Jubilee

Would you take your copy of God‘s word and turn to Daniel 9? Daniel chapter 9.

If you’re newer here to Sharon, we’re so thankful that you’re here. We’re not always in this type of literature that we’re in right now in Daniel that sometimes is called "apocalyptic." It means God is revealing things about what he’s gonna do in the future. Every part of the Bible isn't like that, but some parts of the Bible are. And we think that every bit of God’s word is really good for us. And it's what we need. And that's why God gave it to us.

So this morning we are in a passage of scripture that's got both some very nitty-gritty practical stuff in it, but also some soaring, profound, and prophetic stuff in it. And we think we need every bit of that. And that's why God's given it to us.  We’re gonna take all of chapter 9 in one gulp today with the Lord's help. Because I think that the chapter hangs together best when we read it the way that God gave it to us. All of Daniel chapter 9. So we’re gonna focus the sermon time on the end [of the chapter] which is what I think the Lord's really driving at here, but we really need the first part of the chapter too.

So with that, I’m gonna invite you to stand with me as we honor the reading of God’s word. To my great relief, you’ve already been fed so well through the worship, through our brother Caden's testimony, so that kinda takes the pressure off me. But God‘s word is so good. We turn to it now with joy.

I've thought this week about a commercial from years back. I can’t remember if it was advertising for the Apple Watch or for some sort of app on your phone, but it featured an older man, a senior man, running all over his town for exercise, but he’s running in this really bizarre pattern. He’s kind of zigging and zagging, he’s backtracking. He’s not running a normal traditional route that you would expect. And it doesn't explain any of that. It just shows him then finishing his run, going back to his house, going to his computer, printing something out, and then handing that paper to his senior wife who’s drinking coffee at the table. And what he’s printed out is the map of his run, which he has run in such a pattern that it spells out "I Love You." and he gives it to his wife. You can say it, "awww!" Isn't that precious?

So even though you didn’t really understand what he was doing at the time. It was kind of mysterious. It seemed kind of strange. In the end, the message was actually really simple, and really wonderful. He loved his wife. Still faithful after all these years to her, and he just wanted her to know it.

And y’all, if you don’t take anything else away from Daniel chapter 9, just take that! Because there’s a lot going on in Daniel chapter 9 that's challenging for us to understand. There’s some mysterious things that are spoken. We’re not all sure exactly where God is zigging and where he’s zagging, and what some of these things represent, but I’m telling you the message of Daniel chapter 9 is really simple in the end: God loves his people! And he is faithful to his covenant promises. And even if we can't always tell what he’s doing in the moment, we'll all be able to tell in the end. He loves his people. He’s so faithful. That’s what he wants Daniel to know in a troubled time. That's what he wants us to know in a troubled time.

So let’s get into it. I’m gonna look at this in four quick movements, and we’re gonna start by summing up the first 23 verses, so first:

"Poignant" meaning something that's touching, something that's moving emotionally. We see a poignant scene.

Now this prophecy comes at a very tumultuous time in Daniel‘s life. He’s from Judah, but he’s been carried away as an exile, or a slave, to live in the land of Babylon. But now, Babylon has been conquered by another pagan superpower: the Medes and the Persians. And so there's been this huge regime change. Everything‘s being turned upside down and that’s got Daniel, now an old man, reaching for a particular book of his Bible, probably a scroll, the scroll of the prophet, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah was God's spokesperson right before the exile. And God gave Jeremiah a bad news/good news message. Bad news: y’all have broken every rule that you can break against God‘s law and God‘s covenant for as long as you possibly could. All those Deuteronomy covenant commitments you made, you’ve broken them all. And so God is now sending you out of the land of promise into exile. You’re gonna have to serve under a pagan power. That’s the bad news.

