Sid Roth - This Astonishing Scientific Evidence Proves the Bible with Chuck Missler
Sid Roth:This former Fortune 500 CEO and consultant to CBS for several prime time television specials has uncovered new scientific evidence proving the accuracy of the Bible.
Sid Roth:Hello, I'm Sid Roth your investigative reporter. I'm here with Chuck Missler and I've so been looking forward to this interview, because you see, Chuck is a very successful businessman. He's been CEO of Fortune 500 companies and he's so knowledgeable about the new data that is available today that conclusively, absolutely proves that we can trust the Bible. Chuck, why can we trust the Bible?
Chuck Missler:That's a big subject. There's many reasons. I think the first discovery, there's two discoveries in our way of thinking that will make this clear. The first discovery is that we have here 66 books that were penned by over 40 different guys, over thousands of years and yet we now discover it evidences a deliberate design from end to end, and I don't mean just in theme. We discovered that every number, every letter, every place name appears to be deliberately in place by deliberate skillful design. But the second discovery, the first discovery is the integrity of the whole, which is startling. The second discovery is that it has to do with its origin. See, we, let me back up a little bit, Sid. We all assume that time is linear and absolute, and we do that because...
Sid Roth:That's what we live in, in this situation.
Chuck Missler:Well yeah and in school the teacher wrote a line on the blackboard from left to right. The left end was the birth of somebody, the founding of an empire, or whatever, and the right end was the end of that person or whatever. So we tend from that experience to think that time is linear and absolute. From that background when we start talking about eternity or God we tend to imagine someone who has lots of time. We tend to think of eternity as a line that starts in infinity on the left and goes to infinity on the right, that God is simply someone who has lots of time. Well that's poetic and it's useful in our songs and things, but it's bad physics because we know from Einstein's theory of relativity that time is a physical property. Time varies with mass, acceleration or gravity. Now is God subject to gravity? Of course not. So God is not somebody who has lots of time. God is somebody that dwells outside the restrictions of the physical world.
Sid Roth:That would be a great realm to dwell in.
Chuck Missler:Exactly. Well the point is if God has the technology to create us in the first place, he has the technology to get a message to us. But how does he authenticate the message? How does he let us know that the message is really from him and not some kind of contrivance or a fraud of some kind? One way, there's many answers to that, we'll talk about a few, but one of the answers is to demonstrate that the origin of his message is from outside time. That's what Isaiah means when he says, "It is he that inhabits eternity".
Sid Roth:Okay, so how does he demonstrate this?
Chuck Missler:By writing history before it happens. He declares that he alone knows the end from the beginning. Let me use an analogy to get this across. Let's assume we're watching a major parade. We're sitting on the curb and around the corner comes the marching units, the bands, whatever. For us, sitting on that curb, the parade is a sequence of events. But to someone who's outside the plane of that existence, say in a chopper above, they can see the beginning and the end simultaneously.
Sid Roth:Of course.
Chuck Missler:And that's exactly the position of God.
Sid Roth:But Chuck, a lot of skeptics say the predictions or the prophecies in the Bible are so general that, of course, they come true. They can, they're not that specific. How would you respond?
Chuck Missler:They are shockingly, astonishingly specific.
Sid Roth:Give me an example.
Chuck Missler:Well the most interesting ones tend to get a little technical. But let me give you a simple...
Sid Roth:They're that specific that they're too technical sometimes.
Chuck Missler:Exactly. But let me give you a simple one.
Sid Roth:Okay.
Chuck Missler:People may find provocative. This is a more subtle thing, but at the same time I think it will be provocative, and that's the genealogy in Genesis, Chapter 5.
Sid Roth:What do you mean by that?
Chuck Missler:Well when you read the Book of Genesis, the first few chapters are kind of interesting. You got the Creation, you got the whole incident in the garden, and all of that. That's straightforward. But we get to, Chapter 6 on, you got the flood of Noah and all that. But Chapter 5 is one of those chapters that we tend to skip over because it's the genealogy of ten people.
Sid Roth:It's got a lot names, right.
