I have gotten many favorable responses to my book, and I am grateful for these responses. I have also encountered some detractors. The detractors tend to fit into two camps:

1. Atheists, who think the Bible is bunk, but who are clearly rattled by this new (to them) way of making sense of it; and

2. Christians who either misunderstand what I mean by “decoding,” or who simply reject the notion that the Old Testament contains hidden pictures of Christ.

Last week, I addressed some of the issues raised by atheists. This time, I would like to address some of the issues raised by Christians.

Objection 1: There is nothing to decode; everything in the Bible is in plain sight.

Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.”

Colossians 1:26-27 speaks of “…the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but has now been manifested to His saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

If one looks at the great variety of books written about the Bible, you will find among them some books purporting to offer secret, esoteric knowledge about how to extract hidden meanings from the Bible via various numbering schemes or other mechanisms. I do not place any credence in such theories, and neither should you. That said, however, the above scripture verses show that God does not reveal everything to us at once, and that we can find valid additional meaning beneath the surface, if we go about it the right way.

For any who still believe that God always put everything in plain sight in His Word, please consider these pairs of verses:

Numbers 21:9 – And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived
John 3:14-15 – Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.

Genesis 28:12 – And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
John 1:51 – He then added, “Very truly I tell you, you will see ‘heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on’ the Son of Man.”

Exodus 17:6 – “I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.” So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel.
1 Corinthians 10:4 – And [they] did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ

Based on these scriptures, the brass serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness undoubtedly foreshadowed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Jacob’s ladder was a type and shadow of Christ, and the rock that Moses struck in the wilderness likewise foreshadowed Christ. Thus, the New Testament itself (including Jesus’s own words) gives all the authority one needs to interpret the Old Testament in light of the New Testament, and in the process reveal meanings that had been previously hidden.

So it is not at all out of God’s character to hide treasures out of easy sight. Remember the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:44-46). Remember Jesus’s instructions to “ask,…seek,…knock (Matthew 7:7).” Proverbs 2:4-5 tells us to “search for [wisdom] as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.” In Matthew 13:52, Jesus told His disciples, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”

God is waiting for us to gather these treasures and make them ours. Once they are ours, no one can take them from us. As Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”

Objection 2: The Old Testament doesn’t contain pictures of Christ, but instead contained requirements that Jesus had to fulfill to be the perfect sacrifice.

This is a flat, two dimensional view of Jesus that does not take into account His pre-existent, eternal nature. To believe that Jesus did not have a hand in shaping the Old Testament would be to deny His deity and negate His sovereignty. According to John Chapter 1, Jesus was with God in the beginning, and He was God. Hebrews 1:2 speaks of Jesus as the One “through whom also he [God] made the universe.” Hebrews 12:2 says that Jesus is the author, as well as the finisher, of our faith. Many Christians believe Jesus appeared in the Old Testament as Melchizedek, as the man who wrestled with Jacob, and as the fourth man in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. When Jesus was walking with His disciples on the road to Emmaus, the scripture says that their “hearts burned within” them as Jesus was opening up the scriptures to them. These Jewish disciples already knew their Old Testament scriptures, and were already familiar with the explicit Messianic prophecies contained within them. But they could not have known about the hidden pictures, the types and shadows, until after Jesus lived them out. I believe Jesus was opening these up to His disciples for the first time, and that is why their hearts “burned within.”

In sum, Jesus was not born into the world as a Savior who was forced to fulfill requirements that were not of His own making. Instead, He was involved from the very beginning, from Genesis 1:1 forward. He was, and is, the Alpha and the Omega.