How to discern a sign from random chance

Is God irrational?

Your point is well taken about the strange things that God told the prophets to do. However, they were only strange from our perspective. They were not actions without deep meaning. Everything God told the prophets to do was rational and reasonable for, "God is not a God of disorder but of peace, as in all the assemblies of the saints," (1Cor. 14:33). Orderliness is a part of His very character. However, the problem is that sometimes we do not understand why He does what He does so that His works may appear strange to us. "Our thoughts are not His thoughts." And, "Then I saw that all is the work of God, and that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because however man may labor to seek it out, yet doth he not find it ; and even, if a wise man think to know it, he shall not be able to find it out," (Ecc. 8:17).

When I spoke about hearing God's voice in my article, I had in mind the discerning of real signs from that of fictitious signs that merely come from our own imagination. I was not referring to the voice of God that speaks to our inner man but rather to the signs that He sometimes gives to reinforce or clarify His inner voice to us. If God speaks to our heart, He does not necessarily need to reinforce it by a sign, but if He does, then by definition the sign must be something that is above coincidence otherwise it is not a sign, is it? This is my point. People sometimes call not-so-odd events "a sign" when they are not a sign, since they are not very unusual. Sometimes something happens that is a little odd but nevertheless just a coincidence and we can confuse these incidents with genuine signs from God that are given by Him to grab our attention. (And I know that God is nevertheless the God of coincidences, for He orders them too! Otherwise He is not almighty.)

As we go through our day we are often confronted with coincidences, (though to God they are incidences, not coincidences). If we took every tiny coincidence as a sign from heaven we would become distracted from the simplicity of walking with Jesus by faith. Most Christians rightly ignore the small oddities of life. Perhaps your wife or husband says to you that 'you should phone your mother today', and then an hour later your mother phones you! It was a small coincidence, but not necessarily a sign from God that you should have phoned your mother, though it could be. And that is about where you have to leave it --- as 'maybe' sign --- but nothing worth mentioning to anyone else, that's for sure.

So how do most people intuitively discern between a coincidence and a non-coincidence?

We discern a genuine sign as from God by whether or not it is sufficiently beyond the realm of randomness to warrant much pondering. We discern this instinctively, naturally, and intuitively. God made us that way and He is glorified when we do by nature what He created us to do.

If you found a coin on the sidewalk, you would not say, "Wow, what a coincidence, I found a quarter! Someone must have put it there for me to find!" And if you found several coins scattered around the sidewalk you might say, "It looks like someone lost their money!" But if you found three coins all placed on top of each other upon the sidewalk then you rightly conclude that someone must have put them there. How do you know that? You immediately and instinctively know this because you realize that the chances of someone dropping three coins out of their pocket and then landing one upon the other is too great to be mere chance. Hence you conclude that someone purposely placed them there rather than lost them by the coins falling out of ones pocket or something. But technically it is possible to toss three coins down and all three land on top of each other. But one would have to spend nearly his whole lifetime trying --- and we understand all this instinctively without giving it much thought. This is how God has made our brains to work to tell the difference between mere chance and an orchestrated event. And this is what separates the lunatic from the sane --- the natural ability to discern randomness from order.

God may allow something to happen to us that catches our attention because of its unusualness, and this becomes a sign to us, and the sign reinforces what He has already spoken to our hearts (or will yet speak to our hearts). All things equal, we are confident that it is a sign from Him only in direct correlation to how unusual the event is. Like the three stacked coins we know that He must have put them there --- those strange series of events, or whatever it be. And the more coins stacked upon each other, so to speak, the greater the confidence that we have that He is speaking to us, and also the greater the attention we naturally and rightly give it. And so God has made our minds to work this way. It is part of man's reasoning ability and is one of the attributes of man that makes him more intelligent than the beasts.

Some Christians are more observant of signs than others and God gives some more signs than others due to their calling in Christ. Take King Saul for example. In order to give Saul the confidence to believe the prophet Samuel that he was to become king, Samuel told Saul several significant things that would transpire that same day before they happened. And when it happened just as Samuel said then Saul knew that it was God that spoke through the prophet and this gave Saul the courage needed for the task. While these predicted events could have all been a coincidence, yet Saul knew instinctively that the odds of them being mere coincidence were far too great to be chance, and so he believed, (1Samuel 9-10).