Chuck Missler:Just names. And we have ten people there from Adam, basically the genealogy from Adam to Noah. And when we read that in the English Bible, we stumble in a sense because the names are not translated. We don't translate names. My formal name, they call me Chuck, but I'm Charles. What does Charles mean? Different people have different opinions. No one knows what that means. Well in the Hebrew though, you can infer the meaning of the names because of the roots.
Sid Roth:Names have meaning, yes.
Chuck Missler:So let us go through a few of these, okay. Adam is pretty straightforward. That's "man", right, Adama.
Sid Roth:Right.
Chuck Missler:Okay. He had a son by the name of Seth and what does Seth imply? It's a root that implies "appointed". We get a clue from that from the previous chapter. When Eve gave birth to Seth, she felt he was appointed to be a replacement for Abel, whom Cain slew.
Sid Roth:That's right.
Chuck Missler:The word "Seth" suggests appointed. When Seth has a son his name is Enoch, which comes from "anoch", an incurable wound or woe, or grief, or whatever. It means mortal in effect. Enoch has a son by the name of Kenan. Some English bibles have it misappropriated, Canaan. No, it's Kenan. In fact Balaam does a pun on Kenan on the Canaanites in Numbers 24. It means "sorrow". We go on. Now those two guys probably had a belly full of these horrible names, you know, mortal and sorrow. So when Kenan had a son he named him Mahalalel, Mahalal is the blessed or praised one, El is the name for God.
Sid Roth:So what you're doing though is, if I’m understanding you right, is you're taking the names in Genesis in order.
Chuck Missler:And looking at the Hebrew roots and what they imply.
Sid Roth:And what they imply. So we have ten names.
Chuck Missler:Ten names.
Sid Roth:And when we find out what each one of these ten mean.
Chuck Missler:It's an exploration. Let's see what they say.
Sid Roth:Okay.
Chuck Missler:And Mahalalel has a son by the name of Jared, and Jared has a son, which means "shall", it's a verb, Jaharad, "shall come down". And we have Enoch, which is an academic term, meaning "commencement" or "teaching". Now Enoch is perhaps one of the more interesting ones. I should back up. Most people don't realize that the flood of Noah did not come as a surprise. It was preached on for four generations. But what we learn about Enoch is when he was 65, something very strange happened, because from that day on, it says, "He walked with God," whatever that means.
Sid Roth:Sounds good to me.
Chuck Missler:Yeah, exactly. Well Enoch apparently had a prophecy that as long as his son that was just born would live, the judgment of the flood would be withheld. So he named him after two Hebrew roots, Muth, which means his death and from a derivative of the verb, shalach, which shall bring. The name Methuselah actually means "his death shall bring". It's suggestive of that prophecy that was given when he was born.
Sid Roth:So we have a sentence now by those names.
Chuck Missler:It's coming. I got a couple more and then we'll look at it.
Sid Roth:Okay.
Chuck Missler:Methuselah's son was Lamech. Now there's a root that we use in English, "lament". So you know, it means despairing. And Lamech has a son by the name of Noah. We've all heard of Noah, but his name comes from Noach, which means "comfort". In fact, Lamech tells us that. He says, he tells us why he named him Noach. He says, "This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands". And so on. So now we have these names and if we read them in English they're meaningless to us: Adam, Seth, Enoch and so forth.
Sid Roth:Of course.
Chuck Missler:Let's read them with the English implications of the roots, as I just said.
Sid Roth:Yes.
Chuck Missler:Man has appointed mortal sorrow. The blessed God shall come down, teaching that his death, God's death, shall bring the despairing comfort or rest.
Sid Roth:That is so good that Chuck, I want you to say that one more time with each of those ten names, their actual meaning, put together, forms a sentence and says...
Chuck Missler:Man has appointed mortal sorrow, but the blessed God shall come down teaching that his death shall bring the despairing comfort.
Sid Roth:Now I don't say that that is subtle. I say that that is a blast, you atheists. We'll be right back after this.
Sid Roth:Hello, I'm Sid Roth your investigative reporter. I'm here with Chuck Missler and he said, I'll just give you a little subtle reason why we believe in the integrity of the Bible. So what does he do? He turns to the first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, and he looks at the genealogy in the fifth chapter, it's ten names. We know them by whatever the name says, but what he said is whatever the name says has a meaning, and the meanings form a sentence. So if you take each of the first ten names in order, the exact meaning, it will form a sentence, and what is that sentence?
