A few articles ago we saw how Jesus was a practical joker when He sent the demons into the pigs and they ran into the lake and were drowned. When we “searched out the matter” we found that the biggest part of the joke was that the pigs were being raised to be used as sacrifices to idols. The deeper we dig into the scriptures the more we find that God truly does have a sense of humor. My favorite example is found in the book of Esther.

        On the surface, Esther is one of the strangest books in the Bible. I say that because nowhere in the entire book is God even mentioned. In fact, arguments raged for years with people saying that Esther should be eliminated from God’s Word. Of course, God’s will prevailed and Esther is now a permanent part of the Bible. Since we are becoming aware of the intricacies of the “shadows” that God placed in His scriptures, we can understand now why that book is so important to Him. Read the book with an eye for “types and shadows” and you will see that they abound. The most obvious is that Haman, the evil person who wants to destroy God’s children in the story, is actually a “type” of Satan.

        You may recall that in chapter 3, verse 9, Haman says to the King, “If it pleases the king, let a decree be issued to destroy them (The Jews), and I will put ten thousand talents of silver into the treasury for the men who carry out this business.”

        Verses 10 and 11 continue, “So the king took his signet ring and gave it to Haman son of Hammedatha, the Agite, the enemy of the Jews. ‘Keep the money,’ the king said to Haman, ‘and do with the people as you please.”

        It is here that I laugh out loud. The reason is the coding underneath the surface words. As you may know, high speed computers are now finding sentences, and even complete paragraphs, hidden under the surface text in equidistant letter sequence codes, or ELS in decoders’ parlance. That just means that words are spelled out by looking at the original Hebrew text and skipping letters by a certain number. Under the above verses 10 and 11, by counting every 6th letter ten times (think of 666), we find a phrase that cracks me up. And only someone as super intelligent as our God could create such an amazing book as the Bible with these hidden and coded messages throughout.

        The phrase God hid for those of us lucky enough to be alive at this period of high speed computers is truly a gem, for under the above scriptures about Haman wanting to kill all the Jews, spaced in six letter intervals, God wrote, “Haman and Satan stink.”