The Bible is comprised of 66 books written by 40-plus authors over 2,000 years of history. The feasibility of this many different writers—unaided by collusion or collaboration between themselves—devising such an infinitely intricate and cohesive body of work is beyond absurd, proving the Book’s Divine origin.

“God’s Word is a wholly integrated message system that could have only resulted from supernatural, extra-terrestrial engineering,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill. (www.graceimpact.org). “When you look at the insights that are painted from the beginning of Genesis, you see how much broader they are in their design. They go way beyond the horizon of the writer himself. They demonstrate that the source understood the whole tapestry of time and embroidered in clues all along the way so that when the reader got over to the end, he could look back and say, ‘Wow, He’d been planning this all along.’ ”

In Genesis alone are some of the Bible’s most complete pictures, or proto-types, or macro codes (Editor’s Note: I first wrote about this in my June 18 piece, “Scripture Passage”), regarding Jesus Christ’s first coming, His crucifixion, His resurrection and His Second Coming.

The account of Noah and the Flood, for one example, is a picture of the upcoming Tribulation and Second Coming. In fact, Jesus Christ says in Matt. 24:37, “But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” (In Luke 17: 26-32, Jesus Christ also likened the time of His return to the days of Sodom.)

In the Book of Jude, which directly precedes Revelation, is a reference back to Genesis and Adam’s son Enoch, “the seventh from Adam,” and how Enoch prophesied, “Behold the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all.”

Jude informs us God had given Enoch a message about a coming judgment upon the world of the ungodly, which turned out to be the Flood, but in Jude the judgment being talked about is the Second Coming of Christ—an event that will once again wipe out the ungodly from the earth.

This clearly tells the reader that the Flood was a picture of the Judgment in the “last days.”

“Enoch is a proto-type of some prophesying that’s being done over in the last days, and Jude uses Enoch as a picture of the judgment of the last days when Christ comes back,” explains Jordan.

Now, in I Peter 3:20 it talks about “when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.”

From the different ages of men given in Genesis 5, what’s revealed is that Methuselah, the oldest man in the Bible at 969, is a proto-type for God’s longsuffering before wielding judgment.

Here’s how it goes: Enoch is 65 years old when he has his boy Methuselah. In Gen. 5:22, we learn something happened when Methuselah was born that caused Enoch to begin to “walk with god.” This had to have been the message he got from God about an upcoming judgment.

After 365 years, Enoch is taken to heaven without dying. Hebrews 11:5 tells us, “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.”

Methuselah was 187 when he had his son, Lamech, who was182 when he had his son, Noah. We’re told in Gen. 7:6 that the Flood came when Noah was 600 years old. If you add these three numbers together you get 969, the year Methuselah died.

“Methuselah’s name (in Hebrew) means, ‘When he dies it shall come,’ ” explains Jordan. “When you say Methuselah is the oldest man in the Bible, doctrinally what that’s talking about is God’s longsuffering that’s waited and waited and waited and waited and waited. It’s not just that Methuselah was old; it’s that he was a demonstration of the longsuffering of God. That’s why Isaiah 28 says God’s judgment is ‘his strange work.’ ”

More to come. . .