1Sa 10:2 When thou art departed from me to-day, then thou shalt find two men by Rachel's sepulchre, in the border of Benjamin at Zelzah; and they will say unto thee, The asses which thou wentest to seek are found; and, lo, thy father hath left off caring for the asses, and is anxious for you, saying, What shall I do for my son?

1Sa 10:3 Then shalt thou go on forward from thence, and thou shalt come to the oak of Tabor; and there shall meet thee there three men going up to God to Beth-el, one carrying three kids, and another carrying three loaves of bread, and another carrying a bottle of wine:

1Sa 10:4 and they will salute thee, and give thee two loaves of bread, which thou shalt receive of their hand.

1Sa 10:5 After that thou shalt come to the hill of God, where is the garrison of the Philistines: and it shall come to pass, when thou art come thither to the city, that thou shalt meet a band of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery, and a timbrel, and a pipe, and a harp, before them; and they will be prophesying:

1Sa 10:6 and the Spirit of Jehovah will come mightily upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man.

1Sa 10:7 And let it be, when these signs are come unto thee, that thou do as occasion shall serve thee; for God is with thee.

Here is another example of a sign, but this time it is a sign that God gave to pagans. God had afflicted the Philistines with all sorts of plagues for taking the Ark of the Covenant captive and now they sought to return the ark to Israel, however, the Philistines still had lingering doubts as to whether or not the plagues were simply mere chance events.

1Sa 6:6 Why do you make your hearts hard, like the hearts of Pharaoh and the Egyptians? When he had made sport of them, did they not let the people go, and they went away?

1Sa 6:7 So now, take and make ready a new cart, and two cows which have never come under the yoke, and have the cows yoked to the cart, and take their young ones away from them:

1Sa 6:8 And put the ark of the Lord on the cart, and the gold images which you are sending as a sin-offering in a chest by its side; and send it away so that it may go.

1Sa 6:9 If it goes by the land of Israel to Beth-shemesh, then this great evil is his work; but if not, then we may be certain that the evil was not his doing, but was the working of chance.

1Sa 6:10 And the men did so; they took two cows, yoking them to the cart and shutting up their young ones in their living-place:

1Sa 6:11 And they put the ark of the Lord on the cart and the chest with the gold images.

1Sa 6:12 And the cows took the straight way, by the road to Beth-shemesh; they went by the highway, not turning to the right or to the left, and the sound of their voices was clear on the road; and the lords of the Philistines went after them as far as the edge of Beth-shemesh....

1Sa 6:16 And the five lords of the Philistines, having seen it, went back to Ekron the same day.

Another example of God-given signs are in the case of Gideon. But notice the difference here --- the sign is really a miracle since it defied possibility itself. And so we see that a sign from God can be a miracle of impossibility or a miracle of improbability. Either way, a sign is a very unusual event.

Jdg 6:36 And Gideon said unto God, If thou wilt save Israel by my hand, as thou hast spoken,

Jdg 6:37 behold, I will put a fleece of wool on the threshing-floor; if there be dew on the fleece only, and it be dry upon all the ground, then shall I know that thou wilt save Israel by my hand, as thou hast spoken.

Jdg 6:38 And it was so; for he rose up early on the morrow, and pressed the fleece together, and wrung the dew out of the fleece, a bowlful of water.

Jdg 6:39 And Gideon said unto God, Let not thine anger be kindled against me, and I will speak but this once: let me make trial, I pray thee, but this once with the fleece; let it now be dry only upon the fleece, and upon all the ground let there be dew.

Jdg 6:40 And God did so that night: for it was dry upon the fleece only, and there was dew on all the ground.

There is one other type of "sign" taught in the bible. There are times when a sign is not unusual, but those occasions in the bible are not signs to reinforce confidence that one is hearing from God correctly, but rather the prophet himself becomes the sign or symbol of what God is saying. He becomes an object lesson for others to learn from. But that is not what we are addressing here.

