What are the Evidences that supports the belief in God and the revelation of the Holy Bible?

Ideally, the first place where we should recognize evidence for the existence of God would be in nature itself. And that was a common place in all ancient societies. It was widely agreed that nature could only have been created by a higher being.

The book of Romans 1: 20-22 says:

"For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools"

This was written almost two thousand years ago, but like the whole Bible, it remains very modern.

Richard Dawkins said that "science is the poetry of reality". But I disagree. Science is not poetry. It can be said that Science is a tool that we use to read the poetry that is, in fact, the Creation. It is not with science that the scientist delights. He delights with the subtleties of nature that he discovers through science. So, I do not know if by dishonesty, but they are taking the value of Creation to give it to something else.

For many people, the fine tuning for the maintenance of life, the complexity and harmony between the various systems that make up the universe are enough to recognize the need of a Creator, but this is not consensus.

So, besides Creation itself, the other evidence for God is the Holy Scriptures.

The Bible have been written over the course of 1600 years by about 40 people from different places and eras ranging from kings to the most humble person, resulting in a set of 66 books.

It was absolutely the best selling book of all time. The first book to be printed with the advent of the press, like as if it was made with the purpose of printing this book.

There are several levels of understanding of the scriptures. In increasing order of complexity, we have:

1. Simple reading: what you read is the message itself;
2. The metaphors, which are common to all;
3. The parables which are also well known, but there are actually many Christians who have difficulty in their understanding;
4. Cross-references, for example, you should be aware of Old Testament passages to understand some of the New Testament;
5. Contextual references, for example, you need to know the Jewish tradition and culture, customs, festivals, ceremonies, marriage, etc.
6. Prophetic symbols, for example, mountains means kingdoms, waters means people, leaven means sin, etc.
7. Prophecies, which may be revealed directly or may contain a set of the levels of understanding above;
8. Encoded messages, for example, Genesis chapter 5 speaks of the genealogy of Noah. In it you can find the summary of the salvation plan if you join the meanings of the names in Hebrew of all the descendants;
9. Mathematical phenomena, yes, there are mathematical phenomena in the Bible and they can be used as a kind of integrity checker of the text;
10. Gematria, a kind of numerology on which is based the Jewish Kabalah.

In Matthew 18:21-22 Simon Peter asks Jesus:

"Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times: but, until seventy times seven."

Peter certainly marveled, for Jesus answered in one simple sentence, but he surely understood the contents of a whole primer on forgiveness. If by any chance we have Peter's knowledge to understand the messages between the lines as we read the scriptures, we often get the same reaction from Peter as we hear the Messiah's response and we automatically realize that this is not just any book. There is no book that compares to the Holy Bible.

I find these levels of understanding in the Bible to be fascinating, but I will focus in explaining the ones I believe to be more relevant and accessible to conclude that these writings are in fact a divine revelation: The prophecies and the mathematical phenomena.

Isaiah 41:23 is a challenge to the pagan gods:

"Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods"

In the Old Testament, the main book of prophecies is the book of Daniel and in the New Testament is the book of Revelation. These two books have a certain parallelism. They speak the same things in a similar language. Comparing the two, one can understand that they speak of the same events to be carried out in the so-called "Last Days". But in Daniel, the prophecies come from the time of this prophet, when Israel was in the Babylonian captivity, and many of them have already been fulfilled.

He prophesied in detail the succession of the world kingdoms from his time to the end of the age. He predicted that after the reign of Babylon the kingdoms of Media-Persia, Greece and Rome would follow, then Rome would be divided. The invasion of the Roman Empire divided Rome into ten barbarian tribes. Three of these tribes disappeared and did not become European nations, just as Daniel had prophesied!

Some critics say that the Book of Daniel is too accurate and must have been written after the events had already happened. But Jesus lived in the times of the Roman Empire, and quoted the Book of Daniel:

"But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains" (Mark 13:14)

Daniel also says that after Rome was divided, many would try to reunite Europe and could not. And indeed, Napoleon and Hitler tried unsuccessfully. They also tried reunification through weddings. Queen Vitoria married her cousin, Prince Albert, in 1840. Her nine children and twenty-six of her forty-two grandchildren married other royalty and noble families throughout the European continent, uniting to each other, which earned her the nickname "the grandmother of Europe".

Daniel prophesied that the abomination of desolation will be implanted in the Holy Place, that is in the Jewish temple. Since the year 70, the Temple no longer exists. Some time ago even the state of Israel did not exist and the prophecy seemed impossible to be fulfilled. But in 1948, Israel once again became a nation and conflicts with the Arab peoples have intensified. The wars of independence have begun, then in 1967 there was the Six Day War and Israel got back its Capital, Jerusalem. In 1973 there was the Yom Kippur war. And to the surprise of the world, in all these wars, where the number of armies of the Arab countries and their armaments by far outnumbered Israel, the triumph was always clear and indisputable in favor of Israel. Even today the Arab people do not accept any peace agreement. They say they want to blot Israel off the map. With the US recently threatening to attack Syria, the Islamic countries have warned that if Damascus is attacked, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Hezbollah, would attack Israel, although Israel has nothing to do with that.

What happens is exactly what was prophesied in Psalm 83.

