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Welcome to the Cross References podcast on the Book of Ezekiel. In this study, you learn how every small piece of the Bible tells one big story- and most importantly, how they all connect to the cross and Christ.
Whether you’re a newbie Christian or a veteran Bible reader, my goal is that God’s Word will make more sense to you after every episode.
Host: Luke Taylor
The Hepatic Structure of the Bible
Ezekiel 38-39
Ezekiel series, Part 77
Introduction
As I was going through Ezekiel 38 and 39- which were the two chapters on Gog and Magog where we left off in Ezekiel- I was struck by all the 7s that kept coming up.
Like how the weapons were going to be burned for seven years following that conflict.
Or how the bodies would be left untouched for seven months.
One aspect I didn’t comment on in those two chapters is that the verses are divided up into 7 different sections to explain the story of Gog and Magog.
The way some people calculate it, they even believe Israel will be attacked by seven nations in that battle. And those aren’t the only sevens in Ezekiel.
So before we launch into the final section of the book of Ezekiel in 2025, let’s just take a week and talk about a subject that’s a little strange, kind of a diversion, but something that could give us a big tool for our tool belts when it comes to Bible interpretation.
And you’ll find out what it is today on the Cross References podcast.
[theme music]
The meaning of 7
Welcome to the book of Ezekiel: a Cross References Bible study where we learn how every small piece of the Bible tells one big story- and how they all connect to the cross and Christ.
My name is Luke Taylor, and I’m not a math guy. I’m a words guy. I don’t like working in numbers. I basically made straight As as a student but I needed tutoring to get through math in college. I avoided the book of Numbers in the Bible for way too long because I still had PTSD from high school algebra. If you need help writing your English essay you can count on me, if you need help with your science test you can count on me, if you’re trying to get a political science degree you can count on me, but if you have calculus homework don’t count on me because I can’t count on anything.
So I won’t be your math teacher today, but if you’ll give me the privilege of being your bible teacher for a few minutes, I’d like to share what I know about biblical numerology.
And you have probably heard before that the number 7 is the number of perfection or completion. It’s a number that signifies something has been brought to 100%. 7 days of creation. 7 years of the tribulation. 7 Feasts. 7 churches in Revelation.
And throughout the book of Ezekiel, the number 7 has come up regularly. I mentioned a few already from chapters 38 and 39. Before that we had:
The prophecies against the 7 gentile nations in chapters 25-32. After God got done with the judgments against Jerusalem and it was destroyed, in chapter 25, God opened up a salvo on 7 of the Gentile nations.
The last of those nations was Egypt. In chapters 29-32, there were 7 sections of verses with prophecies against Egypt.
When Ezekiel was called to be a prophet in chapters 1-3, it said that he sat on the side of a hill and pouted about it for 7 days.
And we’re about to launch into a section of Ezekiel with many more 7s than the ones we’ve already encountered in this book. In chapter 40, we’ll see 7 gates of a future millennial temple.
Of course, if we go into other books of the Bible, you’ve probably noticed the numerous number 7s throughout. There are a huge amount of 7s in the first chapter of the Bible, and even in the first verse of the Bible, which is 7 words in Hebrew.
7 parts of the Holy Spirit in Isaiah 11. The 7 marches around Jericho in the book of Joshua, with 7 times on the 7th day. Many offerings and sacrifices coming in 7s in the Levitical laws.
It carries through into the New Testament. The book of John has the 7 miracles and the 7 I Am statements of Jesus. Paul writes to 7 churches. He wrote 13 books, but to 7 churches.
If you know of anymore more, comment below if you’re listening on a platform that does comments. There’s so many throughout the Scripture and if I didn’t mention your favorite, you can forgive me 70x7 times.
And here’s one of my favorites: how many books does the Bible have? Most Christians would quickly tell you: 66. And most Christians would be wrong. Most Christians forget that the book of Psalms is broken up into 5 books. There are actually 5 books of Psalms. So when you take that into account, we actually have 70 books of the Bible.
Chuck Missler calls this the Heptadic Structure of the Bible. Heptadic is a word with the prefix “hepta” which means 7, and it refers to the seven-fold structure of Scripture. He says there are more than 600 passages in the Bible in which the number 7 occurs, and you could identify even more if you take all the things that appear in groups of 7, such as the 7 letters to 7 churches of Revelation. Or the 7 sections about Egypt in the middle of Ezekiel, or the 7 sections about Gog and Magog that we just recently studied.
