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The Number 8 – Twelve Things You Should Know

People of all faiths, or no faith, seem to know that 666 stands for the anti-christ. I wonder how many Christians know how the number 8 relates to the real Christ––Jesus Christ, the Messiah––Yeshua his Hebrew name?

The Incredible #8 and What It Means to You: There are 12 Things You Should Know: #experienceLife, #Jesus, #JesusChrist, #GodWhoAreYou, #WhoAmII wonder, because this is new knowledge for me and I have been a Christian for over fifty years. The points below, meshed with my own research and understanding, I am sharing with you are very simplified from a long, detailed article by Gary Stearman, in his “Prophecy in the News” magazine, June, 2012.
Understanding the number 8 gives a deeper meaning and intimacy with Jesus and what His blood sacrifice did.

Stearman writes, “Biblical patterns featuring numbers (as well as articles of worship and practices in the Old Testament Tabernacle), especially the number 8, are spiritual implications to show God’s transcendence in ways we mere mortals can understand.”

Here are 12 deeper biblical meanings of the number 8:

People of all faiths, or no faith, seem to know that 666 stands for the anti-christ. Do you know how the number 8 relates to the real Jesus Christ? There are twelve ways. Click to Tweet

1. NUMBER 8 – RESURRECTION

Jesus resurrected after the 3rd day, on the 8th day of the week, the day following the 7th day; thus, bringing Creation to new heights – new life – a new birth – new beginnings – superabundance–which is the meaning of the number 8.

2. NUMBER 8 – NEW BIRTH

8 persons entered the ark. Noah and his three sons are said to be “fathers of humanity.” They gave mankind a new physical birth, but also a spiritual one through the waters preserving the godly line of Shem, one of Noah’s sons. Through Shem would come Messiah––Jesus Christ. The number 8 stands for a NEW BEGINNING.

3. NUMBER 8 – WHERE GOD MEETS MAN

The tabernacle in the wilderness journey after the Exodus was laid out in a figure 8 with all the twelve tribes encamped in 8 specific groups. The Holy of Holies was in the center of a huge figure 8. The Holy of Holies is where the high priest met with God.

4. NUMBER 8 – MIDPOINT OF THE TORAH

Leviticus 8:8 is the very center verse of the Torah (first 5 books of Old Testament). Here we learn Moses put the breastplate of twelve precious stones upon Aaron; also, he put in the breastplate the Urim and the Thummim––that somehow revealed the Spirit of the Lord to the high priest (Aaron). The high priest was the literal figure of superabundance, where God’s power made direct contact with the lives of the Israelites.

Urim means fire, the light of fire, a flame, enlightenment, revelation. Thummin means completeness, fullness, wholeness, perfection, integrity, soundness, simplicity, innocence, uprightness, prosperity.
These definitions are the same as for “righteousness,” for Jesus is now our High Priest who makes direct contact with us.

Jesus has made us right with God, and makes intercession for us directly to our Father in heaven—because He now resides INSIDE our hearts through the God’s Spirit, not outside on a breastplate; thus, the Trinity––the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit––actually dwells inside as One God– just as water is one element, yet can appear in three forms: liquid, steam and ice. Wow! Amazing! Unfathomable! Superabundance!

5. NUMBER 8 – LINKED TO PRIESTLY ORDINATION

Moses anointed Aaron in Leviticus 8 with oil. In Hebrew, the word for “eight” means oil or fatness of the olive. Oil is symbolic of the Holy Spirit. After being dedicated for service, Aaron and his sons remained at the door of the Tabernacle for seven days. On the eighth day, and not before, they did their first act of service by sacrificing a sin offering and a burnt offering before the LORD. (See Lev. 8:33-9:2). Thus, Aaron was consecrated for a new and higher order of spiritual activity.

6. NUMBER 8 – SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY

The prophet Samuel anointed David as king by using olive oil–– represented by number 8, a new and higher order of spiritual authority. David was the eighth son.

7. NUMBER 8 – BLESSING TO ENTIRE EARTH

On the eighth confirmation to Abraham by God of His covenant with him, God provided a lamb in substitution for the sacrifice of Isaac. Because of his obedience, God promised Abraham that his seed would bless the entire earth––through the Lamb of God––Yeshua/Jesus, in the line of David.

