Home Topics Index Download
Transcript 268A — Numerology + Christ and Satan
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Thank you. I've got a very serious problem that came up. Some time back, about a week and a half ago, I was visiting with a young man in Davis, who was very much into the occult. And he was telling me about the Jewish Kabbalah, and Kabbalahism, and he inferred that everything in the Hebrew scriptures had some kind of a hidden meaning, and was numerologically related. And he tried to contend that the designation of Jesus as the Lamb of God had something to do with the planet Mars, and all kinds of stuff that I knew was not scripturally sound. But what really bothered me was that he made reference to the number of the sign of the Messiah as being equivalent to the number of the serpent. And I know that in scripture the serpent is always (as far as I know) symbolic of the Evil One, or Satan. And this troubled me very greatly.
And he went to a supposedly conservative Bible dictionary, put out by Funk and Wagnall Company, to prove his point. And he was pointing out that according to this particular dictionary the ''Bright and Morning Star," which Jesus referred to Himself as being, was equal to the planet Venus, and also equal to Lucifer. But Lucifer is the name of Satan. So this really troubled me. And it seemed to me that the people who wrote these books are way off the track. I don't know too much about Kabbalahism, and I was kind of dumbfounded by what I was being told. I didn't know what to think or how to respond, or how to answer this kind of thing. I'd never confronted it before, and I'm so ignorant of the matter that I thought maybe you could help me out.
HC: All right. Let me speak a little bit on this. I've got two or three observations to make that might be surprising to you, but they may be helpful. And I'll just talk to you about this on the air. Would you like to do that? You want me to talk about numerology, and Christ represented by a serpent, and what do we do about this matter of Lucifer and a Bright and Morning Star?
CALLER: Okay.
HC: Thank you for calling. Good night. The observation was made: Is it true that in the Jewish writings there were hidden meanings in every statement? Well, I don't know if there's hidden meanings in every statement. I think that may be saying more than the scripture would say. But definitely there are hidden meanings throughout the Bible. And of course the Bible was written in the context of Jews. Most of the human authors of the Bible were Jews, all under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, of course.
For example, again and again in the New Testament you'll find a phrase where Jesus says, "I AM." When He was being taken in the Garden of Gethsemane by the temple servants, they said, "Are You the Christ?" and He said, "I AM." In some of the Bibles that's translated, "I am He," because "I AM" doesn't seem to make sense. But the word I AM is the name of God Himself, and Jesus is the I AM. This is taken from Exodus 3, where He told Moses, "You tell Israel that I AM has sent you." Christ is the Ever Present One.
And there are many things like this in the Bible, where there is a deeper meaning than what appears on the surface. And normally the deeper meaning relates to the nature of salvation itself. So in that sense our caller's observation is somewhat correct.
However, when it comes to numerology, that in my judgment is not so, when anyone says that the numbers figure out in Jesus' Name to be the same as the numbers of the serpent. Numerology has to do with assigning certain value to the letters of the alphabet, and then looking at the name and seeing what those numbers add up to.
On the basis of this, for example, men have figured out that all kinds of individuals and organizations are the antichrist, because by numerology their letters add up to 666. There is no Biblical precedent for this that I'm aware of. Now I don't know everything that's in the Bible, and maybe there's something here I don't know. But in my studies on this question I have never received the slightest suggestion that the Bible teaches in a numerological way, although I am intensely interested in the numbers of the Bible, and the numbers of the Bible do signify spiritual truth, very frequently.
For example, the number five very frequently in the Bible is a number to symbolically represent grace or redemption. The number forty represents testing. It's used this way again and again in the Bible. The number seven is the perfection of God's plan. The number ten is the completion of God's plan, the number twelve the fullness of God's plan. But that's not numerology. That is simply going back to the earlier illustration that a word in the Bible has a deeper hidden meaning.
Now we come to something that's a little bit strange. The question was raised: Is there ever a time when Christ is identified with a serpent? Is there ever a time in the Bible when Christ is identified with a serpent? Now remember, the serpent is a figure of Satan. He is the great serpent, the devil, the Bible says. And Christ is the absolute antithesis of Satan. He is the eternal Son of God, who came to destroy Satan.
But surprisingly enough, there is a place in the Bible where Jesus is referred to as a serpent. Now don't be horrified now. I'm going to read to you from the Bible. In John 3:14 we read, "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life."
Now what God is teaching here is that He's referring back to an historical incident that occurred in the wilderness, when the nation of Israel was going out of Egypt to go to the land of Canaan. And they murmured against God. They were rebellious against God. They were sinning very grievously. And so God sent into their midst serpent, poisonous serpents that began to bite the people. And they began to die.
