Well, no excuse for the big lapse here, but at least I can report that I’m working again on my writings after falling last Tuesday over an industrial mop bucket and re-injuring my clavicle bone break that was a tender 8 weeks into recovery.

In the meantime, here’s a great passage from a study Jordan gave just before Christmas:

“The Bible doesn’t come via human thought. Nobody could do what the Bible does. There’s an otherworldliness kind of character in God’s Word. The author of the Bible had to be outside of time, unconnected with time, in order to give an overview like that.

“One of the ways you see that in communications is it’s called ‘multi-level design.’ You have a multi-level messaging system. In engineering, you have what they call prototypes. That’s a macro code in computer terminology.

“In the Bible, it’s called typology. Typology is that anticipatory model of some future event or person. It’s what we understand as a pre-designed template where you know the form something’s going to take. It’s the form that anticipates the future event. God pre-designed that for you and put it into the system.

“Numbers are all involved in this multi-layering of information in the Scripture. That’s why when you read Scripture, you can read it just on the surface. If you ever read Moby Dick, that’s the first great American literature classic. That book established the genre we call ‘American literature.’

“You’re told Huckleberry Finn did, but Moby Dick is really where the template was broken from England. When you read Moby Dick, you can just read ‘a whale of a story.’ But you can’t have a degree in American lit if that’s all you do.

“Do you know there are Herman Melville societies that function today? That meet regularly to develop new interpretations and nuances and understandings of his work? Now, if you can take a book like that and you can see layers of information . . . I’ve read articles where people in post-graduate work would write their thesis on Moby Dick and the argument was why he chose this place as the setting rather than that place for where the captain and the ship came from. You say, ‘I just thought it was a whaling story,’ but it wasn’t.

“Well, if that can be true of books like that, how much more is it true of God’s Word? When you study these things, you’re not abandoning a literal understanding of Scripture, you’re just realizing that there’s more to it than just the micro code.

“There are these bigger macro codes that are demonstrated throughout Scripture that show you the Bible is not just written by 40 authors over a period of 1,500 years. It’s not just 66 individual books written that way, but really has something that demonstrates itself to be one book. That’s why we call it THE BOOK. It’s written by one Author who really was above and outside of time so He could write through all of its authors.

*****

“ . . . Micah (for one example) prophesied to Israel 700 years before the birth of Christ as to the exact place where the coming Messiah would be born.

“In Matthew 2, when the wise men come looking for Him, immediately just like that the Jewish scholars that Herod called in to find out if the Bible said anything about where the Messiah would be born, knew Micah 5:2 is where he would be born.

“Now, Jewish scholars are not in the habit of producing evidence that Jesus is the Messiah. Before there ever became a controversy between the Jewish leaders and Jesus Christ about whether He was the Messiah or not—before there became any tension between them when He got into His ministry—way before that they gave testimony to the fact the Messiah was going to be born in Bethlehem exactly where Jesus Christ was born.

“Jesus Christ was conceived of the virgin who lived in Nazareth, over a hundred miles north of Bethlehem. Less than a week before her delivery date, the God of history used a pagan emperor, Caesar Augustus, to give a decree that all the world had to be taxed and everybody had to go back into the city of their origin.

“And so, in order to comply with the law, Joseph puts her on a donkey to transport her over 100 miles across difficult territory so that she could be Bethlehem, the exact place she’s supposed to be when the baby’s born.

“You look at that and say, ‘You know, against all the odds, not just a 700-year predictive prophecy naming the exact place out of all the millions of places on the earth, but then having to manipulate circumstances so that what He said came to pass . . .’

“Just to look at the secular evidence that the book of Micah was written hundreds and hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, you have this evidence that’s outside of question about its objectivity and demonstrates that the Bible is more than just a book.

“It’s not a book of religious ideas. Dan Brown, for instance, talks about how all the religious books of the world contribute and all flow together, but, boy, when you read just this one little thing about God sending His Son and how He did it . . .

“There’s no predictive prophecy in ANY of the religious books of the world and that’s one of the unique features of God’s Word, and that issue of the Bible giving clear evidence of historical matters like that—historical events written in advance—

is a demonstration of the divine supernatural nature of the Bible.”