The Coming of the Messiah
The prophecy begins with the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. After 69 weeks, the Messiah is cut off, a clear reference to Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. This affirms Jesus as the promised Messiah foretold in Scripture.
We’re going to use this as kind of a launching pad, but I’m going to show events that led up to what is resulting in the vision that Daniel has seen. It turns me to Daniel chapter 9, and I want us to begin at verse 20 of chapter 9, and I’m going to read to the end of the chapter.
And whiles I was speaking, and praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before the Lord my God for the holy mountain of my God; 21 yea, whiles I was speaking in prayer, even the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, touched me about the time of the evening oblation. 22 And he informed me, and talked with me, and said, O Daniel, I am now come forth to give thee skill and understanding. 23 At the beginning of thy supplications the commandment came forth, and I am come to shew thee; for thou art greatly beloved: therefore understand the matter, and consider the vision. 24 Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy. 25 Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times. 26 And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. 27 And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.
Daniel 9:20-27
Heavenly Father, as I come before you this morning, Lord, I pray that you would just speak to us through your words. Lord, I pray that you would just help us to begin to understand as we unfold the vision that Daniel was given of these weeks of years, the cause of why they are there, the fact that you are still dealing with the nation of Israel. And Father, that this is going to culminate in the return of our Lord Jesus Christ and the establishment of his kingdom. Lord, I pray that you would just help us to have insight and understanding. May your Spirit guide and direct us as we look at these words. Just read out from Jesus’ mouth. This morning I want us to look specifically at two things that Daniel said were going to be the result of what was bringing this vision about.
Verse 24, it says, weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city. Two things that are causing these 70 weeks to occur are the people of God and the city of God. And there’s much confusion today over what that is.
In the church there’s confusion. Who are the people that he’s speaking of here? Well, he’s speaking of the nation of Israel. We’ve been going through the book of Daniel and you’re seeing that Daniel is writing this vision while he is a captive in the land of Babylon.
He was taken captive from the city of Jerusalem. And he’s in Babylon and the Lord gives him these visions that are dealing with his people and his city. Speaking of the Lord’s people in the Lord’s city.
Well, we know from Scripture the only people that God created as a nation is the nation of Israel. Every other nation came as descendants from men and were given men’s names. And for example, even today, these things like, oh, they’re anti-Semitic.
Well, the people don’t even realize what they’re saying when they say they’re anti-Semitic because the very people that they say they’re trying to defend and coming against the Jewish people and becoming anti-Semitic because the Jews are a Semite race. The Arabs are Semites too. They’re descendants from the same stock except the tree broke once it got beyond Abraham.
And I want us to look at that a little bit this morning to give us background and understanding so you can understand what’s happening in the world today. You understand a little bit who God is speaking about here, what people it is and what city it is. When it comes to the city, the city is Jerusalem.
Jerusalem has always been God’s city. We studied that a little bit the last time we looked at Daniel. We looked at the fact that the Lord, his mountain is Mount Zion and his city is Jerusalem.
He had Abraham go there with Isaac and offer to offer Isaac as a sacrifice on Mount Moriah, which is Mount Zion. And he said that he offered in place a ram and it was to show that the Lord was going to offer a substitute sacrifice for our sins and also to show the faithfulness of Abraham and to deal with the fact that this is God’s mountain, God’s place. David purchased a place on this mountain.
It’s a place to tabernacle. Solomon, his son replaced the tabernacle with the temple at the same location on the Temple Mount on Mount Zion. This is God’s city, God’s mountain, God’s place.
But to listen to the world, you’d think it was everybody but the Lord. The Muslims claim it. The Catholics claim it.
They all want to have control of it. The United Nations wants to have control of it. The nations of the world have claimed it.
But God has said this is my mountain, my city, and my people. And it’s important that we understand this in the day in which we live or we can get very confused. So I want to give you a little history lesson this morning into why there’s all this conflict that we see in the world today, how that all of this conflict is laying the groundwork for this coming evil prince that’s spoken of that’s coming at the beginning of the the 70 week and that the world is going to receive him because of the deception that is here.
And then also I’m going to help us to understand why the Jesus is going to have to come as the whole world is going to come against Israel. And what is going to be some of the impetus that will result in that happening? Well, first of all, you have to go back all the way to when Abraham and Sarah were called out of Ur of the Chaldeans. And they came and God told them, first they came with Abraham’s family to Haran.
