Repentance in Exile (Daniel 9:1-27)

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Good morning. You want to go ahead, grab your Bibles. You can open up to Daniel chapter nine. We’ll be in Daniel chapter nine this morning as you are turning there. I’m sure many of you know, if you’ve got any world history in you at all, that for decades, the white minority in South Africa brutally oppressed and exploited the black majority population under the apartheid system, and in which, by the way, the church was notoriously complicit for a long time, although we should also add the church was instrumental in bringing that to an end for different reasons. But what happens then? So apartheid comes to an end, and with the rise of democracy there in South Africa, blacks began to ascend to power. And the big question was, what was going to happen next, after all these long years of oppression and injustice, what now? Because justice would seem to demand retribution, punishment, maybe even vengeance. And so in a lot of ways, the world was collectively holding its breath, expecting the bloodbath that was coming in South Africa in 1995 or so. Why? Because sin has consequences. I mean, that’s why, that’s all there is to it. Sin brings about all sorts of suffering. So if you break rules and trample rights, we get punished, and that’s what we’re expecting. It’s easy to say that, it’s easy to point that out break rules get punished when you’re pointing your fingers somewhere else, like South Africa, which is far away. But what about you? Because you have broken the rules. You have broken God’s rules. Specifically, the standard is perfection, and we all fall short. I hope I don’t need to convince you of that, but just in case, I do you know, here are some examples to think through. You can probably think of times in the last week when this has been true of you, when you’ve blown up an anger, for example, and realized the anger was not about injustice but about inconvenience. It was selfish anger, or you’ve used your words in a cutting or careless or unkind way you take stock of the relationships in your life, and you realize you got a tendency to use people to see them as means to an end, as opposed to loving them as divine image bearers. Or this is the one that I know is true of all of us, even right now in this moment, which is that we can pay lip service to worshiping God while our hearts are chasing after idols. Of course, we look to money or status or power, whatever it may be, for that significance and security that belongs to God alone comes from God alone. So we’ve all broken the rules. We’ve all sinned, which means we experience the consequences of our bad choices. Again, this is just what happens. Go back to the first example I gave. You blow up in anger and start yelling at somebody say harsh words. You’re going to suffer the consequences of a broken relationship. That’s just kind of how it goes. And of course, on a grand scale, all of our suffering is a consequence of human sin, because it was sin that brought sickness and death into God’s perfect world. We sin, we suffer. It’s that simple. So what can we do, then, in the midst of the sin and the suffering? That’s the question we want to ask as we look at Daniel chapter nine, which is a brief interruption in a series of crazy visions. Except, don’t worry, we get to a crazy vision at the end of chapter nine, still. But how do we respond to suffering? Let’s take a look at it and guess usual kind of go by scenes here. So we got three scenes, the word prayer and insight. Start with Scene one, the word and here it is Daniel nine, one to three in the first year of Darius, son of Xerxes, a Mede by descent, who was made ruler over the Babylonian kingdom in the first year of his reign, I Daniel understood from the scriptures, according to the Word of the Lord given to Jeremiah, the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last 70 years. So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting than in sackcloth and ashes. It is no surprise that we find Daniel in private worship here in this moment, worship, in fact, is one of the prominent themes in the book of Daniel. God’s sovereignty, is probably the main one, but worship might be theme number two, as one commentator put points out the issue is not so much the style of worship. That’s not what we’re talking about when we say worship is the theme here, not so much the style of worship, as it is an expression of loyalty to a particular deity, right? Not how we worship, but whom we worship that matters most. And we’ve seen this all along, right? Daniel won’t eat in certain foods. Foods in chapter one because he wants to be clear on whom he worships. He gets tossed in alliance then because he’s clear on whom he’s going to worship. His friends get put in a fiery furnace because they’re clear on whom they’re going to worship. But it is worth pondering again as we run through all those stories, you know, even in our minds, how does Daniel maintain such steadfast devotion in the midst of such severe trials? And we get our answer here in so many ways, the answer is constant prayer and study. Constant prayer and study. We see him praying under Nebuchadnezzar, and decades later we see him praying under Cyrus, the great Darius, son of Xerxes. We met him earlier. By the way, if you weren’t here, you got all the questions. Maybe Cyrus’s throne name, maybe somebody who’s in charge of the