So what does it mean when you see this number emphasized so much in the Bible? Why does God do so many things in 7s?
Well, I’ll put it to you this way: I believe the number 7 is God’s calling card. It’s God’s signature. It’s God’s way of saying, “I was there. I did that.”
It’s OK to call it the number of perfection or completion. I got not problem calling it that. But I would add another layer on this explanation and say that I believe the number 7 is God’s way of signing His name to something.
Even if you go outside the Bible and look at Creation itself, it seems arranged around this number 7. 7 notes on a musical scale. 7 colors in the rainbow. The earth has 7 continents. Snow White had Seven Dwarves. (That last one is a bit of a joke). 7 is how God does things. It’s how He signs His name.
So today’s lesson is just a fun little diversion before we really start digging into the Millennium next week. But I want to talk about a couple of sections of Scripture that throw some Bible readers for a loop, and I want to give you confidence that your Bible is God’s Holy and Inspired and Reliable Word of God, and that every jot and tittle has been preserved.
Matthew 1’s Genealogy
I name dropped Chuck Missler earlier, and if you know Chuck Missler’s work and teachings, you have probably heard him talking about 7s before. If not, I’ll share some of it here, but I encourage you to visit his website, khouse.org. That’s the website for his ministry: Koinonia House.
Let’s say you’re going to make a genealogy, using whatever names and numbers and ages you want, and that in constructing this you have to make the total number of people in this genealogy divisible by 7.
The number of names in the genealogy must be divisible by 7.
The number of words must be divisible by 7.
The number of letters must be divisible by 7.
The number of vowels must be divisible by 7.
The number of consonants must be divisible by 7.
The number of words that begin with a vowel must be divisible by 7.
The number of words that begin with a consonant must be divisible by 7.
The number of nouns must be divisible by 7.
The number of words that aren’t nouns must be divisible by 7.
The number of words that occur more than once must be divisible by 7.
The number of words that occur in more than one form must be divisible by 7.
The number of words that occur in only one form must be divisible by 7.
The number of male names must be divisible by 7.
The number of generations must be divisible by 7.
So far, that is 14 uses of sevens. Now, does that sound a little difficult to do? I’d say so. In fact, it sounds just about impossible. That would be very very difficult to force.
What are the chances of one of these happening by chance? 1 in 7. Two of them? 1 in 49. And so on.
The chances of all these things occurring by chance: 1 in 678,223,072,849 (678 billion).
And this occurs in the book of Matthew’s Greek genealogy of Jesus. Yes, the genealogy that you may have just read through here in this past December. The long list of names that we all question why God would open the New Testament this way. We mainly try to skip right through it as quickly as we can. It sounds like this:
Matthew 1:1-6
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. 2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, 3 and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, 4 and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, 5 and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, 6 and Jesse the father of David the king.
As you’re reading that, every word counts. The number of words are divisible by 7. The number of consonants. The number of vowels. And so on. It all fits together.
Nobody could have done this on their own. Only a mind like God could have given this to somebody (and I bet Matthew had no idea about all this as he was writing it).
And when it comes to the names, Matthew didn’t really have much choice about which names he used. These names cross thousands of years of history, written by the Bible readers over hundreds of years in the Old Testament, and yet all these names fit the heptadic structure of the Bible.
Perhaps you’re wondering: how can I check this? How can I verify this? Because we can’t speak Greek, so how can we know? And I can’t speak Greek either. But I obtained the book that Chuck Missler was relying on: Mathematics Prove the Holy Scriptures, which contains the observations by Dr. Ivan Panin, and he shows his work in it. And he includes a lot of observations in here about the 7s throughout Scripture.
It we lost one word out of Matthew 1, wouldn’t this amazing use of 7 not work. We wouldn’t have a number of letters divisible by 7 anymore, or consonants, or vowels. It would be all thrown off.
Which means we can trust that God preserves his word! We can trust it! And it shows that when you remove anything out of the Bible, it starts to unravel. And since this amazing design holds together, it’s God’s calling card that He was not only the supernatural designer, but that across thousands of years, He has been a supernatural preserver.