And then they came after that, God told them to go to a land that he had not known anything about, that Abraham had never been to. He said, I’m going to have you go to this land. And this is the land that God said, I am going to give you.
And when Abraham got there, an interesting thing occurred. God told Abraham this was his land and he was giving it to Abraham. And then he said that Abraham and Sarah were to have a son of promise.
Now the son of promise didn’t come. Abraham and Sarah are getting older and older. They’re about the age of my wife and I. I don’t think we’re having any kids.
And they’re looking at each other and they’re going, how are we going to have a child? We’re old. Well, the world said you can have surrogate mothers back then. They didn’t call them surrogate mothers.
But what they did is they said, if you had a servant and the woman of the house, the wife, couldn’t bear a child, she could give her servant to her husband. Her husband would have a relationship with this servant. And the woman who is the servant would become pregnant.
She would bear a child and that child would become, in essence, the child of that couple. Not the child of the servant. That’s what the world said you could do.
Not what God said you could do. What the world said you could do. So Sarah and Abraham decided to do it that way.
Sarah came and put the plot forward to Abraham, said, I’ve got this servant Hagar, take her. They’re a child by her. She will be my child.
She will be your child. So that’s what they did. Hagar became pregnant.
The minute she became pregnant with child, there was already tension between her and Sarah. I want to fast forward to when that baby was born. That baby is born and he’s given the name Ishmael.
And Abraham thinks, I have a son. This must be the son that God was talking about. But what happened is, as Ishmael grew, Ishmael and his mother became very, very attacked Sarah.
Constantly mocking her because she couldn’t bear a child. Mocking her because of her condition. And she went to Abraham and she says, send them away.
So Abraham does. And when they get out in the desert, he sends Hagar away with the child and water and a little bit of food, bread. The water’s gone and she cries out to God, what am I going to do? And she leaves her son and she goes and cries to the Lord.
The Lord appears and says, go back. And he said, then I am going to make promises about your son. It’s written in Genesis chapter 16 . I want to take a look at this. In Genesis chapter 16, pick it up at verse 3 to start with.
And Sarah, Abraham’s wife took Hagar, her maid, to be Egyptian. After Abram had dwelt 10 years in the land of Canaan and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife. And he went in unto Hagar and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes. And Sarai said unto Abram, My wrong be upon thee. I have given my maid unto thy bosom. And when she saw that she had conceived and I was despised in her eyes, the Lord judged between me and thee. And Abram said to Sarai, Behold, thy maid is in thy hand. Do to her as it pleases thee. And when Sarai dealt hardly with her, she fled from her face. And the angel of the Lord found her by the fountain of water in the wilderness, by the fountain of the way of Sur. And he said, Hagar, Sarah thy maid, whence camest thou? And when wilt thou go? And she said, I sleep on the face of my mistress Sarai. And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Return to thy mistress and submit thyself under her hand. And the angel of the Lord said unto her, I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude. And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael, because the Lord hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man, and his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. And he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren. And she called the name of the Lord, called him the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou, God, seest me. For she said, Have I also looked after him that seest me? Wherefore, the well was called Barahiah, because it is between Kadesh and Bered. And Hagar bear Abraham a son, and Abraham called the son’s name with Hagar bear Ishmael. And Abraham was four score and six years, and Hagar bear Ishmael to Abraham.
Genesis 16:3-16
And so we see that Abraham had a son, but his son was Ishmael.
He was born according to the world’s way, not according to God’s way. Now, Ishmael, it was told by the angel what his character would be. First thing it said, it would be a wild ass of a man.
In the original language, what it really is saying is that this man would be living in an area where he would have to, life would not be easy for him. But it would be, he would be the type of individual that would have to, would make do with what he did in the desert. And also his attitude towards those that were around him would be the character of a donkey or a wild ass.
A wild ass who went out in the desert today, a wild ass who would get a buy with, not the luxuries of life. He doesn’t have a green pasture. That would be his character.
A wild ass is also hard to bring under control. It’s not like a donkey that’s been raised on the farm and he’s trained since it was young, but it has its own mind and it does its own thing. The second thing that he said would happen is his hand would be, will be against every man and every man against him.
This would be the characteristic of Ishmael. He wouldn’t be an easy guy to get along with. To be somebody that was kind of always looking for a fight.
