The phrase “Intelligent Design” is used by scientists to explain how certain aspects of nature exhibit attributes that suggest they were designed intentionally by an intelligent creator. However, I am going to co-opt the term to refer to how the Christian Bible also reflects an intentional design. After all, according to the Bible itself, all Scripture was given by the inspiration of God (2 Timothy 3:16), and all prophecy in particular was spoken at the direction of the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). Thus, it would make sense that the entire Bible, if it was written by God through human authors, would exhibit evidence of being composed overall by a single divine author.

Not All Pro-Bible Arguments are Strong

A common argument in favor of Christianity is the claim that Jesus fulfilled so many Old Testament prophecies, it would be impossible for Him to have done so if the Bible weren’t true.

While the existence of Jesus as a historical figure can be demonstrated from outside the Bible, the details of His birth and ministry are, as far as I know, derived entirely from the Bible. Therefore, any prophecy fulfillments are only known to us from the Bible. So how can they be used to prove the Bible’s truth?

For example, Jesus being born of a virgin fulfills Isaiah 7:14 (Matthew 1:22-23). But if we have no evidence outside of the Bible that Jesus was born of a virgin, how can that be evidence for the Bible’s truth? How can we be sure the Bible authors did not simply make that up to make the idea of Jesus as Messiah more appealing to the Jews?

This is true of almost every prophecy Jesus fulfilled. The only exceptions I can think of are some claims in Daniel 7 and 9, but it is easy enough to deny that those were written before the first century (although I will discuss shortly why their presence in the Jewish Bible is a major problem for Bible skeptics).

Of course, I do believe that all the Old Testament prophecies were written hundreds or thousands of years before Jesus’ birth and that He did fulfill all the ones pertaining to the coming of the Messiah. But I want to be careful about arguments for the Bible that may not hold water for Bible skeptics.

By contrast, I will present three arguments that will hopefully give those interested in evidence for the Bible’s divine origin some food for thought.

Biblical Chronology is a Puzzle Meant to Be Solved

The Bible’s timeline has fascinated me since shortly after my conversion. After 15 years of studying it and assembling my own ideas about individual parts of it, I finally sat down to go through every single piece of chronological information in the Bible I could find and create a single timeline that accommodated them all. I used James Jordan’s research (available via his Biblical Horizons ministry) as a starting point, but wanted to incorporate some of my own ideas for improvements.

It took me a solid ten months to accomplish this goal, much longer than I expected. The timeline of the kings of Israel and Judah in particular was such a morass that it took up the majority of the time (including a break I had to take for a month or two because I was so stuck I couldn’t proceed). Nonetheless, the process was fascinating: I was bolstered by some early victories (such as discovering to my surprise that the Sabbath years and Jubilees of Israel synced up with years from creation), then had to slog and slog to get through the kings (which was a challenge until the end – I almost gave up altogether on understanding the time period from Omri to Jehu). I hoped to breeze through the New Testament once I got the Old Testament roughly worked out, but realized to my dismay that I had to come up with a comprehensive eschatological paradigm and resolve some long-standing confusions concerning the return of Jesus to map it out. Several times I thought I was done, only to realize that I had made mistakes that required significant rework. And only at the very end did I expose the incredible numerological properties that I had merely seen glimpses of throughout the process.

The wonderful thing was, this effort radically strengthened my faith. In the beginning I had to start with nothing more than a hope that I could comprehensively harmonize the Bible’s chronological data. But as time went on and I found logical solutions to every problem that vexed me, I began to realize I was untangling a giant puzzle that had been intentionally built into the Bible by an intelligent designer. I felt increasing confidence that with enough determination and patience I could solve any confusion, uncover any clue, and discover incredible revelations. By the end, I was gratified but hardly surprised to see how it all worked together. It was like making the final move on a puzzle box and finally feeling it open in my hands.

Why would the Bible’s chronology be a puzzle? Two reasons:

• God loves a good intellectual puzzle / academic treasure hunt (Proverbs 25:2). The Bible is meant to reward careful and diligent study.
• If the Bible timeline was superficially consistent and obvious, it would broach the realm where apologetics could have the power of conversion. Entering the kingdom of heaven requires humbling yourself like a little child (Matthew 18:3). We do not come to God through worldly wisdom and knowledge (1 Corinthians 19:19-20), but rather through childlike faith, which develops into godly wisdom and sound reasoning that trusts that the Bible will reveal answers if we plumb its depths.

