Scripture: Topics: Numbers in the Bible
All right, we're back again tonight. Numbers in the Bible. This is episode three. We'll be dealing with number four. I am Michael Pearl and you are at the door located in Lobelville, Tennessee. Jesus said, I am The Door. We're taking the Word of God. All scriptures given by inspiration of God and counting and looking at every single number in the Bible and every time it's used. We're looking at thousands of hours of investigation. "Every Word of God is pure. Add thou not unto its words, lest he reproved thee and thou be found a liar." Proverbs 30:5-6
So every number in the Bible is placed there by God and each number has a reason. And there are meanings assigned to the individual numbers, from a child thou knowest the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make the wise under salvation.
It's amazing as you read the Bible through and through and through and through, and you become familiar with the whole book, numbers begin to jump out at you and your mind becomes imprinted with the symbolic meaning of Bible numbers. It's something that takes place automatically. And there's different authors have taken the numbers and given us books called Bible Numbers or Numbers in Scripture or Biblical Numerology and given us the meaning of those numbers. And I'd say 90%, 85-to-90% of the authors agree with each other, but sometimes they're little disagreements, little differences. And so I took those differences and examined them to see what the singular one meaning of all the numbers in the Bible are.
So you know how it is when you look at color. If you were talking to a blind person, you wanted to tell them what color red was, how would you describe red to a blind person, or blue or green? How would you describe these colors? Well, you'd say red is warm, feels warm, and blue, that's cool. Just makes you, it's kind of got a chill, calm effect. It's soft. Red is harsh, it's sharp. And yellow, it's full of bright brightness and light and warmth too, but it's not as warm as red. It's somewhere in between. And then you describe the different colors.
Well, you know, numbers are like that. When you read the numbers that there's a certain color to them, a certain light, something red will differ from blue. Seven will differ from three. And as you read them over and over again, you begin to sense that difference.
And then there are flavors as well in numbers. Some numbers are positive, they're sweet. Some numbers are negative, they're sour. Some numbers are sort of in between. And so once you get 3-4-500 times that a number is used in your mind, so just your mind is full of that, then you say that's a sweet number. That tastes good or that number can be a little bit bitter.
And so numbers are like colors and like taste that you have a difficult time describing the flavor, the color of the number. And that's what we're seeing as we go through it. So tonight we're going to be dealing with the number four. Very interesting number indeed.
I
We dealt with one already. One is just one, no more, one above all supremacy, unique, apart from all others in its class one, Jesus is the holy one. He's the only one of God.
II
And then two too, as you see there, there's a division between them, one on the left, one on the right. So two is the number of division, the number of division, 835 times it speaks of things divided in every usage of the number two.
III
And then we looked at three. Three is the number divine control, election, sovereignty, volition, ordering or perfection and look at it. Three, God the Father, God the Son, God, the Holy Spirit. You have a trinity there. Divine control, election sovereignty.
And then we come to the number four tonight. Now the number four is unique, different from the others. Wholeness in structure or nature. It's a little broad than that, but that'll give us a brief definition. Wholeness and structure or nature, that which God makes or man makes that involves four parts, but the parts together create a unified whole. The whole wouldn't be whole without all four of them. 328 times it's used. 189 times are cardinals. That is one, and then they're ordinals and that would be fourth.
Four is not about the parts or the number as in four as opposed to three. It's about the unit complete in structure and whole.
Revelation 21:16, "And the city lieth foursquare," That's talking about the New Jerusalem, "and the length is as large as the breadth; and he measured the city with the reed, 12,000 furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal."
Notice that the city is foursquare. The city couldn't be threesquare, could it? It couldn't be fivesquare. If it's square, it'd have to be foursquare. Foursquare makes a complete cube.
So four is one, two, three, and yet it's not complete. The fourth one makes it complete. You're going to see that pattern throughout the Scripture.
So what's the origin of four? I went back and looked that up and back in time before English or German or Latin or Spanish or French or Hebrew existed, when men were scratching and scrawling the number four, they put one mark, two marks, three marks, and four marks, and that's the way they wrote four. You can see why they would write it that way. And it expressed the four directions, the four winds and express the fourness that we'll find in nature. Now in time it came to have a slant like that to speed up the writing of it and also to distinguish it from a T or an X.