Mark 16’s Ending
One more place I’d like us to look at is the last section of Mark 16. In your Bible, as you read through Mark’s Gospel, you have probably been confused before to come across a section at the very end that has a footnote or break in the story with text that says something like, “Verses 9 through 20 do not appear in the earliest manuscripts.”
And this causes some readers to down its legitimacy, because we’re like, “Wait, if it’s not in the earliest manuscripts, then where did it come from? Was it added later? Was it made up?”
And I want to have an answer for you today. I don’t know when it was added to the manuscripts, but I know where it came from. Verses 9 through 20 came from God. I know because these verses have God’s calling card in them. Let’s look at the text.
As you’re reading through Mark, you get to the part where the women went to Jesus’ tomb at the end and His body isn’t there. The tomb is empty, but there’s an angel. He says,
(Mark 16:6-8)
He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
And at this point you have the line of text that says basically the rest of the book is not there. Now, there are several reasons I could go through to explain why I think verses 9 through 20 actually are the true ending of Mark, one of which is that if they weren’t there, verse 8 right there would be the ending. It would simply say, “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Which would be a really disappointing way to end Mark’s Gospel. By this point, you haven’t even seen the resurrected Jesus yet! So to me, it’s obvious that this was never meant to be the ending. But you have some traditions and denominations who teach that verse 8 is the true ending because they don’t like how the last 12 verses sound, which is just ludicrous to me.
So the verses go on:
Mark 16:9-20
9 [[Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. 10 She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 11 But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.
12 After these things he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. 13 And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.
And then Jesus gives them the Great Commission. Some Christians don’t like this section because it sounds a little too pentecostally for them, and it messes with their theology.
14 Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. 15 And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. 16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
19 So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. 20 And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs.]]
Alright, so let me tell you what’s so amazing about that section we just read. Verses 9 through 20 of Mark 16, a selection of verses that some doubt is even God’s Word. Let me explain to you how we can know this is God’s Word.
The number of words in this passage: 175 (7 x 25)
Different vocabulary of words: 98 (7 x 14)
Number of letters in the words: 553 (7 x 79)
Number of vowels: 294 (7 x 42)
Number of consonants: 259 (7 x 37)
Number of vocabulary words used earlier in Mark is 84 (7 x 12)
Number of vocabulary words used only in this chapter are 14 (7 x 2)
Number used in Jesus’ discourse are 42 (7 x 6)
And it goes on and on and on with all these 7s that have been discovered.
In fact, if you go into the numerical value of each letter (because each Greek letter has a numerical value assigned to it) and if you add them up, their values all equal 7 as well.
Are you convinced now that the last 12 verses really came from God?
One weird bit of trivia: if you add up all the verses in the book of Mark, you come to 678 verses.
If you take out the last 12 verses, how many do you have in the book now? 666.
And 666 is called the Mark of the Beast. And this book is called Mark.
That doesn’t mean anything, I’m just trying to creep you out.
Housekeeping/Mailbag
And I hope you’ve heard a lot of things today that creeped you out, or at least taught you something you didn’t know. In fact, if you learned something new today, please leave a comment or feel free to shoot me an email: crossreferencespodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Next time on this podcast: guys, we’re winding down. The podcast is coming to an end this year. In fact, in the first half of this year. The book of Ezekiel has been a fun ride, but we have 9 chapters left, and they’re a little tough, so I don’t want to spend 9 months on them.
So we’re going to do a multi-week study of the Millennial Kingdom of Christ. And throughout that series, we’re going to weave in the content of Ezekiel 40 through 48, because those chapters all take place within the Millennium.
Guys, if you’re saved, we’re all going to be spending a thousand years in this Kingdom. But most christians actually don’t know what it’s all about. So I have a 12-part series planned to try and cover it all, comprehensively, and look at what God wants us to know about the Millennium before we get there. So get ready, it all begins next week with a look at the four schools of thought about the Millennial Kingdom of Christ, and which one I feel is the right one.
Make sure you’re subscribed so you can get all the rest of the Cross References podcast!
Thanks for listening to this Bible Study on the Book of Ezekiel. This has been Luke Taylor, and I hope the Bible makes more sense to you- AND IS MORE AMAZING TO YOU THAN EVER- after this episode.