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.

Take the Genesis 22 account of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice in a burnt offering his son, Isaac:

“The Offering of Isaac was a Picture-Prophecy of the Death of Christ,” confirms “Halley’s Bible Handbook,” a long-revered family Bible commentary originally published in 1924. “A Father offering His Son. The Son Dead for Three Days (in Abraham’s mind). A Substitution. An Actual Sacrifice. And it was on Mt. Moriah, the very same place where, 2,000 years later God’s Own Son was Offered. Thus, it was a Shadow, in the birth of the Hebrew nation, of the Grand Event that nation was born to bring about.”

From I Cor. 15:4, the Apostle Paul tells us Jesus Christ “rose again the third day according to the scriptures,” but there’s not one prior verse—in the Old or New Testaments—telling the reader this. It was obviously foretold in code by the story of Abraham and Isaac.

“You know there’s not even one clear verse that says He’s going to be resurrected?!” says Jordan. “In fact, the disciples themselves in Luke 18, after having spent three years with Jesus, don’t even know He’s going to die. Paul says in I Cor. 2 that the meaning of all this wasn’t revealed until he revealed it—until Christ revealed it to him and through him.”

Obviously, Paul knew something about the Bible’s macro codes. Genesis 22: 4-5 reads, “Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off. And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.”

“He’s going to take his boy and not just kill him, he’s going to take his boy and cremate him, and yet he says, ‘The boy and I are going to come back,’ ” explains Jordan. “In Hebrews 11 it says ‘he received him as though from the dead.’ You know what Abraham believed? He believed in resurrection. He’s the one through whom Job learned that ‘my redeemer liveth’ though ‘worms eat my flesh’ (Job 19). Job learned that from Abraham.

“Three days that boy’s dead in Abraham’s mind and yet he know he’s going to be resurrected. What day did he know he’d be resurrected? The third day. How did he know to go, ‘Three days; okay now’s the day,’ and it turns out to be the anniversary of the resurrection of Christ? He didn’t know it, but God knew it.”

As “Halley’s Handbook” points out, the very spot where Abraham offered Isaac—the hill on Mt. Mariah, which is just outside of Jerusalem (777 meters up from sea level) and has a peak named Golgotha—is the exact same place God the Father offered His beloved Son 2,000 years later.

From Gen. 22:14, we’re even told Abraham “called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen.”

“Abraham gives it a prophetic name and doesn’t even know that’s what he’s doing,” explains Jordan.

It’s also fascinating to note that in Genesis 22:19, the writer mysteriously leaves out mention of death-spared Isaac, reporting only that “Abraham returned unto his young men.”

“Isaac was obviously with Abraham, but he’s edited out of the text,” says Jordan. “You don’t find Isaac appear in the Bible again until you find him in Gen. 24:62, and you know what he’s doing? He’s coming to get his bride! That’s the Second Coming, isn’t it?! Isn’t that Revelation 19—when he comes with his bride?!”

Another incredulous foreshadowing is in Gen. 23:1 with the information Sarah was 127 years old when she died. Gen. 17:17 tells us Sarah was 90 when she got pregnant with Isaac, meaning Isaac was 37 at the time of his mother’s death.

“So Abraham wasn’t taking a little boy up onto that mountain to kill him; he’s taking a man at least 30-33 years old!” explains Jordan. “How old was Jesus Christ when He went up onto the mountain and God the Father took His life?

“You got through Genesis 22 and there’s one thing after another, after another, that matches. Sarah dies. There’s the fall of Israel. Abraham sends his servant. He’s not named in the text there; you get his name in Gen. 15—Eliezer, a type of the Holy Spirit. . . To get a bride for Isaac, Abraham says ‘go back to my kin folk.’ Isaac goes back to Abraham’s kin folk (a picture of the ‘little flock’ being gathered in the Book of Acts) and the next time you see him he’s coming with his bride, Rebecca. . . In Chapter 25, Abraham took another wife and he gave her six kids, seven grandsons, and three great grandsons. You’ve got a picture of the blessings that flow in the millennium. You tell me how in the world did the writer of the book of Genesis know how to write all that?!”

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The account of Noah and the Flood represents yet another set of macro codes in Genesis regarding the 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’ Enoch, “the seventh from Adam,” and how he 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.’ ”

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Here’s a great passage on the Bible’s macro codes from a sermon my pastor gave at least 12 years ago:

The prophets would write down the information about the stuff of Christ, and about the glory of His Kingdom, and they’d say, “Lord, we don’t understand what we wrote—what are we talking about here?! How is this all going to fit together?!”

In I Peter 1 we read, “Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you:

Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.

Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into.”

You need to clearly get this in verse 11—they didn’t understand what the ‘sufferings of Christ’ was a reference to! They’d write it down and then say, “What are we writing?!”

Nobody in “times past”—Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, David, any of the prophets back there—were looking forward in faith to the Cross, believing that one day God would send the Lamb to Calvary to die for their sins. When Isaiah wrote Isaiah 53, he didn’t understand that he was writing about Calvary. They weren’t looking forward in faith. They looked at what they wrote and said, “What is this?!” and God told them, “It isn’t for you to know. It’s for people after it happens to know.”