We have always been taught chapter and verse references were added hundreds of years after the text was written. It seems impossible they would have any inspired meaning?
A reason we find it difficult to consider Bible book chapter and verse numbers to be inspired is that history tells us they were added hundreds of years after the Bible was canonized and were even added in a very arbitrary way. If this is so then it’s impossible that they could be inspired by God. But we should remember that the entire Bible was written by 40 different authors over 2000 years and we consider it a fully inspired word of God. God could have inspired the numbers in the same way he inspired the original text of the Bible -the authors thought they were doing it from their own thinking and yet God was working through them as every character and number were written down on paper. More importantly, the evidence for the patterns demand a supernatural creator. No matter what history or our minds tell us, we must consider the evidence that a pattern and number meanings exist that cannot be explained outside of them being a creation of God.
