Theseventysevensofdaniel.com

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I want to share an interpretation of the prophecy of Daniel’s seventy sevens that I have found. It’s probably not one you’ve seen before. I say that because I have been researching this for over 20 years and I haven’t found more than a few people who saw it this way and they seemed to have abandoned it when it didn’t turn out like they thought it would. Well, I applied it a little differently than they did and it has turned out to be way more than I ever imagined it would be. Let me get to the prophecy so I can explain how I break it down and then we can look at the application of that break down.

Daniel 9:22 He instructed me and said to me, “Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding. 23 As soon as you began to pray, a word went out, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed. Therefore, consider the word and understand the vision:

24 “Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place.

25 “Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out (Decree issued) 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. 26 After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death 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. 27 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 at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.

If you have studied this passage at all, or have heard it discussed, you have likely heard the mainstream interpretation. That is that there was a decree issued to rebuild Jerusalem and then 69 sevens passed and then Jesus was crucified at the end of the 69 sevens. The final seven is in the future and is awaiting confirmation of a covenant and that confirmation will trigger the rapture at the start of the final seven years. In my opinion there is a much better explanation, and that explanation fits with what we see in scripture and the world today. Please let me show you.

In verse 25 we see that the seventy sevens are broken down into three time periods. There are seven sevens and sixty-two sevens, leaving one seven that it covers later in the passage. The first two periods of time are said to start with a decree to rebuild or restore Jerusalem, and end with a coming.

25...."FROM the time the WORD GOES OUT to restore and rebuild Jerusalem UNTIL the Anointed One, the ruler, COMES, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens."

There are two people mentioned along with the two periods of time. The two people are the Anointed One and the ruler. The ruler is the Antichrist and the Anointed One is Jesus. This is a prophecy to their coming, not to their deaths or anything else. That is key to understanding this prophecy. People are often confused by this statement:

26 “After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing.”

That is the outcome of the coming of the Anointed One. The 62 sevens are to his coming as stated in verse 25, not to his being put to death. Jesus came when God placed him inside Mary’s womb. Once you have that in your mind, it is much easier to understand this prophecy. Many Bible teachers will state that the verse says Jesus will be crucified on the last day of the 62 sevens. That is very clearly NOT what it says. The prophecy states right up front that the time periods are to the coming.

25...."FROM the time the WORD GOES OUT to restore and rebuild Jerusalem UNTIL the Anointed One, the ruler, COMES, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens."

I believe it is very clear that the Anointed One being put to death is not being stated as the event of the final day of the 62 sevens. His death is AFTER his COMING, with his coming at the end of the 62 sevens. Why would Gabriel feel the need to state this? If the decree is to his coming, then why state that he will be cut off after 62 sevens? It is because Gabriel does not want us to think that this coming is for the setting up of the Kingdom of God and the Millennial Reign of Christ. This coming is for his sacrifice to atone for our sins. It is a very important distinction. It is prophesied in several places in the Old Testament that the Messiah would come and give his life for our sins. It is also stated several times that the Messiah will come and set up a kingdom that will never end. God doesn't want any confusion about the purpose of this coming. The cutting off of the Anointed One is the purpose and the outcome of his coming.

The very next thing it tells us is what the outcome of the coming of the ruler will be.

“26 ....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. 27 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 at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.”

Notice that when it identifies him it calls him "the ruler who will COME". Another clear reference to the initial statement of this prophecy that the time periods given are to the coming of the person. The fact that it now identifies them separately is a very clear indication that they are two different people. That means that the opening verse spoke of them both even though it kind of sounds like the Anointed One and the ruler might be the same person. People will often say that "the Anointed One, the ruler" just means that the Anointed One is a ruler. If that were true, then they wouldn't be spoken of separately just one verse later. If the ruler were Jesus, then it would be Jesus who sets up the Abomination of Desolation in the temple. That is a major contradiction with many other scriptures including the word of Jesus himself in Matthew 24 and Paul in 2 Thessalonians, not to mention, just plain common sense. What is an abomination? Not something Jesus does.

The only thing this verse stops short of saying plainly is that the coming of the ruler will be after the seven sevens. It has to be deduced by process of elimination. If the seven sevens and the 62 sevens are to the coming of the Anointed One and to the coming of the ruler, AND the Anointed One is identified with the 62 sevens, then it is very clear that the ruler comes after the seven sevens. What other option is there? The mainstream interpretation will tell you that while the ruler does come, he does not come after either the seven sevens or the 62 sevens. He comes after an unknown period of time. Not only unknown but unknowable. They also say the Anointed One comes after BOTH the seven sevens and the 62 sevens. They just add them together. The prophecy is not written that way at all. The two time periods are written in the original Hebrew with a mark between them that indicates they are not to be added together nor spoken as if they were.

