Daniel Lesson 38
Interruption, Problem I, What are the “Weeks”? – Daniel 9:24-27
We will be working our way through one of the most difficult prophetic passages in God’s Word and it will probably take a week on each verse. There are seven major interpretation problems in verses 24-27 of Daniel 9. We want to work our way carefully through these because Daniel 9 is the heart of Daniel’s wisdom of history. And I remind you again that this book is the most attacked book of Scripture; if you are a Christian and you want to defend yourself in a mature way against the anti-supernatural skepticism of our generation you must know your way through this book of Daniel. This is where it’s at, because if the opponents of the Bible can undo the claim that Daniel is prophetic, they can undo the entire New Testament. It’s like a set of dominoes, it all goes down together. So this book, particularly this passage, is central.
And don’t think the opponents of the Christian faith haven’t seen this. Professor Collingwood pointed out that Karl Marx, with no obviously clear way of saying this to people, stole his concept of history from Hegel who in turn borrowed it from Daniel. Marx stole from Daniel in two different ways. The communist doctrine of the progress of history is not a dogma that is obvious. If man is but matter and motion, as the communist insist, then it is not obvious that history is progressing any way. It’s not obvious that what the Greeks taught wouldn’t be true, that is history is going nowhere, it’s just chaos. Or as Henry Ford said, history is the sequence of one damned thing after another.
Karl Marx argued that history is progressing somewhere, and therefore your dedicated communist is actually a Christian heretic; he has picked up, though he doesn’t realize it in most cases, he has picked up this whole idea of history from the Bible. And the route between Daniel 9 and Karl Marx has two branches; one branch is that Daniel teaches a premillennialism, that is, that history is headed toward a goal in which the perfect social order will be brought in by Jesus Christ catastrophically and miraculously with His return. Karl Marx borrowed the concept of a perfect society from the Bible, except he subtracted grace, and argued yes, we too want a perfect society but instead of waiting for Jesus to bring it in and instead of being grace oriented, we will be works oriented in and we will bring it in ourselves. That’s Karl Marx dogma of progress by revolution into a future perfect, he thought, social order. Karl Marx also borrowed his concept of history by reading Hegel. Hegel had a concept of four kingdoms and it was quite obvious to scholars who have studied Hegel closely where Hegel got his four kingdoms from; he stole them from the book of Daniel. So whether you trace Marx back through Hegel or whether you trace Marx back to the millennial vision of a perfect society, it all comes back to Scripture. And this is why in fighting communism your best assault is to go back to the Christian faith. Communism has nothing to offer the Christian; absolutely nothing.
We have studied in Daniel 9 Daniel’s great prayer. We have studied his confession, we have studied his confession; we have studied how Daniel is now about to receive extra revelation. At this point it’s good to go back and check and make sure we understand what revelation is all about, not the book of Revelation, the concept of revelation.
The Christian faith is grounded on this whole point; if this slips everything slips. It is this point that Marx denies, that the autonomous western liberal denies. It is this seed which is at the basis for the left, and the media in particular, the hatred of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Someone said if you put Solzhenitsyn’s writings in their chronological order you notice how he has progressively come to the Christian position. How he has we don’t know. Dr. Erickson who is the leading Solzhenitsyn scholar in the United States, who incidentally is an independent fundamentalist, believes that Solzhenitsyn is now a Christian, but how he became a Christian we don’t know. All we know is that back in the early days in the 30’s Solzhenitsyn began to write certain plays in which he realizes the Marxist dogma of soulless man is wrong. And he seemed to be frustrated with the fact that the communist explanation for man was wrong and he began to seek extra material sources, and from there he argued that man must have a soul, and this led from one thing to another till his most recent speech in attacking the western power’s foreign policy in which he argues that the western powers are proceeding in the international realm amorally, without any concept of right or wrong and the western liberals who were so busy to greet Solzhenitsyn when he came to Switzerland, and who now are so busy trying to dismantle his character and call him insane argue yes that’s what we don’t like about Solzhenitsyn; we like the fact that he’s a dissident but how dare Solzhenitsyn base his dissidence on an absolute 19th century concept of right and wrong. And that’s what people can’t stand.
