We are back in our study of “The End of the Age”, as we continue to work through the supporting prophecies to the final judgment Jesus will bring against the Jews in Mark 13. I started this series by offering a critique of the popular way of understanding End-Times prophecy, which is known as Dispensationalism. Dispensationalism creates divisions in Scripture in the way God saves, in the people of God (distinguishing between Jew and Church), and in prophecy itself. We first looked at Daniel 2, where we saw that Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of an image made of gold, silver, bronze, and iron pointed to four empires (Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome). In that dream, Nebuchadnezzar saw a stone which fell on the final kingdom, grinding it to pieces, and then grew into a mountain that filled the earth. That stone was Jesus Christ, and the mountain that grew is the kingdom of God. Then, last week we studied Daniel 7, where Daniel has a vision of four beasts. These four beasts are also the four kingdoms of the image. That vision also pointed forward to the coming of a Son of Man who would take dominion and destroy the fourth kingdom, Rome. This morning, we take up another prophecy of Daniel in Daniel 9:24-27. Let’s read that together. From this passage, see three points: The Prediction, The Prince, and the Pouring of Wrath.
First, from verses 24-25, see the prediction. With all of these sermons, I have a real challenge before me. It’s not convincing you of my view or showing you the beauty of God’s Word. The greatest challenge I have is in keeping you awake. Last week, we dove deep into history, and that always runs the risk of being boring. Well, things don’t get any better this week. Instead of history, we are going to do math. But, the prediction found in our passage is absolutely amazing. It serves to confirm the trustworthiness of Scripture and the authenticity of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Daniel, writing almost 500 years before the events of this prophecy, predicts with wonderous precision what would take place. Keep all of that in mind when we get bogged down in the math.
So, with that warning in mind, we need to first step back and consider our context. Back up in verses 1 and 2, Daniel tells us the reason he received this vision. He says, “In the first year of Darius (aka Cyrus)… I perceived in [the writings of Jeremiah] what must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years.” Daniel was reading Jeremiah 29:10-14, where Jeremiah says, “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill my promise and bring you back to this place.” This prophecy was written before Israel was taken into captivity, and now, Daniel looks back and realizes that he is in the year of its fulfillment. So, he wonders, is God going to be faithful? As far as he could tell, there was no movement in that direction. Little did he know, there was a cupbearer named Nehemiah who appealed to King Cyrus for his people, and God moved the heart of Cyrus to let them return in 434 BC. Then, in 457 BC, King Artaxerxes heard the appeal of Ezra, the priest, and authorized and funded the reconstitution of Israel’s government and religious life.
This concern of Daniel led him to pray and repent for his people. He recognized that even in their exile, they were still a hardhearted people. So, he worried that God would not relent of his judgment on them. As he was praying, God sent the angel Gabriel to give him an answer. That answer serves both as a promise of God’s restoration and a warning of his final judgment. There are two things to notice about this prediction.
First, there is a timeline. Gabriel says that there are seventy weeks decreed about your people. Numbers are very important to the OT, especially the number seven. The Sabbath was established on the seventh day of creation. The laws of Israel were centered around sevens (rest for the people every seven days, rest for the land every seven years, and rest from slavery and debts every 49 years). Seven is a prime number and symbolizes completion. So, above all else, this prophecy points to God’s complete work for Israel. God intends to finish his covenant with the house of Israel on this timeline.
These 70 weeks are seventy sevens, with each day representing a year, for a total of 490 years. In verse 25, Gabriel gives more detail of what will happen in these 490 years. First, there will be 7 weeks (49 years) to rebuild Jerusalem and anoint a new king. Then, for 62 weeks, 434 years, Jerusalem will abide in relative safety, though not without trouble. After this timeline line of 483 years, another prince will come, which we will talk about in a minute.
Before we do, we need to understand the tasks for this timeline. What is God predicting that he will accomplish. In verse 24, there are six things that will be finished. One, it will finish the transgression. What transgression? The transgression of Israel. Notice, it is not “finish transgression”, but “finish THE transgression.” Even though God will restore Israel for a time, even though the temple and the wall will be rebuilt, the sins of Israel have not been entirely dealt with.
Two, this prediction will put an end to sin. Again, the focus here is on Israel’s rebellion. The idea is not to stop sin, but rather, to get the whole measure of it. The Hebrew word for “end” means “completion or wholeness”. As Jesus says of the Jews in Matt. 23:32-36, “Fill up, then the measure of your fathers… from the righteous blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah… truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.”
