Thy Kingdom Come, page 7
Daniel was an elderly man at this time. He had been in exile for about sixty-seven years—a number that’s very important, as we will see below. He was now serving in the court of Darius, king of the Medo-Persian Empire.
Daniel recorded that in the first year of Darius’s reign, he “observed in the books the number of the years which was revealed as the word of the LORD to Jeremiah the prophet for the completion of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years” (Dan. 9:2). In other words, Daniel was having his devotions one day when he read something in the prophecy of Jeremiah that apparently startled him. Daniel was probably reading Jeremiah 25:11–12:
“This whole land will be a desolation and a horror, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years.
Then it will be when seventy years are completed I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation,” declares the LORD, “for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans; and I will make it an everlasting desolation.”
Later Jeremiah recorded this promise from the Lord: “For thus says the LORD, ‘When seventy years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill My good word to you, to bring you back to this place’” (29:10). Daniel was almost certainly aware of this prophecy too.
Here’s what jumped off the page to Daniel. He was reading this in 538 BC, sixty-seven years after Nebuchadnezzar had come to Jerusalem in 605 BC and taken Daniel and other Israelites as captives to Babylon. God said through Jeremiah that Israel’s captivity would last seventy years—so, due to understanding the nature of prophecy and God’s Word, Daniel realized that Israel’s captivity was about to end.
Daniel’s Repentance
The first thing Daniel did after reading Jeremiah was not run out and tell his fellow Israelite exiles to put their Babylonian real estate on the market and start packing.
Instead, Daniel immediately fell on his face and poured out his heart to God in an incredible prayer of confession and repentance on behalf of his nation Israel (Dan. 9:3–19). In this prayer, Daniel personally identified with the sins of Israel more than thirty times. Why did Daniel do this? Because he knew the Law of Moses, including the blessings God had promised Israel for obedience and the curses He had pronounced against them if they disobeyed.
We looked at these earlier in Deuteronomy 28, noting that the curse for disobedience included banishment from the land of Israel. I’m convinced Daniel also knew God’s promise that if Israel in her exile would return to Him in repentance, He would bring the people back to their land (Deut. 30:1–4).
It’s obvious from the way Daniel prayed that he knew the Law: “Indeed all Israel has transgressed Your law and turned aside, not obeying Your voice; so the curse has been poured out on us, along with the oath which is written in the law of Moses the servant of God, for we have sinned against Him” (Dan. 9:11).
Israel’s Sin
Before we go any further in Daniel, what was Israel’s particular sin that brought the judgment of God upon the nation in the form of the seventy-year Babylonian captivity? The answer is also in the Mosaic Law, having to do with the land itself:
Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, “When you come into the land which I shall give you, then the land shall have a sabbath to the LORD. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its crop, but during the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath rest, a sabbath to the LORD; you shall not sow your field nor prune your vineyard.” (Lev. 25:2–4)
This command to let the land of Israel rest every seventh year goes back to creation, when God rested on the seventh day and sanctified it. Sabbath observance was later made a part of Moses’ Law (Ex. 20:8–11).
God rested and enjoyed His creation on the seventh day, and He wanted His people to quit their work and enjoy Him every seventh day. He also wanted to teach them that He could provide for their needs quite adequately in six days. It was an issue of trusting God to provide on that seventh day.
So the people of Israel were to have a Sabbath rest every seventh day, and the land was to have a Sabbath rest every seventh year. During that year, the people were not to plant or harvest any crops, but trust God to provide for them.
It would take faith on the Israelites’ part to believe that God would give them enough food to last them all of that seventh year if they obeyed Him and quit farming after six years. But that is exactly what God wanted from His people: their faith in Him and obedience to His commands.
God also added a warning of what would happen if Israel failed to observe its Sabbath years and let the land lie fallow:
I will scatter [you] among the nations and will draw out a sword after you, as your land becomes desolate and your cities become waste.
Then the land will enjoy its sabbaths all the days of the desolation, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. All the days of its desolation it will observe the rest which it did not observe on your sabbaths, while you were living on it. (Lev. 26:33–35)
Because the nation did in fact fail to observe the Sabbath year, this warning became a prophecy of future captivity. The northern kingdom of Israel was taken by Assyria, and the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered and enslaved by Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar.
In other words, the Israelites were working the land all seven years instead of trusting God, so He removed them from the land. This brings us back full circle to the book of Daniel, where the Israelites were actually living out the punishment described hundreds of years earlier in the Law and later prophesied in the book of Jeremiah.
Israel’s Exile
Apparently, the exile was for seventy years because Israel had failed to observe seventy Sabbath years. The language of the curse suggests that Israel would be in exile until the land received all the rest it had missed during their years of disobedience. So God decreed one year of exile for each Sabbath year missed. Remember, the promise of restoration in Deuteronomy 30:1–4 was conditioned on the nation’s repentance.
