Daniel Lesson 40

Calendar Studies – Daniel 9:25-26

Daniel 9:24-27 probably has packed within it more prophetic truth than any other passage of Scripture, at least any other passage in this book. It is a detailed passage that merits our close attention, and because it has so many problems of interpretation and because for some of you this is your first time through the book of Daniel, I want to show you how these problems of interpretation are dealt with so you do not come up with that lame brain excuse that is used by the sidewalk skeptics, well you can take the Bible any way you want to take it. That’s nonsense and a quick sidewalk response to that kind of an objection is to simply say do you want me to take everything you say the way I want? Obviously that would spell a death knoll to all communication if we took everything the way we wanted to take it.

Nobody in practice ever does that; the only time this ever comes up is when they’re talking about Scripture. It doesn’t come up when you’re writing a letter, it doesn’t come up when you’re having a conversation with someone, the strange thing is always trotted out when we get into an area of doctrine and Scripture. It’s a hypocritical approach and anyone who knows something about literature knows that a man who writes a book doesn’t write it to be taken any way you want to take it; he writes it to communicate and Daniel is no exception. So there has got to be one way of taking this and it’s got to be the right way. There may be 15,000 wrong ways to do it, but we’ve got to keep searching until we get the right way, but there is a right way. Daniel is not a mirror that just reflects back what we want it to say to us.

Daniel is communicating something, and in particular this chapter is communicating the message from God that dies Daniel 2 and 7 together with Jeremiah 29. Daniel had a big problem trying to understand how Israel’s ultimate redemption could occur when at the same time he had just been given the revelation that history was going to go on and on and on. And a Jew, who had been used to living inside the kingdom of God, in the spectacular way between the Exodus and the fall of the nation, was not prepared to do this new kind of living. So Daniel 9, as well as other portions of Daniel, was originally given to prepare believers for a new change of life, their lifestyle was going to be different than it ever was before. The glory, the Shekinah glory would no longer be in the temple, all the Jews would no longer live in the land, all of Israel’s political power would be subordinated to the Gentiles, these were all new conditions and they weren’t used to this kind of thing before. So Daniel is to prepare believers for suffering. That’s why it is not considered among the prophets of the Old Testament; the book of Daniel is in the wisdom section because the book primarily has not to do with prophecy, it has to do with preparation of believers on how to live.

We discussed some of the seven interpretation problems of understanding what it is Gabriel is telling Daniel. The first problem was what are the “weeks” of Daniel 9:24? “Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people,” and what were those weeks? Those weeks were seven year periods. The second problem of interpretation was the terminus a quo of the prophecy, when did it begin. We determined that it began in 445 BC with the decree of Artaxerxes Longimanus.

Today we deal with the third, fourth and fifth problems of interpretation. The third problem is what are the periods, seven, sixty-two and one. The angel had something definite on his mind, he divides these intervals up, which incidentally is one of the signals that these seventy weeks are not symbolic, they’re literal. You don’t divide symbols up; this is the same reason why Genesis’ days are 24 hour days and can’t be any other day; whenever you have a unit, a week, a month, day, hour, and it is used this way, or it is used to count, it is not symbolic; it can’t be symbolic, you don’t count with symbols. You count with references to actual real things. So when we see the seven, sixty-two and one, it’s further confirmation we’re on the right track by tacking this literally and not allegorically.

The fourth problem, which we want to answer today, is what calendar system do we use. We’re talking about seventy sevens and we’re talking about a total time span of four hundred and ninety years; we’ve got to answer the problem, by what calendar, lunar, solar, or some other calendar. That’s not an obvious question and we’ve got to answer that question to our satisfaction.

The fifth interpretation problem which will be answered along with it is the terminus ad quem, the end of the interval, when are these four hundred and ninety years going to be up. That’s a problem that we’ve got to solve. We’ll solve three problems, what does seven, sixty-two and one mean? What calendar system are we to use, and what is the terminus ad quem.