And indeed, here’s what I discovered that proved that the Bible timeline is an intelligently designed puzzle:

• There is sufficient information in the Bible to build a comprehensive timeline.
• There is no extraneous or irrelevant data to filter out.
• There is no outlier data that requires unreasonable interpretations to accommodate.
• Information is distributed in such a way that the entire Bible is required to develop the timeline (for example, understanding the timeline of major sections of the Old Testament requires information from the New Testament). It was clearly not designed by humans incrementally over time.

Here are the numerological properties that solving the puzzle revealed:

• Israel’s first year of possession of the Promised Land was the year 2500. Joshua’s war of possession ended in 2499, which is divisible by 7, meaning the Sabbath years in the Land coincided with cycles of seven years from creation.
• The Jubilee was the first year of every overall cycle of seven cycles of seven years (i.e., it began every cycle of 49 years). 2499 is divisible by 49, which means that the year 2500 was a Jubilee from creation, and every further Jubilee in the Land coincided with cycles of 49 years from creation.
• The 50^th Jubilee from creation immediately preceded Moses’ return to Egypt to set the Israelites free. That Jubilee was the first year of 50 years before the possession of the Promised Land in 2500 (see the counting method of Leviticus 25:8-12). The Jubilee of 2500 (50×50) was then followed by 50 Sabbath year cycles (350 years) before Saul became king.
• The First Temple was completed on the 60^th Sabbath of Sabbaths (2940), and the next year, the 60^th Jubilee, was supposed to be the year the Israelite labor force was released and the Temple system was put into place. Unfortunately, Solomon stopped observing the Sabbath year and the Jubilees in 2941, and he also spent 13 additional years building his own palace before inaugurating Temple worship. The completion of the First Temple was followed by 60 unobserved Sabbaths before the judgment of Judah by Babylon during the 70 years of Babylonian domination began.
• The 70 years of Babylonian domination (as foretold by Jeremiah) preceded the 70^th Jubilee from creation, 3431, when Cyrus the Great returned the Jews to Judah after the Exile. As foretold in Daniel 9, Cyrus’ decree returning the Jews was followed by 70 Weeks of Years (490 years).
• Jesus was crucified in 3921, the 80^th Jubilee from creation.

When I started my research project, I had absolutely no idea this would be the result of my efforts. In fact, because James Jordan made a mistake in interpreting the data concerning Shem, Terah, and Abram, I didn’t even know the Sabbath years and Jubilees synced up with creation until I uncovered his error.

I certainly didn’t know there was meaning connected to every tenth Jubilee, nor did I know they would be surrounded by connected numbers, as shown above. Regarding tenth Jubilees:

• The number 5 is connected to Law: there are 5 books of Law (the Pentateuch/Torah), and the Ten Commandments are two sets of 5 commandments, one concerning God and one concerning man. Hence the Law was given in the cycle of the 50^th Jubilee.
• The number 6 is connected to man, because man was created on the sixth day. Man’s sin means the number 6 is not used positively in most of the Bible, which is why there was such failure connected to the 60^th Jubilee.
• The number 7 is connected to both God’s rest and man’s covenant failure (which occurred on the seventh day of creation). The pre-exile prophets spoke of a new spiritual order that would come when the Jews were returned from exile, which happened on the 70^th Jubilee. But the Jews failed to take ownership of that new spiritual order, and so they had to wait an additional ten Jubilees for God to save them once and for all.
• God made His original promise of a savior and covered Adam and Eve in animal skins (foreshadowing Jesus’ sacrifice) on the eighth day, which is therefore the day God saves man from his failure. Hence, Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection occurred on the 80^th Jubilee.

What are the odds this exact series of meaningful chronological results would be buried deep enough in the Bible to avoid easy identification and depend on information spread across a set of books written by hundreds of authors across thousands of years, passed down through numerous political upheavals and spiritual crises? Is this not clear evidence the Bible as a whole was intelligently designed?

If you are interested in understanding how I arrived at these conclusions, please review The Age of Creation.