Chuck Missler:Man is appointed mortal sorrow, but the blessed God shall come down, teaching that his death, God's death, shall bring the despairing comfort or rest.
Sid Roth:That's absolutely amazing.
Chuck Missler:There's a couple of textual issues here. First of all, you'll never convince me that a group of Jewish rabbis contrived to hide this summary of what would be called the Christian Gospel in a genealogy in the Torah. No way.
Sid Roth:Well obviously, they're not going to hide it. But what I'd like to know is have you ever had occasion to share that with a Jewish rabbi?
Chuck Missler:Oh yes, we have, and in fact...
Sid Roth:So what does the rabbi say beyond?
Chuck Missler:Yeah, exactly, I mean it's not the kind of thing that constitutes a proof, it's really just a discovery that points in a direction. And now there are other examples that are crisper and a little more technical. In Daniel, Chapter 9, now here are the key points, the Old Testament, as we would call it, was translated into Greek in 285 B.C. through 270, under Ptolemy Philadelphus. He's funded it, they needed a copy of the Jewish Scriptures in Greek because that's what everybody spoke in those days. So they translated it. The importance of this is that we have copies of that and it was done in the third century before Christ was born. In that document, we have of course, the Book of Daniel, set aside, who wrote under what conditions, it's there in black and white. Daniel prays, concerned about for his people, is visited by Gabriel, which gives him, Daniel, a four-verse prophecy that lays out, in effect, everything forthcoming. But what it includes, Gabriel says to Daniel, bear in mind he's in slavery in Babylon, Jerusalem is in rubble several hundred miles to the west. It says, "When the, from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem unto the Mashiach Nagid, the Messiah the King, will be a certain number of days". When you work out the arithmetic from the language, it's 173,880 days. Okay. We know the date of that decree because Artaxerxes Longimanus in 14, B.C., thanks to Sir Robert Anderson, head of Scotland Yard, way back when, in 1894, published a book, in which he went to the trouble of nailing that date down. When we count the days from there, then the problem is when does it end? It ends when the Messiah the King, now if you study the gospels you discover that Jesus, several times, they tried to take him and make him as a king, but he slipped away. He says, "My hour has not yet come". Then one day he does something weird. He not only permits it, he arranges it. He tells the disciples to go to a certain place, give them a password, get a donkey, he rides the donkey, deliberately fulfilling the prophecy of Zachariah 9:9, riding the donkey in Jerusalem. When you look at those dates it comes out to the exact day that Gabriel told Daniel, in Daniel, Chapter 9. Now that's, to me, absolutely breathtaking for several reasons.
Sid Roth:Let me see if I get this straight now.
Chuck Missler:Okay.
Sid Roth:We had a starting point.
Chuck Missler:Starting point from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem.
Sid Roth:Jerusalem. And then the exact number of years that it would take.
Chuck Missler:Yes. It's expressed in a strange way that gets in the text, but basically it's 173,880 days.
Sid Roth:Okay. And then what would happen at that point?
Chuck Missler:To the Messiah the King.
Sid Roth:To his birth?
Chuck Missler:The only day, no, it says Messiah the King.
Sid Roth:Ah, so when He would be King.
Chuck Missler:So all through his ministry, all through his ministry, several times, they were going to take him and make Him as a king to the enthusiasm of the crowd. He slips away. "My hour has not yet come". Then one day, he deliberately allows himself to ride this donkey into Jerusalem, we call it Palm Sunday or the triumphal entry, in which as they go, his disciples sing Psalm 118 and the Pharisees are upset because they recognize that in the context that that's happening, they're blaspheming. They're calling him the Messiah.
Sid Roth:The 118th Psalm says, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone". And we chant this at Pesach, at Passover.
Chuck Missler:And I think it's Verse 26, "Blessed is the king that cometh," the king, "that cometh in the name of the Lord". They're saying that. The Pharisees around there are upset because they realize these guys inadvertently blaspheming. "Master, you rebuke your disciples". He says, "If they held their feet the very stones would cry out". In other words, he encourages it. He in effect is allowing himself at that moment to be presented to Jerusalem.