Now let’s look at verse 25, sections of verse 26, and a section of verse 27. Daniel 9:25, “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 this is pretty intricate Scripture but it is Scripture that was given to be understood, not given to be misunderstood, misapplied. Daniel was in the state department of his country, and while he was involved in advising leaders of his nation. He was involved in giving them a clear picture as to where history was going, and apart from Scripture no one knows where history is going. Only Jesus Christ really knows where history is going. So this passage is meant to be understood, and if you look at those verses you’ll see the three periods. First in verse 25, “Know, therefore, and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment …” and then you see the word “seven weeks.” There’s the first section; seven sevens. Then the next thing is “three score and two weeks,” the old English way of saying sixty-two sevens. And then in verse 27 there’s something about one week, one seven. Add them together and there’s your seventy weeks, four hundred and ninety years. So we’ve got all the four hundred ninety years accounted for but now we’ve got to divide them up.

So we come to the first problem, how do we divide these three parts up? There are two ways down through the years that this has been divided. One way is to start in verse 25 where it says “from the going forth of the commandment to restore,” that’s the decree of Artaxerxes Longimanus in 445 BC, from that point “to Messiah, the Prince, shall be seven weeks.” So when Messiah comes it terminates the seven weeks. So we have the seven weeks ending with Messiah the Prince. Then, this particular view, would take “threescore and two weeks” linked to the verb “shall be built,” so over the sixty-two weeks you have the city being built. Then it says “after threescore and two weeks Messiah will be cut off,” so you have a cutting off of Messiah, and then it says there will be one week in which the prince that shall come shall make a covenant. And then there shall be the desolation, or let’s put it the end of history, the judgment. That’s one way of taking it, that’s the way the Jewish people punctuate the text, the Masoretic punctuation has this division. If you’ve been in fundamental circles you understand that’s not the way we take it, but I’m just showing you that it’s possible, if you just deal with the text itself, without comparing it with other Scripture, to take this in a different way than you’re accustomed to taking it.

However, the Septuagint and the oldest, oldest tradition that we have takes verse 27 this way: “from the commandment to restore the city to Messiah, the Prince, shall be seven plus sixty-two, the street shall be built … in troublous times,” and, for the seven weeks, then in the sixty-two week interval between the time the city is built, the city is built by the end of the first seven sevens, then there’s a sixty-two week period from the time the city is built until the time the Messiah is cut off, or until He comes and is cut off. So He comes, then He’s cut off, and then this week starts. So again let me draw these two views on the board so you can see how they differ.

One view has the city being built all during the sixty-two sevens. The other view has the city built at the end of the seventh seven. This view would have the Messiah coming here at the end of seven, and Him cut off here, after the sixty two. This view has the Messiah coming here and cut off. Now it’s not too hard to decide between these two positions, and we decide between the two positions on the basis of history. Did the Messiah come forty nine years after the decree of Artaxerxes Longimanus and the answer is no He didn’t. So the view on the left doesn’t fit history. And if we have a choice between one that does fit history and one that doesn’t, we take the one that does. So we therefore hold that the seven sevens refers to the time of the building of the city. So you look at the text we can then divide it up this way: notice in verse 25, from the decree “unto the Messiah, the Prince, shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks. So the total time interval from the time of the commandment to restore Jerusalem until the coming of Messiah is sixty-nine weeks.

But instead of saying sixty-nine weeks Gabriel says seven plus sixty-two. Now if the angel does this and he divides sixty-nine into two parts, seven and sixty-two it sort of suggests that something significant happened that you divided it up to draw attention to what it is that happened at the end of the seven years. Otherwise, it would have been very easy for the angel to say sixty-nine weeks between the going forth of the commandment to restore Jerusalem until Messiah comes. That’s all he would have to have said, but the angel goes into this little deal about the seven and the sixty-two. Now why?

The only event that we see in verse 25 that makes sense is this last part of verse 25 that says, “the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.” Last week I showed slides of what a street looked like in the ancient Jerusalem, and I showed what the plaza probably looked like in ancient Jerusalem. And the word “street” isn’t street but “plaza” and it stands for the full economic life of the city of Jerusalem because it was in the plaza where the businessmen bought and sold their goods. So you would say the opening of the mall, it’s the opening of the place where the business goes on; that will be finished by forty-nine years after the decree of Artaxerxes Longimanus, and “the wall”, which is the word for “trench,” there you have the military establishment, so when the economic and military establishment comes into existence Jerusalem is looked upon as a functioning city. This is part and parcel to Biblical philosophy of politics; you do not have freedom until you have a functioning market and a strong military; all freedom in the fallen world is purchased by blood in war.

