amount of archaeological evidence for the Bible. This has been thoroughly examined by several different scholars. Among the most prominent was Nelson Glueck, who uncovered 1500 ancient sites in the Holy Land. He stated, “No archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.” Another of the world’s foremost archeologists, William F Albright, said, “There can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of Old Testament tradition.” I recommend that every student of the Bible obtain a copy of Halley’s Bible Handbook [blue cover edition]. It is packed with relevant history, archaeological discoveries, and commentary on the Bible. One last scholar I will mention is Sir William Mitchell Ramsay of Oxford University in England. He set out to disprove the historicity of the Book of Acts, but he instead ended up concluding that it was indeed written by Luke himself in the first century, and that Luke was a first-class historian of the highest caliber. In the course of his research, Ramsay became the foremost authority on the history of Asia Minor and a leading New Testament scholar. After Ramsay woke up and realized the Bible was reliable, having proved the authenticity of the Book of Acts, he turned his attention to Paul’s epistles. In Ramsay’s day, the epistles of Paul were by and large dismissed by the critics as forgeries. After his careful study of the matter, Ramsay decided that all thirteen New Testament letters bearing Paul’s name, were indeed written by him. Hebrews is also most likely written by Paul, which would make fourteen. There are several other great scholars whose testimonies we could examine. I will leave it to the reader to conduct his own further study in this area.
Then there is the greatest proof of all, Bible prophecy. Unlike many other holy books, the Bible was not written by just one author. It was written by forty authors over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. It is very likely that the book of Job was written circa 1900 BC, which would make the authorship of the Bible span about 2000 years. Unlike other religious figures, who showed up unannounced and became self-proclaimed prophets or deities, Jesus was foretold from the beginning of time, with several details that would mark not only his birth, but his life, as well as his death and resurrection. The first place in the Bible that foretold the birth of Messiah is in the book of Genesis. It is called the Protoevangelium:
…..[God said to Satan,] And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shall bruise his heel.
Genesis 3:15
This verse revealed that mankind would be given a Saviour, and also that he would be born of a virgin. The text says “her” seed, yet the woman possesses the ovum which is fertilized by the seed from the man (cf Isa 7:14). It has been calculated by one mathematician that the odds of Jesus fulfilling just eight Messianic prophecies by chance would be 1 in 10 to the 17th power, based on the law of compound probability. Yet there are hundreds of prophecies that foretold the coming of Christ. For instance, he had to come from the tribe of Judah.4 He had to be born in Bethlehem.5 He had to come at a specifically appointed time.6 He had to suffer and die for our sins.7 These are just a few of the many specific details given in Scripture concerning Messiah.
There is one final area we will look at which authenticates the Bible as God’s word. In 2003 I published a book about Bible prophecy called Where Did all the People GO? The following is a brief excerpt from Chapter IX:
Is there a divine watermark which sets Scripture apart from every other piece of literature? There are in fact several. We have already mentioned manuscript evidence, prophecy evidence, and touched on archeological evidence, but what about the controversial Bible codes?
Two of the first scholars to investigate the various mathematical phenomena unique to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, as well as the Greek New Testament were Russian mathematician Ivan Panin, and Czechoslovakian Rabbi, Michael Dov Weissmandl. One such phenomenon is hidden codes known as equidistant letter sequences (ELS’s). By counting for example, every seventh letter, in the original text, certain words and sentences appear to have been encoded into the Bible. Consider for example this very scholarly and well-documented study on ELS’s, published in Statistical Science:
The eminent Statistical Science journal (August 1994, Volume 9, number 3), published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, documented the work of three Israeli professors: Eliyahu Rips of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, along with Doron Witzum and Yoav Rosenberg of Jerusalem College of Technology. They took sixty-six of the most prominent men in Jewish history from the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel, and then they looked for their names in the book of Genesis. What they found is absolutely amazing — not only their names, but next to their names were the dates they were born, and the dates they died — all encoded in the book of Genesis in ELS’s! The probability of these codes occurring by chance is less than 1 in 2,500,000,000. The editor of Statistical Science stated, “Our referees were baffled: their prior beliefs made them think that the book of Genesis could not possibly contain references to modern-day individuals, yet when the authors carried out additional analyses and checks the effects persisted.” Thus, objective scientists who lack the emotional bias that other writers and researchers in this area perhaps may have do not repudiate the presence of supernatural codes in the Bible’s text. The study was also published in the respected Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in 1988.
Perhaps even more fascinating, if not more applicable to English-speaking people, is the fact that the codes only appeared when using the traditional Masoretic Text used to translate the King James Version of the Bible. When the professors looked for the codes using the Samaritan Pentateuch, which new versions rely on, the codes were “completely absent.” Besides using the Samaritan Pentateuch, the researchers said they also looked for the codes in a Hebrew translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and found none.8
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Gail Riplinger and AV Publications for publicizing this information and supplying me with facsimiles of the Statistical Science journal and related articles.