Sid Roth:As king.
Chuck Missler:Right, as king. It turns out that's 173,880 days from the date of that decree to rebuild Jerusalem. It comes out, when you go through the trouble of going through the arithmetic, it comes out precisely to the very day.
Sid Roth:Now you are, you're a logical man. Is there any way to explain that beyond the fact that God knew what would happen?
Chuck Missler:Exactly. I think this represents such an unequivocal demonstration that Jesus Christ really was who he claimed to be. That was when I was a teenager, I discovered that, it was shown to me, it blew me away. And of course, obviously through the last, what, 40 years, I've been studying it even more carefully. It's staggering.
Sid Roth:I have to ask you, again, have you ever shared this with a Jewish rabbi?
Chuck Missler:Oh sure.
Sid Roth:And what is the reaction?
Chuck Missler:Well it's varied. Some reactions are one of staggering acceptance and getting into it, and investigating it further. And of course, all of these things have ways to be denied or refuted, or dismissed, or shined on. You know, we've all done that. So you know, as they say, where you have two Jews, you've got three opinions. So there's all kinds of views. But if you take the trouble to study it carefully, the last four verses of Daniel 9, and the more you can get into the original Hebrew, the clearer it becomes, and you contrast that with what in Luke, Chapter 19, you discover a number of things. Not only does it predict the exact day, you discover, if you look carefully at Luke 19 that Jesus held them accountable to know that day, and it's that point that he predicts the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., that not one stone will be left upon another and all that. And the passage in Daniel also describes that after this the Messiah will be cut off, executed. The Old Testament actually presents that the Messiah will be killed, and indeed he was, of course, on the cross. And so you and I are beneficiaries of a love story written in the blood on the wooden cross, 2000 years ago.
Sid Roth:What is so amazing to me, Chuck, is that you share this with a Jewish rabbi who knows the Hebrew so well. And even though it is so specific, rabbis are instructed not to think for themselves, to go on the thinking of the ancient rabbis. But I'm saying to rabbis, I'm saying to Jewish people, I'm saying to non-Jewish people, to Muslims, respect your heritage, but think for yourself because it's your life. It's your life that's at stake. It's your purpose. It's your destiny. And consider this a Divine appointment with God as to why you're watching right now. Now we'll be back in a moment. And if you are atheistic in persuasion I don't believe you will be after you hear what Chuck has to say. Be right back.
Sid Roth:Sid Roth your investigative reporter. Let's find out who's on tap for next week. Let's talk to my producer in the control room, Janie.
Janie:Sid, you'll be interviewing a Jewish man who there was no way he was going to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. But then some people invited him to a Bible study and he felt arms coming out of the chair to keep him glued to that chair just to hear what scriptures in the Bible. But then after that, he read about Bible prophecy like Chuck is talking about, and that convinced him totally that Jesus was the Messiah because these prophecies were written about Jesus hundreds of years before he came.
Sid Roth:Boy I'll tell you, I'm glad I'm not in one of those chairs, Chuck. It grabs hold of you because maybe that's what we need so that we can sit still to hear the facts. But you know something is...
Chuck Missler:I think it's more than that. I think it takes openness. You know, so many of us are victims of our cultural background and we're blinded by prejudices, not from the Scripture, but by what people have said about the Scripture. I think the Christians are just as vulnerable as the Jews. Jews are excessively committed to the Talmudic traditions rather than looking at what their text says. Christians are the same way. They'll believe some popular speaker or some allegorical interpretation rather than just read it. I think God says what he means and means what he says. And part of the magic is very simple, is to be open-minded and get in to hear him, God, what he's saying, not what some interpreter said.
Sid Roth:Out of curiosity with the background that you have so extensive in the corporate world, how did you become so convinced the Bible was from God?
Chuck Missler:Well my technical background is really in the information sciences. And I think one of the things that staggered me as I began to discover the integrity of design of all these different books, 66 of them over thousands of years, realizing that they have been managed by some unseen hand. You discover, as you get into it, the truth is in the details. Every number, every place name, every detail is there by design and the design evidences knowledge of what's coming, what the end is, and Christ's life being the best example, that there's over 300 details of his life that was fulfilled while he did his ministry. His death on the cross fulfills all kinds of details in the Torah and in the psalms, and elsewhere. And so it's the precision of that and the recognition that precision could only have been established by someone outside space-time itself that blows you away, and it's right there. You can study it, it's tangible, you can get your hands on it.
