Thank you.
Does the numerical significance arise from God putting significance on these numbers or man?
I can't help but admit that I feel cringe and foreboding when we discuss what I view to be numerology, mysticism etc as it pertains to the symbolic nature of numbers and how they are defined and thematic throughout the Bible.
Apologies if I'm not making sense. I've just returned from a 14 day trip which started out with a cold and has ended with a cold. I'm sleep deprived and ill but hope I'm making enough sense so that you can help me with your opinion.
Thank you.
Well let's consider this angle: When God reveals something of Himself, how does He do it? He uses people, He uses human languages. Scripture is written by ordinary people living a specific time, a specific place, with their own language, culture, and unique context. So God is always coming down to meet us where we are to share something of Himself.
In fact God's Chief Revelation is Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, God the Son taking on human nature, born of a human mother, as a human being, with a human body, a human soul, a human mind, etc. God's greatest act of telling us about Himself is the act of the Word made flesh (John 1:14); the Word who is Himself God (John 1:1), the only-begotten of the Father (John 1:18).
God doesn't tell us to climb up to meet Him in the glorious heights of His incomprehensible Divinity--but rather God climbs down to our lowliness and humanity. That is most true in the Incarnation, but it is also true of Scripture itself: God speaking to us through ordinary human beings in human history.
God has no use for letters and numbers, He's God. He's way beyond that. But things like language, the use of letters to write down words, or the use of numbers to make sense of the world around us--that's very human. God freely engages with us on a human level to tell us about Himself.
Even the Hebrew word "el" which means "mighty [one]" (and usually translated as "god", usually in Hebrew we see the plural form Elohim used, along with the occasional singular construction of Eloah) was used by Canaanite Pagans to refer to their false chief god; but the word is used freely by God's people, as God Himself reveals Himself as the true "el", the true
God. So even when talking about Himself He uses words which, in the broader context, were already used. God isn't the Canaanite "El", but rather He reveals Himself as the true el, the true God, and reveals Himself with the name YHWH (the exact pronunciation is lost to us today, but possibly was pronounced something like Yahweh, which is how it is usually transcribed today). These four letters, YHWH (specifically the Hebrew letters Yod, Hah, Vav, Hah) also happen to share a semantic connection with the Hebrew verb hayah or heyeh, "to be" as in the famous phrase God spoke to Moses "'ehyeh asher 'ehyeh", ("I AM that I AM"). Which has led to a somewhat broad consensus that YHWH means something like "He is" or "The One that Is" or "The One that Exists" etc. So we see God HImself operating within the language and context of the time and people; He uses these things to say something of Himself.
So in a culture where the number 7 already had some level of meaning (and we do not need to go to number mysticism or numerology, just a recognition that numbers sometimes have a meaning within a culture), it isn't a great stretch to imagine that God, working through human writers and speakers, would use this too. Not that 7 has an innate divine significance (it's
just a number), but for the people God was speaking to, the number has symbolic value, and so it is used that way.
We have number symbolism in our modern culture too, for example we often use "a million" to simply speak of "a very large number", especially for exaggeration. "I have a million things to do today" simply means "I have a lot of things to do today". We, obviously, don't literally have a million tasks that need to be accomplished. There's nothing mystical about the number, but it is
culturally significant.
-CryptoLutheran
