Daniel Lesson 41
The Two Abomination of Desolations – Daniel 9:26-27
In Daniel 9 we have one of the greatest capsule summaries of prophecy in all of Scripture. We have been studying Daniel and we are finishing Daniel 9 this morning. Daniel is part of the wisdom literature of the Bible; it is considered therefore not to be primarily prophecy but to be primarily wisdom, which means we ought to be oriented in how we use the material of Daniel. Daniel was written to aid believers who would be facing a unique period of history, a period of history that would last many, many centuries. In the Old Testament the kingdom of God went till 586 BC, that is when the nation had the Shekinah glory and was functioning as a true national entity, free and based on a theocratic concept of the Word of God.
After 586 BC that nation would go into captivity, which meant that from 586 BC on to the present day Israel will never exist by virtue of her own freedom or her own power. She will exist by virtue of Gentile permission. And this has been the way that the Jew has had to survive for century after century. To prepare the Jew and to prepare believers of that era for a long time of constant suffering, Daniel was given. Daniel was given to provide the believer’s mind with doctrine. We have a mind and we have a conscience. As we grow in life the conscience becomes first an awareness of the world, we have world consciousness. A baby first obtains consciousness of the world in his first few weeks of life, and then we have self-consciousness and a child eventually develops self-consciousness when he learns to distinguish himself from his environment and uses the pronoun “I” and thinks that way. And then finally the child becomes God-conscious. All that is due to the image of God in man. It is not due to society; it is due to an innate capacity that God has provided in every soul of every person.
Now that function in life is to obtain the Word of God, which comes into the mind and links up with the self-consciousness, the world-consciousness and God-consciousness to provide a divine viewpoint framework. And that’s the story of Christian maturity. Believers who are not interested in the Word of God will never develop a divine viewpoint framework and they will, therefore, never be relaxed individuals and they will never be productive for the Lord. So the divine viewpoint framework is a product of revelation into history through the Holy Spirit and working into the soul in this way.
Now Daniel was to provide doctrine to handle suffering. The people in Daniel’s day had to be able to take the divine viewpoint framework and apply it not just to one problem, but to many problems. Their concept of the faith technique had to be enlarged, just as our concept of the faith technique has to be enlarged. Your faith has to mature to be able to handle more and more difficult problems. And when faith is in great maturity and stretched so it has the ability to endure the Bible had a word for it, and it’s a technical word not used the way we often use the word, “hope.” The Bible does NOT use the word “hope” the way we use it; we use it, well I hope it’s true. That’s not the way the Bible uses it. “Hope” is a long enduring concept that history will one day be consummated in perfect justice, that God’s program will come to pass the way He has promised. So therefore underlying hope, since faith has to be in something, you have the character of God, and it is the character of God that is revealed in Daniel. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omniscient, immutable and eternal and the areas of God’s character that are enlarged in the book of Daniel are His sovereignty and His love. His sovereignty is enlarged because God is seen to be the unseen actor behind historical moves.
As we go on and study Daniels 10 and 11 and we review Maccabean history you’ll see this concept and how it comes across, that what looks like chaos on the surface actually is the unseen hand of God working silently behind great personages of history. In Daniel 10 we’ll see the angels and how they interact with history, and how certain world events can be explained by the angelic mechanism. But all of this, not to lose the forest for the trees, all of this hangs on the sovereignty of God, and any history course that is taken that does not recognize the absolute sovereignty of the Word of God is a false history. The only true history is the history that recognizes the centrality of the Lord Jesus Christ, and recognizes the resurrection as the most important historic event of all time.
Then we have grace; God’s love is seen to be a gracious love and it’s gracious because we do not earn or deserve it. And the Gentile nations do not earn or deserve it, and though Daniel gives hundreds and hundreds of years of judgment free existence to four great world powers, these world powers do not in themselves merit such a judgment free existence. The reason they get it is because God is demonstrating to man that the Word of God is to be received on an individual private basis, you are free to accept and you are free to reject. The responsibility of believers terminates with a clear dissemination of the Word of God.