Three, this prediction will atone for iniquity. Even though God is warning of final judgment on Israel, there is also great hope in this prediction. It promises that there will also be a completion of atonement. There will be an end to sacrifice.
Four, this prediction will bring in everlasting righteousness. Yet another promise of hope. Israel failed time and again, but God will bring eternal righteousness and fulfill the promise of Ezekiel 36, where the law will be written on the hearts of his people.
Fifth, the prediction will seal up vision and prophecy. Sadly, this is another warning of judgment. Isaiah 6 promised that God would one day close up the eyes and ears of the people, so that hearing they cannot hear and seeing they cannot see. Jesus told his disciples, in Matt. 13, that this is the very reason he taught in prophecies, because “to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.”
Finally, the prediction will anoint a most holy place. Thankfully, the last prediction is a promise of hope. The Lord will anoint a new holy place. It won’t be the temple that Ezra rebuilds, but something new.
So, to what or to whom does this prediction point? To answer that, we need to consider my second point, the prince, from verse 26. Gabriel tells Daniel the specifics of how God will bring about all six of these completions. God will do so through one prince, but who is this prince? Here is where the math comes in, because we can use the 483 years given in the 69 weeks to locate precisely when this will be. Gabriel says, in verse 25, that the clock starts “from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem.” That happened in 457 BC with the decree of Artaxerxes to rebuild the temple and government of Jerusalem. So, if you add 483 years to 457 BC, you land in 27 AD. In that year, there was a man by the name of Jesus who was baptized in the Jordan river. At his baptism, the sky was opened, a dove descended to him, and a voice called from Heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus is the anointed one and prince who was promised.
We also know that this prince is Jesus because of what Gabriel says will happen to him. Verse 26 says that he will be “cut off and shall have nothing.” Isaiah 53:8 prophesies that the suffering servant will be “cut off from the land of the living.” Jesus prophesies of himself, in Mark 9:12, that he must “suffer many things.” In this cutting off, Jesus completed three of the six things predicted. He made atonement for iniquity in his substitutionary death. Heb. 9:26 says of Jesus, “He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” He brought in everlasting righteousness. Rom. 3:21-22 says, “Now the righteousness of God has been manifested… through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” And, he anointed a holy place through the temple of his own body. Jesus says of himself in Luke 4:18, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news.”
But, there are three other completions that don’t seem to be fulfilled yet. That leads me to my final point, the Pouring of Wrath. Verses 26-27 have been the source of a great deal of confusion, not because the text is unclear, but because of the modern way we interpret it. The Dispensationalists have taught that, at this point in Gabriel’s prediction, there are two splits. First, in the middle of verse 26, they say we have a different prince – the Antichrist. Because the tone shifts from one of grace to one of judgment, they assume the prince from this point on cannot be Jesus. They also inject a split of time, arguing that some undetermined block of time exists between the first half of 26, and the rest of 26 and 27. They get there by saying that the 70th week, predicted in verse 27, is separated from the rest, and must happen at the end of time.
There are several problems with this interpretation. For one, nowhere in the text do we get even the slightest hint that there is a separate prince from the anointed one, Jesus Christ. The prince of the second half of 26 is the same prince as the first half. Along with this, it is often read as though it says, “the prince that is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary.” But, it doesn’t say that. It says, “the PEOPLE of the prince will destroy the city and the sanctuary.” So, if the anointed prince of the first part of verse 26 is Jesus, then who are the people of Jesus? That would be the Jews. So, did the Jews destroy the city and the temple? Yes, they did. In 66 AD, the temple captain Eleazar led a revolt to stop the sacrifices for Caesar in the temple. This move started a civil war among the Jews. They broke out into three factions: the merchants, priests, and zealots. The zealots fortified themselves in the Holy of holies, and then they contracted with the Edomites to assassinate Ananus, who was the former high priest. The ancient Jewish historian, Josephus, who was there for all of this, said, “The death of Ananus was the beginning of the destruction of the city.” After this, they elected a new high priest who was not of the Levitical line. They then burned the grain stores on the temple complex so the other factions could not have them. It is no wonder that the Romans made quick work of them when they arrived, because the city was already destroyed from within.
