Daniel chapter 9, I believe that there are still some of these little outlines on the back table. If you didn’t get one last Sunday, it’s, we’re going to be looking at this little outline in greater depth today and it will probably, hopefully it will help give you a better understanding of the weeks of Daniel. Daniel chapter and this morning I want to begin and we’re going to start at verse this morning.
1 week = 7 years
70 weeks = 490 years
70 weeks divided into 3 periods:
7 weeks—62 weeks—1 week
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.
Dan 9:25-27
Let’s just follow in prayer. Dear Heavenly Fathers, we come before you this morning.
You revealed to Daniel events, all which were future to him, some which have happened in past to us and some that are still to come. Lord I pray that you would just give us greater insight into your word and help us to be encouraged as we realize the prophecies of your word come true a hundred percent. We live in a world which is moving fast towards wickedness and evil, rebellion against you in many ways.
And Lord I pray that you would just help us to see you are in control. You knew the beginning from the end even before the foundations of the world you gave to us your son as a means of salvation and determined that he would come and pay the penalty for our sin that we could be restored with you even though we hadn’t been born or created yet. This is the great wisdom and knowledge that you possess.
Lord help us to tap into this understanding of your prophecy, dealing with the last days and the days in which we find ourselves living. And Father may we be greatly encouraged by it. This we ask in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Remember Daniel was living during the time of Nebuchadnezzar. He’d seen Nebuchadnezzar attack Jerusalem. He had seen and been taken away into captivity to Babylon.
It appeared that the victory was being maintained by Satan instead of God because all the things around it seemed that the Jewish people and all that they had been entrusted with and stood for appeared to be being destroyed. God then gave a series of dreams and visions to Daniel showing that’s not the case. Don’t despair with where you find yourself at this moment.
Because I’m in control and this whole series of events is showing my justice upon the sin of my people and also it’s going to show how I will bring about justice on a rebellious world and at the same time maintain the opportunity for that world to repent and turn to me. And if you stop and think about it, how could God do that? I shared with you last week I had a young man that wrote me a question. He says, I look around the world and I see all the wickedness there and yet God is in control.
How does that occur? Satan gives people choices. He gave Adam and Eve a choice and they willfully chose to rebel against God instead of walk with him. And whenever you rebel, there’s consequences to rebellion.
And it didn’t matter that God had called Israel out of Egypt. The scriptures tell us they went down as a small group of 70 souls into the land of Egypt. It was basically the immediate family of Jacob, his sons, their wives and children and servants.
And over 400 years later, they came out as a mighty nation. A nation that God had created, not men. God had put this people together and made them a nation.
And God has said throughout history, they will be the clock that we look at to see where we are at in history. It’s sad to say that many people in the Church of Jesus Christ today have abandoned the Jewish people and say that God is done with Israel and that it doesn’t matter anymore. They say the church is a new Israel.
Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity both embrace that philosophy. They say they should control Jerusalem, not the Jewish people. Yet if you look at scripture and follow scripture, scripture said God is not done with Israel at all.
He wasn’t done with Israel during the time of Daniel. And those of you who have been with us studying Ezekiel, who was a contemporary of Daniel, and the Lord was revealing why his judgment was coming upon Israel, you’ll understand that Israel were sinners. And the vast majority of the people within the nation of Israel at that time had embraced other gods willfully, longingly.
And that their spiritual leaders had implanted within the temple false gods and idols and icons that God said should never be there. And God’s judgment was coming on them. Now God is telling Daniel, the sin of my people needs to be dealt with, but they’re still my people and I’m not done with them.
And he said the period of time that I’m going to deal with them before this all comes to a conclusion is going to be 70 weeks of years or 490 years. We got an oversight last week into those 490 years. Today we get a further breakdown as God begins to break it down.
And you’re going to see some amazing things that God is able to do, because he’s God, to be just and holy, yet merciful and gracious, and to deal with the world that’s been in rebellion with them ever since Adam, but still give them means by which they can be redeemed to himself and never leave the Jewish people out of it. And it all hinges on these 70 weeks of years. Daniel starts out in this particular portion of his letter and he says, Know therefore and understand that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and build Jerusalem until the Messiah, the Prince, shall be seven weeks and three score and two weeks.
