One of my favorite philosophers is Rocky Balboa, the main character of the Rocky movies, which basically tell the story of a regular guy who doesn’t give up, either in the boxing ring or in life. The sixth movie in that series has a scene in which Rocky says to his son, “Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place. And I don’t care how tough you are. It will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life, but it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.”
What Rocky describes here applies just as well to our discipleship. The Christian life is, in the words of Eugene Peterson, “a long obedience in the same direction.” Often what matters most in our journey of following Christ is simply the determination to get back up and keep moving every time we get knocked to the ground. The steady faithfulness of day in, day out discipleship is what ultimately leads us to the kingdom.
Daniel 9:20-27 is a text that shows us that God’s plan for history is a long and difficult road that leads to a new world, and so it presses us to consider whether or not we are prepared for the long haul of faith. This text comes right after Daniel’s prayer of verses 1-19, a prayer he offered after reading Jeremiah’s prophecy that the exile of Israel to Babylon would last seventy years. Humbling himself before God, confessing the sins of his people Israel, and crying out to God to have mercy on them, Daniel asks God to fulfill what he had promised by ending the exile and restoring the city of Jerusalem. Surprisingly, Daniel gets an answer from God that tells him that yes, the seventy years of exile from the land are coming to a close, but the spiritual exile of Israel will continue for a much longer period of time: seventy “sevens” (translated as “weeks”), which is a reference periods of seven years. That means the promises of the Messiah and his kingdom will be delayed much longer than Daniel expected.
But this reference to seventy weeks is itself communicating something powerful, building on the pattern of the sabbatical year and the Jubilee. In Leviticus 25, God commanded Israel to let the land rest every seventh year, or sabbatical year. And on top of that, every seventh sabbatical cycle (seven times seven, or 49 years), Israel was commanded to observe the year of Jubilee. This was a year to celebrate new beginnings. No matter how far into a hole you had fallen economically, the hope of the Jubilee was that you would be given a new start. Debts were forgiven. Families that had been forced to sell their land would get it back. Men and women who had been forced to sell themselves into slavery would be released. God commanded Israel to observe the Jubilee at the end of every seventh sabbatical as a way of holding out before them an image of his coming kingdom, in which all things are made new.
So, if a Jubilee was supposed to be observed every seven times seven years, that means the seventy times seven years we see in this text would lead up to a tenth, or climactic, Jubilee. I have entitled this message “The Great Jubilee” as a reference to the fact that the seventy sevens are oriented toward the last and greatest of God’s new beginnings: the establishment of the kingdom of God in the new creation. But if we are going to enter that kingdom, we must be prepared for the long haul.
It is important for us to hear this word, because we do not live in a society that naturally cultivates this kind of endurance. We often value efficiency over depth and substance. The internet and cable news inundate us with soundbites of information coming from all directions at once, and social media trains us to move rapidly from one thing to the next without having to put forth the effort of giving sustained attention to anything. Our sinful instinct is to focus our lives and energy on things that give us quick, evident results, and discipleship to Christ is usually not one of those kinds of endeavors.
But the key to discipleship is the day in, day out, steady commitment of faith. I want to raise a question from this text today and then answer it as we seek to unpack its meaning. That question is this: What marks those who will endure to the Great Jubilee and so enter the kingdom of God? I see three marks from this passage.
First, those who endure are marked by
How many times have you asked yourself, “Why don’t I pray more or better than I do?” I think one of the main answers to that question is that prayer is difficult. Perhaps we operate with the assumption that it should be easy, but we should throw out that assumption because it’s simply not true. Prayer is a fight against the powers of darkness. It requires the focusing of our minds and hearts and, perhaps most difficult of all, the temporary relinquishment of our efforts. When we stop focusing on the tasks that we can accomplish and turn our attention to prayer, we are investing time that, we think, could be more “productive” if we were working on something. And maybe that sense of relinquishment of our time into the hands of God, which requires greater faith in his work than in our own, is what we find most difficult of all about prayer.
That is why prayer is the preeminent activity of faith. In prayer, we acknowledge that God’s work matters more than ours, even to the point that we are willing to stop what we are doing so that we can call on him to work in far greater ways than we can. But we will have no faith or motivation to pray if we don’t have any expectations of our prayers. Until we make solid the connection between our prayers and God’s work in the world, we will never be able to sustain the will to devote ourselves to prayer.
What we see in this passage is an example of how prayer changes the world. Daniel has just prayed with humble confession of Israel’s sins and has called on God to fulfill his promise to restore Jerusalem. That was verses 1-19. Two times in verses 20-21 Daniel says the angel Gabriel appeared to him while he was still praying, with an emphasis on the swiftness of Gabriel’s flight to him. We have here an indication that God is eager to answer the prayers of his people, and he responds immediately to Daniel.