Babylonian part of the Persian Empire. I don’t know one of those two, but he’s still praying. And this is a remarkable passage. That’s why, by the way, there are only three verses I must spend as much time here as I must spend in. Gonna spend in in the other two section as well. It’s such a remarkable passage, because we’ve got Daniel who has proven himself to be a man of wisdom and insight and understanding, Daniel who can interpret dreams and visions, who can actually even tell you what you dreamed last night, Daniel is still giving careful attention to the study of God’s Word in order to grow in wisdom and understanding. I love the way John Calvin says it. He says, although Daniel was an interpreter of dreams, he was not so elated with confidence or pride as to despise the teaching delivered by other prophets. He was like, I’m not so impressive that I don’t need to read what other people have written down of God’s Word. So if Daniel thought he should study them, like, how much more should we? Because I don’t know about you, I don’t feel like Daniel most days, like we need God’s word. I could come up with many, many answers to the question, Why should I study God’s Word? But here’s one, because Daniel did. And until I’ve got Daniel’s godliness, I’m gonna assume I certainly need his means of grace. But there’s more than that. It’s not just his example, although that’s real. It’s because Daniel studying Jeremiah gives me such confidence in this book right here, because you’ve you’ve asked these questions before. Some of you may even be asking these questions now, like, how did we get the Bible? Why is it these 66 books that we have? Are they really authoritative? Aren’t there any other writings that would matter, that we should study, but we see the answer in this story, the answer, how do we get the Bible? Is that God gave us the Bible, and the people of God recognized as authoritative holy scripture from the very beginning, because Jeremiah is Daniel’s contemporary, like when Daniel is heading off into exile back in chapter one, is when Jeremiah is prophesying, and Daniel immediately goes, that’s the word of the Lord, which is what he calls it, right? The scriptures the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah, the prophet. So he’s studying it as scripture. Reminds me of what Peter says about Paul’s writings when he’s like, I know they’re hard. And guess what? That just means you should study them more the way you study the other scriptures, like it’s part of Scripture already. So Daniel is reading Jeremiah, his contemporary as the word of God. Now, a little background in Jeremiah. I’ll try not to go off on a major tangent, although it’s one of my favorite books in the Bible. But Jeremiah reflects the theology of Deuteronomy, especially Deuteronomy is all about the covenant, really is the book of the covenant. And the question Jeremiah is answering in 52 chapters is what happens when we break the covenant that God made with us. The covenant is a little bit like a treaty. Deuteronomy is written like a vassal treaty. So you get a a powerful king who conquers other kings. Therefore he’s a king of kings, right? So we see in Babylon and Persia, and he’ll set up these treaties with these lesser conquered kings, and kind of say, basically, if you obey, I’ll bless you. So if you pay tribute and don’t rebel, I’ll protect you from other kings. But if you disobey, you don’t pay tribute, and you rebel, I’ll come and sack Jerusalem, basically. And that, of course, is exactly what happens. And so Deuteronomy even lists curses, because this is God who is the King of kings, and he making this treaty with us. And so he says things like, if you disobey, then I will scatter you among the nations. For example, Deuteronomy, 2864, and Jeremiah goes, guys, we gotta pay attention to this. Like this is what’s coming any day now. Well, what Jeremiah warned Daniel, of course, lived as he was scattered among the nations. But what’s interesting about Jeremiah that Deuteronomy doesn’t have. Have is the length of the exile. Jeremiah tells us it will go for 70 years. Just gotta mention, real quick, 70 years. Symbolic number, okay, like big round number, usually a good hint that we got symbolism happening here. Think of Matthew 1822 when Peter says, How many times should I forgive Lord seven times. And Jesus says, No, 70 times, seven times. That doesn’t mean you count to 490 in your head, and then go, boom, don’t have to forgive you anymore. Jerk. Nothing like that, right? Seven is a perfect number. 70 is an even bigger perfect number multiplied by, you know, so you multiply all these perfect numbers. Like, just go on forgiving, okay? Like, that’s the whole point. Same thing here, 70 years big round number, symbolic number. And really it’s symbolic of a lifetime. That’s what 70 years is. And so God, through His Prophet, Jeremiah, is saying, you’re going to be there for one lifetime. We see this though there’s going to be just one lifetime places like Jeremiah, 29, verse 10. When 70 years are completed, for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. By the way, that’s Jeremiah 2910 anyone know Jeremiah? 2911 I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you, not to harm you. That’s what that means. By the way, that’s what that verse is about. It’s not about you getting a promotion at work. It’s about God bringing his people back from exile. Just an important reminder, because evangelicals love to rip verses out of context, like Yankees fans ripping the ball out of Mookie Betts glove. That’s not original. I wish I could take credit for that, and I saw the meme. That’s Jeremiah. 