What is he speaking about? The commandment to go forth and rebuild Jerusalem and the temple. It was during the time of Daniel and Ezekiel that the city of Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar on his third invasion would be utterly destroyed. We know from reading in the book of Nehemiah that when Nehemiah got to Jerusalem, it was in total disarray.
The walls lay of no use. They were just rubble. We also know from the book of Nehemiah that when Nehemiah got the walls rebuilt, there weren’t even city, within the city, there weren’t enough houses for the people to live in.
And that became a concern. That’s how totally devastated the city had been. Daniel hadn’t seen that.
He’d heard of the devastation. He didn’t see it other than in his visions and dreams because he wasn’t back to Jerusalem. But God had revealed to him this was going to be the starting point of these years.
The starting point would be when the decree went forth to restore and build Jerusalem. What is that decree? And when did it go forth? And is it recorded in Scripture? How do we know? Well, it’s interesting. You go to Nehemiah chapter . So if you want to keep your finger in Daniel and go back to Nehemiah and we’ll look at chapter . And we’ll see an interesting event happens.
In Nehemiah chapter 2 verse 5, And I said unto the king, If it please the king, and if thy servant have found favor in thy sight, that thou wouldest send me unto Judah, unto the city of my father’s sepulchres, that I may build it. The year was 1445 B.C. Nehemiah was the cupbearer to the king of the Medes and the Persians, the Artaxerxes. And he had been in great despair and despondency as he had heard what happened to Jerusalem.
Nobody was rebuilding it. It had been years since Daniel and Ezekiel and Jeremiah had been taken from Jerusalem. It had been years since the city had been destroyed and it lay in ruins.
The temple had just been commissioned by Cyrus a few years prior to this to be rebuilt. And Ezra had taken some Jews back to Judah, back to the Temple Mount, back to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. But the city itself remained in devastation.
This is the beginning point of these 490 years. Now if you go from this point, 455 B.C., and we do have the exact day, and you go forward, it says that the first 69 weeks of years are going to be broken into two, into two portions. The first seven weeks of years, years, is one portion.
Why is this broke out from the next? Well, it’s interesting, during this particular time, during these first years after this commission was given to Nehemiah, it took time to rebuild the city. It took time for the city to be reestablished. It took time for the walls.
The walls were put up rather amazingly. You can read that in the book of Nehemiah. It was a matter of months, not years, that it took them to rebuild the walls of the city.
But the city itself was not completed, and the people didn’t move back in. And during much of this first 49 years, was the reestablishment of the nation of Israel back in the land. The next 62 weeks of years, it’s interesting, you find very little prophetically spoken of.
It’s referred to as the silent time in the Old Testament. We know events happened, that history went on, and even some of the events that happened, Daniel had foretold they would happen. The time of the Maccabees.
During the time of the Maccabees, there were no prophets written in the Old Testament. There are things that are referred to as the Apocrypha, but the Apocrypha was never accepted by the church as canonical scripture, because there’s some errors, and there’s some things that are historically incorrect in the books of the Apocrypha. But some books of the Apocrypha speak of what happened during the Maccabean revolt against Rome.
And that came shortly after some of the things that we’re going to be looking at, in just a matter of weeks, of events that occurred under Antiphanes, Antiochus Epiphanes, one of the Greek rulers that ruled over Jerusalem at that time. Now, as you look at these events occurring, the 7 and 62 is 69 weeks of years. That is 434 years.
Seven weeks and 3 score and 2 is 62, that’s 69, that’s 434 years. For the 62 and the 7 would be 49, so it’s a total of 483 years, leaving 7 years or 1 week left. Now Daniel tells us something interesting happens at the end of that 69 week period.
