2025-09-03 - Jesus Christ is the Promised Messiah Part VII: The Seventy Weeks Prophecy

The Book of Daniel is considered by some to be the height of Old Testament prophecy of the appearance of the Messiah (Daniel 9:24-27).  Here, time is recalibrated so that when the prophet speaks in time units of days, we should understand these as our own time units of years.  This recalibration of earth time into Jewish prophetic time is most accurately described in Leviticus 25:8.  Thus, seventy weeks in Daniel (ie. 490 days) translates as 490 earth years.

It is important to anchor Daniel’s authorship to the historical record.  Daniel was writing his prophecy around the year 540 BC, which is shortly before the end of the Babylonian Exile and the time period when Nehemiah and Ezra will be appointed by Zerubabel (a Jewish Babylonian Governor, but importantly not a King, in the line of David) to construct the second temple.  They are later given permission from Ataxerxes (another Babylonian king) to build the wall around Jerusalem, in the year 457 B.C.  Daniel 9:24-27 prophecies that 490 earth years after the construction of the wall around Jerusalem, the people’s transgression will be finished and sin will be ended, and the Most Holy will be anointed.  457 BC + 490 = 33 AD, the year of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

Why is prophetic time dilated, relative to normal earth time?  God’s justice and mercy “frame” our daily chronological time, which we can think of as a "metronome beat" toward our earthly demise.  This poetic description of weeks as years is intended to reassure us that in the fullness of time, God’s justice and mercy will intercede in chronological time in order to rectify the temporal occurrence of sin and iniquity.  The poetry is intended to suggest the mysterious but effectual grace by which God's eternity enters into and brings salvation out from the curse of the "metronome beat" of time otherwise moving inexorably toward the grave. Laban’s fraud on Jacob entangles innocent Jacob in sin, requiring him to complete Leah’s wedding “week” (7 normal days) and also to work for Laban for another "week" (this time, poetically referring to 7 years of earth time), before Jacob can wed Leah’s sister, Rachel, whom he truly loves. The result will be a good (Jacob marrying Rachel, who will be the mother of the line that leads eventually to King David and then to Jesus) emerging out from sin (Jacob's bigamy in remaining married to Leah when he also marries Rachel). The point is not that the sin is good but that God's grace can bring what is good in spite of man's weakness and sin. The interplay of a normal week (7 normal days) and a prophetic "week" (poetic reference to 7 years of earth time) suggests the incursion of God's grace into man's sin in a way as to redeem man from that sin, just as we see earlier in the interplay of "God's time" (eternity) with our human time.

Daniel’s prophecy that God will finish man’s transgression when the Messiah appears means that we will be relieved of Adam’s guilt and have the opportunity to achieve eternal life through the gospel of Christ.  Separation from God and one another results from our sinful nature.  The resulting iniquity of building a society that attempts to reach Heaven by our own merits rather than through enacting God’s grace in the Summary of the Law resulted in a perverse civilization characterized by separation. What is required is reconciliation. Thus, "finishing man's transgression" means straightening not only the individual's relationship with God but creating a polity where the redeemed may live in reconciliation with each other and with God. Salvation is personal and civilizational. Our transformation to righteousness through God’s grace, and the accomplishment of God’s will in history, is delivered to us by bringing us into the body of the Messiah, the third temple.