You would need two decrees if this interpretation is accurate. Two decrees separated by thousands of years. Why is that? Because Jesus and the Antichrist come thousands of years apart from each other. There is no doubt about that. Verse 25 tells us that there will be a "decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem". Restore and rebuild sound like kind of the same thing but when you think about it, they are very different. I submit to you that they are two different decrees, one to restore and one to rebuild Jerusalem. Notice too how this prophecy revolves around the city of Jerusalem and not the temple or the nation as a whole. It is just the city of Jerusalem.

If this interpretation is accurate, there should be a decree to either restore or rebuild Jerusalem that is made 62 sevens before Jesus comes. Let's look and see what we find.

Matthew 1:18 This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. 19 Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. 20 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).

God, in the form of Jesus, was with us from conception. Jesus came when he was conceived. But was there a period of 62 sevens before his conception that started with a decree to restore OR rebuild Jerusalem? Indeed, there was. In the book of Nehemiah, we see that the city had been rebuilt, and the wall was also. Then Nehemiah dedicated the wall and the city and RESTORED the whole of it to the service of God. He instituted the Law of Moses with a huge ceremony in 433BC. The exact date is not recorded but the fact that he restored the city with a decree to do so cannot be denied. His reforms and restoration of Jerusalem are known as the Code of Nehemiah. To calculate the amount of time of the 62 sevens we need to be aware that the prophecy does not use the word years. In fact, it refers to the Abomination of Desolation as being in the middle of the final seven. We know from many other scriptures that the Abomination of Desolation starts the Great Tribulation, and the Great Tribulation lasts alternatively 1260 days or 42 months or times, time and half a time depending on which scripture you look at. For all of that to be consistently true a seven would have to be 7x360 days. 62 sevens calculates to days then in this manner: 62x7x360. That comes out to 156,240 days. When you convert that to our solar years it comes out to 428.05 years. Starting at 433BC and going forward 428 years you come to 5BC. That means that Jesus would have been born around 5BC, exactly the time when most scholars say he was born. Many scholars will also tell you they believe he was crucified in 28AD on the Wednesday Passover, which was April 28, 28AD.

I know millions of Christians believe Jesus was killed on a Friday because the Bible says he had to be buried right away because the next day was the Sabbath. What millions of Christians may not know is that the day after Passover is ALWAYS a Sabbath, just not a Saturday. The Bible tells us that the day after Passover is the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread and is a High Sabbath. His followers would have had to wait until Friday to get the spices and things they needed to prepare his body for a traditional Jewish burial. It is not a quick process nor is it inexpensive. By the time they got it all together it was nearing sundown and the Saturday Sabbath. So, they had to wait for another Sabbath to pass before they headed to the tomb. Scripture actually tells the story this way. You should look into it.

The pre-trib people have their own timeline that fits their interpretation, and they have him being born much later, so that their 69 sevens end on what they think is the date of his crucifixion. I showed you why the prophecy is not a counting to his crucifixion, but rather to his coming. I also showed you why the prophecy doesn't add the two time periods together. I hope that makes sense to you. The 62 sevens are in the past and started with a decree to restore Jerusalem and ended with the coming, or conception, of Jesus. The seven sevens will begin at some point in the future and will start with a decree to rebuild Jerusalem and will end with the coming of the ruler, the Antichrist. We just need to find the right decree and we will know the date for the coming of the Antichrist, the date for the Abomination of Desolation and the date for the end of the final seven. None of that will tell us the date or the hour of Jesus' return, although you can bet that it will be very close to the end of the final seven. There is no place in scripture, even if you know when the seven years start and end, that will tell you when Jesus returns. Certainly, once the final seven years starts, assuming you can discern it has happened, you will know the exact date of the Abomination of Desolation and the end of the final seven, even if you were "left behind". But that still won’t tell you when Jesus will appear. Everyone alive at the start of the final seven will have the opportunity to know these dates, if they understand prophecy. What I am telling you that you probably haven't heard before is that you can know when the final seven will begin well ahead of time. It is the same thing that happened with Noah and the ark. Noah was told to build the ark because a great flood was coming, but he wasn't told when it would come. He spent many years building the ark not knowing when the flood would come. Then as the time drew near and the ark was completed, God told him that the rain would start in seven days. We are not warned by only seven times, but by seven times seven.

