Hiding the Truth in Plain Sight – Understanding God’s Methods of Hiding Information in the Bible! Pt 1

The Introduction:

(Ver 1.5)  This is Part 1 in a series of basic important Bible lessons that deals with the question “Why is the Bible so Hard to Understand?”    Many of us have certainly discovered by reading and studying the Bible, that everything that is presented in the Bible, is not always clearly perceived or self evident.  In other words, everything in the Bible is not easily understood using natural human reasoning or logic.  I am personally convinced that the Bible contains many outstanding truths, even though the Body of Christ hasn’t been able up to this point, to agree on a lot of them.  I can at least hope that you too can see and understand the challenge that we all face in studying the Bible.  Based just upon the number of Christian denominations in the world you can see  that God has chosen to conceal Himself not only from the people in the world, but He has also chosen to hide Himself in His Word to give the church, the opportunity to search for Him and to discover Him.  By searching for the truth we come to know Him who is the Truth (John 14:6).  We can conclude that God, if He wanted to remain a mystery forever and keep men in the dark all that He would have to do is to stay silent and not speak to us.  But we can clearly see by the Bible alone that He has given to us, that He has not chosen to do that.  Let’s briefly establish the fact that God has hidden information in the Bible.

Pro 1:23  Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you.

To make something known implies something was first hidden from plain view.  To make God’s Words known implies that what we read in the Bible we need God’s help to understand.  There is an implied unveiling process in this act.  There is an intentional act of uncovering also implied.  To “reveal” that which was hidden.  The Bible is God’s Words written down by chosen men.  These words are not encrypted in a modern coded system of unreadable text.  Yet these words according to the Bible must be revealed in order to be understood.

Eph 6:19  And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel,

In Ephesians we are told that the Gospel of Jesus Christ was a mystery.  Even Jesus confirmed this reality when he told the Jews to search the scriptures because these were words that testified about him (John 5:39).  If they had to search to find Jesus it is very clear that Jesus was hidden in the words that were written in the O.T.  As we have seen the Jews did not understand the scriptures and did not embrace the Gospel of Jesus.  We can clearly see that while Paul and the other apostles used the Old Testament as the basis for their message, very few of the Jewish leadership understood it.  So was it hidden from them only?  Or did they just choose not to see it?

Rom 16:25  Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began,

In this letter to the church, God declares that which was being preached came as a result of a revelation being given.  A revelation is a revealing of that which was hidden from plain view.  It was written in their language, but they did not see it or perceive it.  Why is that so important to understand?

Pro 25:2  It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.

Here is an Old Testament reference that describes the nature and character of God.  This verse declares that it is to God’s glory to conceal or hide information.  But in the same sentence it also declares that “kings” are intended to search it out?  Who is the King of kings?  Jesus is the King of kings.  Who are these “kings” that Jesus is King of?  Who are these kings that need to do this searching for this hidden information?  I believe we are these “kings”.  So I have given you several scriptures that all point you to hidden information in the Bible.  There are certainly many other scriptures that I could have included and you can find them if you search.

There are a large number of reasons that I believe God has hidden information in the Bible.  One reason is to conceal the information from His enemies.  Another reason is to give man a choice in what they believe.  Still another reason for hiding information is to allow God to reveal the information at the right time to the right people.  There are certainly other reasons for God doing this, but as long as you see and understand that He has done it, you will at least be far ahead of a lot of other Christians in the world that do not understand this.

So knowing God has concealed spiritual truths within His Word, we should be smart enough to recognize some of the techniques that God has used to hide these truths.  I call this concealing or hiding the truth in plain view.  Every word in the Bible is clearly readable by anyone that picks the book up, but every word is also equally hard to understand because of the methods and techniques that God has selected to record His words in a book format.  It is much like a game of hide and seek where everyone that you are looking for is out in the open in plain view, but many of them are wearing camouflage and have blended into their surroundings so that you don’t see them clearly.  They are there right in front of you, yet you walk right by them.  So it is with the Bible, just because we can see all of the words and read them, it is clear to me that we need to follow some very strict rules in order to understand what they say, correctly.  Satan can read the same words that we can and he didn’t understand them and he is doing everything in his power to make sure that you don’t understand them either.  If Satan would have understood what was written, he would not have crucified Jesus.

In reading Proverbs 25:2, it reveals to us one of God’s intentions and purposes for giving us the Bible.  This verse specifically informs us that it is God’s Glory to conceal information.  This Hebrew word translated as “conceal” means to keep secret, or to hide from plain view..  When you conceal something that means it is not clearly visible or self apparent.  The US army often times camouflages themselves and their equipment to conceal them from or cause themselves not to be seen by the enemy.  If a government in our world wanted to conceal information from their enemies they would have probably created a code or an encryption system that would in effect make the textual message unreadable to others.  In this way the encoded message is only readable to the intended person to whom the message is sent using the decryption method and the key that would unlock the true meaning.  While many have done crypto analysis of Old Testament scriptures and have seemed to have discovered encoded messages, I am not talking about this method of hiding information.  While I do not discount these or attempt to preach against them in any way, this is not the information that is hidden in plain sight that I am talking about.  Being a computer programmer I understand the complexity behind creating a readable textual message with embedded ELS coded messages.  Without a very, very powerful computer it would be impossible to find them, much less try to create them.   The Bible Codes are to me just an additional proof that God exists and He has written something for us, to us that only He could have done.  To those who don’t believe in God, it is a sign that someday they will understand.

