Are there hidden codes in the Bible?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2003.

Certain writers presume—indeed they state—that the Bible is a cryptic code, whose message has to be decoded by experts of one kind and another.

This, I must say, I very much doubt. There is no hint in the plain text of the Bible that it is in fact a cryptic code, and means something more and something different from what the Bible itself is saying explicitly.

When it comes to predicting the future, God himself explicitly tells us many things in his word. Indeed, in the last words of the Revelation, our Lord himself tells the Apostle John that he has sent his angel to him with this testimony for the churches (Revelation 22:16).

Moreover, we are told in the Epistles of Paul about the mysteries that the Old Testament contained, which have now been fully revealed through Christ and through his apostles. Those mysteries were not codes. Understanding them does not depend on taking the letters of the text of Scripture and rearranging them by computer and then reading them, sometimes vertically, sometimes horizontally, sometimes obliquely; in which case, the meaning extracted from the code is utterly different from what the text is saying by itself.

Above all, it seems to me that if God had intended to give us some message through an inspired code 'beneath the surface of the Bible', the first message he would have encoded would have been that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

Yours very sincerely in Christ,