PART II, ARTICLE VIII: NUMEROLOGY MADNESS, SECTION V

It is easy to come up with something mysterious and exciting once we accept that each letter of the alphabet has a numerical value and that we may apply numerical values, with the concepts that they are chosen to represent, to ideas, events, or individuals in the Bible. So, for example, I could concoct something like this. ‘Belial,’ a synonym for the devil, is supposed to add up to 78. And Psalm 78 contains ‘dark sayings’? Could this not mean that Satan authored Psalm 78? According to the rules of numerology, which are as malleable as a rubber band, this is precisely what it could mean. By the use of numerology, a person can make whatever is in the Bible mean anything that he wants it to mean. Numerology draws its practitioners and dabblers away from the meanings of words, and gets them wonderfully lost in a world of numbers and connections that are disassociated from the real value of God’s Revelation. Indeed, my friend, the maker of the PowerPoint presentation that I have just commented on, is a good example of being a victim of this through princes of Gematria like Bullinger and Panin. Principes—plus exemplo quam peccato nocent. (Princes do more mischief by the example they set than by the crimes they commit, Cicero.) Obsession with this kind of thing erodes common sense and makes the mind vulnerable to nonsense. After over thirty years since converting to the Christian faith, this friend of mine is still hypnotized by what the apostle calls ‘old wives’ fables.’ Each one that he tells me about is as strange as the last one, and every single one is unverifiable. After many, many years, he still talks about the Ark of the Covenant that some people believe has been found underneath the earth where Jesus was crucified. So the theory is that the blood of Jesus dripped down the cross and then into the earth and onto the ark as if to fulfill, in a biological, scientific, physical, palpable way, the Old Testament sacrificial system. What if it’s true? What if the death of Christ happened just like that? Would the fact change anyone spiritually? Would his precious blood have magical powers? Would everyone hearing the news believe unto salvation? My friend must think something along those lines would happen. Or it may be that some people like sensational stories more than sound doctrines, and for no other reason than to speculate about what the stories could mean. It gives them something thrilling to talk about with other folktale enthusiasts. Adam Clarke, the commentator, defines old wives’ fables as ‘miracles without rhyme or reason.’ Matthew Poole, another commentator, calls them ‘impertinent discourses which tend nothing to promote either faith or holiness…discourses having no bottom in the word of God.’ They are to be ‘refused,’ says the apostle; that is to say, declined, deprecated, and shunned. “But refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness” (1 Timothy 4.7.) Old wives’ fables like numerology and the story about the ark under the cross are too silly to entertain, even if it means that the teller of them is so insulted by our refusal that he shuns us in return. It takes just a little meditation to show how silly they are. Considering for a second the one about the blood of Jesus and the ark: Would the cross not soak up the blood before it could reach the earth? And the fact is that the earth soaks up blood even more than it soaks up water, blood being thicker than water, which makes it hard to imagine how blood could drip down through many feet of earth to reach the ark. Maybe the earthquake that happened when the Lord died opened up the earth at the right spot to receive his blood and just perfectly so that the cross did not sink? But no one saw the ark down below? No one wanted to go and get it? And why wasn’t the event recorded by one of the evangelists? The story of Jesus’ blood dripping down upon the ark raises almost as many questions as there are numbers for numerologists to play with. But it is the sort of unsubstantiated story that excites persons who are not satisfied with what the Bible tells us. Does it not border on blasphemy to speculate about the sacred blood in this way? Is Jesus’ blood not precious? Is it not what saves? If it is precious and saving, why countenance fabulous stories about it? Should we not balk at Jesus’ soul-saving blood being imagined outside the context of what the Bible tells us about it? Tales about sacred subjects, and numbers with secret powers—these are twin evils that may be summed up as old wives’ fables. What a disgrace that such things have taken the place of the simple, systematic reading of the Bible. And how disgraceful that to refute this kind of garbage in order to try to straighten a friend out that even something as holy as the blood of Christ has to be explained more scientifically than metaphysically! Sometimes I wonder if we sin by going more than the proverbial ‘extra mile’ with someone.