Introduction (superseded — content pending migration)

Why would He conceal His teachings in parables in the first place and how exactly are we to decode the deeper meanings of scripture? How is it that Paul came to understand the deep mysteries of the Old Testament? Many assume “divine inspiration” and yet Paul repeatedly points people to the Old Testament and demonstrates with reason things that have always been there for those with eyes to see.

This book will give you the key that unlocks the Bible’s symbolic language and teach you the process of decoding and discovering the deep meanings lost on those who hear, but do not hear, nor understand. We like to think that the Bible is “straight forward”, and yet the Old Testament contained secrets from the foundation of the world and scripture tells us that everything Jesus spoke publicly was in the form of parables. And not only Jesus’ teachings but even through the prophets of the Old Testament God used similitudes. Paul tells us the very life stories of real people serve a double duty of also being a parable or similitude. And Daniel tells us that many words are “sealed up” until the time of the end when knowledge will increase.

Scripture is encoded line by line, precept upon precept, so that those who will not hear (obey) it will hear (sound) but not understand (3rd sense of hear).

With this we see that Jesus is continuing the pattern of the prophets and speaking in a manner that is lost on those who read the surface and don’t dig deeper. The church today is as it is written in Hebrews:

How many times have you heard pastors give sermons on milk vs meat teachings? How often have they accurately defined the symbolic meaning of milk given by Isaiah? Those with knowledge and understanding of doctrine are weaned from milk, they no longer need consume it because they know how to chew and process the word of God directly. Milk is given to those who cannot understand sound doctrine — babies. Milk is the simplified message, lacking in detail and easy to misunderstand. Meat is the full understanding of the word of God given to those who are willing to obey. Milk lets people hear what they want to hear and interpret how they want to interpret, but sound doctrine is for those diligent enough to put in the work to understand what was actually meant by letting the language of scripture interpret scripture. Milk doesn’t contradict the meat, but meat brings needed clarity to prevent self-delusion.

That understanding is reserved for the obedient is no arbitrary rule; Jesus made the will to obey the very test by which true doctrine is known:

Understanding follows obedience, not the other way around. He that is willing to do God’s will shall know the doctrine; he that will not is left with milk.

There is an objective meaning behind scripture that is encoded in a self-correcting manner that is robust against the natural drift of the meaning of words over time. This drift is called semantic shift and can transform words making their meanings broader, narrower, more positive, more negative, reversing the meaning, and even entirely changing the meaning of the same word. Semantic drift happens in every language and is compounded by translation drift as each translator brings their own context and may ratify a semantic drift of the underlying language into a new language.

Consider how far this has already gone in our own English Bibles. When the King James translators wrote that “he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way” (2 Thessalonians 2:7), the word let meant to hinder — the exact opposite of what it means today, so the one who restrains evil is now misread as the one who permits it. Paul wrote that the living “shall not prevent them which are asleep” (1 Thessalonians 4:15), where prevent meant to precede, to go before; its modern sense, to stop, leaves the verse meaningless. “Be careful for nothing” (Philippians 4:6) once forbade anxiety, yet now it sounds like a call to be careless. A “peculiar people” (1 Peter 2:9) meant a people for God’s own treasured possession, not a people who are merely odd. And to “replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28) rendered a Hebrew word that means simply to fill it — yet today replenish suggests filling it again, a reading used to teach a former world destroyed and repopulated, a doctrine the words never carried.

Even the word at the center of this chapter has drifted: meat, in “milk and meat,” meant food of any kind — not the animal flesh it calls to mind today.

In every case the remedy is the same. We do not recover the meaning by preference or guesswork, but by letting Scripture define its own words — comparing every place a term appears until the original sense is forced back into view. The drift of a single English word cannot bury the meaning, because the meaning was never carried by that word alone, but by its relationships across the whole of Scripture.

God utilized symbolic language throughout scripture in such a manner that the true meaning of words, which I call symbols, are defined by other scriptures which are in turn also defined in terms of symbols. It doesn’t matter what language the Bible is translated into, so long as the translation is approximately literal and consistent the information encoded in the relationship between concepts remains.

A symbol is an idea; the word is only the label that points to it — the two are not the same thing. The meaning of a symbol is not stored in the dictionary meaning of its word; it is established by the relationships among the words throughout Scripture — every place a word is used, and every other word it stands beside, along with the symbolic meanings those words in turn carry. This is exactly how the studies in this book work: to learn what a symbol means we never reach first for a definition, we gather every passage where its word appears and let those connections — to other words, other passages — define it. Because the meaning lives in those relationships and not in the label, it survives translation: change the words, and the relationships among them, and therefore the symbols they define, remain. Modern AI is living proof of this. No one feeds a translation model a dictionary of definitions; it learns the meaning of every word in every language purely from how the words relate to one another across mountains of text, and from those relationships alone it carries an idea faithfully from one language into another. If the meaning lived in the words themselves, this would be impossible.

But AI is only the proof of concept — never the judge, and never proof of any particular interpretation. We do not use it to render conclusions; it has no authority to settle what Scripture says, and it carries biases of its own. What the principle gives us is fully in our own hands: because the meaning lives in the relationships, we can search the whole Bible, gather every place a word is used, and let those uses define one another — line upon line, precept upon precept — until Scripture interprets itself.

