What’s it on about? Well, in 1984 Drosnin read an article published in a maths journal and it went to his head. It was about Equidistant Lettering Sequences (ELS’s). He claims that by looking for ELS’s (using computers) he has discovered coded (hidden) prophecies predicting lots of recent 20th century events, including the assassination of Yitzak Rabin. He does this by randomly grouping Hebrew letters, sometimes across the page, sometimes down, sometimes diagonally, sometimes forward, and sometimes backwards. In other words, there is an artificial manipulation of the printed text to find "coded" messages. Some Christians claim to have found ELS’s for the name "Yeshua" (Jesus) in the Old Testament prophets, "proving" that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. (Wow! Others like me prefer to simply read the New Testament).

The book makes ludicrous claims about the Bible, for instance: "We have always thought of the Bible as a book. We now know that was only its first incarnation. It is also a computer program" (p 45). It claims that all of history is written in the Bible: "All that was, is, and will be unto the end of time is included in the Torah" (p 44). This is meant in the fullest sense (I’m not kidding!). If you browse the book you’ll see it points out the coded predictions of: the names of Shakespeare’s plays, the name of the Oklahoma bomber, the invention of the light bulb, the Wright brothers, Winston Churchill, Einstein, gravity: its all there if you have the Code!

There are numerous problems here. From a purely mathematical point of view, the whole thing is arbitrary and contrived. ELS’s occur in every piece of extended writing, including the Telephone directory! They are simply curious phenomena, not indications of secret coded messages! Who decides the "equidistance" between letters? And especially working with a language like Hebrew (no vowels, and huge numbers of tri-consonant word roots) it is not hard to discover a random combination giving a "message". But is that any more rational than reading the pattern of tea leaves in a cup according to self appointed criteria?

What Christians should do is to dismiss this sort of thing as utter lunacy. But so many are immature and infantile in their thinking, "tossed here and there by waves, carried about by every wind of doctrine, by craftiness in deceitful scheming" (Eph 4:14). How very important it is for Christians to be thoroughly instructed on the doctrine of Scripture and proper interpretive principles. If The Bible Code is right, then God is not being up-front with us in the Bible. He is concealing, not revealing. The words He speaks are not the "message" words at all.

The Bible is not even literature anymore: it is simply a box of letters (like the board game "Scrabble"), to be arranged into words according to the art of the individual. Page after page looks like a crossword puzzle. To discover (read ‘invent’) coded words, you not only go up, down, and sideways, but often letters have to jumped in order to find the word! So true exegesis (getting the meaning) by means of grammar and context is out the window. Who cares anymore about the historic setting of a book, or the author, or the audience? Who cares about the verbal tenses, voices, or moods? Who cares whether the words are nouns, prepositions, infinitives, or participles? Who cares that they are even coherent words? So long as they are just letters shaken out on a page, there is a "coded message" there if you are determined enough to find it!

How on earth did the Church of God manage all these years before "The Code"? How did she preach her sermons, write her creeds, defend her doctrines and dismiss her heretics? How did she know the meaning of "Thus says the Lord" before ELS’s were known? Indeed, we must ask the quite shocking question: was the Church even right in opposing the errors of the Arians, Docetists, Nestorians, Darwinians, and Papists? Has the Church acted hastily and prematurely, not knowing the full "code"? Was judgement made before the facts were all in?

There is nothing new about this whole agenda. It is just the latest way of avoiding the truth about Scripture. Rudolph Bultmann did it in the 1930’s by a process of "demythologizing" the New Testament. He said the New Testament contained virtually no authentic historical information about Jesus. Rather it is simply the ‘myth’, the story of Jesus told by the disciples, shaped by how they wanted Him to be. So our job as readers is to get behind what the text actually says, and try to discover the real "historical" Jesus. Earlier, Graf and Wellhausen had produced their own unique code (J, E, D, and P words) which has also had a devastating effect on Biblical studies. A few years ago, Dr. Barbara Thiering peddled her secret code, the "Pesher". Aided by the ABC television production "The Riddle of The Dead Sea Scrolls", she applied her secret new method of interpreting words so that meanings entirely different to the obvious ones emerged. The end result: there are no miracles, no death or resurrection of Christ, no ascension. Jesus becomes "the wicked priest of the Qumran (Dead Sea) community".

All of them are continuing the lie started by the father of lies: "Indeed, has God said"? The lie of Satan has always been, "you need to have more than the word of God. You need someone to tell you what it really means. There is a Code, a myth, a Pesher, a key! There are J words and E words! There are ELS’s! You cannot know what’s really on God’s mind until you use my secret method of interpreting! Whatever you do, don’t believe the plain meaning of words in their historical and grammatical contexts". Friends, call the devil a liar to his face! Let us stand firm with the Lord and say "It is written"! Let us be confident with the Psalmist: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path". (By the way, the words I have written above do not really convey my message. See if you can find the real message encoded by ELS’s in the text).