Stephen E Crockett

Bible Prophecy: Illumination and Salvation, Apocalypse and Tribulation Stephen E Crockett

The Center of the Bible is Psalms 118. The shortest chapter in the Bible is Psalms 117. The longest is Psalms 119. Psalms 118 is the center of the Bible, 594 chapters before, and 594 chapters after. Add these together and you get 1188, the central verse of the central chapter: Psalms 118:8Does this verse say something significant about God's perfect Will? " It is better to put trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man."(Psalm 118:8 NKJV) This item is folk wisdom no author, no source but somehow circulating among the water cooler Christians of Middle America. The kernel of truth: God is a lot smarter than you are, so put your trust in him. Yet, the chapter and verse arrangement on which this item of wisdom is based is the work of many men through the years, not least of which, in the case of the New King James Version cited, was a group of English scholars. So were these men expressing God's truth, as they under stood it, by including this strange bit of symmetry and synchronicity? And if they were, should we not look more closely at their message? The reading of the verse itself is the esoteric meaning, but to stop there, if we give any value at all to the exercise, is to miss most of its message. If we read the whole Psalm, we find verse 22 which states: "The stone the builder rejected has become the capstone." (NIV)Now this is indeed curious. In the Gospels, Jesus will use this verse to suggest that he is the Stone. Indeed, Psalm 118 was most likely the hymn sung at the conclusion of the Last Supper, and we know from John 12:13 that crowds on Palm Sunday chanted verses 25 and 26. From this, we might suspect that this Psalm had some deep resonance with how Jesus and his followers understood their mission. And we would be right, except that we are left with only the surface, esoteric text. Jesus and the crowds, chanting verses 25 and 26, understood some thing much deeper in this hymn. Since Jesus himself charged the Temple priests with having lost the meaning of the Stone the Builder Rejected, we can infer that this was secret wisdom, the knowledge of the initiates. So what is this Stone? And why should an understanding of Psalms 118 make one a High Priest, which is Jesus' argument in the Gospel encounter? Is there some secret of Christianity  concealed in the Psalm? Yes indeed, but to understand it, at least as well as the scholars responsible for the King James Version, something must be known of how to derive the esoteric meaning behind the words. Hebrew and Greek are languages in which every letter has a numerical value and words and phrases can easily be transposed into numbers. The number 118 is the value of the Hebrew word for High Priest, and 22 is, among other meanings, also the Hebrew word for unity. Hence the verse about the Stone, 118:22, could be said to point to the unifying principle behind the High Priest or the initiate's under standing of the secret.The Stone is identified by the arrangement of 594 plus 594. In Hebrew, 594 is the number of the phrase Stone of Israel. on which Jacob dreamed of a stairway to Heaven, and the concept of an upper Stone aligning with an earthly Stone, 594 + 594, is the very image of St. John's New Jerusalem, the climactic experience of the Apocalypse. The sum, 1188, points both toward refuge in the Lord and the core of the mystery, the timing of the Apocalypse. Within the sum is 1080, half of a world age of 2160 (due to the precession caused by the wobble of the earth on its axis, the spring equinox appears to move backward through the zodiac at the rate of one degree every 72 years, or 30 degrees, one astrological age, every 2160 years), and its fractal factor, 108, which in Hebrew is the value of the word 'to measure." From this we might infer that timing, the way to measure the passage of cosmic time, the changing of the world age, is at the core of Christianity, the very Stone which has become the "head of the corner."