“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. (Daniel
9:24-26)
and I
answered the king, “If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor
in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried
so that I can rebuild it.”
Then the king , with the queen
sitting beside him, asked me, “How long will your journey take, and when will
you get back?” It pleased the king to send me; so I set a time.
I also said to him, “If it
pleases the king, may I have letters to the governors of Trans-Euphrates, so
that they will provide me safe-conduct until I arrive in Judah? And may I have
a letter to Asaph, keeper of the king’s forest, so he will give me timber to
make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple and for the city wall and
for the residence I will occupy?” And because the gracious hand of my God was upon
me, the king granted my requests. (Nehemiah 2:5-9)
Rejoice
greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes
to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a
colt, the foal of a donkey (Zechariah 9:9)
As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept
over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would
bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon
you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and
hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the
children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because
you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”
(Luke 19:41-44)
This
is a set of prophecies I've wanted to explore with you in depth, but I don't
have the resource I wanted to use with me. I've found something online (link: http://www.alphanewsdaily.com/mathprophecy1.html) that I'm going to summarize. This brings us
down to some very specific details. Beginning with the prophecy from Daniel,
from the decree to rebuild the temple to the time when the anointed one would
be cut off would be 69 weeks. This is understood to be weeks of years. The
Jewish calendar works with a 360 day.
69
(weeks) X 7 (days/week) = 483 years.
483
(years) X 360 (days in Jewish year) = 173,880 days.
173,880
days ÷ 365.25 (days in a year) = 476 years
(our solar 'Julian' calendar)
The Nehemiah passage tells us that in
March 445 BC, Artaxerxes I issued a decree to have Jerusalem and it's wall
built. There have been several other decrees issued with regard to rebuilding
Jerusalem, but this one included the rebuilding of the wall. March,
445 B.C.+ 476 years = Nisan, 32 (6 April, 32) AD. [1]
That would have been the Sunday before
Passover, the Sunday we celebrate as Palm Sunday. On that day, Jesus made triumphal
entry into Jerusalem, lowly and riding on a donkey in accordance with the
tradition of a king riding into a city at peace.
The following week (there is some
dispute as to exactly how this worked out) in accordance with the prophecy,
Jesus was "cut off."[2]
Thirty-eight years later, in 70 AD, the
Romans build an embankment around Jerusalem. They starved and slaughtered more
than a million Jews and set fire to the Temple. The soldiers then tore down the
temple stone by stone to get the gold that was used to build it.
Once again, for those who want God
to prove His existence by doing something dramatic - can it get any more
dramatic?
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