NBA superstar LeBron James, a native of my hometown of Akron where I am currently visiting, is a god in northeastern Ohio and he knows it.

Just this morning on the cover of the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s metro section was a brief about how LeBron plans to change his number from 23 to 6 next year.

“The kids have closets full of No. 23 gear and now we have to go out and buy No. 6 gear?” read a columnist’s commentary. “Money doesn’t grow on trees, or maybe just on really tall trees that only NBA players can reach.”

Biblically, the No. 6 is the number of man, and for the superstitious, code-language loving pagans, it has long been a favorite in connection with the Antichrist’s “666,” and along with the No. 9 (including combinations of the two numbers—69, 96, 66, 99).

Just think of the Beatles tune Revolution 9 where it repeats over and over, “Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 . . .”

According to Wikipedia, if you play backwards the repeated ‘number nine’ it can be heard as ‘Turn me on, dead man.’ ”

“Nine is a very interesting number in the Bible because it’s the last of the single digits,” says Jordan. “The idea is you’ve come to the conclusion of something. We say it’s come to its fruition and, in the Bible, 9 is connected with fruitfulness and fruit-bearing.

“If you look at Galatians 5:22-23, how many fruits of the Spirit are there? Nine. Galatians is the ninth book in the New Testament. If you count five and two and two, it’s nine. By the way, the New Testament has 27 books. Two plus seven is nine. Now, I know, that’s all just an accident. But it is interesting.”

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As I’ve pointed out any number of times on this site, it is endlessly fascinating to look at how intricately God weaves numbers and number patterns into His Word. The codes can be as easy or as complicated as the reader wants them to be. For sure, no human will even ever come close to discovering all of them.

Just the other week when I informed a friend at church I had a huge lawn and garden Glad bag full of old Bible-study cassettes I was happy the share with her, she emailed back, “Do you have any on Bible numerology?”

I personally think it’s one of the most fun ways to study the Bible. As Jordan recently said of his knack for number-search findings, “You just keep reading and noticing phenomena, and after 40-plus years of studying a King James Bible and noticing this kind of phenomena over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, it kind of gets under your skin. It kind of gets beyond just being, ‘Well, that’s superstition.’ The people who think it’s superstition are people who just haven’t studied it very much and seen it work out over and over.”

Jordan continued, “Now, it doesn’t work out every time, but it works out 70% of the time, and listen, in this market, if you got a winner 7 out of 10 times, you’re in pretty good shape, aren’t you? Could you imagine if you were a baseball player and you could get a hit seven out of every 10 times you were up to bat? That ain’t ever happened before. If you were a football player and seven out of every 10 times you caught the ball you got a touchdown, those would be pretty good odds that there’s something there.”

“Look at I Corinthians 12:7. It says that Jesus was crucified in the ninth hour. That was a rather fruitful event. By the way, in Luke it says it was in the third hour. One’s using Roman time and one’s using Jewish time.

“In Matthew 5:3 are what we call The Beatitudes. You know how many ‘blesseds’ there are? Nine.

“How old was Abraham when he had Isaac? 99. That was a fruitful year for Abraham.

“Who’s the tallest man in the Bible? Deuteronomy 3:11 says Old Og, King of Basham, slept in a bed nine cubits long. That’s a big bed! A cubit is 18 inches. That guy’s got a bed that’s 12 feet long and 6 feet wide! When you want to see the fruit of the satanic rebellion among the giants, you see how tall the guy got who was the fruit of all that.

“It’s in Genesis 9 that God took those eight people off the Ark onto the earth and blessed them, and in Genesis 9:1 He tells them, ‘Be fruitful.’ It’s in Genesis 9:9 He said, ‘I behold I establish my covenant with you and your seed.’ He established His covenant with them to MAKE them fruitful.

“Nine months is the gestation period for a human child. If you’re having a real good time, you say ‘I’m on cloud nine.’

“Now, I’m going to do heresy here. How many letters are in (the name) King James? It’s the 1611 King James Bible. Three ones and a six—that’s nine. Now, like I said, that’s just coincidence, but it is kind of fascinating.

“You go over to Jeremiah 26 and you’ll find that when old Jehudi is cutting up the Bible, it’s in the ninth month that he’s doing it. In Jeremiah 52 you’ll see that Jerusalem is destroyed in the ninth month. The fruit of unbelief is connected with the No. 9 in these examples.”

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When it comes to the No. 10, most people say it represents ordinal perfection because you count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and then start over with the zero and the one. Biblically, No.10 is the number of perfection and order.

“When God gave commandments to Israel, how many were there? 10 because that’s the perfection of order,” says Jordan. “Ten is the number of ordinal completion. It’s also, because of that, how you produce ORDER in government and things. But because of that, it’s the number of the Gentiles in the Bible.

“Look at Genesis 10. The first time a Gentile shows up in the Bible by name it’s in this chapter. ‘Now these were the generations of the sons of Noah.’ There weren’t any Gentiles in the earth before Noah. The word Gentile means the nations and God didn’t divide up humanity into nations until the sons of Noah came along.

“Do you remember when we were studying the Book of Ruth I talked to you about those tenth men in the genealogy of Christ? How Boaz is the third one of those tenth men? Do you remember who the first one was? Noah was the 10^th man from Adam in the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s the first to have any of his descendants identified as a Gentile and if you look at Genesis 10: 8-10 . . .