8. NUMBER 8 – THE HEBREW LETTER ‘CHET’

The number 8 highlights the importance of a mature faith, as was Abraham’s. Going beyond seven, the number eight symbolizes man’s ability to transcend the limitations of physical existence through grace and life in Jesus Christ. The letter Chet means these two things, having to do with a higher spiritual life. It looks like this: הּ

Furthermore, the Hebrew name for oil in Hebrew is shemen. The word for eighth in Hebrew is shemini. The two words joined together are symbolic of the power of the Spirit joined to the number 8. When we go beyond 7, we live in the power of the Holy Spirit, beyond our limitations, over and above, exceeding, transcending, overflowing, and dwelling in the heaven-lies.

9. NUMBER 8 – SYMBOLIZES A PERIOD OF TIME BEFORE A MAJOR REVELATION

In the Mount of Transfiguration story in Luke 9:27-31, Jesus said, “There are some of those standing here who shall not taste death, till they see the kingdom of God.”

Eight days passed before he took Peter, John and James to the mountain where Jesus revealed His glory. He talked with Moses and Elijah, “who appearing in glory were speaking of His departure which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”

Later, Thomas did not believe Jesus had resurrected, but on the eighth day, Thomas was with the disciples when Jesus showed proof, and Thomas believed!

10. NUMBER 8 – THE MATHEMATICAL SYMBOL FOR INFINITY

This symbol is an 8 lying on its side as though at rest [which is a completed fish sign]. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16 KJV).

11. 888 – THE NUMBER OF JESUS’ NAME

In the Greek language, as in Hebrew, letters of the alphabet double as numbers. Every word has a numerical value. Eight is the Dominical Number. For everywhere it has to do with Jesus Christ as LORD. The Greek letters of Yeshua’s name below come from an 1894 book, Number in Scripture: Its Supernatural Design and Spiritual Significance, E.W. Bullinger.
I = 10
H = 8
Σ = 200
O = 70
Y = 400
Σ = 200
—888

12. NUMBER 8 – THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA

Number 8 plaque with text overlay of Mysteries Behind the Incredible Number 8

After learning the above 11 points, the Lord revealed more to me. Passover (Easter) has 8 days. Exodus 12:15 says the children of Israel were to eat unleavened bread for seven days leading up to the day they were delivered on the eighth day!

Furthermore, the 8 days of Passover are at the beginning of the year and Hanukkah runs 8 days at the end of the year. In Revelation 1:8, Yeshua/Jesus says, “I AM the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending, which is and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty” (KJV).

THE INCREDIBLE Almighty God – 888 the Alpha and the Omega – the Beginning, the middle and the Ending

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6 NASB). The true Christian believes this claim by Jesus that He is God––the only way to heaven––basically for three reasons:

1) “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness [of sin]” (Hebrews 9:22).

2) John the Baptist said of Jesus, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). The whole purpose for the 400-year bondage of the Israelites at the Passover Exodus from Egypt was to demonstrate freedom by blood. A lamb was slain whose blood was smeared on the doorposts of the Israelites homes. When the death angel saw the blood that house was passed over.

3) “By this we have been sanctified [cleansed] through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10). All sin for all people has been eradicated, but freedom comes only for the individual who believes and receives Jesus personally as the only Truth and way to heaven by surrendering to Him as Lord in his own life and as Lord of all.

Can you think of any incredible number 8’s in the Bible that may have been missed here? If so, please leave a message below for us all to read.

I hope this encourages you as much as it has me in researching the number 8 and how it leads to our Savior and soon coming King!

If you would like to know more about Jesus and His Names, check out my workbook: GOD Who Are You? AND Who Am I? Knowing and Experiencing God by His Hebrew Names.

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M3E Jesus Performs Whole Heart Operation: Jehovah Tsidkenu

6. Jesus Performs Whole Heart Operation:

No matter how much of the heart is blocked, Jesus performs whole heart operation. Consider the children of Israel who did not understand this. After the Israelite’s 430 years of bondage in Egypt, “God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them” (Exod. 2:24-25).

God sent Moses to deliver them. Moses, like all the children of Israel, was a descendant of Jacob (whose name was changed to Israel). Moses was delivered from the wrath of the Pharaoh of Egypt who hoped to retard the growth in the number of Israelites (Hebrews), by sentencing all newborn baby boys to be executed. To avoid that fate, Moses’ parents put him in a floating basket and hid him in the Nile River. He was discovered by the Pharaoh’s own daughter who raised him as her son.

When Moses was an adult and discovered who he really was, he tried in his own strength to deliver his people from their slavery by killing an Egyptian who was mistreating a Hebrew slave. Accused of murder, he fled to the desert to save his own life. While tending sheep, Moses saw a burning bush. After turning aside to look, God called to him, saying, “. . . I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. . . .” (Exod. 3:8).