"A Psalm of Asaph. O God, keep not thou silence: Hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God. For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult; And they that hate thee have lifted up the head. Thy take crafty counsel against thy people, And consult together against thy hidden ones. They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; That the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance. For they have consulted together with one consent; Against thee do they make a covenant"

In the war of independence, Israel became a nation again, in the Six Days War it reconquered Jerusalem and at this very moment, everything prepared for the construction of the Temple.

There is a prophecy to be fulfilled that says that Damascus will be destroyed:

"The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap." (Isaiah 17:1)

If someone thinks that the prophecies that have already been realized were written after the events and those that are for future times were invented... all right. Each one is free to believe whatever they want.

"Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them." (Isaiah 42:9)

There are other prophecies that have been fulfilled and I could mention like the one from the city of Tire, but let's move on to mathematical phenomena.

The scriptures were originally written in Hebrew and Greek. These two languages ​​do not have special characters to write the numerals, using the letters themselves for this. (Similar to Latin which also has no numerical characters but only a few letters have numerical value, the Roman Algarisms) But Hebrew and Greek are the only two alphabets in which all letters have a numerical value, and you can calculate the numerical value of words, phrases, etc. by adding the numerical values ​​of each letter.

Ivan Panin was a naturalized American Russian who graduated from Harvard. In 1890, he announced that he had discovered numerical patterns in the Hebrew text of the book of Psalms, and soon after, in the Greek text of the New Testament. He devoted more than 50 years of his life to exhaustively explore the numerical structure of the Holy Scriptures, generating more than 43,000 manuscript pages of mathematical patterns he encountered. He even published the New Testament in Greek and at the beginning of each book he put an extensive list of phenomena that readers could verify on their own.

Let's look at some examples found by Ivan Panin.

Only in the first verse of the Old Testament:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

In Hebrew:

בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ

1. This verse has 7 words
2. With 28 letters (4x7)
3. The first three words, the subject and the predicate of the sentence, (In the beginning God created) has 14 letters (2x7)
4. The other four words, the two objects of the sentence (Heaven and earth) also have 14 (2x7)
5. The two objects, each one has 7 letters.
6. The three main words: God, heaven and earth have 14 letters (2x7)
7. The other four also have 14 (2x7)
8. The central word (which is the smallest of them) with its previous one, has 7 letters
9. The central word with its posterior, has 7 letters

The probability that only these nine characteristics we can verify without considering the numerical value of the letters to exist at random is one in more than 40 million. Ivan Panin found many more phenomena just in this verse enough to fill 5 pages in one of his books. One example considering the numerical value of letters is that the three leading nouns in the verse (God, heaven, earth) have a value of 777.

Let's look at another example, in the first few verses of the New Testament, where we have the genealogy of Jesus in the first chapter of the book of Matthew.

Genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1: 1-17)

1. The number of words that are nouns is 56 (7x8)
2. The Greek word "δε" is the one that occurs most frequently in this passage and occurs 56 times (7x8).
3. The number of different forms in which the article "δε" occurs is exactly 7.
4. There are two main sections in this passage: from verse 1 to 11 (from Abraham to the deportation to Babylon) and from 12 to 17 (thence to Jesus). In the first section the number of words in the Greek vocabulary is 49 (7x7)
5. Of these 49 words, 28 begin with a vowel (7x4)
6. 21 begin with consonant (7x3)
7. The total letters of these 49 words is 266 (7x38)
8. The number of vowels among these 266 letters is 140 (7x20)
9. The number of consonants is 126 (7x18)
10. The number of words occurring more than once is 35 (7x5)
11. The number of words appearing only once is 14 (7x2)
12. The number of words occurring in a single form is 42 (7x6)
13. The number of words occurring in more than one form is 7
14. The number of nouns is 42 (7x6)
15. The number of words that are not nouns is 7.
16. Of the nouns, 35 are proper names (7x5)
17. These 35 names are used 63 times (7x9)
18. The number of masculine nouns is 28 (7x4)
19. These masculine nouns occur 56 times (7x8)
20. The number of nouns that are not masculine is 7.
21. Three women are mentioned: Tamar, Rahab and Ruth (θαμαρ, ραχαβ and ρουθ). The number of Greek letters in these names is 14 (7x2)
22. The number of compound nouns is 7.
23. The number of Greek letters in these 7 nouns is 49 (7x7)
24. Only one city is mentioned in this passage: Babylon (βαβυλων), which contains 7 letters.

The likelihood of these 24 characteristics occurring by chance is seven to the power of 24 = 191,581,231,380,566,414,401. About one in 200 quintillion. Like stated earlier, these phenomena can be used verify the integrity of the text as a single letter change would dismantle a high number of these characteristics.

Dr. Daniel B. Turney (a converted former agnostic) wrote:

"The Arymetography of Scripture is the death sentence of the theory of destructive critics. Dr. Ivan Panin's works on the numerical values ​​of Scripture are fatal to Enemies of the verbal inspiration of the Bible and are invulnerable. The examination I myself have made of the arithmetography of Scripture emphatically supports what Dr. Panin sustains... Sincere efforts to find numerical expressions in Homer's "Iliad" have not had any success. However, as soon as I did my first experience in the book of the Third Epistle of John, my works were abundantly rewarded. I began with this book because it was small in size and because in Panin's writings I had not seen it analyzed. Results were such, in finding so many numerical schemes that I was without any doubt about the veracity of Ivan Panin's theory..."