We have then, at the end of verse 25, the end of the first seven year period. So we go here, the city is built; it is functioning economically and militarily. Now, verse 26, “And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off,” so nothing happens during these sixty-two weeks as far as this passage of Scripture is concerned, it skips all the way from the city being built to Messiah being cut off after,” again let’s look at the sixty-two week period. It starts with the city finished and functioning going on down until Messiah comes, that’s verse 25, Messiah comes and after He comes, we’ll leave an X for the unknown, there’ll be an interval, not given in prophecy, He will be cut off. So it will be sixty-nine plus X where X is not known. And this is important to observe that this prophecy has built-in gaps in it; that is typical of prophetic literature, it is not a closed system of numbers, it is an open system. So we have Messiah coming at the end, the sixty-nine years end with Messiah’s appearance, and then some time after that Messiah will be cut off. X could be zero, X could be some finite number, we have to go to the text to find out.

“After threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for Himself,” now at this point we’ve got a problem because if we start the decree in 445 BC and we talk about sixty-nine weeks, we’ve got four hundred and eighty three years to deal with, which gives us the year 38 AD and that doesn’t look too sharp as far as what we know of history because though we do not know the year Christ died for sure, we certainly know it wasn’t 38 AD, that’s way out of the range. The ballpark by contemporary scholarship is 30-33 AD, somewhere in one of those four years Christ died. But it wasn’t 38 AD. So now we have a crisis. What kind of a calendar system was being used? Are we sure that the author of this book, and in particular the angel himself, is communicating our calendar?

Now I’ve said this several times and I will say it many more times, and that is when you see a problem in Scripture don’t get your liver in a quiver and quit, just stick with it and eventually you will solve the problem and one of the blessings will be that when you solve what you thought was a great difficulty, God is going to show you another truth, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen here. It looks like we’ve got a massive problem. Whoop, the Scriptures don’t work. After we get through you’ll see that the Scripture not only works out, but in forcing ourselves to cope with the difficulty we’ve discovered something new about our God and about His rule in history.

We have to go back and see what is the calendar. In the 19^th century there was a man by the name of Sir Robert Anderson, an Englishman, a great student of the book of Daniel. Sir Robert Anderson is known in history for the discovery that the Scripture are not on a solar calendar. Anderson had interest in astronomy and he kept working with the calendar systems of the Bible, over and over, he’s written several books, most of which are out of print but several are being reprinted. His most famous book is The Coming Prince. He has also written what I consider his classic work and it’s not reprinted of course, and that is The Silence of God which is a complete theological refutation of the whole charismatic movement, and it was a hundred years before the movement began. But Anderson was an extremely good student of Scripture, and he’s credited with this discovery. Now I’m going to show you his line or reasoning, why the Scriptures are not on our calendar system as it is presently operating, but on a different calendar system.

Turn back to Genesis 7:11, here is proof that the Scriptures do not work by our calendar. This is also why so many dates of the Scripture don’t seem to work out exactly; and it can’t be that God isn’t exact; we know our God is exact. So it must mean in imprecision in our calendar, not the Scripture. We’re going to ask the question, what kind of a calendar was being used during the flood? Was it a solar calendar as we presently use or was it another calendar? “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up,” so we have a certain piece of information, it says “the second month” of whatever the year system was, “the seventeenth day of the month.” So we’ll write it this way: 2-17 but don’t take it as February 17^th, we’re just taking it as the second month and the seventeenth day, their system, we’re not yet sure whether it’s February 17^th in their system.

Now observe the next chapter, Genesis 8:3-4, in verse 3, “And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated. [4] And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.” It says “the seventh month,” the “seventeenth day.” The seventh month, the seventeenth day; it also adds supplementary information that one hundred and fifty days transpired. Now it doesn’t require a degree in mathematics to see that in that system there are five months of whatever the calendar system has transpired. It was the second month it started; the seventh month was counted at the end. So five months have transpired. We also are given the information that one hundred and fifty days has transpired. So what does that tell you about the average length of the month? A thirty day month. So that’s one piece of data that we have that’s solid that Scripture seems to be functioning on a thirty day month system.