In ancient times only an elite few, such as Paul, had access to the scriptures and the dedicated time to study and memorize all of scripture.

When you have such a large body memorized you can quickly recall and identify patterns and connections in the text that are lost on those reading it for the first time or even the 7th time. And it is with this kind of diligent study that someone like Paul can reveal and expound upon mysteries of the Old Testament. These same mysteries could be understood without Paul’s explanation if you understand the symbolic language of the Old Testament scripture and know how to apply it.

As Daniel prophesied, knowledge in these last days has increased: the patterns that once demanded a lifetime of memorization are now within reach of anyone. Modern tools — AI among them — let us search the whole of Scripture not only by exact words but by concept, and that matters, because no translation is perfectly consistent. Whether you read the KJV, the ESV, the NASB, or the most literal version you can find, each one renders a single Hebrew or Greek word with several different English words. Each rendering captures the idea in its own verse, but quietly hides the thread that ties those verses together. The symbolic link lives in the original word; the translation conceals it. These tools let the ordinary reader see through to that underlying word and gather every place it occurs — surfacing patterns that are all but invisible in English.

As you come to see how often this happens, you develop an instinct: reading along in English, you begin to sense when a word may carry a symbolic connection back in the Hebrew — and that hunch can now be tested in seconds. It is like working a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece that falls into place makes the next easier to predict, because you are no longer staring at fragments but beginning to see the whole picture — and the whole picture tells you what the missing pieces must look like. In this way we can decode many of Jesus’ parables on our own and then check our work against his own explanations, verifying whether we are interpreting Scripture by Scripture, or merely reading our preconceptions into the words on the page.

One caution keeps this honest: the matching is structural, not a matter of spelling. The same idea often wears more than one word, and more than one image — a kingdom is drawn as a mountain and also as a tree; a reserved boundary is called a wing, a border, a corner, an edge. So when a thread seems to connect two verses in English, it is often, though not always, the trace of a single Hebrew or Greek word beneath. The thematic link is the thing to follow; the exact word, where it agrees, is the confirmation, not the requirement. This holds doubly in the New Testament, much of which was likely first spoken and written in Hebrew: its Greek has already passed through one translation — one layer of compression and semantic shift — before it ever reached English. So we read for the structure that survives every such layer: the recurring shape of an idea, defined by its company across the whole of Scripture.

There is a deeper layer still, because the Hebrew was first written with consonants alone. The vowel points that now fix each word were added by scribes roughly a thousand years after the consonants were set — a help to the reader, but a late and human one, not above question. Where the points settle on one reading they can bury another the bare consonants allow; and even where the pointing is sound, the unpointed letters often hold a second word standing inside the first — not by accident, but as a wordplay that is part of the meaning. The letters aleph-shin spell “fire” (esh); add the letter he and the same consonants spell, under one pointing, “woman” (ishshah) and, under another, “an offering made by fire” (ishsheh) — written exactly alike, parted only by the points. So when the proverb asks, “Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?… So he that goeth in to his neighbour’s wife” (Proverbs 6:27-29), the strange woman is the fire in the bosom, and the garment she burns is his righteousness. And the same letters run beneath the prophets’ taunt that a beaten army “shall become as women” (Jeremiah 50:37): the word for woman is built on the word for fire, so the routed host that is unmanned is, on those very letters, consumed — Babylon’s mighty men “became as women” in the same breath that “they have burned her dwellingplaces” (Jeremiah 51:30). The points choose one word; the consonants carry both, and the symbol is the richer for it.

This book will give you the process and demonstrate its application in dozens of examples. The process is “deterministic” and “objective” — anchored in the text itself rather than in the reader’s preferences — which is exactly what allows it to correct us when our conclusions are merely what we wished to find, and what so often sets its results against popular teaching. The relationship between words, language, and symbols used throughout scripture is so consistent and unexpected that one cannot help but conclude the book is supernatural. It was written by countless authors over thousands of years and yet contains a symbolic vocabulary of hundreds of words used consistently in ways that the author of any individual part would have a hard time knowing in advance.

As you dive into the meat of this book, some of it will be hard to chew, and some will challenge deeply held beliefs. Many, I expect, will be troubled by what looks like a “works-based salvation” — the constant calls to obedience that arise on their own as we let Scripture speak for itself. I urge you to hear the Scripture out before you weigh any conclusion against what you already hold. But I know some will stop reading before they reach the careful answer in The Path to Salvation, so let me say it plainly here: nothing we do earns our way into the kingdom. We obey because it is our duty. You do not earn a paycheck by doing your duty, and you do not settle your debt of sin merely by beginning to obey. To keep even the least of His commands, with all our heart and mind and strength, is only to stop digging the debt deeper — and so to stop grieving the Spirit of grace. It is by His grace alone that we are saved, and by His Spirit that we are given power to overcome sin (the transgression of the law) with good (the keeping of it). The full scriptural case is laid out in the chapter Grace, Mercy & the Gift.

After reading this book and learning the Bible’s Symbolic Language you will have new eyes and deeper understanding of every verse you read. You will have the tools to be a Berean, searching the scripture to test everything and discern what is true. You will make new connections beyond what this book expounds upon, and you will finally know the difference between milk and meat.