Sermons

Pinebrooke Community Church                                                                       23 March 2025 “Seventy Sevens”                                                                                             Daniel 9:25-27

Taking things at face value can leave us uninformed. There are always dimensions to what we hear, see, or experience. What is there behind the scene? What is going on backstage? That’s why the Psalms are hard to absorb for some people. In Daniel’s experience he had had a vision, but taken at face value it made no sense to him. It is not unlike a symphony without melody. There is no line from which to gain understanding, just a glob of notes. In Daniel’s case God knew that there were no discernment skills in Daniel’s mind to understand what He had given him, so in His grace He sent Gabriel, the messenger angel to explain things to him. Still, it was overwhelming in the explanation to Daniel. The future can be like that. Let’s attend to the text.

“Know and understand this: from the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: war will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. He will confirm a covenant with many for one ‘seven.’ In the middle of the ‘seven’ he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on a wing of the temple, he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.”

At face value Jerusalem was a mess. In his letter to the exiles, that rogue prophet of the Lord, Jeremiah wrote, “This is what the Lord says: ‘When seventy years ae completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place.” (Jer. 29:10). Several decrees had been made by various kings of Babylon and the Medo/Persian Empire to either rebuild the temple in Jerusalem or the city of Jerusalem, but not both. It wasn’t until 444 BC that Nehemiah the king’s cupbearer was God’s choice for that task. Nehemiah’s brother, Hanani lived in Jerusalem and when he returned to the Persian capital city, Shushan, Nehemiah asked about the welfare of Jerusalem. The report was bleak, “The survivors who are left from the captivity in the province are there in great distress and reproach. The wall of Jerusalem is also broken down, and its gates are burned with fire” (Neh. 1:3). This broke Nehemiah’s heart!

“In 444 BC, King Artaxerxes granted Nehemiah permission to leave his court position, commissioning him to rebuild the city of Jerusalem and its walls. The restoration and rebuilding of the city of Jerusalem began in 444 BC and was completed in 395 BC. That’s 49 years, or seven sets of seven.”

According to Gabriel Daniel’s vision included 62 weeks of years to describe the Anointed One’s arrival. The 62 weeks of years was identified more recently. Sir Robert Anderson, assistant Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police from 1888 to 1901 and lay theologian, wrote a book called The Coming Prince. He worked out the math and given the Jewish calendar determined the day that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey as fulfilling this prophecy of Daniel’s vision and the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9,

“Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” The date was determined to be 6 April, AD 32. The anniversary of that day is coming up, though with our calendar we will be celebrating it on 13 April.

The next point in the prophetic vision says that the Anointed One will be cut off. The people we know in that day were looking for a warrior Messiah that will reveal itself in John’s vision in Revelation 19:11, “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice He judges and makes war.” But instead, they were given a suffering servant, “Surely, he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, (see that is how we know Jesus meant what He said on the cross about being forsaken) and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isa. 53:4-6). That’s what iniquity is like in the presence of our Holy God.

In the words of our mentor, the Anointed One, “instead of going after the Gentiles (the Romans), Jesus used God’s words to slice and dice the Pharisees, Sadducees, and teachers of the law (p. 209).” Remember Jesus’ words in Matthew 23, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites…!” The more the people listened to Jesus’ teaching, the less He sounded like a warrior. The word Gabriel used that is translated “cut off” means to “exterminate.”

After the Anointed One is cut off, “Less than four decades after Jerusalem exterminated the Anointed One, God exterminated Jerusalem. Titus, the princely son of Roman emperor Vespasian, besieged Jerusalem. Four months later, his army breached the walls, massacred the people, leveled much of the city, and destroyed the second temple. Prophecy given; prophecy fulfilled.” (p. 210). That is where the temple lays today. The wailing wall is the remaining part of the second temple, destroyed in 70 AD.

The “seventieth week of years” is identified as far as what will happen but can’t be nailed down as to when. What Gabriel describes is that there is a ruler that is coming, and he will operate from Jerusalem. The ruler that is coming will be about authority and worship. That ruler will operate under the wing of the evil one. From his fall from heaven Satan’s intent has always been to be worshiped. Remember Jesus desert temptation, wasn’t that the crowning conclusion to get Jesus to worship him? Allegiance and worship tend to go hand in hand.

Jesus spoke to his disciples of it as the abomination of desolation in Matt. 24:15-16 in the context of his discussion of the end of the age. Paul spoke of it in his discussion of the second coming of the Lord in 1 Thess. 5:3. Even if this doesn’t happen in our lifetimes it is important to not be ignorant of what is to come. It behooves us to be aware as our awareness is important to God just as it was important for Daniel and Daniel’s readers. They wouldn’t see everything in Daniel’s vision in Daniel’s lifetime, but for all who would come to be exposed to the Word of God in all perpetuity it will become the only dependable truth to understand what is happening. Maybe that is why one’s view of the authority of Scripture is so important.

The final description that Gabriel gives is that the ruler who follows the Anointed One will come and deceive the people. This ruler sets himself up as God for the final half-week of years. Again, Satan has always wanted the worship of humankind. We can even now notice the pulling away from the worship of God. In the future when the Antichrist appears after he has deceived the Jews, he will turn on them and terrorize them. Eventually in that time Jewish worship in Jerusalem will be replaced with the worship of the beast, the recognized authority.

So, what do we do with all of this? To begin with God has seen fit to reveal the near future to Daniel and the next generations that will follow his generation. Life was going to be difficult for every generation of those who worship God, obey Him, and eventually will follow God the Son. It has always been hard to follow Him, Old Testament and New. We battle evil within ourselves and in the world around us. Jesus knew that the future beyond his incarnation was important to allude to both for the 11 and for us. Part of our task is to pass on this heritage to the next generation and the next and the next. The heritage built on the foundation of the Word of God.

What we learn from the last 2 & ½ centuries is that God has a plan and whatever the case, God has got it. There are battles constantly going on in the heavenlies. Paul writes about that in the 6th Chapter of his letter to the Ephesian Church. With the evil one the battle for position goes on all the time. As we live life in the shadow of that, we also live in the shadow of the Almighty. The difficulties that we face are simply skirmishes often to test our allegiances, our faith, and our trust. God’s wooing of our lives is informed by His Word. (Prov. 3:5-6; Phil. 4:6-7).

We need to know where things are going in order to not doubt or lose hope. Hope for Daniel is hope for us. God’s got it! It is natural to want to know where things are going, especially if things don’t look good to us. The overview found in the planet earth website is revealed by God for The Chosen.

From Daniel’s position the website reads like this: history future…from the Babylonians to the Medes and Persians to the Greeks to the Romans to the first Advent to extermination of the Anointed One to the birth of the eternal kingdom to various kings and temporary kingdoms (that’s what is going on now) to the rise of the Antichrist and his beast to the second Advent and the permanent rule of the eternal kingdom of God.

Our place is the place of living out of the eternal kingdom through who we are becoming in light of the Anointed One and what we are assigned to do in the establishing of the eternal kingdom. We live in constant contention with the fleshly distorted kingdom of the not yet that fights for its lifeless survival. The dynamics of eternal living now is the transforming presence of Christ in our becoming and living for the glory of God.