The third thing, he would dwell in the presence of his brothers. He had no brothers at this time, but it’s prophetically spoken that he would dwell in the presence of his brothers. What brothers did he have? Well, later on you’re going to see that he has the child of Thomas, Abraham has Isaac.
We’ll get to that in just a moment. And Ishmael would dwell in his presence. He also had other brothers.
When Sarah died, Abraham took another wife. Her name was Keturah. And she had sons.
These were the sons of Abraham. And you can study about those in Genesis as well. He took these sons and not as much is written about them as is written about Ishmael.
But it said that when Abraham was getting all up even further in years, he sent the sons of Keturah away. And he sent them to what we would say today would be the Arabian Peninsula. And he gave them a little bit of an inheritance, but Ishmael received them.
I mean, Isaac received the majority. And he sent these sons away. And that’s basically the last we hear of them in relation to Abraham.
Because when Abraham dies, they don’t come back. But Ishmael does. Ishmael and Isaac bury Abraham.
The next thing that it says about Ishmael, he would constantly be at war with those that were close to him. Now I want you to understand Ishmael is really the father of the Arab people. And we’re going to take a look at that in a minute.
Every Arab is not a direct descendant of Ishmael, but there’s a lot of things that happened that resulted in the Arabs in the Middle East that are descendants of Abraham. Ishmael has influence in them. And if you go to the Middle East today, one of the characteristics of the Arab people is once said that if the Arabs didn’t have the Jews to fight against, they’d fight and kill each other.
And they do. But when they have a common enemy, then they fight against the common enemy. But when the common enemy, Israel, isn’t in their crosshairs, they fight against each other.
That’s what is spoken of Ishmael. It says that he would be a powerful people and he’d be a populous people. The day you go to the Middle East, the Arabs outnumber the Jews tremendously.
And we’re going to look at the Arab countries that are the descendants of Ishmael or Ishmael with some of the other relatives of Abraham. So we see that after this, Abraham listens to God and God tells him, I’m going to send you the son of promise. And they laugh.
Why? Because they’re in their old age. Sarah is beyond the years of a woman being able to bear a child. Abraham is of old age.
And they’re going, how are we going to have this son of promise now? God says, because it’s my son’s promise. I’m going to give him to you. And Sarah bears a child and his name is Isaac, which means laughing.
God’s got a sense of humor. He names the child. So every time they call his name, they’ll remember, he laughed when he told us he was going to be born.
Isaac is born. And immediately there’s conflict between Isaac and Ishmael. Ishmael and Hagar end up leaving and Hagar finds a wife for Ishmael.
And she’s an Egyptian. Now this is logical because Hagar was an Egyptian. So Ishmael marries an Egyptian and he has sons.
At this time, Isaac marries Rebekah, his cousin by Laban, his uncle, relative. And Rebekah has twins. And as she’s bearing these twins, she knows something strange is going on in her womb.
And she prays to the Lord and says, what is happening? And he tells her, there are two nations in your womb and they are warring with one another. Well, she has twin boys, Esau and Jacob. And you remember the account of their birth? A hand comes out, a string is put on the hand, and then a baby, so they know that this is the, they keep track of the babies because they know they’re twins.
And Esau is the oldest, he’s born first. Jacob is the younger, he’s born second. Now Esau being the first has certain rights.
He has the birthright and he’s also received the blessing. The birthright deals with being the spiritual head and director of the family. You are the one that’s given the responsibility to lead the family.
You make the major decisions for your family. The blessing is you get a double portion of the inheritance from your father because you get more. Well, they grow into men and you remember what happened with Esau and the birthright.
The Scriptures tell us that Esau was a man of this world, much like his great-uncle Laban, a man of the world. And Esau loved the things of the world and he really didn’t care about God. And one day, you remember the account, Esau comes back from being out hunting and Jacob has made a porridge or a stew and he’s sitting making the stew and Esau smells the stew and he says, I’m going to die if I don’t have something to eat.
I need food. And he’s willing to trade his birthright for a cup of stew. That’s how much it didn’t mean anything to him.
Because he was a man of the world. He didn’t care about God. Now, I want you to know the significance of the birthright.
The birthright placed whoever possessed it in the line of the Messiah. Because it was Abraham, Isaac and then the child who would receive the birthright and the blessing. Esau was that child, but he rejected it.
He wanted nothing to do with it. He didn’t want anything to do with the Messiah.