The Seven-Day Metanarrative of the Biblical Covenants

About two years into being a Christian, I noticed that the major covenants in the Bible symbolically match the seven-day creation narrative in Genesis 1:1-2:3 (what I will refer to for simplicity’s sake as “Genesis 1”). Here is the model as I currently see it:

• Introduction (Genesis 1:1-2): The creation narrative of Genesis 1
• Day 1 (Genesis 1:3-5): Adam and Eve
• Day 2 (Genesis 1:6-8): Noah and his sons
• Day 3 (Genesis 1:9-13): Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
• Day 4 (Genesis 1:14-19): Moses and David / Tabernacle Judaism
• Day 5 (Genesis 1:20-23): Prophets and Gentile Believers / First Temple Judaism
• Day 6 (Genesis 1:24-31): Gentile Empires and Jesus and the Church / Second Temple Judaism
• Day 7 (Genesis 2:1-3): The Last Days

You can find a detailed explanation of this model here.

If after reviewing the model you agree that the metanarrative pattern is more than a mere illusion and represents intentional design built into the Bible, then the pressing question becomes: who built it in, the Bible writers or God?

If you claim it was the Bible writers, a group of dozens or even hundreds of men writing over thousands of years, in vastly different cultural contexts, we’d have to objectively evaluate the possibility of whether human beings could have coordinated all the various references and symbolic structures that support the metanarrative.

First of all, they at some point would have had to take all pre-existing Scripture, all the historical records available to them (because starting at least with Israel’s time in Egypt, there is archaeological evidence corresponding to at least the high-level historical context of Bible stories), and all Jewish customs in place (such as circumcision) and make them all fit this pattern. It seems far-fetched that they would have even been able to create such a consistent metanarrative at all, even if they could tweak and compile and rearrange and supplement what they had to work with, much less one that would work with any future events that would be captured in Scripture and molded to continue the pattern.

More challenging is this question: when would this have happened? Prior to the Babylonian exile, before even the history of the successive Gentile empires from Babylon to Rome had come to pass, much less the rise of Jesus? Most of the Old Testament had to be in place before the Septuagint was written in the 3^rd and 2^nd centuries BC. And we have many copies of variants of the finalized Old Testament from before Jesus was born (e.g., Dead Sea Scrolls), as well as abundant evidence the Old Testament was well known, studied, and preached in the first century.

This means that the parts of the metanarrative in the Old Testament had to be in place before Jesus was born. So how did the metanarrative get finished in the various books of the New Testament? Was there some kind of secret plan passed from Old Testament narrative strategists through repeated declines in Yahweh worship in Israel and Judah, multiple exiles, significant imperial upheaval, and the splintering of Jewish ideological factions before the birth of Jesus down to the New Testament writers, who colluded effectively to finish the metanarrative? How would that have happened? And why would that have happened? Was there some kind of obsessive need to create this elaborate imagery and then never discuss or advertise it?

Also, how did the secret plan survive the transfer of the Christian faith from Jews to Gentiles that were brand new to it, the persecution of the Gentile church by Rome, and the splintering of the church into multiple segments (e.g., Rome and Constantinople)?

Moreover, did all the older Bible writers just have incredible faith that they would be able to match the events of the Bible to history? What would they have done about Day 6, for example, if there hadn’t been Gentile empires? Did they have contingencies in place?

Finally, if the members of the entire faith tradition since the writing of Genesis up to the church councils that finalized Scripture were trying to form a specific narrative in an unbroken fashion, why have Christian doctrines around eschatology been in direct contradiction with that narrative since before the Council of Rome? Why have literally no Christian traditions upheld that faith narrative? When did that chain get so badly broken?

The simplest, most logical explanation is that God wrote the Bible.

The Daniel Disinformation Campaign

Let’s consider a few sections of Daniel:

First, Daniel 7 speaks of four kingdoms that would rule Israel, starting with Babylon, until the coming of the Messiah. We know from history that Rome was the fourth kingdom to rule Israel (after Babylon, Media/Persia, and Greece).  Daniel 7:24-27 speaks of the fourth beast having ten horns representing ten kings, after which another horn would arise that would subdue three kings, then persecute the saints for 3.5 years (time, times, and half a time = 1 + 2 + 0.5), then be replaced by the Messiah.

Starting with Julius Caesar, the tenth emperor of Rome was Vespasian. There are three possibilities for how the numbering of Daniel 7 fits the situation:

• Mark Antony was counted as a king, making Vespasian the eleventh.
• The eleventh horn refers to Titus, Vespasian’s son.
• The language allows Vespasian to be both the tenth and eleventh horns (because of his role both as general under Nero and as emperor).