He says, And after 3 score and 2 weeks shall Messiah cut off, but not for himself, and the people of the prince shall come and shall destroy the city and the sanctuary, and the end thereof shall be with a flood. Unto the end of the war, desolations are determined. Now, at the end of that week period, an interesting event is going to occur.
Daniel says, the Messiah is coming. There was a man by the name of Sir Robert Anderson. He lived in England, he was a devout Christian.
He studied the Old Testament, the chronology of the Old Testament, the years of the Old Testament. And he studied the prophets, when the prophecies were given, what the prophecies were about, and when they were to be fulfilled, if God gave the time. God gave and indicated the time and the day that Jesus would enter into Jerusalem.
That the Messiah would come. There are many people that say, Well, Jesus really probably wasn’t the Messiah of the Jews, because if he had been the Messiah of the Jews, they would have accepted him instead of rejecting him. That’s one thing you hear the world say.
However, the Jews, the Jewish people, had they known their scriptures, and remember, there was much corruption that was going on in the priesthood at the time that Jesus came. Because remember, he drove out the money changers of the temple, the Sanhedrin, the Sadducees rather, were the priestly order, and the Sadducees’ responsibility was to take care of the temple, yet the Sadducees used it as a political gain in a money-making institution, and they didn’t really teach the scriptures. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were known that they would teach the scriptures, and they embraced the scriptures, and so did the scribes, whose responsibility was to maintain the scriptures, yet both of them did not teach the scriptures as God would have them taught.
What the Pharisees would do is they would rely on rabbis to teach the scriptures, and the rabbis would rely on previous rabbis who would rely on previous rabbis. It’s the same thing that the Orthodox Jewish people do today. You will not find an Orthodox Jewish teacher who will come and teach, for example, verse by verse out of chapter of the book of Isaiah.
They will not do it. If anybody wants to look at Isaiah 53 and say, well, can you explain who it’s speaking of in Isaiah 53? They will say, well, rabbis have said that is speaking of the nation of Israel, or rabbis have said that is speaking of a past king, or rabbis will say, but they will never expositorily compare scripture to scripture and read it according to God’s word and be empowered by God’s spirit to interpret it. Instead, what happened during the time of Jesus, the people weren’t prepared.
The scripture told plainly. It had been revealed to Daniel when the Messiah would show up. He would show up, as we said, 483 years from the decree of the city of Jerusalem to be rebuilt.
Which was given to Nehemiah in scripture. I’m not going to go through all the dates this morning, but if you want to, go and get Sir Robert Anderson’s study on this, and he will show you that Jesus entered Jerusalem the Sunday before Passover, 483 years after the decree was made to Nehemiah. Now there are other prophecies that were given by other Old Testaments that should have told the people who He was.
They said that the Messiah, when He came, He would come and He would cause the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak. Jesus did all of that. But there was one other prophecy, because they would say, well, we’ve seen other prophets that have done that, but Jesus would be able to cast out the demons from a man who was deaf, from a man who was dumb and could not speak.
The priests were known to cast out demons, but they always had to interchange with the demon and talk to the demon. This man couldn’t speak. Jesus came and by His authority He cast the demon out of this man, and the scripture said that would be a work of the Messiah and the Messiah only.
Another proof. It said that the Messiah, when He came, would come with great authority. Jesus came and the people acknowledged they’d never heard a man speak and present the Word of God as Jesus when He spoke.
How could that be? Because He was the Messiah. And because it was His Word. He’d given it.
He’d given this Word to the prophets. He’d given this Word to Moses. He’d given this Word to David and Solomon.
It was His Word. And when He spoke, He spoke with tremendous authority. On more than one occasion, the Pharisees, the scribes, the Herodians, all those that stood in opposition to Jesus, attempted to cause Him to fail in His ability to speak on the scripture and to give wrong answers, or answers that would cause the people to become in great turmoil and turn against Jesus.
Every time they came, He sent them away because what He spoke to them, they could not answer. A prime example of one of the things that Jesus did was the woman that was caught in adultery. You had all of these religious men that brought her to Jesus and said she was caught in the very act of adultery.