In Daniel 9 Daniel reminds us of revelation. Solzhenitsyn’s position makes sense only if revelation is true. Revelation is verbal; revelation is God physically speaking to man in history, not all the time. Be careful here; revelation is verbal meaning that God doesn’t show a vision and have sort of like a divine stream of charades in which shows up and we ask Him what He does and He kind of moves around with spooky lights. God speaks words into history and in the book of Daniel we find this under a military analogy of the angelic realm. The angels were called the [gives Hebrew words, can’t understand] army of Jehovah, just like the modern Israeli army is called the [Hebrew words, can’t understand], the armies of the defense of Israel. Tsaba’ is this word for host, and in here you have God as commander in chief of the universe who gives an order to Gabriel. Gabriel passes the order down to Daniel.
God does not go directly to Daniel as He would if Daniel were a prophet. And the reason that He doesn’t is because Daniel is a statesman inside the kingdom of man, and because Daniel is inside the kingdom of man as a statesman he is not functioning directly as a prophet, thus no direct communication. It is indirect but the concept is the same. God cuts the order, God transmits it through Gabriel. This is a verbal order; it is not intended to be misunderstood. No one gives orders or speaks or writes not expecting someone to understand. That’s what’s so wrong with this idea, well, I don’t read the Bible because after all, it can just mean anything. That’s a very stupid way of looking at literature. I don’t know of anyone approaching the great books of the western world of saying well, Aristotle or Plato or Kant can mean anything. Those men didn’t write those books to mean anything; they wrote them to mean something, something that could be understood, something that could be communicated. And thus God is no exception, He too writes His book to be understood. The problem really is, we don’t want to say it, but we really are just lazy.
The second principle of revelation is that it is personal. That means that we are not neutral in this situation. After God has said I love you, you either say fine or I reject it, but you can’t remain neutral. The personal quality of revelation forces us off the fence. We hear the Word of God and we bow the knee or we don’t bow the knee, one or the other, there’s no neutrality.
The third concept or characteristic is that revelation is historical. That means that God does not speak at all times and all places to all men, He speaks in some places sometimes to some men. God speaks selectively in history and He hasn’t spoken a word since 100 AD. We live in an era of the silence of God, just as there was a silence of God between 450 BC and the time of John the Baptist; some 400 years there there was a silence of God, well testified and godly people knew that. Now in our day there are people who are impatient with the silence of God and they want to create on the basis of their own imagination certain private ecstatic experiences. God the Holy Spirit is not giving a new revelation and won’t until the prophets just prior to Jesus’ return operate on the face of the earth. So revelation is historical.
Revelation is comprehensive. That means that wherever God speaks He’s correct. Now it means that God isn’t going to speak on everything, but because He speaks into history to us, there are some areas which He necessarily has to cover. The famous latrine message in Deuteronomy is an evidence of the comprehensiveness of revelation. When God them how to keep their camps clean He told them where to dig the latrine. Now this is not just being funny because in that day, that was before anyone knew about germs. The proof of it was during the Middle Ages millions of people died because they didn’t know where to dig latrines. And yet God, in advance of man’s scientific knowledge, gave him three techniques for maintaining health. (1) All latrines are to be outside of the camp. (2) Clothing that had been around people with various discharges from their body were to be washed and then laid in the sun. Today we recognize that as ultraviolet sterilization. (3) The men who were working with lepers and so on had to wash their hands in running water, not still water, aerated water. Now the point we make is that when God spoke He didn’t explain the germ theory to these people, he didn’t explain ultraviolet radiation, He just said do it, just trust Me, I know what I’m telling you, just do it. And later on we found out why God told us what He did. So this is something to remember, when you see a command in Scripture, you don’t know why it’s there, just do it; you’re trusting God’s character and He does know what He’s telling you.
The fifth thing is that revelation is prophetic; prophetic as used here in the sense that it is beyond man’s knowledge. Revelation gives us information that would otherwise be inaccessible to our minds. Revelation lets us in on what God’s thinking.