It is clear Vespasian or Titus is intended, because Vespasian became emperor after the Year of the Four Emperors, in which three emperors ruled in quick succession before him (this had to be the plucking of three of the horns out by the roots in Daniel 7:8). Vespasian and Titus manned the war effort of the Romans against the revolting Jews from early AD 67 to the conquering of Jerusalem in late AD 70, a 3.5-year period that coincided with the existence of a provisional independent Jewish government in Judea (Vespasian turned over the war effort in July of AD 69 to Titus so he himself could take over as emperor).

Second, Daniel 9:26-27 predicts that after the death of the Messiah, the “people of the prince who is to come” would destroy Jerusalem and the Jewish temple during a seven-year long war, in the midst of which the Jewish system of sacrifice and offering would be abolished. This has to be a reference to the seven-year First Jewish-Roman War, in the midst of which a Roman prince (Titus) sacked Jerusalem and burned the Second Temple down, which resulted in the end of Jewish sacrifices to this day.

Third, Daniel 12:7 suggests that the “power of the holy people” would be “completely shattered” after another 3.5-year period, which is a reference to the Third Jewish-Roman War of AD 132-135 that devastated the Jewish people on a near genocidal level and ended their national sovereignty for almost 2000 years. However, because the exact length of that war appears to not be settled scholarship, I will leave this passage out of my argument for now.

To be clear, my understanding is that the sections from Daniel 7 and Daniel 9 I am referencing are written in Aramaic instead of Hebrew and are missing from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thus, the very obvious explanation for their seeming prophetic power is that they were written after the First Jewish-Roman War. Indeed, if they weren’t, they would be undeniable evidence that Daniel was inspired by God.

However, both sections are in the Masoretic Text, which is the authoritative source of the Old Testament used by Rabbinical Jews today. Rabbinical Jews deny that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. Now, both these sections of Daniel indicate that the First Jewish-Roman War occurred during the time period of the coming of the Messiah. So how in the world did they end up in the Bible of Jews who claim the Messiah has not come yet, especially given how famously dedicated the Jews were to the careful preservation and transmission of their Holy Scriptures?

The Jewish Christians of the first century were heavily persecuted by non-Christian Jews, and the Roman emperor Nero devastated both the Jewish and Gentile Christians shortly before the First Jewish-Roman War. Christian Jews were thus in disarray after the First Jewish-Roman War and were viewed with either skepticism or outright hostility by non-Christian Jews. How then could Christian Jews have made up these sections of Daniel and inserted them into the Rabbinical Jewish canon?

This kind of effort would match the outrageous plot of a spy movie like James Bond or Mission: Impossible. Any non-Christian Jew between the First Jewish-Roman War and Third Jewish-Roman War would have easily recognized these passages as relating to the First Jewish-Roman War and therefore as a Trojan horse to sneak Christian Messianic ideas into their sacred texts. Moreover, how would Christian Jews, who had been excommunicated from synagogues and Jewish religious activities, have regained access to the avenues by which Jewish Scripture was handed down from generation to generation?

After the Third Jewish-Roman War, Christianity became almost exclusively a Gentile faith, with Christian Jews having no more significant presence in Jewish religious life. Therefore, after that war, Christian Jews would not have had the influence to sneak these passages in, and Christian Gentiles would have had no interest in modifying the religious texts of Rabbinical Jews. They could have inserted these passages into their own Old Testament texts, of course, but that wouldn’t explain why the Jews of today consider them part of the Hebrew Bible.

The simplest and most logical explanation, of course, is that these sections of Daniel were part of the Hebrew Bible before the First Jewish-Roman War and were written under the divine influence of the Holy Spirit.

Further Arguments

For those like me who are interested in symbolism and numerology, there are other resources available that show intelligent design in the Bible, such as James Jordan’s “The Literary Structure of the Whole Bible.”

For those looking for a more holistic approach to evaluating the truth of the Bible, here are two other good resources I am aware of:

• Lee Strobel was an atheist investigative journalist who decided to apply the principles of journalism to the story of Jesus’ resurrection when his wife converted. He determined objectively that Jesus’ story passed muster, converted to Christianity, and wrote a well-known book called The Case for Christ. Note: I have not read this book personally, but given how widely renowned it is, I feel it is safe to recommend.
• J Warner Wallace was an atheist homicide detective who decided to apply the principles of police detective work to Jesus’ resurrection and, like Strobel, decided it passed muster, converted to Christianity, and wrote a book, in this case Cold-Case Christianity. I have read the kid’s version with my children, and it was very informative, so I recommend this one as well.

The evidence is out there for those who have ears to hear.