[geocentrism] Biblical Numerology

Dear Martin and Neville,
This quote from Allen Daves pretty much sums up what I was saying about the 
refusal to see any significance (as opposed to meaning) in the examples I gave 
regarding Biblical numerology. 
Quote:
As long as men let that kind of "reasoning" persist they will be forever 
learning and never able to come to knowledge of the truth or even the capacity 
to understand it.

I don't find it easy to say this Neville but that just about sums up your 
spiritual walk during the time I have known you. You cannot 'reason' meaning 
out of the Bible other than to use your reasoning to realise it! It takes 
something quite different. If the only people who claim to understand the 
meaning of the Bible are the eloquent, intellectual, logical and analytical 
thinkers, then what hope is there for the rest of us understanding the Bible? 

Martin Selbrede dismissed the phenomena with:
Quote:
While Neville and I have had sharp disagreements (although we weren't 
disagreeable in how we expressed them), I must say that I am in total, complete 
agreement with what he has written here. Numerology (unless explicitly referred 
to in the text) merely indulges man's penchant for esotericism, and justifies 
dabbling in Jewish Gematria and other Kabbalistic games.

However the fact remains that the phenomena exists and no amount of 'arm 
waving' can change that. Therefore it is worthy of some comment as to why this 
appears to be the case. I know that the scriptural text is the most important 
aspect but one cannot overlook the amazing mutiples of 7 that just happens to 
exist by virtue of the Hebrew and Greek alpha-numeric values. 

My comparison with the epicyclical 'flower' patterns in Neville's cosmos model 
is exactly the same as is the coded structure of DNA or the unique position 
that the World is in relative to the sun and moon. They all exist and they 
cannot be the result of a non-intelligent source. How much importance one 
attaches to these phenomena is up to the individual. If they wish, they, the 
dabblers in 'Gematria' and other 'Kasbalistic' games etc. can extrapolate 
whatever they like out of them, that is their prerogative but the fact remains 
that this phenomena does exist. Could it be that somehow Satan managed to 
infiltrate God's Word with this novelty in an attempt to mislead us into more 
Satanic numerical gymnastics? I don't think so. I personally am content to 
acknowledge that they are not of Satan or a coincidence or an amazing result 
from pure chance but as an integral part of the Divine inspiration of scripture 
- God didn't just supply the words of the 'cake' but He also put some 'icing' 
on it. 

It is interesting that this phenomena does not appear in the non-canonical 
books of the Apocrypha or any other book in Hebrew, Greek or any other 
language. 

As I see it Neville's problem is likely to be that the phenomena appears in 
those scriptures that he has rejected. If this phenomena had been noted only in 
those scriptures accepted by Neville I would venture to suggest that he would 
view it with much interest but perhaps nothing more than that just as the 
'flower' patterns. However because his rejected scriptures also contain this 
same phenomena then the phenomena must, by default, be suspect. This sounds 
like shades of 'Airey's Failure' along with Michaelson and Morley's. All that 
is needed to put an end to this is explain why or how it happens - surely it is 
that simple. However it can only be that simple if it is acknowledged to exist 
in the first place and if it is not acknowledged, then it has to be a case of 
wanton denial. These may be strong words but I see no other way of expressing 
the problem.

I would like to finish by saying that I am open to persuasion that this 
phenomena can be explained in a way that I have not yet considered. 

Jack

 




  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Allen Daves 
  To: geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 5:30 PM
  Subject: [geocentrism] Re: 666


  The other reason the count is wrong is because you have the wrong start point 
for the beginning of the 70 weeks prophecy. It begins with Nehemiah's prayer to 
God

  This is the real point with all error....... Now you say it starts with 
Nehemiahs prayer to God but Scripture specifically states from the Going fourth 
of the command to rebuild and restore Jerusalem Daniel Ch 9:25 until mesial the 
prince You v Scripture .......You said something about being mastered by the 
scripture? Ch 5 identifies the completion of the wall which is part of 
restoration, now both the prayer and the completion took place in the 20th year 
therefore even if one were to buy into your description instead of scriptures 
description ow the when it was to be counted both events took place in the 20th 
year and still add up to 36 years total. Your point is completely moot even if 
it were true. The exact number of months is not given so to attempt to 
extrapolate some other time outline external of what scripture states as 
somehow voiding the one I have outlined for you based solely on what scripture 
does actually state only further demonstrates egregious error in both reasoning 
as well as conclusions. As long as men let that kind of "reasoning" persist 
they will be forever learning and never able to come to knowledge of the truth 
or even the capacity to understand it. The rest of the 70 weeks vision analysis 
you briefly put forward is just as erroneous.....hint the 70 weeks benchmarks 1 
his birth (70 & 7) 2. His death (62) and 3. The middle of the week (1/2of one 
week or 3.5 years) destruction of Jerusalem. Time=70 weeks Times= 62 & 7 weeks 
and Half a time= middle of one week or 7 years /2= 3.5 years... If you bothered 
to sit down as you suggest that I do and look at what you are saying you would 
see the error in math is not mine here nor is the fast, loose and I would add 
twisting play with scripture. 