Now, it’s interesting, the last time I looked, adultery must take place between two people, a male and a female. But you don’t see any man there standing with her. They merely brought her.
And they laid out their case before Jesus and He says, the law demands that she be stoned. What do you say? Now, if Jesus said that she should be stoned, that they should pick up stones and stone her, they would say, He has no mercy. But if He let her go, they would say He has no justice and He doesn’t follow the law.
And they thought they had Him. And it says that Jesus kneeled down and He didn’t address them. He just wrote in the dirt.
And it says they left one man at a time. Scriptures don’t tell us what He wrote in the dirt, but what He wrote in the dirt must have been really convicting because they knew they had no ability to stand in His presence. And by the time He got done writing, there was no one left.
And they thought they had him. And it says that Jesus kneeled down) and he didn’t address them. He just wrote in the dirt and it says they left one man at a time.
Scriptures don’t tell us what they wrote in the dirt, what he wrote in the dirt, but what he wrote in the dirt must have been really convicting because they knew they had no ability to stand in his presence. And by the time he got done writing, there was no one left but the woman. And as Jesus is standing there with her, he asked her a question.
He says, where are your accusers? She says, I have none. And then he makes an amazing statement because only God can forgive sins. He says, neither do I accuse thee.
And then he makes a statement that could only come from the lips of the Messiah. Go and sin no more. He knew the accusation against her was true, but he was able to take both mercy and compassion and love and forgiveness and yet deal with it with justice because he knew he would one day pay the penalty for her sin.
On more than those occasions, they should have known Jesus was the Messiah. Shortly before he entered into Jerusalem on the Sunday before the last Passover where he would be sacrificed as the Passover lamb to take away the sins of the world, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. Only God has the ability to give life and he made sure everybody knew Lazarus was really dead.
He waited four days before he showed up. Why did he do that? Because the Jewish people believed that maybe you could be resuscitated after one, two or three days, but four days, if you did not breathe after four days, you were dead.You were really dead.
He waited four days, even though they came to him when Lazarus was initially sick and then he died and Jesus waited. He waited to show them four days because he was going to raise him from the dead and it’s interesting how he said Lazarus come forth from the grave because that Jesus said come forth, probably every dead person in the area would have come forth. He’s the Messiah.
He has the power, he is God come in the flesh. Yet, and there’s more events that occurred that pointed to the fact Jesus was the Messiah.He proclaimed it in Nazareth in the synagogue to those that he had grown up with when it was his turn to read from the scripture and he read from Isaiah chapter 61 and he read the part, well, let’s just turn to Isaiah chapter 61 and we may as well read it verbatim what he read and they knew exactly what he was saying when he said it.
Isaiah chapter 61 verse 1, in the spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek. He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. And he stopped and he closed the scroll and every eye is on him.
And he says this has been fulfilled in your presence today. They knew exactly what that scripture was speaking of. That scripture was speaking of the Messiah.
Now he didn’t go on and read verse 2 to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God to comfort all that mourn. He didn’t go on and explain that because that talks about his second coming when he’s coming in great judgment. So all these people should have known they they knew when he spoke those words at the synagogue in Nazareth and they went to throw him over a cliff.
We stood at probably what was a cliff where they were going to throw him over on one of our trips and he no man could have lived had they thrown him over there, but they didn’t. He walked out from amongst them and they couldn’t throw him over because it wasn’t his time. The Jewish people should have known to the day when Jesus would enter Jerusalem because it was to that very day that he entered.
He entered on the foal of an ass that had not been ridden before and the garments were placed on the ass by those that were his followers just as it said in Scripture. Yet they didn’t know. But an interesting thing Daniel is given a second part of this prophecy that the prince is coming, but he’s going to be cut off.
But he’s cut off not for himself. It’s an interesting statement. He’s cut off but not for himself.
In other words, the Messiah was coming and they were going to cut him off, but it wasn’t because really what he had done he was being cut off for you and me. And Daniel is speaking of the fact that Jesus would come the first time after these 69 weeks or years enter Jerusalem, be cut off and then an amazing thing happens in history. So Jesus is cut off.