2910 here’s Jeremiah. 2511 and 12. This whole country will become a desolate wasteland. Then these nations will serve the king of Babylon 70 years. When the 70 years are fulfilled, I will punish the king of Babylon and his nation, the land of the Babylonians, for their guilt, declares the Lord, and I will make it desolate forever, by the way, you can understand then why this piques Daniel’s curiosity, because Babylon just got punished. This is in the first year of King Cyrus, the guy who conquers the Babylonian Empire. And so Daniel is going, Well, hey, if the first half of the prophecy, the destruction of Babylon is complete, then it’s probably time to start praying for the second half of the prophecy, the restoration of Israel. Notice that as he’s thinking about this, he’s not concerned about his return from exile, though, but the end to Jerusalem’s, and especially the temple’s desolation, right? I understood from the prophet Jeremiah that the desolation of Jerusalem would last 70 years. His concern here is not his circumstances. His concern is God’s worship, and at this point, at least, we need the temple in order for that to happen. So he’s pleading with God for God’s glory. Would you let your worship flourish once more? And he prays this interestingly, with fasting, sackcloth and ashes. These are all expressions of mourning and really repentance. Why? Because a passage like Jeremiah requires confession like that’s the proper response, not a prayer for illumination, but a prayer of confession. And so you see it. You see his humility and his zeal in this moment. There are so many lessons for us here in these three verses, but chief among them, of course, is Daniel’s responsiveness to God’s Word in prayer. And he reads God’s word and he prayerfully responds to it. He read with an eye to God’s promises, and so when he saw one of God’s promises, he prayed it like he didn’t give into fatalism. Well, it said 70 years, so we got a little bit longer to wait. I guess I’ll just put my feet up. No. He springs into action because of the promises, and begins pleading with God, interceding, basically saying, God do what you said you were going to do. Here’s the way Matthew Henry Puritan, famous commentator on the Bible says it. He says, hear God speaking to you, and have an eye to that in everything you say to him, because you hear him, and then that should drive your response. He gives this analogy. He says, it’s like when you write an answer to a letter of business, you lay it before you. So I got to answer this email. I’m going to have that email up as I’m typing my answer, so that I can keep going back like this, God’s word must be the guide of your desires and the ground of your expectations. In prayer, we’re going to post that quote on Facebook this week. Some of you are like, I gotta write that down. It’ll be there. Okay, so this is the Puritan practice of pleading the promises, right? You read, and then you respond. God speaks, and then we answer in prayer. You ever feel like you don’t know what to pray? I mean, here is the answer, pray the promises of God like I can’t tell you how many times I because I am a sinner, still have prayed Philippians, one you said. You would carry this work to completion until the day of Christ, Jesus, the good work that you began in me. Would you do it? Lord? Would you do it? Or first, Thessalonians five, right, that God’s going to sanctify us through and through, so that our bodies, spirits, souls, be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord, Jesus, Christ. And then he says, Paul says, The one who called you is faithful, and he will do it. And you go, Look, Lord, you said you were going to do it. Would you sanctify me through and through? By the way, just a final word before we move to the next section. If this was true of Daniel reading Jeremiah, how much more should this be true of us? Because we get to read a better word, a fuller word, right? Hebrews chapter one, in the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets. In these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son. That’s the word we read and respond to. How do we respond? We respond in prayer. Here it is, second scene, verses four to 19, Daniel’s prayer, I prayed to the Lord my God, and confessed Lord the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of love with those who love Him and keep His commandments. We have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled. We have turned away from your commands and laws. We have not listened to your servants, the prophets who spoke in your name, to our kings, our princes and our ancestors and to all the people of the land, Lord, you are righteous, but this day, we are covered with shame. The people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, both near and far, and all the countries where you have scattered us because of our unfaithfulness to you. We and our kings, our princes and our ancestors, are covered with shame, Lord, because we have sinned against you, the Lord, our God is merciful and forgiving. Even though we have rebelled against Him, we have not obeyed the Lord our God or kept the laws he gave us through His servants, the prophets. All Israel has transgressed your law and