Go to Revelation 11, so one can’t say that the Scripture uses a calendar here that’s different from the calendar it uses over there; we deliberately have taken the earliest book of the Bible and we’ve deliberately taken the latest book of the Bible to test whether the Bible is on a different calendar system. In Revelation 11:2-3, speaking about, during the tribulation period, it’s talking about half of the tribulation period and it says, “But the court, which is outside the temple, leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the nations, and the holy city they shall tread under forty and two months.” So our first piece of information is this is forty-two months. Now that is 12 plus 12 plus 12 plus 6, forty-two months, three and a half years. That’s one half of the tribulation, forty-two months. Now in verse three, during those forth-two months, “And I will give power unto My two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days,” now it turns out that if you multiply forty-two times thirty you’d get that number. So here we have evidence again of thirty days per month, in whatever the calendar system that the Bible is using.

So we have a proof from Genesis and a proof from Revelation that the Biblical authors, whether they are John or whether they are Moses, they all seem to use stubbornly against our existing system, they stubbornly use their own calendar system. We have a third piece of evidence beside Genesis and Revelation and that is if you want to be very, very picky, seventy years did not elapse of Jeremiah’s prophecy in terms of solar years, only sixty-nine years elapsed. And that lag is evident a different calendar system was used.

Now Sir Robert Anderson came to the conclusion, he didn’t know why this was happening but he said it was obvious that it is happening. So in Scripture we’re talking about thirty day months. And when we compute and plug this back into Daniel, we find that if you start with Artaxerxes Longimanus in 445 BC, Anderson used 444 BC in his computation, and you use thirty day months, and you compute four hundred and eighty three years of thirty day month periods you come out with 32 AD, the year that Jesus Christ died. Now it’s been more recently computed at 33 AD, but whether it’s that year or not, it’s now in the range, we can’t be any more specific because our calendar systems aren’t more specific. If we had more accurate calendar systems we could pin it down. But we’re not under obligation as Christians to be more specific until the world gives us a more specific calendar.

But we know, then, that Daniel’s time period does line up in the ball park of Christ’s crucifixion, if we use this peculiar calendar system that Sir Robert Anderson discovered Genesis to be using, Revelation to be using, and so on. Now this calendar is part and parcel of the Mosaic Law. Now here’s the difference; our calendar system is 365¼ days, approximately, and 29 ½ days in the month. The Scripture calendar is 360 days with a thirty day month. Now people look at those figures and they say oh, well, you see, the poor people back then were so simple that they didn’t know about those five extra days and they just computed 360, it’s obvious it’s easier to compute the 360 with 365¼. So traditionally in practically every book you read today the answer for this is these people are naïve, they just didn’t know how to do it any better, but we with all our sophistication know more so we have to make the calendar really accurate.

Now fortunately for the Christian there came a man about 1950 by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky, who began to dig around on this calendar system and discovered a whole bunch of other things. Now whether you agree with Velikovsky’s conclusions or not, you are forced to face the data that he brought to light. Here is that data: first Velikovsky’s theory and his explanation of what’s happening here. Now Velikovsky is not interested in vindicating the Scriptures; Immanuel Velikovsky is an atheist Jew who has no interest whatsoever in the prophecies of Daniel. I’ve looked in all the places where he quotes Scripture and all of his books and all of his articles and never once did Velikovsky cite Daniel 9. So he doesn’t have Daniel 9 on his mind and he’s not trying to fudge, force, ram, cram and jam something to fit Scripture. This is a totally independent line of thinking.

His argument is that the solar system and the universe do not run in the nice classical Newtonian sense of uniformity but rather the universe is wracked periodically with gigantic catastrophes, catastrophes that are so fearful and awesome that the human race has observed in recent past that men are terrified of these disasters and therefore refuse to remember the disasters correctly and they mythologize about them. And so therefore to Velikovsky the Indian mythologies and the mythologies of ancient civilizations are but distorted versions of history; man is fearful to remember these things that happened, in particular two events. About 1440 Velikovsky would argue that the planet Venus, which is not a planet, it is a comet that was ejected from the planet of Jupiter, and on a near collision orbit came very close to the planet earth, causing tremendous disturbances fifty-two years apart. Fifty-two years apart, he says, is the uniform myth both of eastern and western hemispheres, in Mexico, Central America the pyramids are constructed with fifty-two year cycles, and Velikovsky observed fifty-two years was approximately the period between the Exodus and Joshua’s long day. And so therefore he argues that there were two inter-actions back at that point; that manna from heaven fell not only on Sinai but it fell all over Europe and that’s why the Norwegians speak of this food from heaven, and why the Greeks speak of ambrosia. All these mythologies are reflecting a global catastrophe that happened in which food was rained upon the planet earth, all over. Only the Bible records the real reason why it happened, but the other mythologies do lend supporting evidence. Fine. But then he says that there was a second interaction between the years 747 BC and the year 687 BC. During those years there was a second massive collision between Venus and Mars which caused less damage to the planet earth but jolted the earth in its orbit, and that was remembered in mythologies.