He’s crucified. He’s buried and he rises again from the dead just as the Scriptures said he would do. But then there’s another prince that’s to come and there’s much confusion in the church today over when this prince is coming.
Some people in the church think that the prince came as Titus in 70 AD because it says prince will come and it gives Daniel tells of the fact that Jerusalem is going to be destroyed a second time and it’s going to be by a prince that’ll come from this nation. But then it speaks of another one that’s coming that’s going to come during the last seven weeks of year, during the last week of seven years. Daniel speaks of the fact that shortly after Jesus is cut off it says here but not for himself in verse 26 the people of the prince shall come and shall destroy the city and the sanctuary and the end thereof (10:39) shall be with the flood.
It says the people of the prince. (10:44) It doesn’t say the prince. The people of the prince.
It hasn’t introduced you to this prince who is a false prince. It introduces you to his people. (11:03) You can look at other portions of scripture and you can determine (11:06) who this people are and (11:11) who came and destroyed the city (11:14) after Jesus was crucified.
The people of the prince that’s to come. What people came and destroyed the city? Well history tells us in 70 AD after Jesus had been crucified, buried, rose again from the dead which all that occurred around 33 AD.70 AD during that period between the Jews had been very rebellious.
They were constantly giving Rome problems and Rome had had enough and so they sent Titus out to take care of the problem once and for all with the rebellious Jews. He went out there and he destroyed Jerusalem. Remember Herod had rebuilt the temple and added on to it the second temple that had been built during the time of Ezra.
Herod during Herod the Great during his reign over Israel. He had rebuilt the temple, not rebuilt the temple, but added on to it and and made it much more beautiful and it is said that he built these giant stones to build the walls around the temple and (12:45) he put as mortar, he put gold inside the mortar. He spared no expense.
When Titus came in 70 AD and they tore down the temple, Jesus had made an interesting statement to his disciples when they were overlooking Jerusalem and the Temple Mount from the Mount of Olives before the last Passover week had been fulfilled and he’d been crucified. It was before all of that events occurred and his disciples were looking at the Temple Mount and they saw the beautiful temple that Herod had refurbished and built and they made a comment on it and Jesus said there will not be one stone left upon another. When Titus came and they attacked Jerusalem and tore it down they wanted the gold out of the mortar and they literally tore stone off of stone to get the gold and Jesus’s words were fulfilled.
You go to Israel today, you will not find the temple. It never was rebuilt. It won’t be rebuilt until shortly before the prince of that nation that destroyed it comes.
That tells us who destroyed it? The Roman Empire. Where is this prince coming out of? The Roman Empire. He’s not Jewish.
He’s not the Messiah. But the sad thing is the nation of Israel is not going to look at the book of Daniel and read the book of Daniel and they’re not going to understand what happened between the time that Jesus came the first time and they’ve been looking for their Messiah to come back. He’s supposed to come back and deal with justice, but he never shows up.
The scriptures tell us that this period of time and if you look at this little chart that we gave you it’s referred to as a time of the Gentiles. Prior to this time God had been dealing solely with the nation of Israel and there were Gentiles that got saved, but it was the exception rather than the rule. You found Gentiles that accepted the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and believed when the people came out of Egypt there were Egyptians that believed and came with them.
So it was always had a handful of Gentiles, but it’s the church had never been taken. The gospel had never been taken to the four corners of the earth. God said it would have to be done before he would come and judge.
You are living in the time of the Gentiles because God put his plan for Israel on hold. During the time of the Gentiles the gospel has been taken to the Gentile nations throughout the world. The early church was all Jewish.
But then Paul was commissioned as the apostle to the Gentiles and Paul took the gospel to Mesopotamia. He took it to Eastern Southeastern Europe. He took it all the way to Spain.
Those that came after Paul took the gospel even further. Some of Jesus’s apostles took the gospel to India. We know that the gospel has gone throughout the whole world and has been since the destruction of the temple by Titus.