Through his servant Moses, God worked miraculous signs and wonders, with ten plagues, to snatch the Israelites from Pharaoh’s grasp. After leaving Egypt and crossing the Red Sea on dry land, the Israelites witnessed first-hand miracles from God Almighty. They could have entered the Promised Land within eleven days; however, when Moses sent out twelve spies into the land, ten came back with a fear-filled report that the people were stronger and taller than the Israelites.

Only Joshua and Caleb Allowed Jesus to Perform Whole Heart Operation

Only Joshua and Caleb trusted in the goodness, wisdom, and power of the Lord, in His promise that they could take the land as He commanded them. For that lack of faith, the Lord told the people, “Not a man of this evil generation will see the good land I swore to give your forefathers, except Caleb son of Jephunneth. He will see it, and I will give him and his descendants the land he set his feet on, because he followed the Lord wholeheartedly” (Deut. 1:34-36 emphasis added).

God sent all the people back to wander in the wilderness for forty years until that generation died. Only the little children who the people said “would be taken captive”19 would see the Promised Land. Joshua would be their leader because, like Caleb, he believed God and followed Him with his whole heart.

Try to imagine what it would look like for a patient to refuse to allow the surgeon to operate on her whole heart? After experiencing the initial life-giving royal blood flowing through her veins and being translated into heavenly places, she wakes up from the operating table and says, “Just take half; give me back the rest.”

In doing so, the upper chamber pumping the blue, lifeless blood would only partially gravitate to the machine. Only a part would ever be energized and rerouted to the body. Left long enough in this state, the result is “congestive heart failure,” where fluid backs up, causing congestion in the tissues due to reduced pressure of the blood flow.

You may say, “But no one in their right mind would do such a thing.”
Spiritually speaking, it happens all the time. Look at what the children of Israel did. After they received the command of the Lord to go up and take possession of the land, the people fell into a half-hearted commitment. Moses writes,

“You grumbled in your tents and said, ‘The Lord hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us. Where can we go? Our brothers have made us lose heart'” (Deut. 1:27-28 ).

The Lord had just told them where to go and how He would get them there; but, they listened to the wrong people–the ten spies. With their non-believing words, they took back part of their hearts from trusting the Lord to live His life through them in His power and in His strength.

This brings up an important question, “If the children of Israel lost heart, did they lose their salvation?” They were out of Egypt, weren’t they? So are the patients who have asked the Great Physician to replace their heart. It is just as impossible to take back a replaced heart as it is blood that is already shed.

Scripture backs this up: “No one can deliver out of my hand. When I act, who can reverse it?” (Isa. 43:13). The apostle John records the words of Jesus, chapter 10 verse 28, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.” If that were not enough, Jesus takes it to the highest authority, “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”

Salvation cannot be annulled; it is the legal contract between Jesus and His Father.

If only the children of Israel could have, in faith, let go and believed this promise:

Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. The Lord your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, and in the desert. There you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place. -Deuteronomy 1:29-31

# # #

With Marie, nothing good came to her life until she was ready and willing to commit her whole life, her whole heart, to Jesus Christ, in complete obedience to His will and His way. Our analogy stops here, for Jesus not only transforms our heart, He replaces it. He says, “I’ll remove the stone heart from your body, and replace it with a heart that’s God willed, not selfwilled” (Ezek.36:26 The Message.). The marvelous thing is, He gives us His heart, uncorrupted, pure and clean.

7. Jesus Performs Whole Heart Operation with a Deep Inner Meaning:

“The Lord confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them” (Ps. 25:14). The Amplified version reads that He will “reveal to them its [deep, inner] meaning.”

E. W. Kenyon (1867 – 1948), discovered this deeper meaning. He was a pastor and evangelist who found the Lord in a Methodist prayer meeting when he was seventeen years old. His ministry lives on through his writings. In one of his booklets, Blood Covenant, he says he knew there had to be more to the New Covenant than he realized, and that it resided in the Lord’s Supper table. “The silence of the disciples when Jesus introduced it, saying, ‘This is my blood of the New Covenant, which is poured out for many unto the remission of sins’; and then told them to eat the bread which was His body and to drink the wine which He declared was His blood–I say, the very silence of the disciples indicates they understood what he meant. I did not and it confused me”20

Through more research, Kenyon found evidence that in Africa, India, China, Borneo, and the Islands of the Seas, men practiced a blood covenant very similar to the Lord’s Table. Their reasons for evoking a covenant, as it were for Abraham and others in the Old Testament of the Bible, were to bring peace between parties, or for love’s sake. When one party had a demand put upon it, the other obligated himself to meet that demand. It was a sacred rite that if broken, one’s own mother or wife, or his nearest relative would seek his death. “No man can live in Africa who breaks the covenant . . . he curses the very ground he walks on.”21 It is so sacred that the children to the third and fourth generations revere it and keep it. It is perpetual and cannot be annulled.