Now we come to Daniel 9:26. Gabriel has interrupted Daniel’s prayer. Daniel prayed one of the great prayers of Scripture and during the prayer, when he got into the petition section, the angel, Gabriel, came to him, and was dispatched from the throne room of God, apparently in a matter of six minutes, was able to traverse the distance through the universe from the throne room of God to this planet to where Daniel was located. And Gabriel is one of the top commanding angels of the universe, for angels do have a command and control structure, and Gabriel was the one picked to give Daniel added information. Daniel’s problem was that in Daniel 2 and Daniel 7 we have a prediction that the kingdom will end and then we’ll have the end of history. So the end of history is going to be delayed. When Israel is restored to the land, that will not be the end of history. And in fact, during those centuries there will be four great powers. There will be the Neo-Babylonian power, the Medo-Persian power, Greece and Rome, and on down through their modern day descendants. And Daniel wanted to know, well, if this long delay is going to happen and these four great historical eras are going to intervene, then what do we do in the meantime.
And so Gabriel is providing doctrine and revelation so the believers will have something to trust. God’s Word never asks you to believe a thing unless you are first convinced of its truthfulness. If I did not know that the Word of God was true and if I did not have the assurance that there’s not one of you that could ever ask me a question that is not answered by the Word of God, even though I personally may not know the answer, I would not be up here teaching the Word of God. The reason that the Bible asks us to trust is because the Holy Spirit is first to give us information that is credible and therefore as we study these portions of the Word of God we’ll be interested in looking at the details of history because it’s there where you must place your trust. You cannot place your trust by going off into a closet and working up some sort of faith, I want to believe, I want to believe, I want to believe and get yourself in some auto-hypnosis scheme. That will not work; it will not sustain you in time of pressure.
Daniel 9:26, here is some of the specific points of revelation that Gabriel gives to the nation. “And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off,” the threescore and two, sixty two sevens literally it reads, and before that there were seven sevens, so we have a total of sixty-nine sevens or four hundred and eighty three years. So says Gabriel, “after four hundred and eighty three years,” and these years, you remember, are computed using the 360 day year and 30 day month calendar. We found out last time that this calendar is not a figment of the Bible’s imagination; this 360 day calendar year was universally used on all continents by all peoples prior to the 6th century.
The reason was not because these people were stupid, these people were able to chart planetary courses, they were able to measure extremely well, the Egyptians had already measured the circumference of the world at 25,000 miles, so it is not true that the ancients believed in a flat earth, and so there were many, many accomplishments of measurement and technology. These people had the instruments easily capable to measure the correct number of days in a year. The reason the ancients used a 360 day calendar was for the very simple and obvious answer that there were only 360 days in their year. The calendar has changed and we cited the data showing that last time. So we move into the 6th and 6th centuries from a 360 day year, due to various catastrophes, over to a 365¼ day year that is presently operational.
But Gabriel uses the calendar current during the prior time of the kingdom. So after threescore and two weeks, added to the first seven sevens of verse 25, “Messiah shall be cut off,” and when you compute using a 360 day year you come out with the year 33 AD. So in 33 AD the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel, was cut off according to prophecy. Now the Jewish people would then go into dispersion and so beginning in 70 AD when Titus, after his father Vespasian started the siege, his son, Titus, ended it. After the siege of 70 AD and the subsequent destruction of can’t understand word] and Masada, the Jewish nation had been crushed, and so the Jews entered their final Diaspora that as to go on and is still going on now centuries and centuries after.
Now what does all this show? The prophecy of verse 26 was fulfilled in 33 AD to give people in the nation confidence that the rest of the prophecies which were not yet fulfilled would come to pass. God is building up His trustworthiness to mankind by predicting something, we watch it very, very carefully, it comes to pass. He predicts something else, we watch it carefully, it comes to pass. He predicts something else, we watch it carefully, it comes to pass. So we argue, if God can predict the big picture, history that involves millions and millions of people with millions and billions of problems, then God obviously is capable of our trust as individuals with our particular individual problem. The argument goes from the greater to the lesser, if God is trustworthy with the greater, that is with all the history, then God can be trustworthy with the lesser, that is myself as an individual in the middle of my problem.
So “After threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off,” but the King James says “not for Himself [says Hebrew words] which means there is nothing to Him, but that is the usual Hebrew way of expression possession, with the negative it is “and He has nothing,” and so its far better to translate it, at the end, in 33 AD, “Messiah will be cut off and He will have nothing.” Now what does that mean, Messiah will have nothing. It means that since this passage is looking at Messiah in a political context Messiah will have nothing of His political power, reign, and kingdom. This is precisely the argument that is used against the first century church in the book of Acts. Why can Jesus be Messiah when Jesus did not take over politically? The reason is because of prophecy, it says right here, “Messiah is going to be cut off, and He will have nothing for Himself.” So Christianity fulfills the prophecy of the Old Testament. “He will have nothing, and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary,” they shall destroy the city and the sanctuary.