Now we know why Daniel fell on his face and prayed the way he did. He realized that even though God had given His people a prophetic timetable for their return to Israel, that timetable would not be actualized apart from repentance. Daniel offered a tremendous prayer of repentance on behalf of his nation.
THE PROPHECY REVEALED TO DANIEL
Now we’re ready for the next link in this chain. It was while Daniel was praying that God sent the angel Gabriel to him with the prophecy of the seventy weeks.
It’s not recorded in Daniel’s prayer that he asked God to show him what was next on Israel’s agenda after the Babylonian captivity was over. But that would be a natural question on Daniel’s mind, and perhaps he was wondering what God was going to do with His people.
The Prophecy’s Duration
This is the question that Gabriel was sent to answer (Dan. 9:20–24). The angel told Daniel, “I have now come forth to give you insight with understanding … so give heed to the message and gain understanding of the vision” (vv. 22–23).
What follows in verses 24–27 is the prophecy called the seventy weeks, literally “seventy sevens.” The idea is not seventy units of seven days each, but seventy units of seven years each. This fits the context, because Daniel had just been reading in Jeremiah about the seventy years of captivity. Also, the prophecy covers far too much time to be anything but seventy units of seven years, or a total of 490 years.
The prophecy begins, “Seventy weeks have been decreed for your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy place” (Dan. 9:24).
The Prophecy’s Specifics
Gabriel gave Daniel six specific things that would be accomplished during the period of the seventy weeks. This 490-year period would “finish the transgression,” a reference to ending Israel’s rebellion and bringing her to repentance. God would also “make an end of sin,” imparting to the Israelites new spiritual life through the new covenant.
Gabriel also said the seventy weeks would “make atonement for iniquity,” pointing forward to the death of Christ as the final atonement offered for Israel’s sin. The fourth item on the list is “to bring in everlasting righteousness” (Dan. 9:24). This is a reference to Christ’s millennial kingdom when He will rule in righteousness and the righteous will rule with Him (Jer. 23:5–6).
The final two items on the angel’s list are “to seal up vision and prophecy,” to fulfill all the prophecies concerning Israel, and to “anoint the most holy place.” Since the word place is not in the original, I take it Gabriel is referring to the anointing of the Messiah.
The Prophecy’s Starting Point
That’s the panorama of the entire period. Then the angel revealed to Daniel how the seventy weeks would unfold. “So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress” (Dan. 9:25).
The angel said that God’s prophetic clock would start ticking on this period of seventy weeks when a decree was issued to rebuild Jerusalem. From that moment until the appearance of the Messiah would be seven plus sixty-two weeks, which in the formula of the weeks is 483 years. Keep that figure in mind.
The decree referred to in Daniel 9 would not be issued until more than one hundred years after Daniel, in 444 BC by the Persian king Artaxerxes. The decree came about because of the burden for Jerusalem and the mighty prayer of Nehemiah, a Jewish exile and the king’s trusted servant (Neh. 1:1–11).
You probably know the story. Artaxerxes noticed Nehemiah’s distress and asked him what was wrong. When Nehemiah explained his agony over the desolate condition of Jerusalem, Artaxerxes sent him back to Jerusalem with permission to rebuild the city and gave him official letters to acquire what he needed. This was the decree referred to in Daniel 9:25.
Nehemiah 2:1 pinpoints the date for us on this decree because he said it came in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes’ reign. So we can establish the date as 444 BC. That’s when the clock started counting down on Daniel’s seventy weeks.
Some Jews in exile had gone back to Jerusalem prior to this time, but from the standpoint of Israel’s prophetic timetable it was the decree of Artaxerxes that got the clock moving. Within the first seven weeks of Daniel’s prophecy, or forty-nine years, the city was rebuilt “even in times of distress” (Dan. 9:25). Nehemiah experienced some of those times in Jerusalem himself as his enemies first taunted him and then tried to kill him.
The Prophecy’s Messiah
The next distinct segment in the seventy weeks is the sixty-two weeks from the time of Jerusalem’s restoration until the appearance of the Messiah. Altogether, then, the angel said we are to count off sixty-nine weeks, or 483 years, from the decree concerning Jerusalem to the Messiah.
Now we’re ready for Daniel 9:26, the next piece of the prophecy. “Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined.”
This is where we see a clear break between the end of the sixty-ninth week and the beginning of the seventieth week. Messiah’s cutting off was a prophecy of Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, after which Jerusalem would suffer another destruction by a different people.
