6. The Seventy Weeks

Prophecy is a cross between art and mathematics. It is both subjective and objective. The arty (or subjective) side is the most important, in terms of what it is teaching; but the mathematical (or objective) side appeals to skeptics who want measurable proof. Of course the real genius of genuine prophecy is in how the two can combine. Prophecy can be objectively measurable at the same time that it illustrates and combines several powerful universal truths.

God won't waste his time with magic tricks just to entertain us. He's not likely to tell you that there'll be an accident in George St., Sydney tomorrow at noon, or that the stock market is going to go up by 32 points, because in the vastness of eternity these are only trivial incidents. The particular glimpses of the future that God chooses to give us are only those which have the most profound spiritual implications.

And what could have had more profound implications than the life and death of Jesus Christ? This is the dominant theme of all the prophecies in the part of the Bible which was written before Jesus was born. Some of these prophecies you might already be familiar with.

Most of us, for example, would have seen Christmas cards with something like this printed on them: "A virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel." (Immanuel is a Hebrew word for 'God is with us'.) That prophecy comes from Isaiah 7:14.

At Easter we might see cards with these words from Isaiah 53: "He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, and the chastisement of our peace was upon him� He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter; and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth."

Such prophecies paint a beautiful picture of the humble, loving Messiah that so many people failed to comprehend at the time when Jesus first appeared on the earth. But exactly who the prophecies are talking about is open to debate. You could technically argue that they are referring to someone besides Jesus. They may even be referring to a Messiah who has not yet come. Some of them don't even specifically say that they are talking about the Messiah.

To be certain that they are talking about Jesus of Nazareth, we need something more specific. Why couldn't the Bible just say something like, "The Messiah will be born in Bethlehem of Judea in the year 4 B.C.. and his name will be Jesus."

Well, there is a prophecy, written centuries before Christ, which must stand as the ultimate proof that Jesus is the Messiah. In fact, it is the only passage in the entire Old Testament which actually uses the word "Messiah", and it specifically says that Christ (which is the Greek word for Messiah) will be "cut off" in 30 A.D. That is, in fact, the exact year when Jesus was crucified.

But we must warn people that to fully appreciate this prophecy, you'll need to pull out your calculators and do some arithmetic. Nothing fancy, mind you, but it will take a bit of concentration.

For starters, there was no such thing as 30 A.D. at the time that the prophecy was written. There was no numbering system at all for one year as compared to another. Instead, you calculated things according to significant historical events. A bit like saying, "I started uni in the year that Menzies was elected Prime Minister."

If you're the arty type and find mathematics boring, then this chapter may be a bit of a drag. But if you want to see the most mathematically verifiable prophecy in the entire Bible, then the effort will definitely be worth it. So here goes�

It's in Daniel 9:24-26. Judea had been destroyed in the 6th Century B.C. Many Jews had been carried away as exiles into Babylon. Then, in 447 B.C., permission was given to the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem, and to be ruled by their own law. In Daniel 9:24-26, God tells Daniel that his "people" (i.e. the Jews) will, from the time that rebuilding started, have 490 years of history left. But seven years before the 490 years are up, God says that their "Messiah will be cut off".

(These remaining seven years will be particularly important when we come to our study of The Revelation later in this book, but for now, we will just focus on the period of 483 years that were left until Christ was to be "cut off".)

Artaxerxes, King of the Medes and the Persians, commanded Nehemiah in 447 B.C. to rebuild Jerusalem. A hundred years earlier, King Cyrus had allowed the Jews to rebuild their Temple. You can find this information in most history books. It is recorded in the Bible too (Nehemiah 2:5-9), but the Bible account, of course, does not have a date next to it. Nevertheless, 476 years later, in 30 A.D., Jesus Christ was crucified, as God had promised to Daniel.

(For those who are sharp enough to note that 447 and 30 do not add up to 476, don't forget that there is no such thing as a year marked "zero". Calendars go straight from the year 1 B.C. to the year 1 A.D., thus more or less skipping a year.)

Depending on which Bible translation you use, something needs to be explained before we can get to the discrepancy between 476 years as recorded in the history books and 483 years as prophesied in the Bible.