Now the “prince that shall come” refers to the antichrist, this is the man who is going to make a covenant with Israel. “The prince that shall come.” It’s very interesting that in the original passage here you have the same word, nagid, used for Christ that’s used for the antichrist, and it means a government high, high official, a political leader. And so the political leader, which is the way we ought to translate it in contemporary language, not “the prince,” but “the political leader that shall come,” now if you look carefully in verse 26 it says nothing about the political leader that shall come. What it does say is who will destroy the city? The political leader that shall come or the people of the political leader that shall come. Obviously it’s the people of the political leader that shall come. We know from history who those people are.
The people that came in 70 AD are the Romans, and that fits with our previous interpretation of Daniel 2. Don’t come to the Bible and say well, that’s just a matter of your interpretation. Only people that don’t study come up with that kind of a lame brain response. If you study Scripture you understand that when you study it carefully things fit together. If it didn’t start putting together somewhere we might as well just chuck the whole thing. If the Bible is really a mirror that just reflects our face, then it’s useless. The Bible is not just a literary mirror, the Bible is conveying information. When I write a letter to somebody I don’t expect them to take it as a mirror, I expect them to read it and obtain something.
So here the Bible is written to give us information and the information is that Rome, “the people of the political leader that shall come” will destroy it. Now what does that predict about the future? It predicts that whoever this political leader is who is coming, whoever he is, he is not going to come out of Africa, he is not going to come out of Asia, he is going to come from the center of apostasy which is European culture. It’s a derived European culture of some sort, it’s going to come out of the culture that goes back all the way to Rome, and that basically is European culture. European and American and Anglo culture is largely made up of all those four elements; the Babylonians contributed the modern economic picture of deficit financing and fractural reserve banking. That’s a contribution of Babylonianism, prevalent in our own culture today, deficit financing. The Medo-Persians have contributed to our culture in the sense that they have given us the concept of internationalism. The Greeks have contributed to our culture in giving us the concept of autonomous reason. And finally Rome, the people specifically mentioned here, have contributed to our culture by giving us the concept of great bureaucracy and socialism type organization. So all of these elements will mesh together and “the prince that comes,” the coming political figure, will come with that culture, it’s going to be no mystery. It’s just a continuation of what’s happening today except it’s going to peak in this one man.
So “the people of the prince that comes 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. The word “flood” here has to be interpreted in the context; “flood” is used in the prophetic books to refer to an invasion, a military invasion. It’s used in Daniel 11:22 in exactly the same way. It is a metaphor; metaphorical use of “flood.” “it shall be with a flood,” a massive invasion. Later in Daniel 11 we’ll have a presentation on the Masada and you’ll see what a massive invasion did. So, “it shall come with a flood,” and what shall happen? “…the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood,” the end of what? The end of Jerusalem and the temple will be with a flood of men.
Historians to this day still do not understand what happened. There were people in the streets outside the temple that don’t know what happened in 70 AD, but something happened. When Titus’ men breached the wall and they went in to sack the temple Titus gave a general order to his army, don’t destroy the temple, save it. And for some strange reason, and again, we do not know what happened, but a soldier reported fire inside the temple and they tried to go in and stop it and it didn’t happen, and one thing led to another and some of the supports in the walls burned, broke down, and the whole thing came crashing down. Nobody knows who started the fire, whether it was accidentally or whether some of the zealots set it, whether the soldiers set it; something happened in the flood and the chaos of an invading army a general order was either disobeyed, neglected or something happened and the temple was destroyed. Now we could have told Titus not to bother with a general order because God’s Word says the temple is going to be destroyed and it was.
“…The end there of shall be with an invasion,” military invasion, “and unto the end of the war,” now the concept of “the end of the war, it’s the word for war or it can mean a prolonged warfare. The end of Israel’s warfare is what it’s talking about, so there will be, according to Gabriel, from 70 AD on down until the end of history, constant warfare over the city of Jerusalem. Now the warfare, “the end of the warfare” it says, “desolations are determined,” desolations or multiple destructions have been determined. So from 70 AD to the end of Jerusalem’s warfare, there will be many destructions of the city. That’s the prophecy.
