Throughout time No. 7 has been significant in its
relationship to humans' intellectual capacity and ability to process raw
information.
"There seems to be some limitation built into us
either by learning or by the design of our nervous systems; a limit that keeps
our channel capacities in this general range,' explains famed psychologist
George Miller in his essay The Magical
Number 7. “This is the reason that telephone numbers have seven
digits."
Bestselling
author Malcolm Gladwell explains that the man who designed the telephone number
"wanted a number as long as possible to have as large a capacity as
possible but not so long people couldn't remember it. At eight or nine digits,
the local phone number would exceed human channel capacity and there would be
many more wrong phone numbers."
Examples of No. 7’s special designation include: The Seven
Ancient Wonders of the World, The Seven Seas, seven visible planets and
luminaries (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) marking the
seven days of the week, the seven liberal arts and sciences and the seven
orders of architecture.
Other commonplace examples are the seven notes in the
musical scale, the seven primary colors, the seven members to a human body and
the seven holes in the head.
The reality is life itself operates in a cycle of sevens
and, as a whole, revolves around the number seven, which symbolizes
"completeness."
Most births are multiples of sevens, for example. The hen,
for instance, sits three weeks (21 days), and the pigeon two weeks (14 days).
This is after having laid eggs for two weeks.
The
majority of mammals have a period from conception to birth of an exact number
of weeks, a multiple of seven, and children are born to mothers in a certain
number of weeks (usually 280 days), a multiple of seven.
*****
As the most frequent number in the Bible outside of No. 1,
seven can be found 735 times in the King James Bible—54 times in the Book of
Revelation alone.
The
Word of God is, in fact, founded upon the number seven and it is the symbol of
divine perfection—the seven days of creation, God rested on the seventh day,
the seven churches, the seven Spirits, the seven stars, the seven seals, the
seven trumpets, on and on.
"There's a reason your Bible counts by seven. . .
seven is a number creation counts by," says Preacher Richard Jordan of
Shorewood Bible Church (www.graceimpact.org). "Sometimes it's
called a perfect number, but it's more than just the idea of perfection,
there's a pattern being demonstrated here. . . Have you ever wondered why a
week isn't 10 days? Or five days? I mean, who decided we're going to count a
week a week and make it seven days? God did that. The whole world works on that
basis and doesn't even know why. . .
"In God's calendar of redemption, No. 7 plays a
tremendous part. You go to the last book of the Bible, seven is the key to that
book. You go to the first chapter of the first book, seven is the key to that
chapter.
"In Genesis 1, the issue of creation had to do with
God dwelling in creation. He pitched the tent where he was going to dwell. He
creates in six days and on the seventh He rests. And there was a pattern God
set out in creation. There's a design, there's something He's teaching and
something He's developing in those seven days of creation."
*****
Not only is the word finished found in connection
with No. 7 in the Book of Revelation, so is the Bible expression, "It is
done."
Revelation 10:7 reads, "In the days of the voice of
the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound the mystery of God should be
finished." Revelation 16:17 reads, "And the seventh angel poured out
his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of
heaven, from the throne saying, it is done."
In preparation for mankind's destruction by the Flood, God
instructed Noah in Genesis 7 to take the animals into the Ark by sevens:
"Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his
female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of
fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive
upon the face of all the earth."
Then God said, "For yet seven days, and I will cause
it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living
substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth."
As
Peter tells us in I Peter 3:20, those seven days in the Ark before the Flood's
arrival completed God's longsuffering and time of
waiting. Genesis 6:9 confirms Noah, in what is the seventh mention of his name,
was "a just man, and perfect in his generations."
*****
Similar pictures using No. 7 in relation to
completeness, divine perfection, or consecration to God for service, are spread
throughout the Bible.
There were seven feast days (Passover, Unleavened,
First-fruits, Pentecost, Atonement, Trumpets and Tabernacle). King Solomon
spent seven years building the Temple and kept the feast for seven days.
The
seven branches on the candlestick in the Holy Place in the Tabernacle signify
the complete light of God for the souls of men.
In
Leviticus 16:14, the high priest, on the day of atonement, sprinkled
the blood upon the mercy seat seven times, representing the completeness of the
redemptive work of Christ.
When Job, in his afflictions, was paid a visit by his
friends, they sat in silence seven days and seven nights, later being ordered
by the Lord to offer seven bullocks and seven rams in a burnt offering.
In
Matthew 18: 21-22, when Peter asked, "Lord, how oft shall my brother sin
against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?" Jesus Christ responded,
"I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times
seven."
In essence, Christ was exhorting,
“Keep on forgiving until you are complete.”
*****
On
Page 7 of the Scofield Reference Bible,
the margin notes reveal even God's use of No. 7 to sum up His own name in
connection with completion and divine perfection.
"In
His redemptive relation to man, Jehovah has seven compound names which reveal
Him as meeting every need of man from his lost state to the end," reads
the notation.
The
names are Jehovah-jireh ("the Lord will provide"); Jehovah-rapha
("the Lord that healeth"); Jehovah-nissi ("the Lord our
banner"); Jehovah-Shalom ("the Lord our peace," or "the
Lord send peace"); Jehovah-ra-ah ("the Lord my shepherd");
Jehovah-tsidkenu ("the Lord our righteousness") and Jehovah-shammah
("the Lord is present").
