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Mark It On Your Calendar


“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?


[1] Remember, there is no year 0, one goes directly from 1 BC to 1 AD)
[2] Also translated "Executed"

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