Jacob gets the blessing as well. So Esau is angry. He doesn’t acknowledge the fact that he willfully gave up the birthright and he really probably didn’t care about the blessing other than he wanted twice as much as Jacob got.
And so there’s contention between Jacob and Esau. I want you to see that the contention, even though it was somewhat resolved when Jacob came back with his wife, that it never was fully resolved amongst the other descendants. The descendants of Esau always looked down upon the descendants of Jacob.
It’s interesting, these two nations, there were prophecies given about Esau. It says that Esau would live by the sword. In other words, that would become his lifestyle.
Brutality, striking, taking. It also says that the younger would serve the older. I mean, the older would serve the younger.
In other words, Esau would end up serving Jacob. This was contrary to everything that the world said because always the younger served the older, not the older serving the younger. And also it says that Esau, his descendants would willfully take a yoke upon themselves.
It would be very hard and they’d give up an easy yoke to get this hard yoke. What are these prophecies speaking about? Well, if you look at what happened in the scriptures, you always see that the Edomites, which are the descendants of Esau, were in contention with Israel. During the time of David, David made the Edomites servants to him.
They became subservient to David. They also were still in that state during the time of Solomon. And they were the servants.
But there came a time where they cast off this relationship. And they became a real thorn in the side of Israel. And you’ll see at various times, for example, during the time of Nebuchadnezzar attack, Jerusalem, people were trying to escape to the south.
The Edomites land, and I was going to put up the map, but the Edomites land lay south. It’s in the southern part of what today is Jordan. It’s by Mount Seir that was given to Esau by God as his inheritance from the Lord as the land he could have.
And being south, when the Jews were trying to escape and go south as Nebuchadnezzar’s coming, they prevented them from doing it. When the Romans came and conquered Jerusalem, they did the same thing. They were constantly a thorn in the side of the Jews trying to prevent them from escaping peril.
And they hated to be their servants, even though God said they were. And I want you to understand when they cast off the easy yoke and took the hard yoke, an event occurred. Now, I’ll give you a little more detail before we get to that big event.
The descendants of Esau and the descendants of Ishmael, they intermarried. Esau, as a matter of fact, took wives that were descendants of Ishmael. We also know that the descendants of Keturah intermarried the descendants of Ishmael.
And some of the tribes that are in the Saudi peninsula today are both the descendants of those men. You see that what happened is there were two other people that were related to Abraham that lived in the area as well. The Moabites and the Ammonites.
The Moabites and the Ammonites were the descendants of Lot. Lot was the nephew of Abraham. And you remember when the people came out of Egypt and came up, the Lord told them specifically, do not take anything of the land of the Moabites.
And if you need to take any of possession from them, pay them for it. You just don’t take it from the Moabites or the Ammonites. Well, there was Balak and Balaam.
There was a whole series of events where the Moabites attempted to prevent the Israelites from gaining access into the promised land. They also attempted for Balaam to curse the Israelites. And Balaam also told Balak how he could get God to judge Israel and that was to get them to intermarry with all of the pagan tribes and that their descendants would start worshipping false gods and God’s judgment would come upon them.
And that’s exactly what Israel did. And you come to this passage in Daniel. This is after years of the Israelites ignoring their calling to have and worship God in purity.
And embracing the false gods of the peoples around them. And God is bringing judgment on them. And this is the judgment that he’s bringing on them.
But he hasn’t forgotten. But the Moabites and the Ammonites join in spirit with the Ishmaelites and the Edomites and they hate Israel. The Ishmaelites hate Israel because they feel that Ishmael should be the firstborn of Abraham.
He should have been the child of promise, not Isaac. The Edomites hate Israel because Esau was the firstborn of Isaac and he should have been the one that got the blessing and the promise, not Jacob. Now, you look at all of this and you come to today and you look at what is happening in the Middle East today.
Well, an interesting event occurred when a man by the name of Mohammed came on the scene and he was an idol worshipper. He worshipped the moon god and he wanted to gain access and control, if you would, to the Jewish and Christian people. But he wanted to really bring a false religion.
He wanted to incorporate some of his beliefs into their beliefs. They would have nothing to do with him. They rejected his ideas and he turned on them.
It’s really coming out of the worship of the moon god. He incorporated into it some of the Jewish teachings from the law. For example, the Muslims don’t eat pork.
They have dietary laws that are similar to the Jews. They have a day of worship that’s similar to the Jews. They do similar things to the Jews because he took from that because he was trying to create something that wasn’t his.