That brings us to the subject of the different English versions of the Bible. I highly recommend you study the Authorized King James Version of the Bible, especially for memorization of Bible verses. The most common objection to this suggestion is that it is too hard to understand. Even if that were true, and I have serious doubts about that, it is not a Christian attitude to take, especially about something as important as God’s word. A Christian should never ‘take the easy way out’, just because it is easy. I am a big fan of working smarter and not harder, but there are a lot of situations where that philosophy simply does not apply. In many areas of life, the right way is the hard way. The KJV is the only English version that rightly says in Revelation 13 that the mark of the beast will be in the right hand and in the forehead. All of the new versions say “on” the right hand or “on” the forehead, which opens the door to a deceptive invitation to take the mark but refuse the tattoo, or some other possible scenario. In Chapter 14, where the Bible says the tribulation saints will be marked with the Father’s name written in their foreheads, the new versions add another name in that verse, to make it appear as if they should have two different names in their foreheads. Again, this appears to be an attempt by the enemy to deceive people into taking the mark of the beast in a moment of weakness. Undoubtably some will accuse me of splitting hairs and making a big deal out of nothing by pointing this out. I would ask them to heed the final warning of Jesus in Revelation 22:
…..For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
…..And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
The Revelation 22:18, 19
Incidentally, there are similar numeric phenomena, just as fascinating as the ELS’s of the Old Testament Hebrew text, that validate the Greek Textus Receptus (Received Text), or Majority Text, that the New Testament of the KJV is translated from. Likewise, these phenomena are absent in the Minority Text manuscripts that the new versions are translated from. The phenomena are based on patterns of seven that can be seen in the Greek text.9 For a little information on this subject, go to: http://www.khouse.org/articles/2000/201/ or see Cosmic Codes, by Chuck Missler (Koinania House, 1999).
Volumes have been written on the superiority of the Textus Receptus and the KVJ. I refer the reader to AV Publications, where scores of volumes by scholars who thoroughly investigated this subject can be found.
Ivan Panin said, “I used to doubt certain parts of the Bible, now I just doubt my understanding of the Bible.” That is the right way to look at Scripture. It’s like an algebra problem. When you do not get it right the first time, you do not say there is an error in the textbook. You keep working on it until you figure it out. We have only scratched the surface of all the verifiable proof there is for the accuracy of Scripture. God promised he would preserve his word in Psalm 12. It does not say God crossed his fingers and hoped that men would do a good job in preserving his word. God said he himself would preserve it. Jesus reiterated this promise in Luke 21:33 and John 10:35. Of course there is also the evidence of the countless lives that have been changed by the promises of the Bible. Each of these changed lives is a testimony to the reliability of Scripture.
We live in a day and age when many have become convinced that there is no such thing as truth. People like to say “everybody has an opinion,” to excuse themselves from taking responsibility and finding out the truth. It is basically discrediting the witness. It is an old trick that every trial lawyer knows, but it also posits a false premise, namely that there is no such thing as truth. If that is true, that there is really no such thing as truth, then we should get rid of our court system and erase all our laws. We should let people do whatever they feel is right for them. Try to imagine what kind of a society that would be. Somebody you know is murdered. You see the crime committed. But you cannot prove it, because the perpetrator denies it. His truth is different than yours. Your truth does not work for him. Our legal system is based on the principle that there is such a thing as truth, and if we diligently search for the truth, we can find it. What if we were to truly operate as if there was no truth? We could all do whatever we wanted, according to our own truth. One could say, I do not want to obey the traffic signals because I do not believe in them. You can imagine the results. Therefore, there is such a thing as truth, and to diligently search for that truth is arguably the most important pursuit there is. Whatever it is you are trying to achieve, whether you are a carpenter or a postman, a musician or a welder, the truth is essential to your success. If you are an engineer for example, you need true data to build your bridge, your automobile or rocket, whatever the case may be. If you have bad data the results can be catastrophic. If you are a financial advisor, the truth is all that you can use. False data is of no use to anyone (except the enemy — deceit is his weapon).*
4 Genesis 49:10.
5 Micah 5:2.
6 Daniel 9:25.
7 Isaiah 53.
8 [California] Modesto Bee, Saturday, November 4, 1995, p. G-1. The unique nature of the Masoretic Text is even more fascinating considering the fact that the Masoretic Text contains vowels and spaces which were not in the original text. The original text contained no spaces and the vowels were implied. It appears that the word of God is literally “purified seven times” (Ps 12:6), and that God’s hand is upon it to preserve it, just as He promised (Ps 12:7). The study published in Statistical Science also gained the attention of Jeffrey Satinover of Bible Review (October, 1995), and David Briggs of the Associated Press (Baton Rouge, LA, November 4, 1995).
9 Seven is the number of completion (Gen 2:2). E.g., there are seven days in a week, seven colors in a rainbow, and seven notes in a musical scale. God often uses seven as his signet. This unlocks the mystery behind Psalm 90:4 and II Peter 3:8. In context, these verses refer to the second coming; just as God rested on the seventh day, the earth is scheduled for a seventh millennium of rest. God created the sun on the fourth day, a type of Christ (Ps 19:5), prefiguring his advent in the 4000th year (cf Mal 4:2).
* Dragon Slayer Jesus Christ, pp 85-91
PS: A few days ago the CDC voted 15-0 to add the COVID jabs to the Childhood Immunization Schedule. I highly recommend you read the article linked above on Technocracy News & Trends and pray as the Spirit leads.
