Patterns of Seven
When I saw the multiplicity of sevens in and outside the Tabernacle, and in the Bible as a whole, I decided to count them. For comparison, here is a list of the cardinal numbers along with their number of occurrences, just the ones in the New Testament. I counted each number together with its occurences in non-number compounds, through Semantic Search.
"One" and "two", counted together, are a majority of the cardinal number occurrences in the Greek NT text. However of all the other cardinal number words, "seven" stands out numerically.
NT1520, "one" 280x,
NT1417, "two" 137x,
NT5140, "three" 85x,
NT5064, "four" 53x,
NT4002, "five" 43x,
NT1803, "six" 29x,
NT2033, "seven" 102x,
NT3638, "eight" 14x,
NT1767, "nine" 11x
This also reflects seven's abundance in the Old Testament, mostly in the Torah, the five books of Moses, especially in the books of Exodus and Leviticus - the books describing God's residence and order of service necessary so that He could dwell among His chosen people. (occurrences: Gen - 54x, Exo - 19x, Lev - 46x, Num - 46x, Deut - 11x)
There seem to be innumerable groups of seven "kinds of things" that people keep finding, and not just in the Bible. I began to wonder if there was a deep underlying principle in the natural world. Did God create them to be somehow linked together by sevens? No, it's much more elegant than that. Consider the rainbow. How many colors?
On Quora, Frank Dauenhauer says: "The rainbow is caused by the refraction (breaking up) of light into an infinite number of colors, not just seven. It does present all other colors, but the human eye cannot see and the mind cannot comprehend all of them, so the brain just separates out the main ones and we give them the names we all know..."
Our names for the colors of the rainbow depend on our language and upbringing, along with our color vision, and not on how many colors are visible in the light spectrum. People usually list between six and nine, though artists who work with colors can name quite a few more. But Dauenhauer's explanation immediately reminded me of something else.
Novelist Michael Crichton mentioned a "level 7 data management" in his novel, The Andromeda Strain. When I came across the phrase "level 7 data management" I thought it might be a real thing, since Crichton based his books on current developments in science and technology.
After a bit of sleuthing, I found a reference in a psychology magazine archive for: "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller. His is a well known psychological theory suggesting that our young healthy brains are able to keep in working memory up to seven (plus or minus two) things or objects. Wikipedia calls this paper, "one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. It is often interpreted to argue that the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2. This is frequently referred to as Miller's law."
God seems to have made our brains so that we can remember roughly seven things well. If the number of objects exceeds seven, we might tend to forget some. It is an interesting fact that there are a disproportionate number of sevens in God's Word compared to the other cardinal numbers (except for "one" and "two"). Maybe He wanted us to be able to especially remember His "sevens".
It is not difficult to see the 7-fold pattern contained in both the Tabernacle and the Seven Feasts of YHWH, and also both the Lord's Prayer and Paul's Praise in 1Tim 3:16. Could they be seen as two pairs? Type with antitype; prophecy with fulfillment? Yeshua called Himself the Way, and David said God's Way is in the Tabernacle. Our Father created the pattern for His dwelling place. And then Yeshua, as that pattern's embodiment, laid down His life so that we, His family for eternity, could have fellowship with Him now and forever in His House of Prayer.
We are remaking ourselves into His likeness as we pray according to the pattern of His magnificent model prayer that fulfills the Tabernacle pattern. We do this as we live in the flow of time. YHWH's seven annual "Feasts", literally "rehearsals," are the signposts of YHWH's plan for the ages. On their exact appointed days two thousand years ago, within a span of two months, the culmination of Yeshua's life fulfilled the first four of those Feasts -- Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits and Pentecost (Hebrew: Shavuot, or "Weeks"). After Yeshua's exact fulfilling of those Feasts, we know where we are on the timeline of YHWH's Plan of Redemption.
The prophesied events that comprise the fulfillments of the last three Feasts of YHWH, may also all happen within the short span of their actual calendar dates, from the Feast of Trumpets (Rosh haShanah), through the fast of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), to the last great day of the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), -- three weeks. No one knows exactly what year, day, or hour the heavenly trumpets will sound. We need to be found doing faithfully what He has given us to do. As we see the first four promised fulfillments already past, it brings us hope and expectation as we perceive events coming into alignment with the three fulfillments finally to come.