So what Gabriel in effect has told them, don’t buy real estate in Jerusalem, it’s a bad investment. But look at why it’s a bad investment, and some of the destructions of Jerusalem, here’s just a brief history of the major desolations of Jerusalem. In 70 AD Titus under the Romans destroys it. In 135 AD Hadrian comes and conquers Jerusalem and declares Jerusalem to be a Gentile city, kicks out all the Jews and says there’ll never be another Jew in all of Jerusalem. Hadrian builds a third wall and conducts a massive thing in the second revolt. In 614 AD the Persians come in and take over the land. In 637 AD the Arabs from the south, the Muslims come in and take over Jerusalem. In 1517 AD the Turks take it over and it becomes part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1917 the dramatic General Allenby conquered Jerusalem, walking into Jerusalem after whom the great Allenby Bridge is named. Allenby was a man who trained soldiers using Scripture; he was a great Christian general in the British army in World War I. In 1948 the Arabs take it, and in 1967 the Jews took it. So it’s a city that has changed hands time and time again.
Now of all this time, the most interesting thing from the standpoint of prophecy is that only in 1967 do you have Jerusalem ruled by a government in the land. All the previous rulers had Jerusalem ruled by a government in another country. The Turks ruled from Turkey. The Persians ruled from Persia. The Arabs ruled from the south. Never was there a government locally established that ruled except beginning in 1967 when the Israeli government ruled the land and the city. That is a unique development and something that one senses in the flow of history, ears ought to go up, you ought to be pricked in your conscience, something is happening. This is the first time this is happening, that a local government, local in the land is now reigning in Jerusalem.
“…unto the end of the warfare, desolations are determined.” Some of you have heard Handel’s Messiah sung, if you hold the place this will explain a verse that you’ve heard from that Messiah. Isaiah 40:2. Isaiah 40:2 looks to the completion of this prophecy in Daniel. “Speak ye tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she has received of the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.” That “cry unto Jerusalem, for her warfare is accomplished” is actually the fulfillment of the prophecy you have just read; unto the end of the warfare shall be multiple desolations. Isaiah announces at the end, “Cry unto her, that her warfare is now accomplished,” for the desolations have punished her sufficiently in history to make all men cognizant of cause/effect in the ethical realm that when disobeys God’s Word one reaps the results. So verse 26 finishes up in Daniel 9 with a prophecy on down to the time of peace in Jerusalem.
Daniel 9:27 is future even to our time, for this picks up one part of verse 26, which was the prince, the coming political leader, and speaks of a time yet future. “And he” and the nearest antecedent is “the prince that comes,” he, not the Messiah, “he shall confirm the treaty [covenant], or a treaty, or a covenant, “with many for one week,” now he is going to confirm the covenant with, not the nation, but “with many.” Now what is “the many” here? “The many” will be, actually to the nation but it will be the majority, why doesn’t it just say then he will confirm the covenant with Israel? Because in that day the Jews will be intensely divided on this issue. Many Jews, the majority of Jews will agree to the covenant, but there will a firm minority of Jews that will not agree to the covenant and apparently their disagreeing with the covenant, their refusal to recognize what their government tells them to recognize, is recognized by God Himself to be an act of faith. He does not count the Jews of the minority to have part and parcel with this treaty. And therefore he does not say he will make the covenant with the nation. He’ll make it with the assenting majority.
It’s much like today in Israel; today there are two parties in Israel, and you see the response on the Sinai Accord, the majority like it and the minority doesn’t. It’s the same thing here, the majority will like the covenant, the minority won’t. “He will make a covenant with many for one week,” that verse alone sentences to death the proposition that the majority are always right, which is the axiom of all democracy. The axiom of democracy that the majority are always right is not Biblical.
“…in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease.” In “the midst of the seven,” so after the treaty is in force for three and one half years, this man is going to terminate, by political order, the temple ritual. The oblation, the sacrifice are temple rituals. Now again, this doesn’t require a great stroke of genius to realize that if you have temple ritual you probably have a temple, and so here is one of those places in God’s Word that gives us the indication that the Jewish people are going to rebuild their temple. They are going to rebuild the temple not to satisfy this prophecy, they don’t even know it exists, but God is going to so move that one of the next moves we will see in history is the Jewish people building their temple. And it’s got to happen before this prophecy can be fulfilled. The antichrist can’t come and stop the temple sacrifice is the temple isn’t there for the sacrifice to operate in.
“…he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease,” and now in the King James, this is a very difficult section here, the King James says, “and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate.” A far better translation means wing, so literally here’s how it reads, “and the wings of abominating abominations that make desolate,” or “the abominations that make desolate would be better. “…on the wing (dash)— abominations that abominate,” or abominations that make desolate. Literally it reads like this: “on the wing—abominations” plural, “which desolate.” That’s a literal rendition, the problem is it doesn’t tell you anything much, but that’s what the literal words read: “on the wing—abominations that desolate.”
