Church
services on Sunday were uneventful. We spent more time on Daniel nine this
week, focusing on the purpose of the prophecy contained in the final
four verses therein.
“I
got to thinking,” I began, “that we spent so much time last week talking about what
prophecy was, and its purpose being in the Bible at all is. So, right
here IN the book of Daniel, in fact immediately
before the chapter that we were reading. Flip back over to Daniel 9, to the
segment right before Daniel 10 that we’ve been looking at these last two
sessions, and let’s read verses 24 thought 27. These,” I add partly in buildup
and partly to give them time to find the passage, “are perhaps the most
important prophecies about the End Times in the Old Testament:
“Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your
holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for
iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and
prophet, and to anoint a most holy place. Know therefore and understand that
from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of
an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks. Then for sixty-two weeks
it shall be built again with
squares and moat, but in a troubled time. And after the sixty-two weeks, an
anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing. And the people of the
prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end
shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are
decreed. And he shall make a
strong covenant with many for one week, and
for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the
wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end
is poured out on the desolator.”
“Oh,
what does all of that even mean?”
“Well,
Doris, let’s try to break it down. There’s a lot about readin’ text that’s 2600
years old that we can still relate to today, but there are other places that it
helps to understand the customs or such of the place and time so we can put it
in our 21st century minds a little better.
“The
seventy ‘weeks’ are actually seventy ‘weeks of years’, not of days, or in other
words seventy seven-year segments. So ‘seventy sevens to finish the
transgression’ and all of that means 490 years before the Messiah comes to
finish up the human race’s crimes against God by those six methods there in
verse 24. Then he splits them up. There’s going to be a set of seven
‘weeks’, or 49 years, that they ‘restore and build Jerusalem’ – that’s the
length of time from his writing until the second group of returning prisoners
from Babylon finish doing exactly that, precisely 49 years later. Another
prophecy fulfilled. The next set is sixty-two sevens, or 434
years, until ‘an anointed one shall be cut off
and shall have nothing’.
So that’s sixty-nine of the seventy weeks, 483 years, and that number gets us
to Christ’s first coming. Amazingly, He arrives for the Triumphant Entry
exactly on the DAY of that prediction, exactly 483 years later, the
Anointed One presenting Himself to be ‘cut off’ on that day.”
“No. That’s not possible.”
“Oh,
I know what you mean, Hank. I know. I
didn’t believe it until I did the math myself while I was an undergrad here at
SAGU. Every one of those multi-year prediction things comes true precisely,
no matter what the prophecy was. That’s one of the most tangible proofs we have
of God.”
The awed silence in the room was SO
satisfying as a teacher.
"I wish I could tell you the next part was as clean as that one; there's no definition of the break between the first sixty-nine sevens and the beginning of the seventieth. But there's definitely a break, because he talks about...ah, yes, here in verse 26:
And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war.
And THEN comes the covenant for the last week. Of course, what actually happens is that very soon the "people of the prince" - the Jews - fight back, and Rome utterly destroys Jerusalem. Just as Jesus had predicted at the start of Matthew 24, leading into HIS version of the End of Days, no two stones will remain atop each other. Something like that."
Priscilla stared at her Bible like she was going to see through to the
cover.
“See,
that wouldn’t have even made sense to the people Isaiah was
saying it to! ‘They’ll come destroy the city!! And then you’ll have the
sacrifices going when the next problem hits!’ That wouldn’t have even made
sense to them, would it?”
I
had to smile at this. She couldn’t have
set me up any better had I given her the question before class!
“Priscilla,
THAT is one of the very best
proofs for God’s validity through the Scripture. When WE write stories, or statements,
with a political or historical bent – or for ANY reason, I suppose! – we do so
aiming at what audience? Our CURRENT clients, the people who will read
it right away.
“If
the Bible were faked, by ordinary people of the time, it would
have had signs of being written to satisfy the people it was most directly trying
to fake. However, most of the time,
it was NOT good news for them. One of my favorite Bible jokes isn’t really a
joke at all: A kid asks his dad how he knows the Bible’s real. Without missing
a beat, Dad replies, ‘Mark 11, verses 13 and 14’, and drops the subject.
Kid goes and looks it up. Wait a sec,
gotta find it. OK, here it is:
And
seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, He went to see if He could find
anything on it. When He came to it, He found nothing but leaves, for it was not
the season for figs. And He said to it, “May no one ever eat
fruit from you again.” And His disciples heard it.
“The
kid brings the verses back to Dad, and Dad replies, ‘Yep, that’s it,’ and the
kid says, ‘I don’t get it.’
“Dad’s
reply is priceless, and I think it’s essentially right: ‘Son, if you or I were writing about
Jesus, we’d want to make sure He looked as good as He could, so everyone would worship
Him, right?’ Son agrees. ‘But these
guys didn’t DO that. They included a story like this, that kinda makes
the Son of God look like a bit of a jerk, y’know? So, if stuff like that
made it into the Gospels, I’m going to believe the rest of it’s true,
too.’
“My
point is, there’s a ton of stuff like Mark 11 here that isn’t what you’d
include if ALL you’re worried about is making points with the audience of the
time.
“But
GOD writes with an Eye towards the audience He needs to read it LATER. Revelation
chapters two and three do this. Sometimes, He even writes out predictions that
come true TWICE, in two different eras, under two completely different sets of
people and circumstances. Daniel 11 will be a great example of that later on in
our studies, Priscilla, probably two or three weeks from now.
“This
goes back to something that I left you
with a terrible answer to last week, Doris. When you asked how
God could see all of time at once, I basically shoved the question aside by
saying something like, ‘Because He’s God,
that’s why!’, and that’s not really an answer at all. So let me try to give
you something better.
“We
don’t know HOW He does it. But I think it’s a matter of dimensions. We can only
experience one dimension of time – we
can only go in one direction, forward, at one speed, 60 minutes per hour. But just
like we can look at an entire field at once, because we can see in three
dimensions of space at once, God sees
in more than one time dimension at once, So he sees us, I think, as if he
sees ALL of our lives at once, and in fact the whole of creation at once, too.
“That
doesn’t mean we can’t change things as we go – but God sees the changes,
just like we’d see the changes in a chess board. I don’t know if this is a
perfect analogy; well, I’m pretty
sure it isn’t, I guess. But is it a little better than what I gave you last
week, Doris?”
“It
is, thank you. That does make more
sense to me.”
“Me
too,” chimed her husband Stanley. “I was frustrated more by the question than
your answer, but that answer helps a ton, kid. Thanks.”
Good deed for the day accomplished. Achievement
unlocked.
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