So what I want to do in this blog series, is to explore some of the primary ways that I have discovered how God has hidden Himself in plain view for us to find.  By studying some of these methods we can use them to unlock more of the truth and to see and know Him better.  So did God encode things in the Bible for us to discover?  You might still not understand code concepts, and that is OK.  I’m not here to teach you computer algorithms.  What I want you to see is some general concepts and methods that God has implemented in the Bible to hide information and truth.  By understanding these concepts we can then apply them to our Bible study and hopefully learn whatever God wants us to know before Jesus comes back for us very soon.

Earlier I mentioned a common trait of codes and encryption.  This has to do with knowing the key that unlocks the code.  The key is the electronic word, phrase, numbers, symbols, or combination of all of these that we use to unlock the encrypted information.  That is what we are going to explore in this series of lessons.  I want to show you some keys.  By understanding the methods that God has used to hide information it will give us the keys that we need to unlock it and to understand it.  Jesus makes this statement:

Mat 16:19  And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven:

I know I pulled a part of a verse to make a point, but take this information and understand the concept given.  Jesus tells us that there are keys to the kingdom of heaven.  That implies there are hidden or locked things within the kingdom that are not readily available to all.  What Jesus is doing is giving us a simple concept lesson and He is telling us that it is our responsibility to open the doors that these keys are associated with.  You never hand someone a key, either a physical key that unlocks a lock or an electronic key to unlock a code and not expect them to use it.  Are you grasping the concept?  So let’s explore some of the key methods that God uses to hide information in the Bible.

Technique 1:  Widely Dispersed Truths

One method that God uses frequently to hide truths in His Word, is to spread out the information so that a subject is not completely covered in any one location of the Bible.  The Bible is a significantly large book with a lot of words and subjects within it.  Finding specific related scriptures is not always as easy as you might think.  By spreading the information out in a widely dispersed random pattern, it become exponentially more difficult to grasp the correct meaning of anything.   Spreading out information in the Bible is just one of the many techniques that God has used to hide things for us to find.  One advantage that we have today over previous generations, is the proliferation of computers within our society.  By using a computer’s database indexing and search engine capabilities, we are blessed with a tool that makes it much easier to explore the Word of God and to find truths that are spread out over 783,137 words in the King James Bible.  If you don’t study the Bible using a computer you should, it will help you tremendously once you get over the initial learning curve of using a computer to read and study the Bible.  What we discover in our search is there are scriptures everywhere in the Bible that speak to, or comment directly on other passages in the Bible.  In other words we have the commentary of the author, the Holy Spirit given to us on any given subject.  God did not leave us in the dark, he just made it a little challenging to find.  I also made mention that the commentary and related information may appear in any random order.  Information can be given on any subject in any book of the Bible.  This certainly is a very tricky method of hiding information.

Let’s take creation and the story of Adam and Eve.  If you search the Bible you will soon discover that both Adam and Eve are referred to in other books of the Bible by name.  These are God’s direct commentary on the Genesis story given to Moses.  But by studying these verses we can gain a significant amount of insight into the original story.  But of course that is not all the information, we would have to search for all of the subjects found in creation, like: man, woman, temptation, sin, serpent, gardens, fruit, seeds, trees, and all of the other subjects that are mentioned in the book.  By omitting these facts from our study of the subject we are lacking vital clues to what God intended for us to understand.  This example is just a simple sample of a much larger truth that God has spread out the information so that while it is in plain sight, it is not easily found, related or understood.  This is one of the most important lessons from this blog that you should take away and learn to put into practice.  Don’t read a single verse and attempt to say I understand that, without researching and looking for the related passages and God’s commentary on the subject.

Think with me and consider the hidden reference to the serpent in Genesis chapter 3.  I have heard people say that this is not Satan while others say it is Satan.   However, there is absolutely no way to know this by only reading this chapter of Genesis.  If you read the Bible cover to cover, it would take you a long time to finally find the answer to who this serpent is.  This infromation is not revealed until Revelation chapter 12.  God finally sees fit to reveal the identity of the hidden serpent in the last book of the Bible.  This is a clear example of a widely dispersed truth.  Where God introduces you to a subject in the 3rd chapter of Genesis, but does not reveal the identity of the being until the 12th chapter of Revelation.   I hope you are beginning to understand these tricky  concepts that God has implemented in the Bible.

Widely dispersed truths are an essential part of finding the hidden information in the Bible.  You see the Old Testament is a large set of books that Jesus told the Jews to search, for he said these are they that testify about Him (John 5:39).  But if you read the Old Testament you will not find one chapter called the story of Jesus.  While there are hundreds of prophetic verses of the coming messiah, not one said you will call his name “Jesus”.  Yet if you have eyes that see, you can find Jesus on almost every page of the Old Testament in some form or reference.  Some are more easily found than others, but none are in plain view and self apparent.  The Bible is a complex tricky book written with complex and tricky techniques that record truths in a manner that is not easily recognizable.  We have just touched on this subject in this blog and talked about one of these methods.  By putting little pieces of information here and little pieces of information elsewhere in a large random order you can certainly understand that this would make it very challenging for us to find anything of value.  This one technique alone would make the Bible very difficult to understand, but God has many other techniques of hiding information that we will get into later.

If you would like to continue reading this series, please go to Part 2.