The “prince who is to come” is a reference to the Antichrist, the final world ruler who will reign over a restored Roman Empire. This is the “little horn” (Dan. 7:8) who seizes world power. Therefore, the “people of the prince” has to refer to the Romans, who did in fact come against Jerusalem and so completely destroy the city and the temple in AD 70 that there wasn’t even one stone left on another, as Jesus Himself prophesied (see Matt. 24:2).
That’s the basic scenario of what happened at the end of the first sixty-nine weeks of Daniel’s prophecy. Let’s see how accurate this prophecy is, since Daniel was writing more than five hundred years before the fact.
The Prophecy’s Accuracy
The key to plugging Daniel’s prophecy into history is to know that he was writing about prophetic years, which are different from our calendar years. Whenever the Bible speaks of prophecy it measures time in prophetic years, which are thirty days a month for twelve months, for a total of 360 days a year. This concept of the 360-day prophetic year is arrived at by comparing the last half of Daniel’s seventieth week (Dan. 9:27b), which is three-and-a-half years, with the 1,260 days of Revelation 11:3 and 12:6 and the forty-two months of Revelation 11:2 and 13:5. The number of days works out to thirty days a month, or 360 days a year. Using this figure of 360 days per year, multiplied by the 483 years of Daniel’s first sixty-nine weeks, gives us a total of 173,880 days. This is the length of time from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 444 BC to the Messiah being cut off.
Many Bible students have done the calculations, which show that this length of time brings us from 444 BC to March AD 33, the month in which Jesus was crucified. You can either call this an incredible coincidence or sheer good luck, or you can say God has the whole world in His hands! Like the official at the track meet, He has all the seeming chaos of world events firmly under His control.
So at the end of the sixty-ninth week as prophesied in Daniel 9:26, the Messiah was cut off. Jesus was crucified, and He had nothing. He was a King, but He had no earthly kingdom.
After Christ’s death, the clock stopped ticking on Daniel’s prophecy. The nation of Israel entered a time of parenthesis that continues until this day, and will continue until the tribulation, a seven-year period that will constitute Daniel’s seventieth week.
Just before His crucifixion, Jesus said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. Behold, your house is being left to you desolate!” (Matt. 23:37–38).
Then in Matthew 24:2, Jesus prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple that occurred in AD 70 under the Roman general Titus. Speaking of the temple, Jesus said, “Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another, which will not be torn down.”
This was history before it was written because that’s exactly what happened. Jesus even prophesied that Jerusalem would be trampled by Gentiles, the Romans (Luke 21:24). When the temple was destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans, the Jews lost all their genealogical records of the twelve tribes, since those records were stored in the temple. To this day, the Jews do not know their tribal descent because all those records went up in smoke when the Romans sacked the temple.
But God preserved one genealogy, the record of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the genealogy of Christ in Matthew and Luke. It was necessary to have this record to prove that Jesus was the Messiah. This is all part of God’s prophetic program.
The Prophecy’s Gap
One series of sevens, the seventieth week, stands out as distinct in the prophecy of Daniel 9. The prophet marks a clear division between the first sixty-nine weeks and the seventieth week, but what Daniel didn’t reveal is the nature or the length of the gap separating the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks. We have to turn to the New Testament for that information.
When Jesus told His disciples, “I will build My church” (Matt. 16:18), He was announcing the start of a new program in God’s plan of the ages. What we learn is that the final week of Israel’s prophetic program was being put on hold. The clock has stopped for Israel, and God’s primary focus will now be upon the building of a new entity called the church.
The church is different from national Israel because the church is made up of Jews and Gentiles, coming together to form one new body called the body of Christ (Eph. 2:11–22). God hasn’t ceased His program with Israel, but because Israel did not repent and receive its Messiah, the nation was put on the sidelines, prophetically speaking.
God called a “timeout” on Israel for a period of time called the “church age.” So far, that timeout has lasted for nearly two thousand years, and it continues for Israel today.
DANIEL’S SEVENTIETH WEEK
Now let’s go back to Daniel 9 and finish the prophecy of the seventy weeks:
And he will make a firm covenant with the many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering; and on the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction, one that is decreed, is poured out on the one who makes desolate. (v. 27)
The Israelites were restored to their land after the captivity, but the people did not really repent. Jesus Christ came preaching this message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 4:17). But instead of receiving their Messiah, the nation rejected Him and cut Him off. They put Christ to death on the cross. The crucifixion marked the end of Daniel’s sixty-ninth week and stopped the clock on Israel’s prophetic program.
Starting the Clock Again
That clock will start ticking again during the seven-year period known as the tribulation, as I said above. During this yet-future period, God will complete His program with Israel to bring the nation to repentance, cleanse her of her sin, fulfill His promises, and accomplish all the other things the angel outlined in Daniel 9:24.