turned away refusing to obey you. Therefore, the curses and sworn judgments written in the Law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out on us because we have sinned against you. You have fulfilled the words spoken against us and against our rulers by bringing on us great disaster under the whole heaven. Nothing has ever been done like what has been done to Jerusalem, just as this is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come on us, yet we have not sought the favor of the Lord our God by turning from our sins and giving attention to your truth. The Lord did not hesitate to bring the disaster on us. The Lord our God, is righteous in everything he does, yet we have not obeyed Him. Now. Lord, our God, who brought your people out of Egypt with a mighty hand and who made for yourself a name that endures to this day, we have sinned. We have done wrong. Lord, in keeping with all your righteous acts, turn away your anger and your wrath from Jerusalem, your city, your holy hill, our sins and the iniquities of our ancestors have made Jerusalem and all and your people an object of scorn to all those around us now, our God. Hear the prayers and petitions of Your servant for your sake, Lord, look with favor on your desolate sanctuary. Give ear our God and hear, open your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears your name. We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. Lord, listen, Lord, forgive, Lord, hear and act for your sake, my God, do not delay because your city and your people bear your name. Notice, first of all, that he prays to the Lord all caps. In other words, he prays to Yabe why? It’s actually not that common in Daniel to have God’s covenant name, but it’s proper here, because he’s using the covenant name Yahweh as he talks about the covenant, because the prayer appeals to God’s covenant promises to forgive and restore his people. And of course, that’s how he addresses God in the prayer as well. He calls him great and awesome because of, as Paul house put it, because of his unstinting covenant fidelity. He is faithful to the covenant. And then, of course, he goes on and says, you know, this is the God who keeps his covenant of love. So everything he said so far, he is laser focused on God’s covenant faithfulness. Again, there’s such a lesson for us in this, the power of invocation in prayer. I know that most of us, when we pray, we kind of just go to the same address every time. Maybe it’s Dear God, maybe it’s father or Lord, but we just kind of say it and just kind of move on from there. That’s not how Daniel’s praying. That’s not how a lot of people in church history have prayed either. Like we need to remind ourselves of who God is, what aspects of his character we want to lean on in this moment so that we pray Well, a great lesson for us is is just what we get here in Daniel, where whatever address you use for God followed up with who, right so, Lord our God, who you. Keeps his promises. Who is going to, you know, finish the good work he started in me, who whatever you need to remember at that moment, include it in your invocation. But if Daniel stacks up words of praise here, he equally stacks up words of contrition as he considers the people of God, he says we’ve sinned, which means to miss the mark. He says, we’ve done wrong, which is twisting God’s word, where we’ve acted wickedly. I don’t need to explain that one. We’ve rebelled right against our King, who is God. He says, We’ve turned away from the law, and then we haven’t listened to the prophets either, so we’re ignoring God’s commands, and then also ignoring those who call us back to God’s commands. That’s a lot right there, like I read this prayer and I think, do we take sin as seriously as Daniel does here? Do we own God’s righteous judgment? And what’s even more interesting about all that is Daniel’s praying this way for corporate confession. This isn’t Daniel’s sin. This isn’t David in Psalm 51 after committing adultery with Bathsheba and murdering her husband, Uriah, when he says, I have sinned against you. You know transgression, iniquity, whatever you want to call it. Yes, Lord, that’s what it was. I understand that piece, but here Daniel like, like Daniel’s done pretty well, and what we’ve seen in his life, clearly, he had sin in him, but we don’t see like these overt acts of wickedness and rebellion. And you hear saying, you are right to judge us, Lord, because he understands what it means to have solidarity with God’s covenant people. The covenant people broke God’s covenant, and so God’s covenant people, corporately, need to confess their sin. And this gets hard for some people. This is a tricky one corporate confession, because we kind of want to go that wasn’t me, right. You can imagine the church today in South Africa, the white church, kind of going like, Yeah, but I didn’t participate in apartheid, so I don’t need to talk about that. That’s South Africa. That’s really far away. Were there any instances of racial exploitation and oppression in this country that you can remember of in which the church was notoriously complicit? Yeah, so we gotta own that piece too. What about sin today? Though, something’s coming on Tuesday, Jake talked about that. I won’t talk about that too much because I get all, you know, we don’t want to go off but, but let’s just think about this. Because right now, our country is in two halves, small group of us who are