A personal sign:

As a personal example of a numeric sign (since that is what we were originally addressing), a few weeks ago during my devotions I sensed that the Lord was 'speaking' to my heart about a certain matter to do with bible numbers. I was impressed in my inner man that the 1260-day interval from Ezekiel's personal siege was completed and that I was to check the numeric about Saddam that I had put on the forum a week earlier. (I will not elaborate on the numeric of all this other than to say that it has to do with a 1260-day interval forwarded in time from when Ezekiel began his symbolic siege --- forwarded 1290 + 1335 years. Another 1260 days from now will be the end of the literal siege of Jerusalem about which Ezekiel was symbolically depicting by his personal siege that began 1260 + 1260 days earlier. I speak about all this on my bible numbers website put there nearly 10 years ago. www.1260-1290-days-bible-prophecy.org. The point is that a particular 1260-day span had ended and that the Lord had alerted me to it the very day that it terminated, and thus it was unlikely a chance thing, but rather a confirmation that the Lord was trying to get my attention.)

So I checked my calendar and that morning was indeed that day. However, I also knew that we were in the general time period of this 1260-days, plus or minus 30 days, and thus I realized that it may only be a coincidence and not a sign confirming His voice. However, at this same time I also sensed Him speaking to me about the significance of the timing of Saddam Hussein's coming execution. When I studied this matter further, the timing of the numeric was indeed perfect in everyway. It would be about a one in 5,000 chance to be random, (as I would very roughly compute it). This combined with the other word about the 1260, (which I put at about one in 20 chance since I knew that we were in the general time period, etc.), would make a total probability of about one in 100,000. This was sufficient an odd for me to say that it was a sign from God confirming His voice to me. However, when it comes to major things I (generally) will not act on such a sign as the above publicly (but keep the sign to myself), because for me to go public and reveal a sign to the world on the internet (usually) I would insist on a sign to be far more sure sure than this. I would expect the sign(s) to be virtually impossible to be mere chance, --- say about one chance in a billion or so to be mere random chance. Of course, all signs and subjective words to our heart must be checked by the Bible for authenticity. In all things we are to test them by the Word of God no matter what the odds or how miraculous.

Usually we cannot compute what the odds are exactly as to any given sign, we can only rate them using general terms such as 'improbable', 'highly improbable', or 'near impossible', etc. We can all tell generally whether they are low, high, or very high, or virtually impossible in unusualness. And the better we can discriminate this the better we will know whether a possible 'sign' is indeed a sign not. Now, I am fully aware that God is the God of chance in the sense that He created randomness. But with God there is no randomness in the absolute sense. He ordains the place of every atom at every moment, and randomness was created for us so that order might appear out of it. As it is written,

Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Gen 1:2 And the earth was waste and empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Gen 1:3 And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.

Gen 1:4 And God saw the light that it was good; and God divided between the light and the darkness.

Gen 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning--the first day.

We would not know 'day' unless there was 'night', and we would not know 'form' if there was no 'formlessness'. God is the author of both in the material creation. (Though He is not the author of darkness in the moral sense, obviously! Otherwise, how could He judge the wicked?)

The sign of the hurricanes, one chance in a billion billions:
An example of a sign that I have declared publicly is the sign of the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005. I use it here as an example because its probability are relatively easy to compute. I do not claim to be a statistician, but I do think that I am in the right ball park in my computations.

On my website, I was monitoring the named storms of the Atlantic season as they occurred in 2004 and 2005 in relation to the Balance Bible Code of June 27, 2004 as brought to my attention by the voice of the Lord to my spirit in August of 2004. Each storm was happening on a number of days significant numerically as spanning from when God revealed to me the Balance Bible Code. That bible code was, in part, about Jesus' stilling the storm.