Now these serpents represented their sin. And sin of course is intimately related to Satan Himself, because Satan is the very essence of sin. It was a terribly destructive kind of a situation, the very thing that happens in our lives when we sin. And everything that we do is tainted by this sin. We are subject to death. We are moving in the direction of hell, because of our sin. It's like we are being bitten by these poisonous serpents.
Then the people cried out to God, and God instructed Moses to make a serpent of brass and put it on a pole. And then he told the Israelites that anyone at all who was bitten and who was dying of that snake bite, could look upon that brass serpent on a pole, and he would receive healing.
And now God says in John 3:14 that that serpent on the pole was a figure of the Lord Jesus Christ: "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life."
Now how can we tie this together? Well you see, the Lord Jesus, in going to the cross, became sin for me. He was my substitute when He went to the cross, where He was lifted up. The language of being lifted up and looking upon Him is the language of us looking to Christ on the cross as our Savior, who can save us from our sins.
Before we are saved, we are bitten by our sins. We are slaves of Satan. We're being destroyed by our sins. We're heading for hell. Our situation is exactly like, in a spiritual sense, it was in a physical sense with the people of Israel in the wilderness.
But Jesus became sin for me. He took upon Himself all of my sins. And with all of my sins He was hung on the cross, where He endured the wrath of God, the equivalent of an eternity in hell. And because He became sin for me, He became intimately identified with me as a sinner, as a slave of Satan. He became intimately identified with all that is cursed and vile. And yet I have to look at Him on the cross, where He became sin for me. I look upon Him spiritually when I place my trust in Him and in His redeeming work for me on the cross, in the fact that He went there to pay for my sins. And in that sense He became a serpent.
Now He did not become Satan. Christ never did become Satan, because Christ is Eternal God, and Satan is an antichrist. Satan is directly opposed to Him. But He did become the very essence of sin, which Satan is, in that He became sin for me.
Now the last observation is also very interesting. The comment was made that Lucifer is called a "Bright and Morning Star," and so is Christ called a "Bright and Morning Star." Lucifer of course is another name for Satan in the Bible. And that seems just impossible. How can this be? Well, significantly, that is the case. That is the case.
In Isaiah 14 it's talking about Satan, under the figure of the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar. Babylon is used in the Bible as a figure of the kingdom of Satan. And in verse 12 it says, "How you are fallen from Heaven, oh Lucifer, son of the morning! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, 'I will ascent to Heaven, above the stars of God. I will set my throne on high. I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will make myself like the Most High.' But you are brought down to hell, to the depths of the pit. Those who see you will stare at you and ponder over you, Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms?"
Now the morning star is Venus, but that doesn't mean that Satan is related in any kind of an occult way or supernatural way to Venus. That's only a figure. But Christ also is called the Morning Star. But Christ is the eternal Morning Star. Christ is the one who finally rules over this world. You see, Satan was given the right to rule over this world because he vanquished Adam and Eve in the Garden. And he is the one who is called the ruler of this world today. But Christ comes as the eternal Ruler. He came to vanquish Satan. He came to destroy him. And Satan will be sent to hell, this world will be renovated, it will be destroyed and recreated New Heavens and a New Earth. And in this New Earth Christ will rule over us forever and ever.
Now the fact that Satan is called the prince of this earth, which is really a title that ought to only be attributed to Christ, does not mean that Satan now is Christ, or that Christ is Satan. It simply means that Satan, for the time being is ruling over the hearts of men, but that the time will come when it will be God Himself, Christ Himself, who will rule only over the hearts of men.
And this is why Christ went to the cross, to redeem us from Satan, in order that He might be our ruler. So the fact that Christ is called a Prince of King, and Satan is called a prince or a king, therefore we should not be surprised that Lucifer is called a morning star, and Christ Himself is called the Morning Star.
Actually, it is Christ who is eternal. Satan is simply temporal. He only for the moment is shining bright, as the prince of this earth. But his doom is certain, because of what Christ had done against him on the cross.
So insofar as our caller's question is concerned, some of the observations he heard were at least somewhat correct, although we have to be very careful in this kind of a study that we don't go beyond what the Bible does. The moment that we get into numerology, the moment that we get into thinking that there's a relationship between the planets . . . The sun, for example, is used as a figure of Christ. But that doesn't mean the sun is involved with Christ in getting the work on this earth done. The sun is simply used as a figure in that it rules over the day, in the sense that it brings its light and warmth and life, and so on. Only in that sense is it related.
Well, thank you for that question.