like, I’m not having anything to do with either half, but you know, two halves, and we like to talk about the sins of the other half. But what would it look like for the church, the covenant people of God, who have unity in Christ, Jesus, that certainly transcends political parties, never mind nation states to confess all of our sins. I’m gonna step on everyone’s toes here. Alright? You good? We ready for this? Okay, alright, here we go. What would it look like for the Church of God to go we have sinned against you by, for example, laughing at jokes about how the nation of the island, state of Puerto Rico, is a floating pile of garbage that we have dehumanized immigrants to this country where they’re legal or illegal, we have treated them as less than God’s image bearers, which is a strange thing to do for people who talk a lot about the sanctity of human life. Oh, but we got to talk about that one too, don’t we, because what about the church, the people of God, who have compromised on issues like abortion and human sexuality and God’s plan for marriage? Because it doesn’t fit with what our Party is trying to do, Did I step on everyone’s toes? I got everyone let me know. If I didn’t, I can, I can get you later. Okay, you understand that? Like, people don’t like that, like what I just did. There probably was some part of that where you’re like, Hmm, why? Because, in corporate confession, people sometimes own what we might not be willing to but what we must, why? Because of what Daniel says here, verse seven, because, Lord, you are righteous, and that should probably scare us. The word righteous has legal and ethical overtones. So uh oh, because we are not righteous and God is here’s the good news, though, the word righteous doesn’t just mean like ethically perfect. The core word in Hebrew has the idea of wholeness, so maybe integrity would be a good English rendering of it there. Like God is whole. God is always. Who he always is, and so his righteousness is the basis both of his judgment and of His mercy. He is the God who forgives wickedness, rebellion and sin, yet does not leave the guilty unpunished. Exodus. 34 that is who he always is, which means looking at second half of verse 11, we can’t complain when he exiles his people, therefore, the curses and sworn judgments have been poured out on us, right? We can’t complain when God brings suffering into our lives, when he exiles his people into a foreign nature, nation, or allows us to suffer the consequences of our sin, because he’s just keeping His covenant character. He is who he always is, and he did what he said he’d do. If you’re a parent, you probably have had this conversation at some point with your toddler, usually right after, you know, got themselves some taps on their behind, kind of thing, and the toddler is like, why did you do this to me? And you’re like, I just told you. Like, if you say shut up to your mom and hit her again, I’m gonna paint your back porch red. We mean, why did I do this to you? Like I just but even that illustration is right? Because when I have done that, that’s a real interaction, right? Okay, even when I’ve done that, I don’t do that because I hate my kids. I do it because I love my kids. Or this is the father disciplining us in love, and that’s what we see in this moment when he keeps his covenant by bringing covenant judgment on us. Now, as I said before, the focus is on Jerusalem and the temple. We see it here again, right? That’s what verse 12 is getting at, even when it says, under the whole heaven, nothing has ever been done, like what has been done to Jerusalem? And you’re like, really? Like, we’ve been sacking cities since, you know, just about Eden. Like, what do you mean it hasn’t happened before? What hasn’t happened before is God bringing his worship to an end by allowing the temple to be destroyed. And that caught Israel off guard. They assumed they were safe because God dwells in Jerusalem, right? Because his temple was there. That’s actually why they arrest Jeremiah. Interestingly, because they’re like, no, he’s like, sinned against the temple by saying God’s going to destroy it. The only reason they don’t execute him, right then, is because they read Micah and realized, oh, wait, they did that too. And then they even say like, Yeah, but when we read Micah, we repented, and so God didn’t allow his temple to be destroyed. Maybe we should try that instead of arresting Jeremiah. But common sense did not win out there. So Jeremiah says things like this. This is the Lord speaking through Jeremiah. Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house which bears my name and say we’re safe, safe. To do all these detestable things has this house which bears my name become a den of robbers to you, famously quoted by Jesus, of course, you see the issue. What he’s bringing out there is that the people had presumed upon God’s presence, and so God had to punish them. And then in verse 13, Jeremiah said, Jeremiah, Daniel says, What about us? Have we caught on yet? Yet we have not sought the favor of the Lord our God by turning from our sins and giving attention to your truth. They hadn’t paid attention to the word. They hadn’t turned from their sin yet. So he’s the Prophet doing what Prophets do. He’s standing at the bow of the Titanic yelling iceberg, going like turn turn, knowing that it may take a long time for the people of God to actually start to turn. So he’s turning for them in this prayer as representative of his people, and his specific request in those last two paragraphs of the prayer are, what Lord would you get your city and your temple back up and running again quickly? Why he says it over and over and over again, for your sake. Lord, do this for your sake. God, because this city and this people bear your name, act for your glory. Lord, anytime we’re praying, God would glorify himself. We know we are praying according to his will, and He will answer that prayer, but this is what responsive prayer looks like. You read the law, you see where you fall short,