Now there's a book called Dictionary of Symbols. This is not a Christian book, this is a secular book, but a very good one that goes into the history of symbols and how they came about. Here's a quote. "Almost from prehistoric times, the number four was employed to signify what was solid, what could be touched and felt. Its relationship to the cross," four points, like I just showed you, "made it an outstanding symbol of wholeness and universality, a symbol which drew all to itself."
Now, I only discovered that last week. I understood the meaning of the number four from the Bible first, and yet I find that a secular writer in looking at the historical use of four finds that it very closely resembles the Biblical meaning.
It's fascinating then that four is the number of that which is structured or created or ordered, that the DNA of all living things is composed of four letters, not five or not three. If they're not four or if they're more, then it's incomplete, it's broken. It takes exactly four letters and all the information in your body, in your DNA comes from just four letters. On the computer you have just two. And so we have twice as much as the computer does. That's the reason we're still smarter during this year than computers since we make them. G, C, A and T are the four letters in your DNA. And by the way, that's the DNA of all things. Four blood types in animals and humans alike in mammals, four blood types. They are A, B, O, and AB. Do you know which blood type you are?
Four chambers in the heart.
The cerebrum, the largest part of the brain is divided into four lobes. That which God creates and makes four parts making a whole, that which is structured, built and ordered by God in creation in four.
Now that would scare you to death, you went to a dentist and he showed you that one, four kinds of teeth, it's fascinating about the teeth.
There are:
So the number four is found in your teeth. And I see somebody out there tonight, you've lost four teeth. So that's the way it works.
Four basic types of tissue in humans and it's fascinating.
When God creates, he creates in this unit of four, just as we build a house with four walls, we may build two sections and each have four walls. And so it ends up with eight walls, but we build in units of four.
Now if I don't pronounce that correctly, it's because I've never heard it pronounced before. I just read it and I'm doing my best.
The cow I know is insulted over the way I pronounce that, but he'll have to live with it.
This is fascinating. I read in the science journal.
“By studying this plasma, physicists hope to learn more about the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature.”
That's the four fundamental forces of all of nature that God created.
And then:
Even the people of a couple thousand years ago knew this.
So all of matter exist in one of those four states. You're going to see that in the text.
And then there are
Four of Jupiter's moons are readily visible from the earth, called the Galilean moons.
Now here's interesting. All winged insects with exception of flies, they would be an exception, wouldn't it, have four wings. Insects of the superorder, I won't even try to pronounce it like butterflies, ants, bees, beetles, fleas and flies, that kind of rhymes. Moths and wasps complete metamorphosis in four stages. We've done that at home in homeschooling. Take a worm and put it in a box with some leaves and watch it go into that metamorphic stage and come out as a beautiful moth or butterfly.
Now that's the stages they go through, four of them.
And then...
No more. Four is the smallest composite number and the smallest squared number. Special relativity and general relativity treat nature as four dimensional. Say how do you do that? Time, Einstein says, is the fourth dimension and it's yet to be disproven and some evidence tends that way.
In music, common time is constructed to four beats per measure, 4/4, 6/8, 2/4. The common scale is built on two sets of four notes as in CDEF, and then GABC.
The foundation of creation is built on the structure of four.
The foundation of creation, the whole of life is built on the structure of four. One, two, three, four. Four makes a whole. Wholeness and structure or nature, that's the way the Bible uses the number four every time it's used.
We are going through the Scripture now and I'm not cherry picking. In fact, I've gone out of my way to pick some of those verses that one might question that we are being consistent. So we're going to cover those as well as the others. We're making a pretty good blanket stab at the whole bunch of Sripture here, okay?
Genesis 2:10 "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted and became into four heads." So the garden of Eden composed of four different streams, wholeness and structure or nature. You notice the four aspects of nature which was earth, wind, and the way the old timers have said, earth, wind, water, and fire. Well, you've got there the solid of the ground, the garden, you've got the river and it became four heads. You've got two aspects of nature there.
Genesis 47:24, "And it should come to pass in the increase, that ye shall give the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own." Now we're going to come to fifth part and four parts and half and tenths and all those fractions. And you're going to be amazed when you see a bunch of them together in the same sentence and see how they play one against another. "For seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food, for your little ones."