But verse 23 is key here: “At the beginning of your pleas for mercy a word went out [from God], and I have come to tell it to you, for you are greatly loved. Therefore consider the word and understand the vision.” The point here is not just that God sent out a word in response to Daniel’s prayer to inform Daniel about what was going to happen in the future at the Great Jubilee. That is true, but there is more to it. The significance of the word going out from God is that, when God speaks, he doesn’t just inform about what is going to happen, he decrees what is going to happen. We should read this announcement from Gabriel to Daniel similar to the way we read God’s words in Genesis 1:3: “Let there be light.” The fact that God says it is what makes it happen. And God’s decree, which sets the agenda for the future history of the world here, comes in response to Daniel’s prayer. That means Daniel’s prayer changed the world.
I don’t mean that, of course, in the sense that Daniel prevailed on God and convinced him to do something he didn’t originally plan to do. What I mean is that one of the means God has appointed for the fulfillment of his sovereign plan is the faithful prayers of his people. The kingdom of God will come. From where we sit now, Jesus Christ has already been enthroned as king, and it is only a matter of time before his rule is openly revealed to the world. But that day will not come apart from our prayers. And so disciples of Jesus have been commanded to pray to the Father, “Your kingdom come,” knowing that when we pray for this, we are not just rattling off pious nonsense. We are actually moving history to its God-appointed end.
But as we pray for the big picture, the coming of the kingdom, we also have endless needs among our people in our day-to-day lives. And we are commanded to pray about these things as well, and to pray with expectancy that if even earthly fathers, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to their children, how much more does our heavenly Father know how to bless us with all good things? So let prayer—expectant prayer—be our instinct in every situation that arises. One practice that has helped us here is what we have started doing at our Sunday night meetings. Several weeks ago, the elders decided we wanted to communicate to you that, as we share prayer needs on Sunday nights, if the Lord moves the heart of any individual to ask that we stop and pray for a particular need, that is not a distraction or annoyance. That is one of the very purposes for which we have gathered. And so several of you, when you have heard a need shared, have asked if we could stop so that you could lead us all in prayer for it. And we have prayed together, and we have expected God to hear us and respond in mercy, and time after time we have seen him bless us with answers to prayer. And my hope is that we will continue to grow in our ability to pray with a sense of expectancy, because it is the expectancy that God moves the world in response to our prayers that will keep us engaged in this difficult practice of relinquishing our own efforts for a time in order to call upon him to act. Prayer is the lifeblood of discipleship, and so one mark of those who endure to the Great Jubilee is regular, expectant prayer.
A second mark of those who endure is
Daniel has prayed for an end to the exile as God promised through Jeremiah, but the message from Gabriel indicates that the exile will actually come to an end in two stages. The first stage will be a physical return to the land and a rebuilding of Jerusalem after 70 years of exile, just as foretold, but the second stage will be something far, far greater, and it will come after 70 weeks of years.
And so what is the ultimate goal toward which these 70 weeks are oriented? What exactly is the hope of the Great Jubilee? Notice Gabriel’s announcement in verse 24: “Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city.” Now Gabriel lays out the goal in six statements, three of which are negative and three of which are positive. The three negative statements are these: “to finish the transgression,” that is, the transgression of Israel that has led them into exile; “to put an end to sin,” which probably refers not only to Israel’s sin, but also to the nations of the world, represented by the beasts of chapters 7-8; and then “to atone for iniquity.” And this statement is the theological basis for the previous two. God will wipe sin out of his creation because he will atone for it. In the words of Charles Wesley, “He breaks the power of canceled sin.” That is, sin that has been atoned for is sin that has lost its power over us. One great hope of the Great Jubilee is that it will be a day when the guilt has been removed, and sin has no more place in God’s world.
But the blessing of the Great Jubilee is also presented in three positive statements at the end of verse 24: “to bring in everlasting righteousness,” for where sin is no more, all is right and good. 2 Peter 3:13 speaks of “a new heaven and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.” The second positive statement from Gabriel is “to seal both vision and prophet,” or to bring all of God’s prophetic words to their fulfillment, so that they can be sealed up, like a scroll that has been read all the way through. The third positive statement is “to anoint a most holy place.” Daniel prayed for the restoration of the temple, and Gabriel tells him that, yes, indeed, there will be a restoration and re-consecration of the most holy place. But Daniel does not yet understand the full significance of what that means. More on that later.