Now I can’t go into all the evidence but Velikovsky would argue that between these years prior to this last interaction the planet earth was on a 360 day revolution and was on a month with the moon rotating around the planet every 30 days. As a result of the disturbances between 747 and 689 BC the revolution of the earth was changed to 365¼ days, and the moon now is slower by ¾ of a day a month, that there was significant, measurable and observable difference in calendar systems that was not due to improved calendars, it was due to a physical change in the system.

Now here’s some of the evidence; the evidence that we’ll use, I’ll show some Scriptural support but let’s deal with some of the indirect evidence. The indirect evidence that Velikovsky cites is this: We know that the ancient ability to accurately measure time. We know this by the orientation of the pyramids. We know this by their water clocks. We know this by their planetary computations. So it couldn’t be that the people lacked the mathematical know how to come out with a calendar that was no good, because after all, after five you know your calendar is no good, it doesn’t come out right. So no one but an ignoramus would come up with 350 day year if in fact things were going the way they are now. So the evidence that the whole ancient world that had these sophisticated forms of observation and time measurement insisted all over the earth, north hemisphere, southern hemisphere, eastern hemisphere, western hemisphere, all nations, all tribes report a 360 day year. Velikovsky said how come everybody made the same mistake? Obviously its because they didn’t make the mistake, they are telling us what in their day was happening, there was only 360 days in their year, and only 30 days in their month; it was not due to their lack of ability, it was their correct ability.

Here are citations from India: all Vida texts speak uniformly and exclusively of a year of 360 days; it is striking that the Vida’s nowhere mention intercalary period and while repeatedly stating the year consists of 360 days nowhere refer to the five or six days that are part of the solar year. Now how come. The Vida’s [can’t understand word] their Scriptures of India, their reflections are what went on back there centuries ago. Why is it these people didn’t come up with the intercalary year that is, this addition. Babylon, in the new pre Neo-Babylonian period, (quote), “The Babylonian astronomers recognized a year of 360 days. The division of the circle into 360 degrees must have indicated the past [can’t understand word] by the sun each day in its assumed circling of the earth.” Did you ever wonder why the circle has 360 degrees in it? Do you know where that came from? Babylon… and all our systems of trigonometry are based on 360 degrees. Now why do you suppose we divide a circle into 360 parts? Because of the horizon, this is talking about the movement of the stars over one year, and so they divided the heavens into these parts and came up with 360 parts, that’s how our foundation of trigonometry is built on the 360 day year. Now this should trigger something in your minds; the calendar system that the Bible is using is the calendar that our modern mathematics is built on. Egypt, the five epagomenal, that’s those extra days, must have been added to the 360 days subsequent to the end of the 18^th dynasty. We have no mention of five days in all the numerous inscriptions of the 18^th dynasty. The epagomenal or as the Egyptians call them, the five days which are beyond the year, are known only from documents seven centuries or later.

Now here’s the surprise, I could go on and on, I refer you to Velikovsky’s book, Worlds in Collision if you want the details, but here’s the shocker. The shocker is when you ask the next question, all right, all the tribes, and by the way, other tribes would be Greece, Rome, South America, Central America and China all had 360 day years. Now the shocker is this, when did all of these countries, all across the face of the earth, change calendars, and all of them changed calendars in the 6^th century. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd? Did they all make the same accident of 360 days, and did they all suddenly discover their mistake at the same time?