Sid Roth:What is the best thing you would say to an agnostic, an honest agnostic or a dishonest atheist? I say dishonest atheist because you say you know that there is no God. Now come on, be a little more intelligent than say, I know there is no God. All you can do is say, I'm not sure. That's an agnostic. That's what you really are. So talk to the honest agnostic.
Chuck Missler:Investigate. If he's honest and he's open, it's the most important thing of his life because if there is truth here and that truth is going to determine his destiny, it deserves a high priority investigation.
Sid Roth:But what about Darwin? What about this whole evolution business?
Chuck Missler:Well now that's, you know, you put your finger on the greatest myth of our society. It imbues our psychology, our culture, not just biology. And today the good news is scientists are finally beginning to admit that Darwinism or evolution as we taught, that's a very imprecise term, what we really mean is the biogenesis that life began as an accident, defies all the scientific evidence. You know, we have a spectrum of possibilities.
Sid Roth:But wait. If it defies the scientific evidence, why do we believe it?
Chuck Missler:Cultural pressure, career planning. There are people fired that if the staff discovers they're creationists in their orientation. And yet there are books like Philip Johnson's, "Darwin on Trial", Michael Behe's book, "Darwin's Black Box".
Sid Roth:Give me one reason why it is unscientific. One.
Chuck Missler:It's impossible. It violates all the entropy laws. It's impossible, natural selection, which is the premise of Darwinism can only operate if there's something to select. It doesn't operate to create inanimate material from, I mean animate material from inanimate chemicals. It takes, the Darwinist theory is if you have matter and energy, and you mix those together, you can get life. It's an unbalanced equation, matter and energy, plus information. What the Darwinist cannot explain is the origin, not of life, of information, because if something is highly probable, it happens all the time, we call that a scientific law. If something is highly improbable we call that design. That's what cryptography deals with. You got what looks to be a jumble of letters, but if you discover in those letters design, a message, that's called cryptography or a detective, forensics. When you have a highly improbable event that's occurred, we impute design. So life lies between those two boundaries: either highly probable, which like a scientific law, highly predictable, most of life is in the middle, we call that chance. But if it's highly unlikely to occur by chance we call that design. Well as you start looking, for example, the best example is DNA. You have a DNA molecule that is we now discover, is a three out of four error-correcting code. Now first of all, it's a digital code like Paul Revere, one if by land, two if by sea.
Sid Roth:And why couldn't that just happen?
Chuck Missler:Because a digital code takes significance by prearrangement.
Sid Roth:Of course.
Chuck Missler:It can't happen randomly. If you have code happening randomly you have to have an engine to process that code. They can't each evolve asynchronously. They have to be highly coordinated. So that's part of the answer. There's also a concept of irreducible complexity. If I take a mouse trap that consists of five things: a spring, a hammer, a hook. And if I only have four of those five things, I don't catch four-fifths of a mouse. In other words, there's a point at which you can't reduce it and still have it functional. So the question is how do you get to that function? It turns out there is no scenario, evolutionarily speaking, to get to something that has irreducible complexity. Now when we look at what was called a simple cell in Darwin's day, we discover today that that simple cell is more complex than an entire city, an entire automated factory.
Sid Roth:What, stop right there.
Chuck Missler:Okay.
Sid Roth:That simple cell is more complex than an entire city? And you're telling me that this just happened by chance and chance, and coincidence, a little more coincidence? How much more do you need? I'm going to tell you a fair thing to do. Why don't you pray this prayer: Dear God, tell me the truth about Jesus and as I read the Bible, show me the truth about the Bible. You see, it's personal. That's all God is trying to do is to get your attention. I believe he's got your attention. Now it's up to you. God, show me truth about Jesus. And start reading your Bible. Start with the New Covenant and start reading it because the Bible makes a promise that if you read it, your faith in the invisible realm will grow and it will get stronger, and stronger, and stronger. So this is God's moment for you. What are you going to do about it? It's your choice. But he's already chosen. You are loved by God.