So this is wholeness and structure, nature. Notice seed of the field, food for your households, food for your little ones. This is nature and it comes in four parts.
Exodus 25:12, "And thou shall cast four rings of gold for it, and put them in the four corners thereof; and two rings shall be in the one side of it, and two rings in the other side." Now that term four corners is found 20 times, which is quite a few. That's better than one 10th of the entire usages of the number. The whole of a physical structure is what you're seeing there. Four corners as in the square that I showed you.
Exodus 37:12, "And he cast for it four rings of gold," talking about the temple, "and put the rings up on the four corners there were in the four feet thereof." Many fours appear in this construction of the temple. It's interesting the number seven does not, but four appears frequently. Why? Because it's all about the construction of the temple. Something made wherein you need, three feet wouldn't hold it up, it would fall over and four corners, it would be necessary and four rings of gold for each of the corners.
...and on and on it goes in the constructed temple. So many of our fours are found there in reference to the temple. I'm not going to go into all the verses, it would take too long.
Leviticus 11:30, "All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination." Indeed, now certainly that's nature, something God created. Animals going on four, you know, there are no three-legged animals unless they got a foot caught in a trap or got it shot off or something like that, bit off otherwise four, we have four limbs. We humans and animals have four limbs as well.
1 Kings 18:33 "And he put the wood in order, and cut the bullock in pieces" (talking about sacrifice) "and laid him on the wood, and said, Fill four barrels with water and pour it on the burnt sacrifice on the wood." Now this is fascinating because we have all four elements of nature there. You have wood, that which is solid. You have water which is the liquid. You have the burnt sacrifice, which is fire and gas. So you've got all four elements
1 Chronicles 9:24, "In four quarters, where the porters toward the east, west, north and south." Four quarters, the four, you know, if couldn't have dimension without four, north, south, east and west. If you removed one of them, we wouldn't have dimension as we do, four quarters.
Job 1:19 "And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell up on the young men, and they're dead, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee." So again, a house with four corners is normal and that's found 20 times. So this 20 and the other 20 makes 40 out of what it was, 150, 160, something like that times it's used.
Now Proverbs 30:24, this is amazing, "There are four things which are little up on the earth," so these are things on the earth God made, "but they're exceeding wise: The ants are people not strong yet they prepare their meat in the summer; The conies are but a feeble folk," he speaks of these as if they're humans, "yet make they their houses in the rocks; The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands; and spider taketh hold with her hands," which spiders don't typically have hands, "and is in kings' palaces." So these are four things up on the earth that are exceeding wise.
Jeremiah 49:36, "And upon Elam will I bring the four winds from the four quarters of heaven." Four winds is found nine times and we already saw four quarters in that context.
Ezekiel 10:9 "And when I looked, behold the four wheels by the cherubims, one wheel by one cherub, and another wheel by another cherub; and the appearance of the wheels was as the color of a beryl stone." Cherubs surround the throne of God and they minister on his behalf, and they always come in groups of four and they have four wings and they have four faces. I won't go into all the Scripture on that, but created by God around the throne are fours.
Ezekiel 14:21, "For thus saith the Lord Good, how much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence to cut off from it man and beast?" So God's judgments come in fours as well, and we'll see that in the book of Revelation.
Ezekiel 43:15 "So the altar shall be four cubits and from the altar upwards shall be four horns." Four is referenced to the altar six times. So you see these structures that God ordered made that man built come in four, four four.
Now in John 4:35, "Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? Behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white already to harvest." So four has to do with nature a whole lot. And so he's talking about the harvest, he's talking about months.
Now I started to include this one in the peripheral passages that are not as bold as the others, but I think this is pretty, is sufficiently bold to be enlisted here with the others, so whole complete unit.
And then Acts 10:11, "And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending onto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at four corners, and he let it down to earth, wherein were all manner of four-footed beast of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things and fowls of the air." So there's your four again in nature. Four-footed beast, all manner of beast on the earth. So that was everything basically.
There are four gospels, we read in the Bible.