IMPORTANT AND INTERESTING THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE NUMBERS 62 AND 49

Every year, on the Jewish calendar, Passover occurs in the Spring. Then the biblically mandated "Counting of the Omer" starts the day after Passover. That count is seven times seven, or 49 days. This is a remembrance of the time from the Exodus to the day when God gave the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. The day the Ten Commandments was given is called Shavuot. Christians call it Pentecost, but we celebrate Pentecost on a different day than the Jews do. Pentecost means fiftieth day. The day after Pentecost starts a count of 62 days to Tisha Ba'Av. That is the day on the Jewish calendar that both the first and second Temples were destroyed. This is the spiritual and symbolic basis for the breakdown of the sevens in Daniel's prophecy. That is where the numbers 49 and 62 came from. Passover and Pentecost occurred long before our Savior gave his life on Passover. The pattern and the timing were set centuries before Jesus came. Jesus is the living Temple of God. This is why he is associated with the 62 sevens and the destruction of the Temple. His death was a more real version of the Temple of God being destroyed than when the physical temple was destroyed in 70AD.

The seven sevens count ends with the coming of the Antichrist and the start of the final seven. I do not know why the Antichrist is associated with the seven sevens. Perhaps it is a perfect period of time. It gives us a perfect warning. Perhaps it is something specific about him that we will see when he comes. Perhaps it indicates his pretend status as a man of God. It is important to note that Pentecost is a stand alone day and is not part of either count. This parallels the gap in time between the two periods of sevens and is consistent with not adding the two together.

I believe what I have just showed you is the purest way of dissecting the prophecy. What did Jesus have to say about that prophecy, if anything?

Matthew 24:15 “So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand— 16 then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. 17 Let no one on the housetop go down to take anything out of the house.

He pointed us to the prophecy of the seventy sevens and said, “let the reader understand”. Remember that when Gabriel gave the prophecy, he started by saying “Know and understand this...”. It is very clear that the prophecy of the seventy sevens is something we can understand and that we are meant to understand it. In fact, when Jesus made the statement recorded there in Matthew 24:15, he was answering the question, “what will be the sign of your common and of the end of the age?” Notice that he didn’t say that there would be no way to tell when he was coming or when the age was ending. He didn’t say that’s date setting and not to engage in it. He said to go to the prophecy of the seventy sevens and understand it and then you will have your answer. “let the reader understand”.

In that light, let us now move forward with the application of the counting of the seven times seven, now that we know how much time we are talking about.

Let me show you what I have found regarding the decree to rebuild Jerusalem. Israel was reborn as a nation in 1948 but the city of Jerusalem was under a partition plan. No decree to rebuild it was given at that time. Even if it had been, it has been way longer than seven sevens since then. We need a decree that was given less than seven sevens ago. In 1967, the Six Day War saw the city and the Temple Mount largely fall into Jewish hands for the first time in nearly 2000 years. On June 28, 1967 the Israeli Knesset issued a decree regarding Jerusalem. But it has also been too long since that decree was issued for it to be considered the correct one. So, we come to the only other decree issued to rebuild Jerusalem in current existence, The Jerusalem Law of 1980. Here is the text of that decree.

The Jerusalem Law July 30, 1980

Jerusalem, Capital of Israel

1. Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.

2. Jerusalem is the seat of the President of the State, the Knesset, the Government and the Supreme Court.

3. The Holy Places shall be protected from desecration and any other violation and from anything likely to violate the freedom of access of the members of the different religions to the places sacred to them or their feelings towards those places.

4. Development of Jerusalem

(a) The Government shall provide for the development and prosperity of Jerusalem and the well-being of its inhabitants by allocating special funds, including a special annual grant to the Municipality of Jerusalem (Capital City Grant) with the approval of the Finance Committee of the Knesset.

(b) Jerusalem shall be given special priority in the activities of the authorities of the State so as to further its development in economic and other matters.

5. Area of the jurisdiction of Jerusalem (Amendment no. 1)

The jurisdiction of Jerusalem includes, as pertaining to this basic law, among others, all of the area that is described in the appendix of the proclamation expanding the borders of municipal Jerusalem beginning the 20th of Sivan 5727 (June 28, 1967), as was given according to the Cities' Ordinance.

6. Prohibition of the transfer of authority (Amendment no. 1)

No authority that is stipulated in the law of the State of Israel or of the Jerusalem Municipality may be transfered either permanently or for an allotted period of time to a foreign body, whether political, governmental or to any other similar type of foreign body.

7. Entrenchment (Amendment no. 1)

Clauses 5 and 6 shall not be modified except by a Basic Law passed by a majority of the members of the Knesset.

MENACHEM BEGIN
Prime Minister

YITZCHAK NAVON
President of the State

Section 4 titled “Development of Jerusalem” would constitute a decree to rebuild. Not only is it a decree to rebuild, but it also places Jewish sovereignty over the city and the Temple Mount and prohibits future governments of Israel from giving away that sovereignty to a foreign entity. Section 5 incorporates the decree that was issued regarding Jerusalem after the Six Day War in 1967.