The fiery new member, tthzr3, enjoys bombarding me with question after question in Chat.
One such question was about prophecy. He claims that in order for prophecy to be verified, that a specific date and time must correspond, otherwise it is non-specific. I gave Jesus'
The Day and Hour Unknown answer found in Matthew 24 as a reference to why it is not done in that manner.
Firstly, anyone who knows the day and the hour of a prophecy can feverishly work to either subvert that, or to fulfill it. For instance, if God were to say that on December 1st, 2007, He was going to come back, every one on planet earth would know about this prophecy. They would seek reconciliation the night before, which obviously, is not indicative of a heart after God.
Conversely, supposing their was no God and that the prophecy comes from man, anyone could turn it in to a self-fulfilling prophecy the day prescribed in the literature.
I did, however, remember one prophecy in the book of Daniel that brings prophecy down to the tiniest increment. He then asked me to start a thread on it. So here I am.
"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.
"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." -Daniel 9:24-27
Now, this may look as cryptic and as obscure as any other passage in the Bible to most people. But allow for an eschatological exegesis of the prophecy to bring understanding and meaning to the passage.
Written 600 years before Jesus’ time, God instructed Daniel on the approximate date that
Mashaic ben Yosef, the Suffering Servant, would be cut off for our sins.
The passage in question gives us a timeline for much of what God would be doing with the nation of Israel and the Messiah. In their apostate condition, Israel had been taken to Babylon. God told the nation of Israel that they would be in captivity for seventy years. A remnant of people would come back at the appointed time under Ezra in order to rebuild Solomon’s Temple. However, permission to rebuild the Temple was given to King Artaxerxes, which secular history places around 447 to 445 BC. Seventy weeks are described in Daniel’s prophetic book.
Now, what should we make of the 'sevens?' What are sevens? The best translation of the word is best described, simply as
'seven.’ The timeframe described is ”seventy sevens.’ When we think of the number seven, most of us probably correlate it to weeks. This certainly makes sense because there are seven days in a week. And afterall, the very dissection of weeks, denoting seven days as a week was a system in lieu of the Pentateuch.
But as it turns out, God has in mind here years, and not literal days. Thus, we are talking about a total period of approximately 490 years (490 = 70 x 7), hence, seventy sevens. According to the table, it would take 7 weeks, that is, 49 years, to complete the rebuilding of the Second Temple.
After this time there would be another 62 weeks, or (434 years) until the Messiah would be killed. The death of the Messiah would accomplish all kinds of things and directly conform the Scriptures to verifiable history. This is the closest approximation and confirmation possible.
Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem occurred 173,880 days (483 x’s the Hebrew 360 day, year). Jesus Christ fits so amazingly well into this timeline, that given this piece of Scripture alone, we should know beyond all reasonable doubt that Jesus truly is the Messiah. You see, anyone hoping that the Messiah was not Jesus must find another Jewish man who comes from the line of David, but that can supersede the curse of Jehoiachin, who was born of a virgin, out of the Tribe of Judah and that comes from Bethlehem in this exact period of time.
445 BC to 32 AD is 476 years. Multiply these years according to the Julian calendar of 365 days per year, which amounts to 173,740 days. Add 116 days because of the addition of leap years and the difference of 24 days between March 14th and April 6th which is inclusively to Jewish practice. The sum total amounts to 173,880 days from the time Daniel spoke this prophecy to the time of Jesus’ crucifixion.
We are living in the parenthesis between the 69th and 70th week of Daniel’s prophecy. This parenthesis of time is the entire
age of the gentiles. God has been using the gentiles as His primary source of interacting with mankind. However, this is temporal, because God will once again resume His dealings with Israel. At the end of the 70th week, Mashiac ben David (the Glorious Messiah) will come for His Bride; the church that worships in truth.
“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake
™ Version 4.2