And so we get the picture from Gabriel’s announcement here that the Great Jubilee, or what Isaiah refers to as “the year of the Lord’s favor” that Jesus announced at the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:19) will come, but it will be a long time coming. And so verse 25 seems to make that point: “Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks. It shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time.” It seems that God’s decree for Jerusalem’s restoration from verse 23 would become effective in the form of the decree of King Cyrus of Persia in the year 538 BC, which was just around the corner from the time in which this passage is set. Gabriel says here that from that decree until the coming of the “anointed one,” which is the Hebrew word “Messiah,” there would be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks, or a total of sixty-nine weeks. Two questions that come up here are: Are these time references to be taken literally? And: If you wanted to communicate sixty-nine weeks, why not just say “sixty-nine weeks” instead of “seven weeks and sixty-two weeks”? I think we can answer these questions together. First, I would say the reason for dividing the sixty-nine weeks into a period of seven and sixty-two is to provide theological meaning in these numbers. The mention of seven weeks signals to us the Jubilee pattern, as though Gabriel is saying, “In this period that leads up to the tenth and final Jubilee, there will be a preliminary restoration during the first Jubilee.” And so he begins with a reference to seven sabbatical cycles to show us that the physical return from exile would happen and that Jerusalem would indeed be restored. But then sixty-two more weeks would follow, which seems to be a symbolic way of saying, “Get ready for a long time of waiting before the Messiah comes in the final, climactic sabbatical cycle.” So I don’t take these numbers literally. I think they symbolize a short period of preliminary fulfillment, a long period of waiting, and a climactic period of the Messiah that leads into the new creation.
And so what this vision tells Daniel is that while the physical return from exile will occur shortly, he must be prepared for a long time of waiting before the Messiah would come and the exile would be definitively ended. The implication is that he must live in hopeful patience, facing the day-to-day challenges of walking in faithfulness, knowing all the while that one day, the Great Jubilee will come. The journey is long, but the hope of the destination inspires us to keep putting one foot in front of the other day after day, year after year, decade after decade.
Isn’t that how we live most of our lives? We may see the spectacular, the exciting, the extraordinary, every so often, but real life happens in the ordinary. As Woody Allen put it, “Eighty percent of life is just showing up.” Let us devote ourselves to the simple disciplines of showing up for the rhythms of faith: the congregational gathering, the Word, prayer, the table. These are the practices that nourish and express our faith. They are the tangible ways that we hold on to our hope that the Messiah, who has already come once in fulfillment of this word to Daniel, will one day come again. And so for us who desire to enter his kingdom when it comes, let us be marked by hopeful patience.
And then finally, in addition to expectant prayer and hopeful patience, those who endure are marked by
As the New Testament makes clear, the way of discipleship is the way of the cross. And the way of the cross is what Daniel learns here. He prayed for the restoration of Jerusalem. In response he hears that Jerusalem will be restored, the Messiah will come, but then he will be “cut off” (put to death), and Jerusalem and the temple will be destroyed again! As this vision of the Great Jubilee unfolds before Daniel, what he learns is that his dreams for the restoration of Jerusalem are actually too small, and so they must die so that they can be raised anew to something far, far greater.
So as we look at these puzzling verses, it will help us if we note that they are laid out in a parallel structure of an ABAB pattern, where the same thing is said from two different perspectives, and it is said in two cycles. Both cycles tell us something about the Messiah’s work, followed by a word on the coming destruction of a rebuilt Jerusalem. The first cycle is verse 26. Notice what is said about the Messiah’s work in 26a: “And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing.” That could just as well be translated, “shall be cut off, but not for himself,” indicating that the Messiah will be put to death for the sake of others. And then, following the death of the Messiah, 26b says this: “And people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed.” There are several different views on who “the prince who is to come” is. But in my view, the best explanation is the simplest: verse 25 has already referred to “an anointed one, a prince,” and here those same two words are used, “anointed one” in the first half of verse 26 and “prince” in the second half. I think the prince is the Messiah, and so this statement says the people of the Messiah will ruin the city and the sanctuary, leading to wars and desolations. So, let’s just summarize what Daniel has heard to this point: Jerusalem will be restored, then it will be a long time, but the Messiah will come. So far, so good. But then the Messiah will be put to death, though not for himself. And then the people of the Messiah—the Jewish people—will ruin the sanctuary and the city, and that will lead up to a second complete destruction of Jerusalem! What in the world?!
This prophecy was actually fulfilled in the first century. We know that Jesus the Messiah was put to death, though not for himself, around AD 30. In the late 60’s, as tensions escalated between the Jews and the Romans, the city of Jerusalem descended into chaos when different factions of Jewish groups broke out into civil war against each other. As different leaders fought for control of the city and the temple, “the people of the prince who is to come,” the Jewish people, ruined their own city and sanctuary. As a result, the Roman emperor Vespasian sent his son Titus to lay siege to the city, and in AD 70 the second temple was burned to the ground, and the city was destroyed again.