So Gabriel, in Daniel 9:21, appears to Daniel, “While I was speaking in prayer, even the man, Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, touched me about the time of the evening oblation.” And he’s using temple time. [22] “And he informed me, and talked with me, and said, O Daniel, I am now come forth to give thee skill and understanding. [23] At the beginning of thy supplications, the commandment came forth,” when it says “the commandment came forth,” it’s a picture of God as Commander in Chief issuing an order, for the Hebrew words here is the idea of a command going forth, is an idiom that was used of the Medo-Persian king when he issued an order. “When the commandment went forth,” God gave the order, so Gabriel said when you started your prayer God issued the order, “the commandment went forth, and I am come to show it to you,” I have come to deliver the order and he made it from wherever he was in the universe to where Daniel was in six minutes or less. One of the questions on the feedback was how can you speak meaningfully of going from one point to another point in the universe when the universe is infinite? Well, who said the universe is infinite? The Bible doesn’t say the universe is infinite, the Bible says it’s finite, so that being the case it’s no problem.
So Gabriel delivers the order and he wants the order understood; obviously you can’t obey something you can’t understand. So beginning in verse 24 we have the first verse that explains the order. This is the content of God’s order. It’s an order regarding history actually. Now God is doing several things. One of the things He’s doing is looking forward in time. This is the year 538 BC; as time goes on down the Jewish people are going to be subject to tremendous persecution. They are going to suffer a lot; they are going to suffer mostly however in the mind. Most suffering, by the way, is in the mind. You can take a heck of a lot of suffering physically if you can maintain your mental attitude but let your mental attitude go and the least little pain will get to you.
So Daniel is going to be the means that God uses to provide the advance for Jewish mental attitude under persecution. He is going to develop the concept of faith used in the long range which we will… call long range faith equals hope. That’s what the word “hope” means in the Bible, it doesn’t mean gee, I hope it’s so. That’s the wrong idea. “Hope” in Scripture means patient enduring faith. Again, the best example we have of this is the modern communist, the Vietcong and the NVA when they were being carpet bombed by the B-52’s in Vietnam demonstrated hope, they kept going, on and on and on and on, young kids with 5th, 6th, grade educations because they had been carefully indoctrinated into a religious position; they had hope. And hope is very hard to dislodge from people, very hard.
So Daniel is going to provide the Jew with his enduring hope, a hope that goes on to this day. You see the loyal Hassidim in the city of Jerusalem this day that hold to a literal Sabbath. They still use the Old Testament system. If you want to see legalism with a vengeance go to Jerusalem. But these people endure and no matter how many hard times come their way they are going to survive. So Daniel was one of the source points for this enduring hope, and it all begins in verse 24.
Daniel 9:24, “Seventy weeks” Gabriel says “are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy. [25] Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times. [26] And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. [27] And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.”
Now obviously in reading this through you can see that it’s given in code, a code that would be understood only by the mature believer. Daniel is a book, as we said from the very beginning, it’s an apocalyptic book, it is meant to be understood only by those who have carefully studied Scripture. Therefore it takes great maturity to move through Daniel.
In verse 24 we have come with the first of the seven interpretation problems. I will list the seven major interpretation problems which we will solve as we go through these verses. This is why it’s going to take so long to go through this passage. We want to understand the order that came down because if we can we can unlock history and see where history is going.
The first major interpretation problem is what are the weeks? Are they symbolic? Are they literal? Are they days? Are they years? What are the seventy weeks? It’s not obvious; those of you who have been around fundamental circles say it’s obvious to me. I don’t think so, I think if someone challenged you to explain why these weeks are years you couldn’t do it. It’s just that you’ve heard it and you think you know it. Don’t let familiarization ruin thought. What are the weeks? That’s the first problem.
The second problem, and we’ll be using this word so it’s a good one for your vocabulary: what is the terminus a quo of this prophecy? In other words, what is the beginning point? What is the terminus a quo of the seventy weeks? When do these weeks begin in history? It says it shall begin at the commandment of the going forth to build the city; well when was that? So we’ve got to ascertain when these seventy weeks begin, the terminus a quo.