And then four in the Book of Revelation it's found:
That's an interesting number. Three times seven is 21 and then seven, which is 28 all together, four times seven.
Four beasts are found 11 times like those cherubim that I told you about. That's the beast. And then four angels are found four times as well.
Revelation 7:1, "And after these things I saw four angels stand on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree." Notice the elements of nature there, wind, sea, earth.
Revelation 7:23, "And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God; and he cried with a loud voice under the four angels to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea." Now these are four bad angels bound in the River Euphrates. God put them there to be a judgment upon mankind at the end of the tribulation. Now it must be that they are pretty bad guys to be selected out of all the evil angels and bound up, tied, chained and put in the bottom of the River Euphrates. That means that right now in the bottom of the River Euphrates, there's a unrustable chain holding four angels down, probably sunk in the mud with silt covering them, and they're down there gagging and waiting to be released. There will come a time when they will be released up on the earth. Four in judgment.
Revelation 9:14, "Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, loose the four angels which are bound in the great River Euphrates. And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year to slay the third part of men." So one third of the human race will be killed through the instigation of these four wicked angels.
And then foursquare is found 10 times in the Bible, once in the New Testament in the book of Revelation, "And the city lieth foursquare," we read that while ago, the length, this is the breadth and so forth.
Incidental usages of Four
Now here's some incidental usages of four. Now when I say incidental, those fours where God initiates the use of the number in the temple or the number of days Lazarus laid in the tomb, that sort of thing. Then we can see very clearly a bold declaration of this consistency of meaning. But sometimes the number four is incidentally used by someone where there's not a spiritual context or divine events taking place. It's just kind of like off the cuff you'll see them. So I call that an incidental use of four.
Now I will grant you that these are like T-cells, these incidental usages. In other words, if it used the number six or number seven or number eight, it wouldn't be out of place because there's really no context that dictates one meaning or another. But we can assume when we have 160, 182, 200 times that a word is used and the meaning is apparent when there's four or five verses where it's not so apparent, there's no reason for us not to believe that the same meaning carries through. It's just not made obvious in the passage.
Jeremiah 36:23, "And it came to pass that when Jehudi had read three or four leaves," that's a book, "he cut it with the penknife," he was a Bible corrector, "and cast it into the fire and that was on the hearth until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth." So he didn't like the King James version, and so he started cutting pages out of it and burning it up.
Now I noticed four leaves. Now I said that's in incidental. Three or four, it could have been five or six, but he said three or four. And so maybe possibly God didn't intend for that to have the same meaning, but there's no reason not to assume that it does.
Numbers 7:7 "Two wagons and four oxen he gave unto the sons of Gershon, according to their service." This is just kind of what you might post at the courthouse, a notation of something that took place, a legal transaction there, and he said he gave him for oxen to the sons of Gershon according to their service. But then it is related to nature to wagons and oxen. And so we let the text decide.
Exodus 22:1 "If a man shall steal an ox, or a sheep and kill it, or sell it; he shall restore five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep." And I call this incidental, but it is about nature. It is about ox and sheep.
2 Samuel 3:4 "The fourth, Adonijah the son of Haggith; and the fifth, Shephatiah the son of Abital," if you read it, it's got the first and second and the third and fourth and fifth all the way through the 12th. In other words, it's giving a list of men in one through 12 and so somebody's got to be fourth. So maybe this has no meaning, but then again we may not know how that applies.
And then 1 Kings 6:1, "It came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year," we're not going 400, we'll do that with a separate thing, "after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord." So in the fourth year that could be because it's a reference to the structure of the house of the Lord, why that's used there and maybe it's incidental. I'll let you decide.
John 11:17, "When Jesus came, he found that he had lain in the grave four days already." That's how long Lazarus had been dead, four days. But that was the complete whole time guaranteeing death.
And then the fourth is used 69 times that which is structured or treated to be complete or total, none missing, whole within that number. That's the same meaning as four.
Genesis 1:19 "And the evening and the morning were the fourth day." God made the sun and the moon associated with creation on that fourth day.
Genesis 2:14 "And the name of the third river is Hiddekel, that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates." That's those four rivers in the garden of Eden.