you confess and repent, you read the promises of God, and you plead that God would bring them to pass. The big question, of course, is Will God answer? Let’s see as we read the last scene, Insight verses 20 to 27 while I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and making my request to the Lord my God for His holy hill, while I was still in prayer, Gabriel, the man I had seen in the earlier vision, came to me in Swift flight about the time of the evening sacrifice. He instructed. To me and said to me, Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding. As soon as you began to pray, a word went out, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed. Therefore consider the word and understand the vision. 70 sevens are to creed 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 place. No one understand this. From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven sevens and 62 sevens will be rebuilt with streets in a trench. But in times of trouble, after the 62 sevens, the Anointed One will be put to death 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 at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation until the end that is decreed is poured out on him. So it is while he’s still confessing and pleading that Gabriel arrives. So we get the answer to our question, yes. God hears and God answers prayer. What an encouragement to us, especially when we see how touching this response is, and he says, I’ve come because you are highly esteemed. You look, in other translations, might say loved or very precious, which is exactly what that word gets at. And again, this is probably a reminder we need, because we struggle so with guilt and shame. God loves you. If you belong to Christ. He is not disappointed in you. He is eager to respond to your prayers. Gabriel comes at the time of the evening sacrifice, which is so interesting, because guess what’s not happening right now evening sacrifices, because the temple was destroyed. Also, Daniel lives in Babylon, not Jerusalem, and we’re talking 65 years since he’s seen an evening sacrifice, and yet he still measures his life in those terms. He is unconsciously driven by God’s worship. Again, this is one where I go. Have we lost this? Maybe because worship is so easy for us, like we just get to gather. We had it taken away from us for a time during the pandemic, and so for a brief moment, corporate worship was so precious to us that we could almost go this would have been the time we would have gathered. And now it’s easy again, and now we’ve got other things to do, but Gabriel arrives to give Daniel insight at the time the evening sacrifice gives Daniel insight into Jeremiah’s prophecy, because Daniel is thinking, it’s time for desolation to end. And Gabriel comes to say, what you’re asking for is bigger than you think. We’re not talking about the end of the exile. We are talking about the coming of God’s forever kingdom. That’s what you’re really after. So God prepares him and prepares us for what’s coming. And it’s 70 sevens okay, we already talked 70 and seven, right? So everybody’s clear already. We’re talking symbolic numbers here. Okay, so if you’re going to try and find what 490 years are being talked about, even assuming that seven means years or something like that, good luck to you. Okay, it is symbolic in the perfect time, the way the gospel writers would say it would be in the fullness of time, right? Like that’s when it’s going to happen. We we have to have this in our minds as we read apocalyptic again, we’re doing revelation. Okay, I’m just prepping you. That’s the only reason, Daniel, so you’re ready for revelation in January. Okay? I remember, I think I shared this before, somebody once called the church. They wanted to talk to the pastor. They had theological questions. I answered the phone and she says, do you take the Bible literally? That was the one question. And I went, I know what you’re asking, and the answer is yes, but not to the question you ask, because you’re not asking the right question. I take the literal parts of the Bible literally, and the figurative parts I take figuratively, and the symbolic parts I take symbolically, and sometimes it’s hard to know what’s what I grant, which is why we carefully study God word and keep hoping Gabriel will show up and help us out. Because, man, this part is tricky, right here. Okay, so this is a symbolic amount of time. What happens during these 70 sevens? Well, verse 24 is really helpful for us, because it gives us the six goals. Like this is the end that Daniel is really hoping for. What is it where we’re going to stop sinning two times, right? Says it like and repeats it pretty much. We get atonement for sin, everlasting righteousness. That sounds something better than the end of exile, right? Like that’s something bigger than that. We’re