The third major interpretation is that these seventy weeks are divided into three periods; seven weeks, sixty-two weeks, one week. What are those three periods of time? What do they mean? Are they all present? Are they all past? Are any of them yet future, the seven weeks, the sixty-two weeks, and the one week? That’s the third major interpretation problem.
A fourth major interpretation problem is what calendar ought to be used once we figure out what the weeks are? Do we use a solar calendar? And as we’ll get there we’ll see that very few people at this time used our solar calendar, so we’ve got a calendar problem. Do we use a lunar calendar? Do we use a 365 ¼ day calendar or do we use a 360 day year calendar. Do we go back to the ancient form, 30 day month or 29 point dot dot dot month? What do we use? That’s the fourth major interpretation problem, what calendar system do we use to compute.
A fifth point is what is the terminus ad quem? These are all Latin terms, for those of you who have been in high school and had sex courses instead of Latin; this is the period when the seventy years ends. The terminus ad quem, when do they end.
The sixth problem we’ve got to solve, there are two princes mentioned in this passage; who are they? There are two princes, are they the same man? Is one the Messiah and one the antichrist? Or are they both the antichrist? Or are they both the Messiah? Who are the two princes? That’s the sixth major interpretation problem.
Finally, the seventh problem hinges around verse 27, what are the desolations mentioned? What are the desolations? That’s the seventh major interpretation problem. So you can see we’ve got seven rather difficult problems that have to be solved do understand this passage correctly. We are going to show you how we arrive at conclusions, we are not just going to teach you the conclusions but I want you to see the process of thought that is used to reach these conclusions.
Let’s go back to the term “seventy weeks.” In the Hebrew it looks like this: shib‘iym shabua‘ [?]
shib‘iym is translated “weeks” and shib‘iym is translated “seventy.” Obviously they look very much the same and it comes from the basic root, the stem, seven. So we’ve got to lock this down and be firm on what the weeks are. If we do a concordance study, and this is how you answer these problems, you don’t just read books about them. A concordance is the most crucial book you can buy. Before you buy all this stuff that’s sold in Christian book stores get yourself a good basic Bible study tool. A concordance gives you every word that occurs in the Bible in every location where that word is found. And when you want to trace something down all you have to do is go to your concordance. In most cases you don’t have to worry about interpretation if you just have a concordance.
So when we use the concordance and look at this word, shib‘iym, we find that it is used of days, years, all sorts of things. It’s not used of one unit of time at all. It is used, for example, of days in Leviticus 12:5. It is used of years in Genesis 29:27. So we have a precedent, at least, for saying it’s years. But we need something more than just precedent. So looking further, back in context for the other rule of Bible interpretation is read the context where this problem occurs; maybe there’s a hint right in the context. So when you look at the context in Daniel 9:2, which was the whole point of starting this thing off in the beginning, “In the first year of his reign I, Daniel, understood by books the number of the years, concerning which the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah, the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem.” So in the immediate context what’s being discussed? Days or years? Years. So Daniel 9:2 is an evidence from immediate context that years are in Daniel’s mind. After all, Daniel has been thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking, when is this prophecy… see he’s got a prophecy of Jeremiah and he’s trying to figure out how is this going to be; 538 BC Daniel is living and by his computations Jeremiah’s prophecy should be up in 535 BC. So he’s got years on his mind. So if shib‘iym is used of years and Daniel has years on his mind, most probably it refers to years.
It turns out that in Daniel 10:2-3, the very next chapter, when we speak of again, shib‘iym in terms of weeks, we have in the Hebrew though not in the English, it qualified with the word “days,” and if the qualification of days is introduced in the tenth chapter, it must mean that he’s warning us, hey, wait a minute, I’m using “weeks” differently in Daniel 10 than I used them before. So this would argue again that years are meant, not days, years in Daniel 9.
And finally in the Mishna which is an Old Testament commentary we have this expression for shib‘iym; “if a man leased a field from his fellow for a shib‘iym ….” and in that context it can only mean years. So we have evidence from extra-Biblical literature as well as from context, as well as from Daniel 10, as well as from Genesis that shib‘iym ought to be taken as years, not days.