We have hints in Scripture to what happened back then, hints which if we take the Scripture literally suggests Velikovsky had something. Turn to 2 Kings 19:35, this time period, 747-489 BC is during the reign of Hezekiah. Was there any unusual thing that happened under Hezekiah’s reign that had anything to do with calendars? Let’s see. In 2 Kings 19:35 we have a catastrophe that happened Hezekiah’s reign. Sennacherib has an army of hundreds of thousands of men surrounding Jerusalem; from the human point of view everything looks bleak, the believers are trusting the promise behind the walls of the city, but trusting in sort of a half-hearted way because as they look over the walls every morning they see hundreds and thousands of Assyrians; these are the sweet folks that went around staking people out, spread-eagling them and then peeling their skin off with a knife before they killed them. So if you were behind the walls and saw hundreds of thousands of these Assyrians I think you’d probably have a little problem claiming the promises.

So during this situation, fortunately God didn’t have any problem with His promises and He destroyed the Assyrians in verse 35, “And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.” Now extra-Biblical evidences from the Talmud tell us more about this catastrophe, and in particular they tell us about the fact that great stones from heaven fell, stones which were later used by the Jews in the second temple. There was some sort of a catastrophe.

Now the angel of the Lord appeared and he did something; he destroyed the Assyrians, but that doesn’t prove that that’s all he did because in the very next chapter we have other peculiar things going on, look at 2 Kings 20:10-11, the sign given to Ahaz. “And Hezekiah answered, It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees: nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees. [11] And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” Do you know what he’s talking about? The sun dial and what does the sun dial measure but the flow of time. Doesn’t verses 10-11 argue that precisely during the reign of Hezekiah there was a disturbance in the flow of time? A disturbance which the earth and its rotation obviously changed. Sure, God could have refracted the light locally just around the sun dial, but that’s not what it’s saying. It’s saying that the sun dial went down ten degrees and Hezekiah was no stupid person, if God just refracted the light locally at the sun dial he could have gone some place else and checked, they had more than one sun dial. And he could have said it’s just a fluke with my sun dial and I’ll just ignore it. Obviously this must have been a universal change in time that happened. We know enough about the fact that this indicates the change in shift in the rotation of the earth to produce this kind of a miracle.

So, we have all the evidence from all over the world that calendars were shifted, changed, everybody was up in arms during the 6^th and 7^th centuries, the people complained their calendars weren’t working out. And it isn’t until the 5^th and 4^th centuries that the calendars finally get settled down. In fact the first Greek philosopher, [can’t hear name], in 586 BC makes the first prediction the Greeks ever made on the basis of our present calendar, and he’s accorded the father of our calendar because he’s the man that (quote) “discovered” how it all came about. So there’s all this consternation that finally settled down and it synchronizes with what the Scripture insists happened.

One further note, 1 Chronicles 30:2-3, again an incident that happened during the reign of Hezekiah. There’s a little note here about Hezekiah keeping the Passover. “For the king had taken counsel, and his princes, and all the congregation in Jerusalem, to keep the Passover in the second month.” Passover was always observed in the first month. [3] “For they could not keep it at that time, because the priests had not sanctified themselves sufficiently, neither had the people gathered themselves together to Jerusalem. [4] And the thing pleased the king and all the congregation….” Part of the sanctifying work in verse 3 that’s mentioned of the Levites is the preparation of the calendar, you can go back to Leviticus, they were the ones that were basically the calendar keepers. So this doesn’t explicitly say, but it suggests a disturbance, something just got fluey here during Hezekiah’s reign. So we have evidences here and there not totally conclusive but highly suggestive that there was a calendar shift.

So why does Daniel use a 360 day year and 30 day month? For the reason that Daniel, if you turn back to Daniel, Daniel insists upon using the old temple time. Remember when we dealt with verse 21? We said that no offering had been given because the temple was inoperative. Daniel in 921 BC, before all this happened, [tape turns] how did he measure time? He tells us when Gabriel appeared to him, he “touched me about the time of the evening offering,” so Daniel insists upon using temple time. But what was the temple time? The 360 day year, the 30 day month, that was temple time. He in verse 21 is using the hour of the day, but he’s expressing it in the now defunct temple. Daniel, then, goes by temple time.

Now we could draw some doctrinal implications out of this for us as Christians. We want to tie this thing together; so far in Daniel 9 we’ve worked our way down into verse 25, we’ve solved the problem of the calendar, we solved the problem of the terminus ad quem, the terminus a quo, the one, the sixty-two and the seven, and we’ll go on but we want to stop here and draw some conclusions that we can take from all this consideration.