Kenyon tells a profound story that illustrates the New Covenant Jesus was trying to communicate to His disciples and to us:

Journalist Sir Henry Stanley was commissioned to go to Africa to find David Livingstone. When he found the Scottish missionary on November 10, 1871, his now famous words were, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” In his seeking, Stanley came in contact with a powerful war-like equatorial tribe. His interpreter explained what a blood covenant was and asked Stanley, “Why don’t you make a strong covenant with them?” “What will the results be from such a covenant?” Stanley asked.

“Everything the chieftain has will be yours if you need it.”

Stanley revolted from drinking someone else’s blood, but when conditions worsened, he agreed. The first step was negotiation as to motives and the commitment and ability to keep the covenant. Next, the chieftain and Stanley exchanged gifts. The old chieftain wanted Stanley’s goat, but giving away the goat meant life or death for Stanley. He was in poor health and had to have goat’s milk to live. It took everything within him to give it. The chieftain gave Stanley his seven-foot, copper-wound spear. Stanley thought he was defeated.

To Stanley’s surprise, the ritual continued with each man bringing in a substitute to perform the actual cutting. Blood dripped from the substitutes’ wrists, falling into one cup of wine. The bloods were mixed, and then the cup was given back to the two substitutes to drink in equal parts. They were now blood brothers, and Stanley and the chieftain and his men were bound together. Gun powder was rubbed into the wounds of the substitutes, which when healed, was the sign of the covenant.

After sealing the wounds, a priest pronounced awful curses upon the wives, children and tribal members if the covenant was broken. Then a tree was planted–one known for its long life–as a remembrance for the time to come.

Afterwards, Stanley’s men did not have to stand guard over their bales of cotton cloth and trinkets, but now they could sell them and buy from the tribe as well; to steal meant death. To Stanley’s amazement, everywhere he went with the chieftain’s spear, everybody bowed to him as though he were the chief himself.

Yellow lilies with text Because God is Jehovah Tsidkenu He sees Jesus blood

In comprehending Stanley’s story, heart surgery and how it relates to us and the New Covenant, consider these things:

  • The difference between the Old Covenant and the new is that the third person of the Trinity cuts into the heart. (He is the only third on earth today.) The Holy Spirit does the work of Jehovah Tsidkenu. [For simplicity’s sake, Jehovah Tsidkenu is used here, although Jehovah Mekoddishkem is God’s name meaning to sanctify, or purify. The Holy Spirit is the sanctifier.22] When we trust Him to do so, He cleanses our heart of waste matter with His royal blood; for “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). He then daily and perpetually gives a spirit-filled life to those who believe whole-heartedly.
  • An open-heart surgery cannot take place unless 100 percent of the blood supply is diverted to the artificial heart-lung machine. Until we mentally and spiritually assent to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, giving Him 100% commitment–as Stanley did with his goat–and make Him our number one priority, we cannot find life.
  • These seven dimensions of heart operation performed by the Holy Spirit can only be discerned through the Holy Spirit, for “the man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). As we spiritually discern this New Covenant, we begin to see that when God looks at us, He sees Jesus. He sees the royal red blood Jesus shed for us, and the legal contract signed in His blood.
  • In exchange for our gift of self to God, He gives us five words, “In the name of Jesus” (see John 14:13). After Jesus ascended to His Father and sent His Holy Spirit to earth, His disciples used these words in time of need, for themselves and others. By so doing, Jesus replicated himself 100-fold, just as a dying seed brings forth life multiplied (see Matt. 12:42). Using the “name of Jesus” (which represents all that He is) puts a demand upon the New Covenant. This was revealed to Stanley when tribesmen bowed to him because of the spear. It represented the chief himself, “Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9-11).

ENDNOTES
19. See Deuteronomy 1:39.
20. E. W. Kenyon, The Blood Covenant, (Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, Lynnwood, WA, 1969), p. 5.
21. Ibid, p. 10.
22. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, p. 1100.