“ ‘And Cush begat Nimrod and he began to be a mighty one in the earth.’ Now, notice who Cush is. Noah has a son named Ham, who’d be the eleventh. Cush, verse 6, is Ham’s boy and Nimrod is Cush’s boy. Nimrod is going to be the 13^th from Adam.

“Now, 13 is the number of rebellion in the Bible, but just like Noah is the 10^th from Adam, Nimrod is going to be the 13^th and notice what Nimrod does. Verse 9 says he’s ‘a might hunter before the Lord’ and verse 10 says ‘the beginning of his kingdom was Babel.’

“Well, the first Gentile kingdom in the earth was established by one of the descendants of Noah, the 10^th man from Adam, and when he established that Gentile kingdom in the earth it was Babel, and when you go over to Daniel 2 and Revelation 13 and 17, how many toes does that kingdom have on it? It’s got 10.

“How many kings does it have reigning with it in Revelation 13 and 17? Ten. Ten is the number of Gentile dominion and activity in the earth. There were 10 plagues on Egypt. There were 10 nations in Genesis 15 that Israel is to war against. (Gen. 15:19)

“If you go to Psalm 119, almost every verse in that psalm talks about the Word of God. There are 10 separate titles given to God’s Word there. There are 10 psalms that begin with the word ‘hallelujah,’ meaning ‘praise the lord.’

“You know what, if you’ll study that terminology ‘hallelujah’ in the psalms, you know what you’ll discover? Almost every time it’s a reference to excitement about God destroying some Gentiles and delivering Israel. It’s one of those weird words and when you hear people going around hollering ‘Hallelujah!’ and ‘Praise the Lord!’ sometimes some of the verses they get that out of isn’t so good.

“Do you remember the parable in Luke 19 where Jesus gives the pound to His servants and says, ‘Go occupy while I’m gone to heaven to receive the kingdom’? The guy is given 10 pounds and when Christ comes back, He rewards him with authority over 10 Gentile cities.

“Galatians 5:19 gives the works of the flesh. Adultery, one; fornication, two; uncleanness three; lasciviousness, four; idolatry, five; witchcraft, six; hatred, seven; variance, eight; emulation, nine . . . See what the tenth is? It’s wrath. What’s God’s attitude toward the earth because of their rejection of His truth? The No. 10 has to do with bringing order into the government of the universe and it focuses on the Gentiles.

“By the way, it’s in Acts 10 that that famous Gentile in the Book of Acts, Cornelius, gets saved. And you go through the Word of God and you’ll find 10 connected with Gentiles and with the government in the hands of Gentiles.”

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As a Bible number, 11 points to incompleteness and is, in essence, one short of where you ought to be.

It’s in chapter 11 of Genesis that the Tower of Babel is identified and it’s one short of chapter 12 where Abraham shows up.

“You remember in Matthew 28 and Mark 16 where it talks about ‘the eleven, the eleven, the eleven’?” says Jordan. “That’s a title given to the 12 apostles when one of them, Judas, has fallen away. And that’s what the No. 11 is branded with all through the Bible. It’s the idea, ‘You’re just not quite there.’ The apostles were incomplete when there were eleven of them. Eleven is just not quite enough.

“When Israel leaves Egypt in Deuteronomy 1 they go toward the Promised Land and Deuteronomy 1 says they went 11 days. If they had just gone one more day they’d have gotten there. They were one day short.”

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Twelve is the number of governmental perfection and that’s the reason it’s the number associated with the nation Israel, God’s government nation in the earth. There are 12 apostles who will sit upon 12 thrones judging over the 12 tribes of Israel.

“It’s in Genesis 12 that God calls Abraham out to be His man and makes the covenant with him,” says Jordan. “In Exodus 12 He calls the nation out of Egypt. In Revelation 12:1 you see the woman with the stars and you have Israel identified.

“You go over to I Kings with Solomon and he’s got 12 officers; 12 spies that go and spy out the land. Twelve is just the number of the nation Israel all through the Bible.

“In Job 38 you see the universe is ordered according to this. Recently we were looking at Book of Joshua where he brought Israel across the Jordan River there and He put 12 stones in the river bed and then put 12 stones over on the Canaan side on the land. Twelve stones represented the 12 tribes of Israel. Elisha goes up on Carmel and makes an altar but he makes it out of twelve stones because 12 is the number of Israel.

“In Job 38:22-33, Mazzaroth is the name for the Zodiac. There’s the 12 signs and there are 12 constellations in the Zodiac. The way God organized the earth is the way He’s organized the heavens because the government He established on the earth is a reflection of the government He’s established in the heavens. And that’s why over there in Revelation 21, when John goes into the New Jerusalem, he sees the 12 apostles and the 12 foundations and the 12 gates. He sees that tree of life and it bears 12 fruit because there are people who are going to be taken by the Body of Christ off of Planet Earth into those positions put out there and the whole universe is ordered according to that.

“The earth is the command center for the angelic government. Where Christ is where the command center is. That’s why Jacob said in Genesis 29, ‘I perceive that this piece of real estate I’m sleeping on is the gate of heaven. The government of heaven is here.’ ”