For
the whole King James Bible, C.I. Scofield says its divided into seven
dispensations, or "periods marked off in Scripture by some change in God's
method of dealing with mankind, or a portion of mankind, in respect to the two
questions: of sin, and of man's responsibility."
He
explains, "Each of the dispensations may be regarded as a new test of the
natural man, and each ends in judgment, marking his utter failure in every
dispensation. Five of these dispensations, or periods of time, have been
fulfilled; we are living in the sixth, probably toward its
close, and have before us the seventh, and last: the millennium."
Toward the end of this current sixth dispensation
we're still so incredibly blessed to be living in—
named by the Apostle Paul as the " dispensation of the
grace of God which is given me to youward," (Ephesians 3:2)— and right
after the Rapture of the Church, will come the tribulation and an
intensified seven-year period of horrific suffering on earth
called the Great Tribulation.
"It is evident that we are living in the terminal
generation of the Church age. . . an epoch that immediately precedes a
seven-year period known as 'Daniel's seventieth week,' " writes Bible
researcher Noah Hutchings in his book, God
Divided the Nations. "This 'week of years' is called elsewhere the
'Great Tribulation' and the 'time of Jacob's trouble' in Scripture. It is of
vivid interest to Bible students how the basic seventy nations of Genesis 10-11
will finally align in these last days."
*****
In his book, The
Signature of God, Grant R. Jeffrey outlines a phenomenal discovery of
now-deceased mathematician Ivan Panin, who, in the 1930s, examined the Hebrew
text of Genesis 1:1 and found 30 separate codes involving multiples of seven
that couldn't be explained by chance, even by Harvard math professors.
In
part, Panin found:
1. The
number of Hebrew words = 7
2. The
number of letters equals 28 (7 x 4 = 28)
3. The
first three Hebrew words translated "In the beginning God created"
contain 14 letters (7 x 2 = 14)
4. The
last four Hebrew words "the heavens and the earth" have 14 letters (7 x
2 = 14)
5. The
fourth and fifth words have 7 letters
6. The
sixth and seventh words have 7 letters
7. The
three key words: God, heaven and earth have 14 letters (7 x 2 = 14)
8. The
number of letters in the four remaining words is also 14 (7 x 2 =
14)
9. The
shortest word in the verse is the middle word with 7 letters
10. The
Hebrew numeric value of the first, middle and last letters is 133 (7 x
19 = 133)
11. The
Hebrew numeric value of the first and last letters of all seven words is 1393 (7 x
199 = 1393)
"When professors on the mathematics faculty at Harvard
University were presented with this biblical phenomenon they naturally
attempted to disprove its significance as a proof of divine authorship,"
writes Jeffrey. "However, after valiant efforts these professors were
unable to duplicate this incredible mathematical phenomenon.
"The Harvard scientists used the English language and
artificially assigned numeric values to the English alphabet. They had a
potential vocabulary of over 400,000 available English words to choose from to
construct a sentence about any topic they chose.
"Compare
this to the limitations of word choices in the biblical Hebrew language which
has only forty-five hundred available word choices that the writers of the Old
Testament could use.
"Despite
their advanced mathematical abilities and access to computers the
mathematicians were unable to come close to incorporating 30 mathematical multiples
of 7 as found in the Hebrew words of Genesis 1:1."
*****
As Jeffrey further explained, "The number seven permeates the totality of Scripture because the number speaks of God's divine
perfection and perfect order. . . Panin and others have examined other Hebrew
literature and have attempted to find such mathematical patterns, but they are
not found anywhere outside the Bible."
Panin, whose own book, The
Inspiration of the Scriptures Scientifically Demonstrated, details the
"seven" phenomena examined and verified by numerous authorities, had
accumulated over 40,000 pages of detailed calculations covering most of the
Bible before his death, says Jeffrey.
"These
incredible, mathematical patterns are not limited to the number seven,"
writes Jeffrey. "There are numerous other patterns. These amazing patterns
appear in the vocabulary, grammatical forms, parts of speech, and particular
forms of words. They occur throughout the whole text of the Bible containing
31,173 verses.
"When
you consider the amazing details of this mathematical phenomenon you realize
that the change of a single letter or word in the original languages of Hebrew
or Greek would destroy the pattern. Now we can understand why Jesus Christ
declared that the smallest letter and grammatical mark of the Scriptures was
persevered by God's Hand: 'For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and
earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all
be fulfilled' (Matthew 5:18)."
So what was Panin's own belief on divine origin of
Scriptures? Jeffrey records this statement from an essay by Panin "warning
of the limitations of wisdom found in secular philosophy":
"Not
so, however, with The Book. For it tells of One who spake as men never spake,
who was the true bread of life, that which cometh down from the heavens, of
which if a man eat he shall never hunger."
In
conclusion, Panin wrote, "My friend of the world, whose you are: Either
Jesus Christ is mistaken or you are. The answer that neither might be is only
evading the issue, not settling it. But the ages have decided that Jesus Christ
was not mistaken. It is for you to decide whether you shall continue to
be."
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