Mangling Scripture

Meet Theodore Dusty.

He is extremely Bible literate, brought up in a strict brethren environment and force-fed the Word of God, albeit in a very stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere. He took refuge in his teenage years through the calming pastime of fishing, where he befriended Andrej, an illegal Polish immigrant, also a Christian, who introduced him to the quirky world of numerology. To cut a long story short, Theodore’s experiences, knowledge and growing messianic impulses combined to create a unique theology where he was the modern Noah, surrounded by folk from the immigrant community, known collectively as The Fish People. He was guided, characteristically, by a new revelation from God, which directed him to all the Bible verses he needed to validate his mission to save mankind. His core motivation was 2 Chronicles 2:17:

Solomon took a census of all the aliens who were in Israel, after the census his father David had taken; and they were found to be 153,600.

To Theodore it was the aliens, the immigrant community, who were to build not the Temple, as the context insists, but a new ark, to rescue the chosen few from God’s fresh flood. Theodore’s excitement was that through his calculations, the time had come, through the alignment of two other key verses:

Simon Peter climbed aboard and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153, but even with so many the net was not torn. (John 21:11)

Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. (Genesis 7:6)

Firstly he connected all three verses numerologically, through the numbers 153,600 and 153 and 600. Secondly the alignment was brought about by the fact that Theodore had just reached his 600th birthday (calculated by further Scripture twisting) and that, with the birth of the Polish baby mentioned earlier, there were now exactly 153 Fish People in the community. The time had come, the flood was coming and his trip to a weather station “confirmed” it. So off they went to the ark they had built in the woods…

Yes, an extreme example, but there are countless Theodores out there, equally dangerous, but in less obvious ways. They, unfortunately, get all the validation for their strange ideas through the pages of the Bible. So, how come? We need to look closer at this Book of books.

The Bible may be considered a divine encyclopaedia but it is not ordered like one. Topics don’t fall into neat indexed sections, but are threaded through the text in a myriad of literary styles. Thousands of years before the invention of hypertext and web links, the Bible was already structured like our modern day Internet, a seemingly infinite cloud of connections and pathways logically ordered not by the mind of the web page designer, but by the awesome mind of our resourceful God.

He provided a key to its understanding, a key that has unfortunately been lost to us. That key, ironically, was the human mind itself, a mind dedicated to a lifetime of study of and reverence for the written Word of God, a mind unpolluted by alien philosophy and pagan interpretations. Jesus and his contemporaries possessed that mind, but as history progressed and Biblical truth was invaded by the ideas of competing cultures, such as Greece and Rome, the ability was severely hampered.

Steve Maltz
January 2014

(This is an abridged extract from Steve’s book How the Church Lost the Truth: And How it Can Find it Again)

You may also find the following interesting

Watch the above video by Steve Maltz – “Hebrew Roots – Bondage or freedom?”.

Watch the above video by Steve Maltz – “Jesus from a Hebraic Perspective”.