Now notice the second cycle, saying the same thing from a different perspective, in verse 27. First we have the work of the Messiah in verse 27a: “And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering.” This statement is parallel to 26a, which declares that the Messiah would be cut off. It tells us that in being cut off, the Messiah will cause the new covenant, made with “many” (his new covenant people) to prevail, in contrast to the Mosaic covenant that has been broken by the unfaithful Jewish people who ruin the city. And this covenant is made “for one week,” meaning it is a covenant that will be made in the climactic period of the seventy weeks, and it will endure into the Great Jubilee. This is the only mention of the seventieth week in this passage. Moreover, in the middle of that final week, the Messiah will put an end to sacrifice and offering. The book of Hebrews tells us that, by offering the definitive sacrifice, Jesus brought to fulfillment all of the sacrifices of the Mosaic covenant, making the Jerusalem temple and its sacrificial system obsolete. The fact that he accomplished this in the middle of the seventieth week indicates to me that we are still living in the last half of the last week of this period. We are in the time of turmoil and suffering that precedes the end, elsewhere identified in Daniel as “a time, times, and half a time.”
So having laid out the Messiah’s work again in 27a, the vision concludes in 27b once again by describing the second destruction of Jerusalem: “And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator [or desolate place].” The “wing of abominations” indicates the point at which abominations—hateful things—have reached their limit. During the civil wars among the Jewish zealot groups in Jerusalem of the late 60’s AD, the temple was used as a military base, and a number of abominations were committed in it, defiling the holy place. In response, God raised up “one who makes desolate,” that is, the Roman general Titus, to come and destroy the temple and the city. All of it was done according to God’s decree, and AD 70 marks the definitive end of the nation of Israel under the Mosaic Covenant. She had been unfaithful to her God, she had rejected her Messiah, she had defiled her own temple. And so she was scattered once again to the nations.
But what was the result of this judgment? The unfaithful nation of Israel was scattered and the temple was destroyed so that the true Israel (made up of both Jews and Gentiles) could be gathered to the Messiah, and so that he might make this new covenant people into a new temple, a new dwelling place of God that would one day culminate in a new creation, the whole of which will be a massive temple. Don’t lose sight of the six purposes of the seventy sabbatical cycles from verse 24. This whole convoluted process of cutting off the Messiah and destroying Jerusalem again is the means God ordained to finish the transgression, put an end to sin, atone for iniquity, bring in everlasting righteousness, seal up vision and prophet, and anoint the most holy place, the very new creation itself. Daniel prayed for the temple to be restored, not realizing that final temple would not be a building but all of creation. Daniel’s dreams for the earthly Jerusalem have to die so that he can look to the hope of the New Jerusalem.
Something similar happens to Peter in Matthew 16. When Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter rightly responds, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” showing that he grasps the important truth that Jesus is the long-awaited Davidic king who will rule over God’s kingdom. But Peter’s thoughts are wrapped up in first century Jewish expectations about that kingdom, so he naturally assumes that Jesus’ mission will be to march to Jerusalem, overthrow the rule of pagan Rome, and restore Israel to the kind of glory it had in the days of King Solomon. Of course, Jesus’ immediate prediction about going to Jerusalem to die conflicts with that vision, so Peter takes Jesus aside to tell him to stop saying such silly things. But doing so earns him the rebuke, “Get behind me, Satan!” Peter must come to grips with the fact that the pathway to the messianic kingdom runs through the cross of Golgotha. Peter must die to his own imaginary messianic kingdom so that he can be raised to new life in the real one. And so it is for us. If we are going to endure to the day of the Great Jubilee, we must come to terms with the fact that this story isn’t about us or what we want, even when what we want is in itself a good thing. We are the supporting characters in a story that has all kinds of plot twists that we don’t expect, and those plot twists are often painful for us, especially if we have a lot invested in our own plans and dreams. But if we hold on in faith through the pain, through the failure of our expectations, we will find in the end that the only path to true life is through death to ourselves.
In this age, it ain’t all sunshine and roses. But the Great Jubilee still lies before us, when all things will be made new. May we be among those who endure to the end: who pray with expectancy, who cultivate patience in hope, and who die to ourselves on the path of discipleship so that we may be raised again.
If you are not a disciple of Jesus Christ, I invite you to consider his claims upon you. As this passage declares, he was indeed cut off, but not for himself. He gave up his life willingly in order to take the punishment of God’s judgment in the place of all who would trust in him alone to deliver them. But God did not leave him in the grave. On the third day, God raised him from the dead, and has exalted him to his right hand, where he now reigns from Heaven, giving you time to turn from your sins and trust him before he comes again to judge his enemies. Every moment you do not bow to him, you are standing in rebellion against him, and that is not a fight you can win. So give up your desire to live for yourself, call upon him to forgive you and to make you his own, and be baptized in his name to show that you are his.
For all of you who are baptized disciples of Jesus Christ, members in good standing with a church, we will now celebrate once again his death and resurrection for us. This practice of eating and drinking Sunday by Sunday is one of those shared practices that sustains and expresses our faith as we continue this journey day-by-day, week-by-week, together, until we enter the kingdom.