If you're reading a King James Version of the passage, you will find that God says to Daniel, "Seventy weeks are determined for your people." The word translated "week" is literally "seven", but it is also the Hebrew word for "week". In other words, "seventy sevens are determined for your people." The Jews had a strong attraction to the number seven, which is used repeatedly in The Revelation as well. They broke time up into seven day periods (or weeks) and seven year periods (which were also called weeks).

In Genesis 29 there is the famous story of Jacob being tricked into working an extra seven years before he could marry Rachel, because his future father-in-law had slipped Rachel's older sister, Leah, into his bed after he had completed his first seven years of labour for a bride. In the 27th verse, the father-in-law says (King James Version), "Fulfil her week and we will give you this also for the service which you shall serve with me yet seven other years." It goes on to say (in verse 28), "And Jacob did so, and fulfilled his week, and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife also."

The modern translations don't use the word "week". (e.g. Instead of seventy weeks, they just say things like "seven times seventy years".)

So God was telling Daniel that 490 years (or seven times seventy years) was "determined" for Daniel's people (the Jews).

Daniel 9:25 goes on: "From the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem, unto Messiah the Prince (Christ the Lord) shall be seven 7-year periods (49 years), plus sixty-two 7-year periods (434 years)."

Add these together and you will see that this gives you a total of 483 years.

The next verse (Daniel 9:26) says, "After the sixty-two 7-year periods, shall Messiah be cut off; but not for himself." The Today's English Version of the Bible translates this, "At the end of that time, God's chosen leader will be killed unjustly."

Because this is the only place in the entire Old Testament where the word "Messiah" is used, this prophecy, more than any other, is talking specifically about the long awaited Hebrew Messiah. You cannot say otherwise. And it gives a date when the Messiah will be "cut off" (or killed), "but not for himself". Christ was executed as a criminal, but it was not for anything that he had done wrong; he died as the innocent sacrificial Lamb for the sins of the whole world, in 30 A.D.

Now let's look at the discrepancy. The prophecy says that Christ would be cut off 483 years after the decree to rebuild Jerusalem; whereas the history books say that it was 476 years later that it actually happened. There is a difference of six years. How do we explain that?

The explanation comes from a comparison of calendars. We use a solar calendar with a year of 365 and a quarter days, or the exact period of time it takes the earth to orbit the sun. The Babylonian year was 354 days long. But the Bible uses a "prophetic year" of twelve equal 30-day months, totalling 360 days. Calenders from Armageddon for Beginners

The Revelation uses the prophetic year of 360 days. It refers repeatedly to a period of three and a half years, but sometimes it uses months (42 months), and sometimes it uses days (1260 days). If we had used a solar calendar to calculate 42 months (or three and a half years), we would have arrived at a figure of 1278 days, and our calculations would have been out by 18 days.

So if we were to change the 483 years of Daniel's prophecy, computed at 360 days per year (for a total of 173,880 days), to solar years of 365 and a quarter days each, we would come up with exactly 476 years and 21 days! Go ahead and work it out for yourself.

There is no way that this prophecy can be pushed aside as contrived, or based on subjective interpretation. It is clearly talking about the promised Messiah, and it clearly gives the date when he died. If Jesus Christ was not the Messiah, then we must look for someone else who died in the same year. How could such a prediction have been made hundreds of years ahead of time without help from God. Where is there any prediction in all history which can be more objectively proven to be supernatural than this one?

If you get nothing else from this book, let it be very clear to you right now that there is a God in heaven who has spoken to us through the Bible and, more importantly, he has spoken to us through his Messiah, Jesus Christ. Your very existence on this planet is for the purpose of gauging whether you are going to respond to God in faith, or whether you are going to go on doing your own selfish thing. You cannot be neutral. You cannot argue that there is no evidence one way or the other. You cannot remain complacent. You will be judged eternally on the basis of how you respond to the voice of God coming through his Son, Jesus Christ.

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Appendix, Chapter 6

Daniel 9:24-26:

"Seventy weeks are determined upon your people and upon your 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. 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. 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."

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Revelation 12:6, 14:

The woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and sixty days� To the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place where she is nourished for a time and times and half a time, from the face of the serpent.

Revelation 11:2-3.

�the holy city shall they tread under foot forty-two months. And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and sixty days, clothed in sackcloth.

Revelation 13:5.

There was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him t