In the time of Daniel, God’s people were in exile in Babylon because of their repeated rebellion against Him. The angel Gabriel came to Daniel with a message that gave Israel another chance. They would return to their Land and rebuild their temple in preparation for Messiah the Prince. The prophecy would commence with a command to restore Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, known later as the second temple or Ezra’s temple.
In this prophecy God tells Daniel:-
“Seventy
weeks are determined for your people and for your holy city, to finish the
transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to
bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to
anoint the Most Holy.” Daniel 9:24
The ‘weeks’ in the prophecy are weeks of
years, so a week is seven years. According to this wrong teaching, only 69
weeks have been fulfilled and there is another week or seven years to go. They
teach that between the 69th and 70th week, God has
inserted the Church Age. When the Church is ‘raptured’ out, then comes the 70th
‘week’ of God’s dealings with Israel during the great tribulation. They believe
that all the promises contained in vs. 24 have not yet been fulfilled.
Coupled with this idea of a 70th
‘week’ yet to come is, what I believe is a MIS-interpretation of Daniel 9:27
”Then he shall confirm a covenant with many
for one week;
but in the
middle of the week he shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering.”
This interpretation goes like this: -
‘He’ in the sentence refers to the Antichrist. He makes a peace pact with
Israel. After three and a half years, ‘in
the middle of the week,’ he breaks the covenant and stops the sacrifices at
the temple. From this they reason that a third Temple will have been built.
This supposedly happens during the last ‘week’ or seven years of the prophecy
given to Daniel, and will be a time of God’s special dealings with Israel – a
time of great tribulation. Meanwhile Christians will be ‘raptured’ out to
escape the tribulation and there is much speculation about whether this will be
‘pre-trib,’ ‘mid-trib,’ or ‘post-trib.’
This is the popular end time teaching in many evangelical and Pentecostal
churches. It is a firmly held and rarely questioned belief, passed on from one
generation to the next.
The
truth is that the seventy weeks were seventy consecutive weeks as you would
normally expect. If God was intending to insert a long period of at least 2,000
years between the 69th and 70th week, one would expect
some indication of it in the Scriptures. There is none. The ‘He’ in vs. 27
refers to Christ not the Antichrist. The seventieth ‘week’ was the week which
included Jesus’s ministry. After 3 and a half years of ministry, In the ‘middle of the week,’ Jesus brought an
end to the need for animal sacrifices, by making the one perfect sacrifice for
all time. By His ministry and sacrificial death on the Cross He confirmed or
strengthened the Abrahamic covenant, “The
covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ,” (Galatians 3:17) and
in so doing, He fulfilled all the promises contained in vs 24. God has only one
answer for this world’s condition, and that is the Cross of Christ. Anything
that He is going to do was accomplished there. It is a finished work. We just
haven’t understood the full extent of all that the Cross and resurrection has
achieved. In these last days of the Church Age, God will bring revelation on
the finished work of Christ which will cause the Church to rise up in Kingdom
authority.
Jesus moved with a sense of purpose. He
understood the plan of Redemption and worked within the will of the Father. He
often said, “it is not time yet” or “My time is not yet come,” (e.g. John 7:6),
because He was working to the plan. He said, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”(Matthew
15:24). When He sent the disciples out He told them to go only to Israel.
(Matthew 10:5:6) That is because the work of redemption had to be first
demonstrated in Israel, the pattern and priestly and prophetic nation. During
that seventieth ‘week,’ Jesus taught the principles of the Kingdom; He was
crucified and resurrected; the Holy Spirit was poured out and the infant Church
established. Then and only then, the word came to take the gospel to the
Gentiles. (Acts 10) and Paul, who was to be the apostle to the Gentiles, was
called and commissioned. The seventy weeks had been completed. There is no
‘seventieth week’ to be yet fulfilled.
When we see that, we can see that this
teaching which occupies so much of our thinking about the end time is wrong. We
can stop looking for an Antichrist to make and then break a pact with the Jews
and stop watching for the third temple; it is not part of God’s plan. The third
temple as far as God is concerned is the Living Temple which Christ is building
as in Ephesians 2:21:22. The Jews may or may not build another temple but it is
not a marker for a seven year count down to the 2nd Coming, preceded
by the ‘Rapture’ pre, or mid ‘trib.’ Jesus is not planning to snatch His people
out of the world but to cause them to rise up in Victory over the forces of
darkness which keep the world in bondage. 1 Thessalonians 4:16,17 [the ‘rapture’
scripture] is about the manner of the 2nd Coming, when the Church
will be caught up to meet the Lord and escort Him back to the throne.
On the night He was betrayed Jesus
prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane for His disciples-
“I do not
pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them
from the evil one.” John 17:15
God told Daniel that some end time truth
is sealed until the time of the end; (Daniel 12:9) but about 200 years ago,
there were those who went ahead of the Spirit and put together an end time
scenario which doesn’t leave a lot of room for the Holy Spirit to bring
revelation on the real plan of God for the Church. Getting raptured out any
moment may sound exciting but what God really has for the Church is even more
exciting.
Very soon a ‘Joshua’ generation will
arise in the Earth that will bring down the ‘gates of Hell.’ [Mat 16:17,18] This
is what God has been working towards since the promise in the Garden that the
Seed of the Woman will crush the Serpent’s head. (Genesis 3:15).Christ and the
Church is that Seed. This Seed is also the Seed of Abraham which will possess
the gate of his enemies and be a blessing to the whole earth. (Genesis 22:17,
18)(Galatians 3:16, 29) If you belong to Jesus then you are part of this
Overcoming Seed. Jesus has done all the work and is now seated at the Father’s
right hand ‘waiting till His enemies are
made His footstool.’ Hebrews 10:13. That’s our job!
A generation of the Seed of Abraham and
the Seed of the Woman will rise up to our full potential in Christ. This is ‘Elijah’
that Jesus said would come and ‘restore all things’ before His 2nd
Coming. [Matthew 17:11]. In Acts 3:21 it says that the heavens must retain Jesus
“until the times of the ‘restoration of
all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since
the world began.” This will happen any time from now to 2027. How I know
that is for another time
The days ahead are days of the
restoration of all things which God has been working towards for millennia.
These are exciting times. “Christ in you
is the hope of glory.”
