The Seventy "Sevens"

Daniel 9:24-27 states:

²⁴ “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.

 ²⁵ “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. ²⁶ 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. ²⁷ 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.”

I could lie and tell you I know exactly what is being referenced here, but I don't, and everything I'm looking up online is only creating more confusion. This ties in nicely with Dr. Pratt's post about sealing up the prophecies, because there's a strong implication that we might have no idea what these verses mean because the time for us to know hasn't arrived. I'll comment on that in greater detail either tomorrow or Monday (whenever we cover Daniel 12), but for now, since "I don't know" makes for fairly dull posts, I'll do my best to add some explanation to these verses.

I'm out of town right now and don't have my Chronological Bible, but the online Bible I use has footnotes by the words "seven" which say an alternate wording (and the word used in the King James Version) is "weeks." To further muddy the waters, many commentators will say that "weeks" in this case is actually "years" (and these are Bible literalists who do this, and they do it with a straight face. Don't get me going on Bible literalism). This gives us two intriguing possibilities:

1. These seventy sevens represent 490 years, of which I have no idea when they occurred, since some of the events (the events of the last "seven") haven't yet happened.

2. This is a figurative number, of which the last "seven" will describe the last seven years of Earth's history. In the middle of that seven-year period, the Antichrist will make himself known and attempt to lure the rest of the world into eternal damnation.

Fun stuff, eh? And to think, there's people who devote their lives to the study of these questions, AND THEY'LL NEVER KNOW THE ANSWER! It can make for some fascinating research to look into the meaning of these verses, but it's also just as possible that their meaning has been sealed up and isn't for us to know. This doesn't mean we use our get-out-of-Daniel card and  just skip over them, but perhaps it's not our time or place to understand them. 

For what it's worth, I'll probably spend some time on Sunday, September 11th discussing these verses (how coincidental is that, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to discuss the end of the world) and other End Times matters, since people do find it interesting and we really won't be discussing Revelation in a face-to-face manner in this class. Some people don't like discussing it at all, and I can understand that, because it can be terrifying to consider the ramifications of the devil (I won't dignify him with an upper-case "D") loose in the world, but the cold hard truth is ...he already is--the stakes will simply be much higher.

Be prepared. We don't know when it will happen, but we do know THAT it will happen. Be prepared.

Scott