What that did is it gave the Arab people really another reason to come against the Jews and Christians because of the religion. It was a false religion modeled after but not nearly like. It had no redeemer.
It has no love. There’s a lot of things that are just the opposite. You can put it Christianity and Judaism, biblical Judaism over here and Islam over here and the direct opposite.
That’s because they came one from Satan and one from God. Now why is there so much hatred of the Jews today? It’s interesting that they’re even called Jews because every person that’s a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You can be of the tribe of Napoli.
You can be of the tribe of Benjamin. You can be of the tribe of Issachar, Dan. It doesn’t matter.
You’re still called a Jew. Well, it’s interesting. Which one of Isaac’s sons was the Messianic line coming to? Judah.
What does Judah mean? It means praise God. The tribe of Judah and Benjamin were the tribes that were given that became Judah or the southern kingdom when the kingdom split. But the Lord said that when he called them back, he called them back as one people and they that were two sticks would come back as one stick.
That happened in . But at that same time, all the Arab nations around there conspired just like we read about in Psalm today. They conspired together against the Lord.
It was really a conspiracy against God, but they said they were going to drive the Jews into the sea. The Jews were outnumbered, outmanned, outgunned in when the Arabs came and attacked. But God preserved them and the Arabs lost.
And if you read accounts of it, it makes no sense that they lost. There were times where there was whole thousands of Arabs attacking a handful of hundreds of Jews and all of a sudden they looked and turned around and ran away. It’s like they saw something.
It was God’s protection. But at that time, the Arab nations embraced completely Islam. Just about every Arab nation today is an Islamic nation.
The Bible said, as it was talking about Esau, he would give up a light yoke and trade it for a heavy yoke. What did Jesus say about the yoke that he’s given me? It’s a light yoke. It’s a yoke of promise.
It’s a yoke of hope. It’s a yoke of love. As you’re yoked to the Lord and you become His, there’s a difference that comes in your life.
You experience love and forgiveness. You experience joy and peace. You experience the power of God’s Spirit.
It’s not a heavy yoke to bear. What is the Islamic yoke? It’s a horrible yoke. It’s a heavy yoke.
It’s something that can’t be borne. It results in death and hatred and everything that’s opposite of who God and His character is. They gave up the relationship with God and embraced a relationship with Satan, just like it said they would do.
Does that mean that there are no Arabs that are Christians? No. God said that there would be from every tribe, tongue, and nation, those that would come to Jesus Christ and come to Him through Christ. There are Christians today that have been set free from Islam and set free from the hatred of the Jewish people that are Arab.
There’s a guy, you can go and listen to his testimony, the son of Hamas, one of the founders of the Hamas religion, those Hamas people. He became a believer in Jesus Christ and he loves Israel today. He actually worked for the state of Israel at different times.
Well, why is it important that we know this stuff? Well, you can go and look at the names of the Arab countries today. Jordan consists of the lands that were the Moabites, the Ammonites, and the Edomites. The very top portion of what is Jordan was given to Israel.
It was the inheritance of Reuben, the two-and-a-half tribe. That was their inheritance. But south of that was the Ammonites, the Moabites, and the Edomites.
There is a group of people that are known today as the Palestinians. Where did they come from? Well, there was another group of people that hated Israel and tried to destroy Israel every chance they got. They were the archenemies during the time of the beginning of the judges and during the time of David in the Philistines.
They absolutely hated Israel. They had five major cities. The five major cities of the Philistines were Ekron, Gath, Ascalon, Ashdod, and Gaza.
The Palestinians today have taken the name of the Rome did when Israel kept revolting against Rome. He renamed, instead of calling Israel Israel, he called it Syria-Palestine. Because he knew that the Philistines was a derivative of the word Philistine.
And he knew the two countries that Israel hated were Syria and the Philistines. They called it Syria-Palestine. He gave the land to them in what he was saying.
But it was God’s land. He couldn’t give it. And we see here that the name Palestinian came out of that.
The Philistines were actually driven from the land. There are no Philistines. And maybe some people have, maybe go way back if you look at their history, maybe they got some blood.
Because they really came from Greece and the islands in the Mediterranean where the Philistines came from. So they may have some blood in them. But the Philistines are no longer recognizable people.
But the Palestinians are really Arabs, or of Arab descent. And they came into the land of Israel to work, a lot of them. And Israel came back into the land.