  Allen


  Allen Daves <allendaves@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
    Again 596 BC is 596 years before Christ not 595 years no zero year. If 
there were a zero year counted then 596 years before christ would be in 
actuality 597 years before Christ and or  70 AD would be actualy 71 AD.  Christ 
was born in December of 1BC which was at the very most 30 days from January 1 
AD that can be proven as well.. I cant help it if people can''t count. But at 
the end of the day 596 years before Christ which is what BC stands for by 
definition is not 595 years. That would be a contradiction but 596 years before 
Christ plus 70 years begging in that same 1 January AD I mentioned earlier is 
666 years + 11 months. I know very well the error you are attempting to point 
out. The problem is you don't seem to understand your own error you are not 
counting.  I don't say that to be curt but if you will draw out 12 months of 
596 years on one side of a time line and 70 year of months on another side of 
the time line you will see that Christ was born on December of BC just days 
before 1 AD and when you count up 596 years to September AD 70 years you will 
always have 666 years 596 is not 595. I did not say 595 years before Christ I 
said 596 years before Christ. If there were a zero year that would be 596 + 70 
+ 1(0 year)= 667...simple arithmetic 596 +70 = 666  on any number line there is 
measurment of zero only a line of separation that separates -1 and +1 it is 
called zero but zero only separates the + and - it is not a actual measurment 
of zero inches. 31 December is the dividing line between one BC year and the 
next Year AD......I am afraid the "joke" is on you guys....:)


    Allen

    Martin Selbrede <mselbrede@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 


      On May 21, 2007, at 6:44 PM, Allen Daves wrote:


        Me in blue

        You astound me on the one hand with your eloquence and on the other you 
"gift" for your lack of understanding and missing any and all verbatim 
correlation(s) "Trample via gentiles" "the city"within the relevant text as 
well as the context as a whole itself....you seem to piecemeal Revelation 
Daniel and Jesus as all separate not related topics and text in sipte of their 
specific referenced staments ...see previous?





      The mistake is straightforward. Your count is wrong (for several 
reasons), because the span of time from 596 BC to 70 AD is not 666 years, but 
665 years.  You're doing the count on the assumption there is a Year Zero.  I 
made this clear, transparent, and gave TWO examples of how this is to be 
correctly counted, and even SAID that the 666 year count is wrong, and you 
still missed it.  I can't help you if you don't pay attention to what I'm 
communicating.


      The other reason the count is wrong is because you have the wrong start 
point for the beginning of the 70 weeks prophecy. It begins with Nehemiah's 
prayer to God, offered in the month of Kislev, the third month of the civil 
year, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes (455 BC).  The references to the 
rebuilding occurring in Ezra are baseless (as if the decree emanated from the 
7th year of Artaxerxes, or from Cyrus, which hypotheses fall apart under 
scrutiny). The 483rd year of the 490 in the set begins at the outset of 
Christ's public ministry, the middle of the 70th week occurs when Christ is 
crucified and cut off, the remainder of the 70th week terminates at the stoning 
of Stephen. In other words, the 490 years overlaps the 70 years, and this 
circumstance is fatal to the consecutive treatment they receive in the 
Powerpoint slides.


      Briefly, your 596+70=666 count is wrong because you need to subtract one 
year for crossing the BC-AD divide because there's no discretization at that 
threshold, and even if you hadn't made that mistake, you're off by more than 
three decades by failing to pinpoint the correct terminus a quo for the 
beginning of Daniel's prophecy concerning the rebuilding of the wall. Ezra was 
only allowed to work on the temple -- he had religious freedom there to 
rebuild, but no civil authority to raise up the defenses of Jerusalem, for 
which reason the city remained a reproach. I won't go into detail here with the 
scriptural proofs for this position, and the refutation of alleged 
counter-passages in Ezra, Haggai, and Isaiah, but I'm ready to bring them into 
the open if your response indicates this is needful. But I'm very, very 
well-armed on this, scripturally.


      So, when you write that "Year zero has nothing to do with those 
calculations...."  you're mistaken. You should have verified this first before 
reaffirming the same mistake a second time. Had you sat down with paper and 
pencil and just looked at what you were doing, you'd have seen the problem 
right away.  You merely assumed you were right, and I was wrong. Such 
assumptions can come back to bite one, especially after you charge me thus: 
"you did not read very carefully."  It takes more than a blunderbuss approach 
to be a workman approved, not ashamed. 


      Nobody, and I repeat, nobody, is a master of Scripture unless they've 
first been mastered BY the Scripture. You play so fast and loose with verses, 
it truly shocks me to see so much boundless zeal put behind such 
feebly-supported speculations, at the expense of the straightforward 
expositions and exegeses of the passages. You downplay the "jots and tittles" 
in order to impose preconceived ideas about context. You merely assume that (1) 
your take on the context is correct and that (2) its bearing on Rev. 13:18 is 
determinative.  Assertion is not proof.  What's particularly annoying is that 
I, too, have made an appeal to context within Revelation, and you've dismissed 
it without a second thought. But you charge ME thus: "you don't even grasp the 
context of what is going on and you want to understand it how?"  Having taught 
verse-by-verse through Revelation as early as 1981 at the seminary level, I 
know something about the context of what is going on. For that reason, I have 
very little sympathy for the vast majority of popular "thinking" on the topic. 
Too many of these folks need to go back and do a little homework before going 
to press prematurely. 


      On the positive side, if (as I think you're saying) you're teaching that 
God set up His kingdom prior to 70 AD, I would be in hearty agreement with this 
view. That would be the correct take on the final parts of Daniel 2, that 
during the ancient Roman Empire God would set up His kingdom, one that would 
never be shaken. If this is your view (and it seems to be the case, based on 
your slide presentation), you'd be in sharp disagreement with much of 
evangelical Christendom, but you'd nonetheless be correct. The setting up of 
that kingdom doesn't await some future event: it occurred twenty centuries ago, 
and the demolition of the Roman Empire is proof of it (the stone cut without 
hands strikes the statue, and it becomes like the chaff of the summer threshing 
floors and was driven away by the wind).  If I've misunderstood you, and you 
don't think God set up a kingdom of any kind at that point, we'd again be on 
opposite ends of an issue.  Which tends to be a prevailing situation. As 
Neville says, there's surely plenty of diversity on this forum.


      Martin












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