For instance, Hurricane Katrina was 430 days from the Balance Bible Code, which code was revealed to me exactly 1290 + 1335 years from the end of Ezekiel's symbolic siege of Jerusalem, which siege lasted 390 days, (Ezek. 4). (There is a lot to this numeric aside from this, but we keep to the point of our discussion that concerns the laws of probability and the discerning of whether or not a sign is real.) Now God wrapped up the astonishing year of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season with seven grand finale storms --- all record-breaking storms in the sense that no other year has seen so many storms, with the first of these last seven storms of the season being the worst hurricane on record, (i.e., Hurricane Wilma). The next six were all named after Greek letters of the alphabet, half of which were encoded in the Balance Bible Code which was put on the net 490 days earlier! (It was the first year ever that Greek letters had to be used because the proper names from a to z had been exhausted. See Daniel 9 for the significance of 490 days, which is "seventy weeks.")

I was able to guess with increasing accuracy as to when each of these storms would die out by hitting land or dissolving at sea. I was able to guess this because they were all following a rather simple numeric pattern, as did the storms before them. The more this last numeric pattern of the seventy weeks was repeated the more confident that I became as storm after storm emerged to the surprise of the meteorologists. These last seven storms were all 70 x 7 days (as per Dan. 9, and thus 483 days as well) from the Balance Bible Code or as from the other points that represent the end of Ezekiel's siege. (He lay on His side 390 days to bear the sin of "Israel", and then another 40 days "for Judah", a total of 430 days. But when Ezekiel's symbolic siege is forwarded by 1290 + 1335 years to the present there is a variance of one-month possible (30 days) due to their being two methods of leap-month adjustment for the 360 calendar. (See http://www.360calendar.com, which was put on the net about six years ago. Note that the 1290 days of Dan. 12 is simply 1260 days [of Rev. 11-12] with a leap-month added to make it the full 1290 days. The Balance Bible Code came to me exactly 1290 + 1335 years to the day from the end of Ezekiel's 390th day of his symbolic siege. And then there is another 1260 days to the start of the literal siege of Jerusalem about which Ezekiel was prophesying and enacting by his symbolic siege. The 1260 is broken down into 490 + 770 days, or 483 + 777 days. This is the origin of our 490 days to the storms of which we speak. The 1260 is also broken down into a "time, times, and half-a-time," but that is another topic.)
Hurricane Wilma, and especially the Greek-letter named storms, all terminated on their correct days. (These seven storms spanned 77 days in total, with 777 {and 700 days} yet to elapse unto when the actual literal siege of Jerusalem began, {as forwarded by the said 1260 + 1335 years}. This complex pattern of sevens arise because 483/490 + 777/770 = 1260 days, which in turn is half a seven-year period, and 1260 days is the length of time that elapsed from the end of Ezekiel's symbolic siege of Jerusalem unto the beginning of the actual literal siege of Jerusalem about which Ezekiel was prophetically imitating. {From the beginning of Ezekiel's symbolic siege unto the end of the literal siege were 1260 + 1260 days, etc, which is an exact seven-years. See Bible-Numbers website for details.} Our goal, here, is to illustrate the complex precise timing of the last seven storms of the 2005 Atlantic season in relation to the number seven. The bible numbers, 70 x 7 {490}, 777, and 1260, etc., are symbolic of 'completion and perfection' and sometimes of 'forgiveness'. The pattern is far more rich than even this, but this should suffice to show the importance of the timing of these storms. They are a sign that Jesus the Messiah is victor over the so-called gods of this world. And they are a sign that He will one day in like manner 'still the storms' of worldly conflict once His people Israel turn to their Messiah, as explained and foretold in the Balance Bible Code, and far more importantly, as foretold by many prophets of the bible as recorded in the plain text of the Scriptures. The bible codes are just a sign, as are the storms, given in hope that men might believe all that the bible prophets have said. But very few ever have ears to hear. Jesus said, "And there shall be signs in sun and moon and stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, in perplexity for the roaring of the sea and the billows.")

Let us (roughly) compute the odds of all of these storms terminating on the particular days that they did.