If God insists upon using a 360 day year we may guess safely that He will return the planetary system back to this system. The earth will one day go back to a 360 day year and the 30 day month, for the reason that all the prophecies are given in these terms. The whole prophecies of the tribulation are given in these terms; the millennium operates under the temple, the revived temple and under its temple time, temple chronology. And we suggest that the events of the tribulation will be so catastrophic that the earth and the solar system will be altered once again in history and the calendar will drop back to the temple period, 360 day years.

What does this tell us? All physical laws that we’re so confident in, in our intellectual pride, all the physical law is subservient to the Word of God. God says and God speaks. When he spoke at creation He brought into existence not just matter and energy but physical laws Himself, just like at Sinai He brought in legal laws. So also in creation He brought in physical laws. We were talking about the Noahic Covenant in family training; do you ever realize what the Noahic Covenant is promising. If God is going to maintain His covenant promise that you see expressed every time it rains in the rainbow, if that rainbow means anything, it means that God must control the entire solar system to avoid any disturbance that would flood the land, a brush with a near body in such manner that the earth would be enveloped with tidal forces that disturb the whole seas and their position in the ocean beds, that has all got to be guaranteed that it will never happen, or God must break His promise that He made with Noah.

His promise that He made with Noah is not written in the form of an equation, it’s written as God’s Word. He said I will keep you free from a global flood again. We, with our scientific knowledge as believers ought to have a deeper appreciation for what He really promised. He promised to control the entire geophysical universe. Therefore, all physical law inside that universe is under the control of God’s spoken word. If God speaks a new word tomorrow 2 + 2 will no longer be 4, that’s what we’re saying. Every law that you know in math, physics and chemistry, can be altered with a new word from God. So man has a choice of whether he going to build his knowledge on God’s Word first and gain his stability there, or whether you’re going to go out in whatever academic area you’re working in and say okay, I’ve got my knowledge, here it is, I’ve got it all arranged, got it all under my intellectual control, and the only thing you’ve done is idolize a portion of creation.

You’ve set up whatever it is your favorite area and you’ve said your area is immutable, your area will never change, I’ve got this law E+MC squared for example, and I know that’s true and it will always remain true, and I erect my whole edifice on that assumption. Your assumption is an idolatrous assumption. You have no basis for making that assumption; you have no real reason apart from a religious one, for saying the sun will rise tomorrow. The fact that it’s always risen for thousands and thousands of days up to today means nothing; it means nothing. Your statement about the sun rising tomorrow is a religious statement and either you trust the Lord to make it rise tomorrow or you don’t. You may impute to the sun a power in and of itself, that it rises by itself tomorrow, completely independent of God’s work.

You can’t take a middle of the road position, you either have to say that all things flow from God’s Word or all things flow from natural law. There is no middle of the road ground and I think as Christians the choice is clear; we make it and we confess it before the world; we’ve made a religious choice, a presupposition that underscores all of knowledge, whatever the scientific field, I’ve made a religious choice before I had one iota of scientific information; I have exposed myself to the Word of God and on that basis I build my science, or I build whatever it is, I build my education. That is one of the implications, the supremacy of God’s Word over every area of knowledge, EVERY area. God’s Word is not culturally conditioned; it speaks to all men everywhere at all times in terms of God’s absolutes.

Then there’s another truth that we get from this passage. The Jewish people were worried about suffering. Over here was blessing, over here was cursing, the believer was suffering, suffering, suffering, how long O Lord will You let the suffering go? And the application is God says you’re suffering will not go on forever, there is going to be an end when I terminate the suffering. And I will allow it to go on only so long as it says in verse 24… what does it say? Six reasons, “to finish the transgression, to make and end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up the vision, and to anoint the holy place.” In other words, I’ve got a program and it’s going to bring you blessing, but it’s going to be on My calendar by My time schedule at My authority. Your suffering will not go on forever. And we can apply this now to ourselves as believers, if He can control history and alter calendars to keep His Word in force throughout all space and time, then as 1 Corinthians 10:13 tells you that you will never face a trial, a pressure, suffering or heartache for which God has not made adequate provision.