The dispensationalist gap is also problematic because there is no sense that a gap of time should be in this prophecy. It is strange that the dispensationalist will say that 483 years of this prophecy happened in tight succession, but the last seven years will happen way out in the future, 2000+ years later. Instead, let me explain how this last week that we find in verse 27 fits, and what Daniel means by the “abomination of desolation.” Verse 27 says “he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering.” First of all, who is “he”. That would be the prince of verse 26, Jesus. If the 483 years lands us at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in 27 AD, then half of the last week (about 3 ½ years) lands us at his death on the cross in 30 AD. In April of 30 AD, on a hill called Golgotha, the Lamb of God gave his life for the sins of the world, and in that death, he put an end to sacrifice and offering. From that cross, the Son of God cried out, “It is finished.” In the city of Jerusalem that day, in the temple that the Jews held so dear, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies was torn in two from top to bottom.
So, you might be wondering, what about the rest of the week? After all, verse 27 says he will make a strong covenant for one week. After Jesus’s death, the apostles began to proclaim the Gospel to the Jews of Jerusalem, and on Pentecost, some 3000 people were saved. They went daily the temple to preach, but at every turn, those same leaders who crucified Jesus resisted them. That resistance grew until, some three years later, Saul was commissioned to stamp out the movement, starting with a deacon of the church named Stephen. Stephen was brought to the Sanhedrin, condemned, and stoned to death as Saul looked on. The persecution spread, James the Apostle was killed, and the church scattered into Gentile lands. The work of the church moved from the Jews to the Gentile world in 34 AD, 3 ½ years after Jesus’s crucifixion, ending the strong covenant of one week that began with Jesus’s baptism.
There is one thing left in this prophecy. How is it that Jesus completes the last three promises of this prophecy? Verses 26 and 27 say that “desolations are decreed” and “on the wings of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.” Again, because of the way dispensationalists insert a gap to jump us to the End of Time and the Antichrist, they read this “abomination of desolation” to be a sacrilegious defilement that the Antichrist will perform in a new, rebuilt temple during the seven-year Great Tribulation. But, that is not what abominations or desolations mean. This abomination of desolation has to do with “the people of the prince that destroy the city and temple” in verse 26. First of all, abominations are not something Gentiles do in the OT law. Abominations are caused by Israel’s failure to keep the law. Lev. 20:22 says, “You shall therefore keep all my statutes… that the land where I am bringing you to live may not vomit you out.” Numbers 35:33-34 says, “You shall not pollute the land… for blood pollutes the land… you shall not defile the land in which you live, in the midst of which I dwell.” In the law, God promises that if Israel defiles his land, he will make the land desolate. In Lev. 26:31-33, God promises that he will “lay your cities waste and make your sanctuaries desolate” if they defile the land. So, did Israel do this? Yes, they did. In Matt. 23:37-38, Jesus says, “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it… see, your house is left to you desolate.” During the civil war leading up to the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, the Zealots defiled the temple by converting it into a stronghold. They shed the innocent blood of Ananus on temple grounds and installed a priest who was not of the line of Levi. In burning the granaries, they denied food to the poor and needy of Jerusalem in their time of desperation, so that the prophecy of Rev. 6:5-6 would be fulfilled, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil and wine.” All of this violates the law of God and is an abomination of desolation. But, there is a greater abomination of desolation that was done before all of this. In 30 AD, these same leaders had captured Jesus and brought him into the temple court, where they beat him bloody. They mocked the Son of the Master of the Vineyard. Ultimately, they condemned him and crucified him, spilling innocent blood on the land where God dwelled. As Jesus warned in his parable of the tenants, from Mark 12:9, “What will the master of the vineyard do [to the tenants who killed his messengers and his son]? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyards to others.”
Jesus is the anointed one. He is the prince who atoned for iniquity, brought everlasting righteousness, and anointed the holy. He is also the prince who finished the transgression of Israel and saw the fullness of their sin and sealed up prophecy with parables so that seeing they could not see and hearing they could not hear. In Christ, God has put an end to the old covenant. He has proven that by leaving the old Jerusalem and its temple desolate. Not one stone is left standing upon another, as a sign to the finality of his judgment. But, there is a new temple where the presence of God abides. Jesus called himself the true temple (“destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” – John 2:19). We, too, are temples of the Holy Spirit. And together, we are being built up into a temple of God in Christ. Oh, how beautiful this prophecy of Daniel is, because it shows with such marvelous accuracy that Jesus is the Anointed One of God. He is the Son of Man who is now seated at the right hand of the majesty on high. He is the Stone that the builders rejected that has become the cornerstone and grinds to pieces those who resist him.
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