Therefore the first solution is that the seventy weeks are seventy times seven, seven seven year periods, or four hundred and ninety years. So the prophecy has something to do with some five centuries of history; four hundred and ninety years God said He runs His universe this way; four hundred and ninety years! Now why do we make such a big point over this? For several reasons, amillennialists and postmillennialists, those are people who study the Bible who believe that Jesus Christ is not going to bring in the millennium, have to use a different system of interpreting prophecy. They will agree with us that we use the literal interpretation in other places, but when we hit prophetic passages the amillennialist and the postmillennialist revert to allegorical systems of interpretation, whereas we who are premillennial argue that you must interpret prophecy the same way you interpret any other passage of Scripture, namely the literal way. So right here from the start we are going to interpret this passage in literal terms of literal years.
Why four hundred and ninety? Why this odd way of telling Daniel, “Daniel, seventy sevens are determined upon your people?” Turn to Jeremiah 29:10-14 and look at the passage that we’ve looked at already in our study of Daniel 9. Is there something on Gabriel’s mind, why didn’t he just say Daniel, there are four hundred and ninety years; that would have been a lot easier, a lot less ambiguous, to just say it straight out; why go through all this running around Robin Hood’s barn to get to the answer. Why give it in this kind of spooky code? There’s a reason for it.
In Jeremiah 29:10, now this book, Jeremiah, was available to Daniel so Daniel had been studying this book. And when he studied this book he had come to certain conclusions. “For thus saith the LORD, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place.” So Daniel had done a simple subtraction, he had realized that in the year 605 BC you had the first wave of Jewish captives. So all Daniel had done was subtract seventy to get 535 BC, obviously he didn’t do it in our calendar system but he got basically the same thing, and this was the date that was coming up. So it was a study of verse 10 that originally started Daniel off in his praying.
But in verses 11-14 you’ll notice, sandwiched into this thing… verse 10 is very clear, it’s a clear explicit statement we’re going to get a return from Babylon. But now when you start to read the next verse and the verse after that look what happens. Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end,” or planned end. In other words, God isn’t going to let Israel go. [12] “Then shall ye call upon Me,” well, when’s “then” in verse 12? “Then” must be when those seventy years are accomplished. Then you will call upon Me, after those seventy years, “Then shall ye call upon Me, and ye shall go and pray unto Me, and I will hearken unto you. [13] And ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart. [14] And I will be found of you, saith the LORD: and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places whither I have driven you, saith the LORD; and I will bring you again into the place whence I caused you to be carried away captive.”
Now if you notice in verse 14 God says “I will gather you from Babylon…” NO! “I will gather you from all the nations,” so verse 10 God flat out says in 535 BC I’ll return you from Babylon but then after the “then”, “then” I will return you “from all nations” with an ambiguous time element here. Daniel tries to get verse 14 and verse 10 to come together at the same time in history; that what his prayer is about: Lord, You’re going to gather us from Babylon, I know that, that’s verse 10, but what I would like Lord if for You to complete the regathering of all of Israel and terminate history now. That’s what Daniel wants, he wants the fulfillment of all of those five verses, not just one verse, but he wants five verses fulfilled. So what has he got on his mind? The seventy years, he wants, in other words, a period of seventy years to end everything.
Now there is one other point that we have to go back to. Turn back to 1 Chronicles 36:21. This passage tells us why it was seventy years. We’ve got to find that out, why not fifty-nine years. This is something you ought to do when you read the Bible, God says seventy, ask Him why isn’t it seventy-nine or seventy-eight? “To fulfill the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfill seventy years [threescore and ten years]” Do you know what that’s saying? Why was there a seventy year captivity? Because for seventy sabbaths the Israelite farmers had not let the land lay fallow. It was an ecological reason why God removed the nation from the land; they mistreated nature, they did not rule nature properly, and because of their faulty ecology and her lack of care for the natural resources, she was thrown out of the land.