Now “the abominations that desolate” is a term used in the singular in Daniel 11:31 and Daniel 12:11, so we have control on this phrase by its use elsewhere, in 11:31 and 12:11. Daniel 11:31, “And arm [forces] shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the” singular “abomination that makes desolate.” In Daniel 12:11, “And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that makes desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days,” three and a half years.
All right, so we have confirming support that something is going to happen “on the wing.” Now the question is, what is the wing? The word “wing” is a Hebrew word translated in the Greek, in the Greek Old Testament that occurs in the New Testament with connection with a pinnacle of the temple. And so it would read, “on the pinnacle of the temple abominations that abominate.” So apparently at the end of three and a half years antichrist is going to come in by order and terminate the temple ritual and there’s going to be a statue of something, left undefined, a statue of something that’s up there. Later on in Daniel we’ll see that when the first cycle of the antichrist happened in Antiochus Epiphanes, the Syrians, what it was was a statue of Zeus. Now there are some modern statues of Zeus, one of them is in the UN building; you can’t read the Bible in there but you can worship Zeus. And there’ll be some stature or something that will be identified with the abomination of desolation. Now the Bible is quiet about what it’s exactly going to look like. The believers of the hour who are directly concerned with it will know it, but we don’t know it, it’s not our hour yet, but there’s going to be something strange happen at the end of the three and a half years at the temple.
Now Jesus refers to this and we have confirming support, Matthew 24:15, Jesus is in the middle of His discourse. I want to look at Matthew 24:1 to prepare yourself for something here in a moment. “And Jesus went out, and departed form the temple,” so they were just in the temple, “and His disciples came to Him to show Him the buildings of the temple,” as if Jesus didn’t know, He had just cleaned them out twice. [2, “And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”] His disciples came and they were just marveling over the temple, so he comes out, they show him the temple, and then verse 3 says, “And as He sat upon the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be,” when is that temple going to be destroyed.” And that was the launch for this particular discourse.
Now in Matthew 24:15 we have the abomination of desolation, “When ye, therefore, shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet,” So Jesus accepted this particular portion of Daniel and without the aid of the higher liberal critics He didn’t have the added insight that perhaps Daniel didn’t write Daniel, but He believed that Daniel wrote Daniel, “spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place” so it’s standing in the temple, “(whosoever reads, let him understand.) [16] Then let them who are in Judea flee into the mountains.” That’s the signal to evacuate, every believer get out when you see that thing happen in the middle of the three and a half years; it’s a signal to disburse and get out. And of course there’ll be believers, well, I’m not sure of that interpretation, who will probably stay there and get killed in all the fighting that’s going to go on. But Jesus is trying to be merciful, trying to warn people, when you see it happen just take off.
All right, now the end of Daniel 9. So the abomination of desolation occurs in the midst of the week, “and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.” In other words, Jerusalem will end in one great paroxysm of world conflict; this will be the final dose of suffering, of sorrow, and military fighting and then it will be all over, so says Gabriel. Now to remind us that this occurs in actual history I have some slides of the temple and you’ll see this wing of the temple so you’ll have fixed in your mind what this wing in the temple looks like. That’s the temple area. This is the modern city, it was not there in Jesus day, it was built by the Turks. There’s the pinnacle, the pinnacle was the southeast corner of that temple. There’s the debris that has piled up over the years, as one desolation occurs the rocks are just dumped down and then they start again, so when they built the second wall they just built on top of the first all, just keep on going up. This is an accurate model of the temple in Jesus day and it’s very credible. This is the valley of Kidron. [shows more slides]
We’ll conclude by looking at the various doctrines we can apply to this passage. By outlining the course of action Gabriel has given a 490 year perspective. That 490 year perspective on history is going to be the basis of trust; the Jewish people are going to have to place their trust in something sound, something solid. It’s going to be a rock on which they trust, and the rock is the Word of God which, as John says later on, comes in the flesh as Jesus Christ. But hope, which his nothing more than long range faith technique applied on a day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out month after month year after year basis, that’s hope. That’s what you want to shoot for in the Christian life. If your Christian life is like a roller coaster, up and down, up and down, you do not have long-term enduring hope. When you begin to get this long-term, the ability to slug it out in the mundane things, the common things, the every day things and go from trial to trail to trial, sure going up and down but not these violent wild oscillations from depression to exultation, when you can stabilize and move consistently in a Biblical direction you know you are operating with a long-range concept of the faith technique.
Next week we’ll begin Daniel 10.