Each storm terminated seventy weeks (490/483 days as per Dan. 9) as counting from the end of Ezekiel's siege for Israel and then for Judah, (Ezek. 4). (Ezekiel laid on his side another 40 days for Judah in addition to the 390 days for Israel. The Balance Bible Code was discovered at the end of the 390 days --- both on the 360 calendar and on the regular Jewish calendar. And there is also a margin of one leap-month of 30 days to keep in mind as well. See www.360calendar.com )

(I went by the the official {NOAC} government hurricane center for the timing of these named-storms. These times can be verified on their own website. Actually, storms Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon were accurate to the very hour, that is, 8 am in the morning on each of their perspective days --- which is also about the time of day that the Balance Bible Code was revealed to me 490 days earlier, etc!)

Besides all this, the bible code also predicted the names of several of these storms ahead of time, and moreover, it also predicted the day (and name) upon which the seventh and last storm of the season would end. (I did not fully comprehend the significance of the Zeta codes when I first discovered them two years earlier. {The Zeta code is part of the Balance Bible Code}. However, I did notice at that time regarding the numeric of the 560 days or years in relation to the "Zeta" code and of Zeta's association with judgment of some sort. ("Zeta" in Hebrew is "Zayin".)
(The last storm 'Zeta' was 560 days from the Balance Bible Code.) Thus we have the 390 days {of Ezekiel's siege} to the Balance Bible Code, plus 40 days (of Ezekiel's siege), plus the leap-month of 30 days, plus the 490 days = 560 days, which is the same as 70 x 8, or 14 x 40 days. Also note that the letter 'Zeta' is used to signify the number seven in Hebrew! The ELS for "Zeta" was found in the Balance Bible Code twice, once at an ELS of 7 x 2 = 14, and the other at 20 x 2 = 40. As said, 14 x 40 is 560, something I took note of two years before the storms. When studying this two years ago I speculated back then that the ELS for Zayin {Zeta} denoted 14 x 40, that is, 14 generations of 40 years. I took note of this back then because "14 generations" is the same breakdown of the genealogy of Christ given in Matthews gospel. A generation is 40-years in the bible.)

Mat 1:17 "So all the generations from Abraham to David [are] fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon [are] fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ [are] fourteen generations."

Hence, my rough guess is that the probability of naming several storms ahead of time adds up to about one chance in 10,000,000. And so now I calculate a very (very) rough guess on what the total odds would be. To do this I calculate a one-in-490-day chance for each of the seven storms to be each on their correct days and then multiply this number by the approximate probability of also naming half of these storms ahead of time in the code.

490*490*490*490*490*490*490=6782230728490000000 x 10,000,000 = one chance in 67,822,307,284,900,000,000,000,000.
This number is so huge so that it essentially means that it is impossible to be mere chance. This gave me the assurance to put this sign out on the public internet. (See the series on the Balance Bible Code for details on each of these last seven storms.)

Basic pattern recognition and a basic sense of "what are the rough odds of this or that happening" are all that one needs to discern huge statistical improbabilities from chance. I have never studied the laws of probability at depth. And this disqualifies me from discerning those grey areas where the odds are not so obvious. But the obvious ones most all of us can and should discern for ourselves. And after 12 years of studying patterns in numbers and codes I think that I have attained a better sense than most concerning what is random from what is not. But whether one realizes it or not, when any one of us identifies something as being a sign from God it is because we sense something highly unusual about the event and thus we suppose it a sign with a confidence that is in direct proportion to its unusualness. And this is the way God has made our brains to work in this present creation.
Dean
(Click here for the first article)

Also see forum for discussion on this.

Examples of Faulting Numeric Reasoning

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Balance Bible Code series:

Balance Bible Code

Audio-visual         Axe to Root

*** Summary of Hurricanes ***

Balance/Hurricane Bible Code imagery explained (on forum)

Hurricane Charley Ivan    Jeannie
Stairway to Hell (2) Psalm 18

Deep Impact

Hurricanes Dennis
Emily ("The Rock") Dennis

Katrina Rita   Stan

Hurricane Wilma
and trial of Saddam

Storm Alpha

Alpha-Beta Code

Gamma   Delta & Epsilon

Storm Zeta!

Mount Carmel

(River) Ape-Atbash

Balance-Bible-Code Acrostic

Merry Baal-mas!
Predicting the next storm

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