During this period that is referred to is a time of the Gentiles, but this time is coming to an end. Now there’s an event that brings this time of the Gentiles to its conclusion and Paul talks about it in Thessalonians. He talks about the fact of the rapture of the church.
As you look at this timeline that’s given when the prince of these people comes, the nation of Israel is going to embrace him according to the prophecies given in the Old Testament as well as the book of Revelation. They are going to embrace him as the Messiah. Because he’s going to come and he’s going to offer them something that nobody else has been able to do.
He’s going to put them at peace with their adversaries and (so they’re going to believe he’s the Messiah. Daniel tells us for the first three and a half years of this last week of years everything’s going to appear to go pretty well with this prince of peace, but then all of a sudden the temple has been rebuilt and they’re offering sacrifice again on Temple Mount and he goes up and prevents them from using the temple for their worship any longer, goes in and proclaims himself to be God and (18:51) proclaims it as his temple. And after that you have the great tribulation where God’s wrath is literally poured out on the earth.
If it wouldn’t be for this period of time between you and I probably wouldn’t be sitting here today. But God’s grace was there in the spite of his coming and impending judgment. Now the other thing that is interesting as you look at this (is that not only is God’s grace shown to the Gentiles, but the Bible talks about the fact that the Lord’s going to come as a thief in the night.
No one will know the day or the hour and yet you look at and you can lay out the timeline and we’ve got here the minute that this man comes to power. We know that the last seven years of history are coming about and you can plan this out and you can see and have a you can look at when it’s going to occur. So how can it be that nobody knows the time of the day and nobody because there’s another event as I mentioned that needs to occur before that happens and when that event occurs that’s when this guy comes to power and that is the rapture of the church.
I want you to understand and we’ve got to close because we’re out of time, but I want you to understand there are a couple things that the church is really attacking today. One is the rapture. To say rapture isn’t real.
Rapture doesn’t exist. It only started with Darby in England and that’s a lie. The Apostle Paul wrote it about it in Thessalonians.
The thing is, the other thing is that the church needs to make the world better in order for Jesus to come and the scriptures are very evident and clear that Jesus is coming because things have gotten so bad and so out of hand and the nations of the world are coming to kill every Jew that is left alive and he is coming to rescue them with his ten thousands of saints and to judge the nations and the battle of Armageddon occurs. The world has gotten so bad and for those people that are Christians and say, well, we just have to bring about righteousness throughout the whole world and then Jesus can come. They don’t read Jesus’s own words in Matthew 24 and 25 where he says if it weren’t, if he didn’t return would there be any faith left? It’s not better and better.
It’s worse and worse and all one has to do is look around. You can look around and you can see politicians in our own country that speak one thing and they sound so good and all of a sudden they don’t do what they say. And these are the good politicians.
How are things getting better and better? Tell that to the kids in Iran that just got gunned down. Tell that to the Kurds in northern Syria that are being slaughtered. Tell that to the Christians that are being beheaded in Africa.
Tell that to the people that are still wanting to have England be England. It’s becoming a Muslim country. Tell that to the people of Christians that live in Minneapolis.
How are things getting better and better? Daniel tells us and it’s and it all hinges around these 489 years and these 489 years are dealing with Israel and Israel is the thing that you need to watch as the world begins to hate Israel more and more. You’re getting closer and closer to the last days. The events going on in the Middle East right now, the United States is helping this Confederacy of Nations that Ezekiel speaks of in Ezekiel 38 to come against Israel.
We’re helping set it up with our foreign policy. We need to look at God’s Word in order to properly interpret the events of the day in which we live so that we can properly tell people where they need to look for their help and that’s Jesus Christ. Let’s just close in prayer.
Lord, I pray that you would just speak to us through your Word today. Help us to understand your Word. Lord, I pray that you would just help us to get a better handle on the 490 years, 483 of which have already occurred.
Help us to understand that last week was referred to in Scripture as the great tribulation, the tribulation and the great tribulation. And Lord help us to look to you. This we ask in Jesus name.
Amen.