"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings."
A Father's Preface
Every treasure hunter needs tools.
You wouldn't go looking for buried gold with your bare hands. You'd bring a map, a compass, maybe a metal detector. The tools don't create the treasure — the treasure was already there. But without the right tools, you'll walk right over it.
The Bible is the same way.
Most people read Scripture on the surface — and the surface is genuinely beautiful. Salvation, grace, the life of Jesus, the Psalms, the promises of God. You could spend a lifetime right there and never go hungry.
But there is a deeper layer. A hidden architecture. A mathematical skeleton beneath the stories and the poetry. And to see it, you need to know which tools to pick up.
This article introduces those tools. And while we're getting acquainted with them, we'll follow one thread — the number 26 — just far enough to show you what the tools can do.
The One Rule
We build from truth, not toward it.
The method only has integrity if Scripture confirms itself before we draw any conclusions from the numbers. A numerical "coincidence" that hasn't been anchored in verified Scripture first is just a trick. Tricks dazzle for a moment, then collapse under scrutiny — and a collapsed trick doesn't just fail on its own. It poisons the well for the reader who went looking in good faith.
There are more than enough genuine, confirmed, mutually-reinforcing connections in Scripture to fill a lifetime of discovery. We will never need to fabricate or stretch.
The rule is simple: establish the truth in the text first. Then let the numbers confirm it.
Tool #1: Strong's Exhaustive Concordance
In the 1800s, a man named James Strong (1822–1894) undertook one of the most remarkable projects in biblical scholarship: he personally indexed every single word in the King James Bible, organizing them alphabetically and assigning each original Hebrew or Greek word its own unique number.
The result, published in 1890, was Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible.
Here is how it works:
- You look up any English word — say, "love."
- The concordance shows you every verse in the Bible that contains that word.
- Each entry is cross-referenced to a number — the Strong's number — pointing you to the original Hebrew or Greek word, its definition, and its root.
The Bible was not originally written in English. It was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek — ancient languages that carry layers of meaning that don't always survive translation. Strong's lets you reach past the English and touch the original word.
James Strong built this tool in the 1880s with no computer and no way to know what the numbers would eventually reveal. He was just doing his work faithfully.
Tool #2: Webster's 1828 Dictionary
Noah Webster (1758–1843) is best known for standardizing American spelling and building the foundation of American English literacy. In 1828, he published An American Dictionary of the English Language — the first truly comprehensive American dictionary.
What most people don't know is that Webster was a deeply committed Christian scholar who learned multiple languages specifically to trace word roots back to their biblical origins. His definitions don't just tell you what a word means — they tell you what it originally meant, grounded in the understanding of the men who framed Western civilization.
Modern dictionaries reflect modern assumptions — including many that have quietly erased God from the definitions where He once stood. Webster's 1828 has not been revised. It still carries the original freight of meaning.
When you use Webster's 1828 alongside Strong's concordance, you gain two lenses simultaneously — the original Hebrew or Greek meaning, and the original English meaning — both pointing toward the same God.
Tool #3: Verse Position
The Bible contains 31,102 verses, and they can be counted sequentially from first to last. Every verse in Scripture has a position number. Genesis 1:1 is verse #1. Revelation 22:21 — the last verse of the Bible — is verse #31,102. There are 23,145 verses in the Old Testament from Genesis 1:1 to Malachi 4:6, and there are 7,957 verses in the New Testament from Matthew 1:1 to Revelation 22:21.
Here is where it gets interesting.
Strong's numbers are not random. Each one corresponds to a specific word in the original language. When you take a Strong's number and use it as a position — finding that numbered verse in Scripture — you land somewhere specific. And when the words that matter most are pointing to verses that say exactly what those words mean, the results are not random.
The method runs both directions. You can count forward from a known point, or work backward. Either way, you are not constructing a result — you are discovering a position that was already there, waiting.
The Number 26 — A Path
Let's walk this together the way the discovery actually happens. Not starting with a number. Starting with a statement.
"God is love."
Everyone has heard that. It may be the most familiar sentence in all of Scripture. So familiar, in fact, that most people have stopped wondering what it actually means.
We are going to start wondering.
Phase One — The Number Finds Us
What is love?
Not sentimentally — precisely. When John says God is love, what Greek word is he using? We open Strong's concordance, find the word Love, and glance through all the verses that contain the word, and we see 1 John 4:8 ... God is love. 26. We understand that 26 is the entry in the Greek Dictionary in the back of the Strong's Concordance. We turn to the back — find the Greek dictionary — and look it up.
The word is agape (ἀγάπη). The highest, purest, selfless love. Not affection. Not sentiment. The love that gives without calculating the return. The love that is a nature, not just a feeling.
Strong's Greek number for agape is 26.
We weren't looking for a number. We asked a question about love, and the concordance handed us one. We set it aside for a moment.
Then — perhaps from something we once heard, perhaps from something half-remembered — we think of the Hebrew name of God. YHWH. The four letters that form God's personal name in the Old Testament.
In Hebrew, every letter carries a numerical value. This is called gematria — a tool as old as the language itself. The values of the four letters of YHWH are: Yod (10) + He (5) + Vav (6) + He (5) = 26.
That is the same number.
We are curious now. One more check. Take the English word GOD and assign each letter its position in the alphabet: G is the 7th letter, O is the 15th, D is the 4th. Add them together: 7 + 15 + 4 = 26.