Because the land started to become prosperous again. And it was God who came. Some of them had lived there, but the majority had not.
We also know that today, there are those that hate Israel in Lebanon. The Bible talks about that as well. It talks about the tire, Sidon and Tyre, which is the southernmost part of Lebanon.
We have those that would hate Israel. Guess who’s there? Arabs. Hezbollah.
In Syria, if you look at the Middle East, and it’s important that you understand the history of the Middle East in order to understand the Bible and understand what’s happening today. In the Middle East, Syria and Iraq, those two nations way back at the beginning of the dispersion of the Jews during the time when the northern kingdom of Israel went into captivity. They were taken into captivity by the Assyrians.
The Assyrians, that nation consisted of part of what is Syria today and part of Iraq. Iraq also became known as Babylon later on. It was the land of the Chaldeans.
That was Iraq. These have always been enemies of Israel, even though at times, God works and graciously saves people out of those nations. We also see that Saudi Arabia, I already talked about them.
They’re the descendants of the other sons of Ishmael and the other sons of Abram. And then all of North Africa along the northern edge of countries that are inhabited today by many Arab people. As you see, the land area is huge that the Arabs have.
And I didn’t even talk about Egypt. There’s a whole other story there, but we’re out of time. Another account.
So God is dealing with these and it says that there’s one people He hasn’t forgotten and He hasn’t forgotten their city or that people. It’s not the children of Ammon. It’s not the Ammonites or the Moabites.
It’s not the Edomites. It’s not the Ishmaelites. It’s not the children of Qatar.
It’s not the ones that are the descendants of the Syrians or the Sidonians. And it goes back to the promises that He made. A son of promise given to Abram, Isaac, who was not the oldest son.
A son who the blessing and birthright would come through through Isaac, who was not the oldest son. A son who the blessing would come through, who was a son of Jacob, who was not the oldest son. A son who the blessing and birthright would to come through David, who was not the oldest son.
God never did it the way the world said it needed to be done. He did it according to His promises and His Word. And so when you begin to look at what’s happening around the world today, and you hear all the anti-Semitism, the first thing you need to say is, when you’re saying you’re anti-Semitic, then you’re saying you’re against all the Semitic people in the world, and that includes all the Arabs of the world, who are the ones that are anti-Semitic.
It makes no logical sense, because people don’t think, and they don’t know. They’re really anti-Jewish, and they’re really anti-Messiah. And God told Daniel, there’s two things I have not forgotten, and I’m going to deal with.
And it’s gonna come during the weeks of years, I’m gonna deal with them. And I’m going to deal with the nation of Israel, and my city, Jerusalem. My people are my people.
My city is my city. And I don’t care what the world says, that’s what God says. And we’re gonna see that God, in all of His grace, as the Apostle Paul tells us in the book of Romans, gave us the great privilege of being grafted in to the covenant, to the covenant, as His children.
Because we were, as the example Paul gives, we were wild olive trees, living in rebellion against our Creator, yet our Creator took us, who were a wild olive, and grafted us into the root, and gave us a position of blessing, that we did not deserve. And He will to anyone who trusts in His Son, Jesus. I wanted to lay this background, so that you can have a better understanding when we get into looking at the weeks of Daniel, and we see how this begins to play out, and the promises that, the visions that Daniel’s given of the cities, and the nations that are going to come against Israel, and the peoples that are gonna come against Israel, and then how God is going to bring this all together, and the culmination, where He will come and judge all these nations.
On the back table, I’ve got some papers that have a set of the weeks of Daniel, showing what happens during these weeks. I’d like you to pick up one of those, and take it with you, and bring it with you when you come to church, so that you have some points of reference as we begin to go through this, and you can help give you an understanding, a better understanding of how these days of weeks, or these years of weeks, rather, fall, and what’s happening in them. Let’s just close in prayer.
Father, I thank you for the opportunity that you’ve given to us to gather together. Thank you for the promises you’ve given to us from your word, and Lord, I pray that you would just help us to understand that you will accomplish your promises. You’ve revealed to Daniel that you’re not done, and it’s your city, or your people.
There’s going to be a judgment that had to come upon them, because of the rebellion against you, but you’re not completed. And that at the end of this weeks, it’s going to be a marvelous time, and you’re going to come and establish your kingdom of righteousness on this earth. Lord, now I pray that you would just go with us, and help us to be encouraged by your word.