going to seal up vision and prophecy, which probably means bring them all to fulfillment, all the promises of God, and then we are going to anoint the most holy place, the temple. Uh, that certainly would be what Daniel would have heard there. But of course, we know that Jesus is the temple who is coming. So probably Jesus, who is the Anointed One, the Messiah, plus it just says the Holy of Holies. It doesn’t actually say place. So was it most holy place, or is it the most holy person in Jesus? It’s one in the same. So it doesn’t really matter. But what a day that will be right when these six things are true, like that is the fulfillment of everything we are longing for, but it will be a long time coming, and that’s the point that Gabriel is making here. So we get another four fold scheme, I guess these 70 sevens. In some ways it’s two because the seven and the 62 get put together, and then there’s another seven. In some ways it’s four because that seven is divided in half, and in some ways it’s three. If I can’t even tell you how many sections we got, you know, we’re in trouble, right? Okay, so let’s talk about it. First one the seven sevens talking about, from Cyrus’s decree that the exile is over, the people of God can return to Jerusalem, to the coming of the anointed one. At least in the NIV we got a capital, a capital O, that makes us think Jesus. But of course, not necessarily. They didn’t have capitals back then and stuff. We anoint priests. We anoint kings. Are we talking about Joshua, the high priest, Zechariah three? Are we talking about Zerubabel, the king in the line of David? Or are we actually supposed to squish the 62 and the seven together? In which case, maybe we actually are talking about Jesus. I don’t know. And then at the end of the 62 the Anointed One is cut off. Okay, the city and the temple have been rebuilt by the end of that 62 although with difficulty. If you’ve read Ezra Nehemiah or Maccabees, you know just how true that is, of course. But what Anointed One is being cut off? Are we talking because of what’s coming here in a moment, about Antiochus that we met last week, and when he cuts off Anias, the third, the high priest at that time? Or are we talking about Jesus, who is the Anointed One, who is definitely cut off. And big things happen at that moment. And then the last seven the ruler shows up, although the Anointed One was called the ruler earlier, but this is a different ruler, and he desecrates the city in the temple, and he brings war, and he confirms a covenant with many, which sounds really good, unless we’re talking about a military treaty with like, bad people in Jerusalem, which Antiochus certainly had. Talk about more that more. When we get to chapter 11, is this Antiochus? Is this Titus under Rome? Does the same thing? Is this Satan? Or when we get to verse 27 is the he? They’re not talking about the ruler, but it’s talking about the anointed one, in which case it’s Jesus who establishes the new covenant with us when he’s cut off, which would be kind of cool. And then we get the second half of the last seven the abomination that causes desolation, which we know happened under Antiochus, and then again under Titus. And then Jesus talks about it like it’s still to come, I don’t know. But then it ends with until the end that is decreed is poured out on him, which is really good news. Who here is hoping Gabriel shows up in a moment like that is me summarizing the very best commentaries on Daniel. Okay, but don’t miss the point. Like, that’s the nice thing about apocalyptic, right? It’s meant to be elusive, allusive, symbolic. I think of it like expressionist paintings, if you know expressionism, right? Like they’re trying to paint joy. And what happens when people look at candy. I used to teach Kandinsky, and I would have people look at it, they’d be like, Oh yeah, you can kind of see the canons here. And you’re like, they’re not canons. Okay? He’s trying to express joy, but we just want to, like, fixate on concrete images, and that’s what we do. So we read apocalyptic and we go Apache helicopters, and God goes, No, you’re missing it. Okay, just take it in what it’s trying to express to us, what is it? Bad things will happen. The end will come. That’s what we need to get in all of this at the perfect time like Daniel wants the end of the 70, the end of exile and desolation. And Gabriel says it’s be more like 770s until true exile, our spiritual exile and true desolation ends, and God’s forever kingdom comes, but it will come because everything is going to plan. Because our big theme in Daniel, right, in spite of appearances, I was