Three times. Three different systems. Three different languages. The same number.
We didn't go looking for 26. We asked what love was and 26 kept showing up. In the Greek word for love. In the Hebrew name of God. In the English word for God.
That's worth noticing.
Now we are asking a different kind of question. Not what is love? but what is 26? We have seen this number in three places and we want to know if it goes anywhere. We pick up the thread and follow it.
Phase Two — Following the Number
Where does 26 lead?
We could have started here if we kept seeing the number 26 everywhere and didn't know anything about it. But here, we arrived at this question noticing a pattern in Scripture.
We open the Bible to the beginning and count. Genesis 1:1 is verse one. We count forward to the 26th verse.
The 26th verse of the entire Bible is Genesis 1:26:
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."
The 26th verse of Scripture is the moment God creates humanity in His own image.
Strong's # 26 is Love. The 26th verse of the Bible is the moment we are made in the image of God.
Put it together: we were made in the image of Love.
That is not a coincidence we manufactured. That is a verse — fixed in place for thousands of years — confirming what the number already said in three separate systems. The 26th verse and Strong's #26 are saying the same thing in two different languages at the same time.
The body agrees.
Now we notice something we have carried around our whole lives without thinking about it.
The human foot has 26 bones.
We walk in Love — on feet built with 26 bones.
What about the hands?
The human hand has 27 bones.
Now that is the very next number.
We are not done. We are uncovering where this path now leads before it lets us rest.
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
Now we look at the Strong's...
Strong's Greek #27 is agapetos — Beloved.
The one to whom agape is given. The recipient of love.
Two consecutive Strong's numbers. Two consecutive verses. One complete picture:
Strong's #26 / Genesis 1:26 — we are made in the image of Love.
Strong's #27 / Genesis 1:27 — we are made for Love... to be Beloved.
We were created from love. We were created for love. That is the opening statement of the human story, written twice — once in the verse numbers, once in the word numbers.
We give Love — with hands built with 27 bones.
The body is not an accident. It is a declaration. God signed His intentions into the architecture of the frame He gave us before we ever opened a concordance.
The last word on language before Christ.
Do you know that the word language appears exactly 26 times before the first mention of Jesus? And once more after?
The 26th and final occurrence in the Old Testament - is this:
"For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve him with one consent."
The 26th occurrence of language is God's promise to restore to humanity the one language we were always made to speak.
The language of Love.
The Chinese Language
On the topic of the human hand, it might not be obvious that there are 27 bones, but we all learned to count to 10 on our fingers. The Chinese Language looked at the same ideas from a different perspective. Before Babel, the mastery of language was at its peak, and the secrets of heaven were as an open book. Here, we get a glimpse of a fragment that Chinese took in their symbol for 10.
This is what the Chinese saw when they looked at their hands and counted to 10... They saw love.
A Glance Down the Path
The path does not end here. It never ends.
26 × 26 = 676.
Hebrew Strong's #676 is the word for finger — the finger of God.
The finger that wrote the Ten Commandments in stone. Those commandments are so often read as a legal code — a list of demands from a distant judge. But the finger that wrote them is the same finger that stooped in the dust to defend a woman her accusers wanted to stone, writing words no one else recorded.
The commandments were not law pressed down from above. They were the love-language of a God who wanted to be known.
That thread has its own article. For now, it is enough to see that the path continues — that it opened from a simple question about love, and that it has not stopped opening since.
For the Young Person Reading This
Think about your favorite game, movie, or series — the ones with Easter eggs. A detail in the background that foreshadows the ending. A name with a double meaning. A number that keeps appearing. The creators buried those on purpose, for the people paying close enough attention to find them.
God did this with Scripture — at a scale and with a precision no human author could match.
The Strong's numbers, the verse positions, the word roots — these are not the treasure. They are the map. They are God's way of saying to the person willing to look carefully: I was here. I planned this. I wrote your name into this book before you were born.
The treasure is the God who hid it.
Your Toolkit
- Strong's Concordance — Free here or online at BlueLetterBible.org. Look up any word, find its Strong's number, and begin.
- Webster's 1828 Dictionary — Free here or at webstersdictionary1828.com. Look up any word and read its original definition. You will be surprised how much has been lost in translation to modern language.
- Wade's research tool — [NewJerusalem.org] — Here. Built specifically for the kind of digging described in this article.
- Your own curiosity — the most important tool of all. Don't take anyone's word for it. Dig for yourself.
"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you."
Closing Thought
James Strong spent years of his life building a tool so that ordinary people — not just scholars — could reach into the original languages of Scripture and touch what God actually said.
Noah Webster spent years building a dictionary so that ordinary Americans could understand their language the way its founders did — grounded in the God who made them.
Neither of them knew about the hidden layer. They were just doing their work faithfully, one entry at a time.
God used their faithfulness to build the map.
That is what He does.
Reflection Questions
- Before reading this article, did you know that Genesis 1:26, the 26th verse of the Bible, could connect to Strong's or that Strong's #26 was the Greek word for love? What does that layering suggest to you about who wrote this book?
- We were made in the image of Love, and made to be Beloved — two consecutive truths in two consecutive verses. How does that change the way you see yourself?
- What word would you want to look up first in Strong's? What do you think you might find?