Now the way the Israeli calendar looked, here’s the farming calendar; these are years. The farmer could plant his field for six years but the seventh year the land had to lay fallow, under penalty of God’s wrath. Now this can’t be done today, you’d starve to death. The reason the farmer in Israel could do this was because God would bless his crops in the fourth, fifth, and sixth year so he’d have extra harvest that would carry over into the seventh, and the principle was that they were to stop the economy in the seventh year, and by the way, all debts were erased in the seventh year, you had a total economic return back to zero, so to speak, every seventh year. This prevented inflation, it prevented long term indebtedness. They had a lot of reasons for doing it, but for farming the point was that the farmer had to trust in the fertility that would be provided during those other six years for his food. And it was a way of resting, of trusting in Jehovah’s care.
But the farmers didn’t do that; there was always a temptation to look over the fence and see the next guy planting, so you’d plant. And so the seventh year finally it turned out all the farmers kept on planting anyway, with the result they depleted the land. And God allowed the land to rest, not only for theological reasons but also for physical reasons. Interestingly the Dutch farmers, into the 20th century, used to do this but they used to do it in a different way. The farmer would divide his acreage into seven parts, seven equal parts, and the Dutch farmer would plant 6/7th’s of his acreage, leaving 1/7th of his acreage fallow. And this is the way they worked until Holland had become more liberal in theology in the latter part of the 20th century. But the point was that the farmers had not done this.
Now look what happens with this farming calendar. If seven years had gone by, if every seventh year the farmers had allowed their land to be planted, how many years had gone by if seventy sabbaths, or seventy sabbatical years had gone by. Seventy sevens, right? So four hundred and ninety years prior to Daniel and Jeremiah, for four hundred and ninety years of history the farmers had refused to obey the orders of the sabbatical rest of the farmland. So that was the background for the seventy year captivity.
Now back to Daniel; when Gabriel says “Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people,” he is saying Daniel, not four hundred and ninety but seventy sevens are yet determined. What Gabriel is saying is Daniel, you know you were concerned about those seventy years, let me tell you something, seventy times seventy are yet to happen. So here’s the point, four hundred and ninety years before farmers had refused to plant correctly, to over plant; for seventy years there was the captivity, and Gabriel says there’s going to be yet four hundred and ninety years, seventy times seven out ahead before history terminates for Israel. That’s what he’s saying in the seventy weeks. So “seventy weeks have been determined,” passive voice, God has outlined history. God is sovereign, God is the planter of history, God shapes history. With all due apologies to the communists, economic determinism does not shape history, God’s Word shapes history.
Daniel 9:24, “Seventy weeks have been determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city,” notice again for future problems that we must solve, city, people and temple, the triumvirate always occurs together in this passage of Scripture: city, people, and the temple. Four hundred and ninety years, which concerned not the church of Jesus Christ but Israel, notice. So, we’ve learned something, the four hundred and ninety years literally apply to Israel and in particular apply to the city of Jerusalem. Things are going to happen in that city for an interval of four hundred and ninety years that have our attention. This is not talking to the Church. The Christian aren’t even in this; this has to do with Israel.
Now it says six purposes for this four hundred and ninety year period, six reasons why we must have not seventy but seven times seventy. First, “to finish the transgression,” second, “to make an end of sins,” third, “to make reconciliation for iniquity,” so there are at least three reasons that have to do with sin. And interestingly when we study those words those are the exact words that Daniel used in verse 5. Remember when he made his confession, he confessed sin in all of its natures, he said “we have sinned,” is the word for “transgression,” we “have committed iniquity,” and we “have done wickedly.” Those were three words; the first verb meant sin, missing the mark, cutting across God’s standards. The second word emphasized the damage that was done, that sin always causes damage, if you don’t treat a machine according to its operating instructions you blow it, and if you don’t handle your life in the way God intended you to handle it you blow it; damage is done by sin, from which we get the English word “wrong,” which means wrong out of straightness; twisted. And the third verb in Daniel 9:5, “have done wickedly” had to do with rebellion, in the King James it’s not translated that way but that’s the word to revolt, rebel, and that stresses violation of God’s authority by way of sin.