really hoping you guys would know that one by now. In spite of appearances, God is in control. God is reigning. Everything is going according to his decrees and his promises. So what do we do in the meantime, though, like, how do we bring the two halves of this section together, the prayer of repentance on the one hand, and then this vision of the end on the other? Well, what’s the goal of the end? Again? Verse 27 the end of sin, full atonement per. Perfect righteousness from our perspective, we lay hold of that through repentance and faith. And I think that is the lesson, right? Instead of guessing when start living in light of then, like bring the future into the present, and it’s all about the covenant. So our big idea for the day when we suffer the consequences of covenant breaking. We can confess, repent and trust the covenant keeper. You notice I said, Can? We can not like we must, we should. Yes, you must and you should. But it’s not that we have to confess and repent and trust. It’s that we get to confess and repent and trust in the God who keeps the covenant like that’s the part that applies to us today. Only we’ve got so much more understanding even than Daniel did. We have broken the covenant in Adam, the human race has broken the covenant. That is why the world is bleak. That is why evil exists, and that is why we suffer, sometimes directly, as a direct result of our choices we experience as the consequences of sin, sometimes indirectly. Tornado hit Oklahoma yesterday, not because they sinned more than we did, but because we live in a broken world. That’s the bad news, but there’s such good news. What we break? God restores, preserves, keeps. It’s another part of Jeremiah. Kyle actually quoted part of it as he was reading from Hebrews this morning. Says the New Covenant, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant. God says through Jeremiah, new meaning the old is insufficient and will soon be obsolete. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors, because they broke my covenant. That was the problem with the Old Covenant, right is that we broke it, we couldn’t keep it. And so God says, this is the covenant I will make. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. That’s the heart of the Covenant right there, for I will forgive their wickedness, and we will remember and we’ll remember their sins, no more, like we need a covenant that answers the Bible’s big question, which is, how can God eradicate sin and yet still welcome sinners? That’s the big question. How can God make us into covenant keepers? What will that look like? The answer is, well, because God is righteous, that’s what it will look like. His holiness and His mercy will meet perfectly where the hill of Calvary, of course, and what does Jesus say the night before he ascends that hill? This cup is the new covenant, which is in my blood, poured out for you. That is the answer to all of our questions right there. How can God eradicate sin and still welcome sinners because of Jesus, because He punished our sin, our covenant breaking in Jesus. That’s what Jesus takes from us, and then He gives us His perfect righteousness. When we see that, it leads us to repent, because we are aware that we’ve broken the covenant, but he’s kept it, and that stirs something so deep within our hearts that we long to return to Him, to be faithful to Him. Now, we’re not perfect. The presence of sin still lingers in our lives, and so our whole life is by the way, Reformation Day was last week, right? First, the 95 theses, the whole of the Christian life is repentance, and that’s what Luther is getting at right there, right? Is because we keep sinning, we keep turning and we keep trusting, we keep repenting. Kyle read that for us as well. Hebrews 1014, right? Look at the balance in this phrase, by one sacrifice he has made perfect, there’s your everlasting righteousness, because it’s Christ’s righteousness given to us his all sufficient mercy in us now by one sacrifice he has made perfect. It’s done forever those who are being made holy, oh, it’s not done. Something still needs to happen in us. So how do we hold those two together? We acknowledge our sin, we feel godly sorrow that leads us to repentance and to seek God’s restoration. We don’t cower in guilt and shame because it’s the joy of the Lord that is our strength, that he reconciles us to himself and to each other too. Go back to South Africa just briefly. I know a lot of you know the answer to that question. You know what was coming next? Was it gonna be bloodbath? So what everyone was expecting? But that’s not what happened. Because instead of bloodshed, Archbishop Desmond Tutu headed up the Commission on truth and reconciliation, and the whole point was, basically, if you acknowledge the truth, you could experience reconciliation. So if those who participated in this great evil would come forward and admit their guilt, they would receive amnesty, certainly in terms of physical violence, but often legally as well. That is a picture of the gospel in action. It is also a. Picture of the gospel, isn’t it? Because that’s what we get here. If we come forward and admit our guilt, we receive amnesty in Christ, all because of Jesus. When we suffer the consequences of covenant breaking, we get to confess and repent and trust once more and the covenant keeper. Let’s go to Him in prayer now, Lord, we confess that we have broken the covenant. We have not lived up to the standard you have set for us. We have sinned, acted wickedly, rebelled against you. We have ignored your commands and ignored the prophets who are calling us back to your commands. We have been apathetic about corporate worship, we have been lazy when it comes to prayer and the study of Your Word. We are guilty Lord, but you are righteous. You keep your covenant with us. You will be our God, and we will be your people, and you’ve made away by the blood of Christ. Help us, Lord to remember that truth again, especially as we celebrate the Lord’s supper together now, and help us, Lord to live in light of that truth with that joy that comes from our forgiveness. Lead us to ongoing repentance and an ongoing pursuit of the holiness to which you call us. We pray for Your name’s sake. Amen.