I made mention of Mark Spencer at the end of last week’s Nugget but then realised that I had better wait a week before I introduced him and told you the story. I met Mark at breakfast each morning when I went to Brazil to teach Deeper Bible. Mark is the husband of the Director of Horizontes and was looking after breakfast in the hotel dining room each morning. We got chatting each breakfast but Mark was also participating in the course during the day. We talked on the third morning and Mark shared with me how he had been longing for Bible study like DB for years. As we talked more he told me how DB touched all his buttons and he was loving the opportunity to do such deep Bible study. I asked him if he would be interested in teaching Deeper Bible. He stood there looking at me for several seconds with a look of incredulity on his face and then said, “Ian, that would be like a dream come true. I would love the opportunity to learn from you and teach Deeper Bible.”
Since our first meeting I have noted his passion for the Word of God and have given input to him to enable him to teach Deeper Bible to 301 Level. I passed on extra background material to him and gave him the files to enable him to teach Deeper Bible in Brazil at Horizontes and in the United States as well. Mark and I have had numerous Zoom and Skype meetings to guide him to the point of him being able to teach deeper levels of the course. In the meantime I forged ahead finishing off the last level. When I came to the end of Level 701 I wanted to gather together a theme I had been developing and blend it with a motif I had found. I was working on the Glory theme and researching every mention of a particular Hebrew word from my Hebrew Concordance related to the word Glory. I was surrounded by Glory. I had lists of multiple Hebrew words all over my desk with all of the references found on them from the Old Testament scriptures. I was waist deep in Glory when I got an email from Mark.
He told me he had felt inspired to give me a gift and that he was sending the gift to me by way of an electronic link. It was a book he had come across that he felt he should send to me. I thanked him for his thoughtfulness and suggested that he send it to me via Kindle as I had a Kindle and could read electronic books on that. So within a matter of seconds the gift appeared on my computer. I found myself looking at the title of the book and I started to cry – happy tears and tears of amazement at the serendipitous timing of God and Mark’s sensitivity to our Creator. The book was A Peculiar Glory: How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness by John Piper. I was stunned, incredulous that Mark would be inspired to send me a gift and the gift would be the perfect book to round off what I was working on to close a major portion of Deeper Bible 701. I spent some time in worship before continuing what I was doing. It just seemed appropriate.
My second Ian Story in this Nugget concerns the process of my digging into the matter of the 153 fish of John 21:11 which I told you the beginnings of in the last Nugget Following God’s Leads (Hearing God’s Voice 13). In 1983 Prof Brown had challenged us to dig for the gold behind the text in John 21:11. I have been digging for a long while, 37 years to be exact. Oh not continuously of course, but I would pick up Prof’s challenge of “153” again from time to time. I sent him what I had before publishing God’s Awesome Book and its inclusion in there. His response was “There is always more Ian”. One of the last comments he made to me before he died was that I would need to solve the problem of mem sofit to make more progress. I knew what he meant but I didn’t know how to solve it. So i just left it on the shelf.
Last year when I came to finish off Deeper Bible 701 I was pondering as to whether I would include the 153 fish example again as an example of sod level complexity or not. I told God that I would not include it unless He showed me the solution to the mem-sofit problem. If He didn’t show me then I wouldn’t include it. I kept praying about it but nothing happened. So I was resigned to the fact that the 153 fish example would not be part of DB 701.
The difficulty in a nutshell is that the value of the Hebrew letters making up the phrase “the sons of God” which appear in John 1:12 more appropriately translated by most modern Bibles as “the children of God”. The gematria of the Hebrew in this phrase adds to 153. I am not going to explain it in detail now, I have numbers of times in the Gems and other places. That is amazing. Mind boggling even but it has a major problem. The fact that the Hebrew letter mem (מ) is used and not mem sofit (ם) in order to calculate the 153, when in fact the letter should be mem sofit. That is what Prof Basil Brown told me as his last clue to me to solve the problem. But I didn’t know what to do with the clue to solve the problem so it sat on the back burner. (Sorry I did tell you it was on the shelf – well no matter where it was I couldn’t solve it so it would be left out of DB 701). I had told Father about it and He hadn’t responded. So there the trail ended. I left it in God’s hands. I was convinced there was an answer but I didn’t know how to solve it. So clearly it was not going to be included in DB 701. I was coming to point when I need to pull it all together in a matter of months to get the book ready to teach DB 701. I kept reminding God of that fact but He kept ignoring me.
On June 15th last year (2019) I was awake in the night with a word going around and around in my mind. The word was isopsethia but as far as I was concerned it was a nonsense word. I had never heard of it before and had no idea what it meant let alone what its relevance might be. But couldn’t get it out of my mind. It just kept recycling around in my brain over and over preventing me from sleeping. In the morning when I woke I dug into the word. I knew it must be a Greek word as it started with the “iso” element. I knew as a geographer there were a series of words which began with the prefix iso– which were all connected – isobars, isotherms, isopleth, isohyet etc. I sensed somehow this word isopsethia was important and related to the other iso- words so I set out to find out why.
I began with the title for this Nugget as The Perfect Gift at the Perfect Moment and Learning a New Word in the Middle of the Night (Hearing God’s Voice 14). But realise that I am not half way yet and already this Nugget is too long. So I am stopping at this point and giving you the first part now and the second part in the next Nugget. Deeper Bible 701 graduates can just turn to the appendix and follow up for themselves. However those of you who have not progressed that far yet will have to wait a week for the revelation.
I don’t mean to keep you waiting. I am not deliberately spinning it out to maintain suspense. These Nuggets just pour out of me as I write until I sense I have finished what I want to say or realise that the Nugget has already grown too long. In this case it is the latter that has brought us to the end.