Now isn’t it interesting that when Gabriel goes to deal with the answer to Daniel’s prayer, because Daniel has said Lord, we confess our sin, this aspect, this aspect, this aspect, this aspect. Gabriel says Daniel, not seventy but seven times seventy are ordained to finish out this aspect of sin, this aspect of sin, this aspect of sin, this aspect of sin. So verse 24 is an exact answer to Daniel’s prayer. Gabriel is saying sin will persist for Israel for four hundred and ninety years in all of its aspects; it will not be finished until the seventy weeks are done.
Now the next three reasons given in verse 24 have to do with God’s righteousness. Same pattern as was used in the beginning of the prayer. Remember Daniel’s confession dealt with his own sin, dealt with God’s holiness, so in verse 24 Gabriel answers the prayer, first with sin, then with God’s holiness, the pattern is repeated. So what are number four, five and six reasons? “To bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the holy place [most Holy].” Let’s look, “to bring in the righteousness of the ages,” that means to bring about in real history, real space time history, the ideal social and individual conditions, where God’s law will function in politics, in society, in the international area. “I will bring in the righteousness of the ages.” The righteousness of the ages is a goal of the ages, the righteousness anticipated by the ages. So we have the righteousness of the ages, the goal of the ages.
“To seal up the vision and prophet,” not prophecy, prophet, “to seal up vision and prophet.” Now what does this mean? This seems to mean an end to prophecy, what does that do? What that’s saying is that when Jesus Christ brings about the ideal conditions of the millennial kingdom there won’t need to be any prophets because as it says in Isaiah 11:9, “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” There won’t be any prophecy in the sense of God speaking some words to some men in some places at some time but all men in all places at all times during the millennium will have access directly to God’s Word. I will end this intermediate form that we are now having in this point of history.
Then, “I will anoint the most holy place,” and we don’t know what this refers to, obviously it has something to do the temple. It could refer to Christ, it could…somehow the Church might be in here as included in the overall temple of God, we don’t know, it’s a vague expression but it generally means to set up the final worship place of believers.
So much for verse 24; we want to summarize what we have done so far. Next week we’ll being with verse 25. Daniel has prayed a prayer that receives a “NO!” Now that’s kind of interesting, isn’t it. Remember all the time we were leading up to this chapter and say, hey, look at this fantastic prayer, tremendous, mature, Biblical, sound, the guy did lots of study before he prayed and he rated a “no” answer. So you’ve got good company when that happens.
But I want you to notice also that when God gave Daniel a “no” answer, He answered His real need. The “no” wasn’t toward relief of Daniel’s need; the “no” was toward the means Daniel proposed to relieve his need. You may have a problem in your life and you say God, would You do thus and such with this problem. And God says no, but God also makes “a way of escape that you may be able to bear it,” so He does solve the need, He just doesn’t solve it the way you wanted Him to solve it. So when God gives you a negative answer in prayer, look around because it is not the nature of our God to give you a “no” without somewhere, some how, leading you to solve that problem. God does not want you to sit the rest of your life with unsolved problems. That’s not what He created man for; man is lofty in the Christian image, he’s not a mouse to go groveling around, overcome by circumstances, exasperated and frustrated by problem after problem that’s apparently unsolvable. God didn’t make us to be frustrated that way. He gave us His Word so the answers have got to be there.
Finally, besides watching this “no” answer we know something else. God’s Word is irresistible. Turn to Hebrews 2:3 for a little parting shot at how God’s decrees cannot be resisted. “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard Him,” etc. All that because of verse 2, “If the word spoken by angels,” that’s Exodus, the Old Testament, “became steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward.” In other words, Old Testament history is a witness, you have just heard from the seventy weeks answer that God enforced upon the entire economy the sabbatical law principle. For four hundred and ninety years the citizens of the nation thought they could get away with violating God’s Word. Five centuries came and went before it finally caught up to them, but finally it did. And Gabriel is there to announce, you cannot escape God’s decrees; they will bless you or they will curse you, but God’s decrees will never remain inoperative.