Genesis 2:14, "But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full." Four generations is how long God allowed the children of Israel to be cast out of their land. And the fourth generation, Moses, led them out and they came back and that's found seven times.
And then Revelation 8:12, "And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars," notice all the elements of nature there, "so the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise." That's certainly four and related to nature.
Mark 6:48 "And he saw them tolling in rowing; for the wind was contrary to them, and about the fourth watch of the night," so night is divided into four watches. If there three, that's not the whole night, the whole night is four watches, "walking upon the sea, and would have passed by them.""
Mark 14:25 “And in the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea."
So four or fourth and then I skipped one, four or fourth exceeding three. This is unique use of four. Four is found often as three. Four things are alike. Three are identical or very much alike. The fourth is different, but it completes the them. We found that several times.
Number 14:18, "The Lord is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquities of the fathers under the children under the third and fourth generation." So the iniquities of the fathers are visited upon the children through the third and to the fourth generation.
Proverbs 30:15-16 "The horseleach hath two daughters," and the horseleach is a leach that attaches to a horse and sucks the blood out of them, "hath two daughters crying, give, give." In other words they want blood, blood, more. “There are three things that are never satisfied,” like a leech is never satisfied. "There are three things that are never satisfied, yeah, four things say not. It is enough." In other words, the fourth one different than the others, but there is no end. There's no limit. There's no satisfaction. It just keeps wanting more. "The grave, and the barren womb," the barren woman wants a baby, the grave keeps seeking, "the earth that is not filled with water," it keeps raining, "and the fire that saith not, it is enough." So those four things, the fourth one exceeding the three.
Proverbs 30:18, "There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yeah, four which I know not." Three is wow, four is like that's over the top. "The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea," that's three wow things, the fourth will knock you out, "the way of a man with a maid." He said, wow, that just completes this list of four here. He probably wasn't married yet when he wrote that.
Proverbs 30:29, "There be three things which go well, yeah, four are comely in going, a lion which is strongest among beasts, and turneth not away for any; a greyhound; and a he-goat also," and lastly, different from the other three which were beast and greyhound and goat, "a king, against whom there is no rising up." So there's four of them. One is different. The king, he's a man. The other three were animals. And so those four together make something that are go well and are comely.
Proverbs 1:3, "Thus saith the Lord, for three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they have threshed Gilead with threshing instruments of iron."
So here's an incidental use of fourth as well.
1 Chronicles 27:7 "The fourth captain for the fourth month," now you have third captain for the third month, the fifth captain for the fifth month and so forth could be incidental, I'll let you decide.
Deuteronomy 3:11 "For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? Nine cubits was the length thereof," Now that's a pretty big, that's nine times 40 inches, so that would be well over 10, 11 feet, "the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man." So, that's 18 inches. Now that wouldn't be that big, would it? A cubit, I was going by meter, a cubit. So I'll let you figure it out. I'll get it all messed up. So anyway, that was the giant.
Several numbers in the same text. This is the last one. This is interesting. There are several like this. We just didn't take the time to go over them.
Leviticus 19:23 "And when ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit thereof as uncircumcised," that means they can't touch it, "three years shall it be as uncircumcised unto you, it shall not be eaten of." Now you remember what the number three was? The number of sovereign election, divine control and ordering. God commands them not to eat."But in the fourth year," what's that? The fourth is the number that makes things complete and whole. "The fourth year, all the fruit thereof shall be holy to praise the Lord withal." Now we haven't got to fifth, but we've got to go through this. "And the fifth year," now fifth year is we're going to cover that next time, "the fifth year shall ye eat of the fruit thereof, that it may yield under you the increase thereof, I am the Lord your God."
So the fifth year is divine appointment, divine appointment. So God appoints the fifth year. So you have three of them straight in a row, each used differently, three, four, and five, each within consistent with the meaning of the word. And you find that once we get through enough of these numbers and you start seeing a lot of the numbers and fractions together and see them contrast in one, so you can see the flavor there, the flavor of three, the flavor of four, and the flavor of fifth all working together.
So the number of divine appointment is going to be our next one. And now next week, remember Emmanuel is going to be here. But after that, after four or five weeks of Emmanuel, I will be back with the number five. And it's fascinating. We'll see that. Good night.