But God also gave Jeremiah good news! The good news was that after 70 years they would get to come back home [Jeremiah 25, 29]. God says, "I still have plans for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future [Jeremiah 29:11]. Not only is God gonna bring them back into the land after seventy years, but he’s going to make a new and better covenant with them. It’s gonna be better than before! And that's Jeremiah 31 - "I'm going to forgive all of your sins, remember your iniquities no more. I’m gonna change you from the inside. I’m gonna give you a new heart. I’m gonna write that law that you can't keep when it's on the outside of you, I'm gonna write it on the inside of you in your heart. And I will bring you into a glorious new day.“ That's the good news that Jeremiah preached. Daniel rolls up that scroll, finishes his quiet time, looks at the calendar, and sure enough guess how long they’ve been in exile? Guess how many years? Seventy years. That's how long Daniel's been in exile. Daniel is 90 years old or close to it at the time of Daniel chapter 9. And so Daniel sees it's time for God to do what he said and bring the people home.

So in this very moving poignant scene, old Daniel gets on his knees, probably at that open window facing Jerusalem, like we heard about in chapter 6, where he prayed three times a day. And Daniel prays God's word back to him. And Daniel says, "God we don't deserve anything from you, but you are a merciful promise-keeping God. And we are your people, and Jerusalem is your place, and these are your promises from Jeremiah. So, God, for your own glory, would you keep your word and send us back home, and bring in that new covenant era? I’ve been waiting for this since I was 15 years old. Would you keep your word and send us back home?

That is so beautiful. And there's so many practical lessons we could learn there about how Bible reading and praying are connected. It's a two-way conversation. We listen to God speak to us in his word. Then we talk back to him about it in prayer. There are lessons here about how God's people are to keep their hearts in Jerusalem with the Lord no matter where our bodies may be located. There are lessons here about the beauty of long-term faithfulness and godliness like Daniel has shown. And maybe some of your Gospel Fellowship Groups can wring out some of that practical truth.

But I want you to see this morning that the scene gets even more poignant and more moving,  because before Daniel can even finish his prayer, God sends an answer. He sends a personal response through the angel Gabriel. And what he tells his 90-year-old servant living in exile is first of all: I know your name, Daniel. I know your name. And I do hear your prayers. And I love you greatly. That's magnificent. Life has not been easy for Daniel. He's spent his whole life in exile. And yet God assures him, "you are known, you are heard, you are loved."  And Daniel's reward is going to be great for his faithfulness to the Lord down through the years. We'll see that more later on. And we need to know as we're called to be exiles living for the Lord in a world that's in rebellion against him, if we walk by faith before the Lord, then we are known, our prayers are heard for Jesus' sake, and we are loved greatly for Jesus' sake. Isn't that good news? And a reward is coming for those who hope in the Lord and walk with him. But Daniel's reward really begins now because in this moment, God is going to give Daniel a glimpse of his wonderful plan for the future. So that was a number one: A Poignant Scene.

I want you to see a patient sovereign, a patient sovereign. A patient king. That's verse 24. Now, Daniel has been very focused on the end of this seventy years, right? Just like Jeremiah talked about. Daniel is thinking of this seventy year exile like a mountain climber might think about this mountain that’s right in front of him. It’s a steep climb. It's really difficult. But once I reach the top, I'm home free! But mountain climbing is deceiving. Climbing hills and running hills, it can be deceiving. Sometimes you get to the top of that steep climb and you find out, "man we're just getting started! There’s a bunch more mountains to come that I wasn't able to see down there. And I've got further to go.“ And I think that's God's message to Daniel here in verse 24. What God tells Daniel is "Yes, you're exactly right, the 70 year exile is almost done, but you’re not done yet. My plan's not done yet. This seventy year period is just a small phase of a much bigger plan."

Sometimes is God‘s plan bigger than we realize? Sometimes is God happy to take his time when we're wanting him to speed up? Yes? That's what Daniel is finding out here. And what God tells Daniel is that the 70 year exile is almost done, but God's got seventy more weeks on his calendar.

This actually isn't the first time the Bible's talked about seventy weeks in this way. If you were to look at Leviticus 25, God talks about seven weeks of years ending in what he called the year of “jubilee“—the year when the trumpet is sounded and all debts are forgiven. And all slaves are set free. And all property that's been taken from you is given back. The Jubilee, after “seven weeks of years.“ I think God here is talking about a super Jubilee. The ultimate Jubilee that he's got planned for his people when everything that's wrong is made right. In other words, the fulfillment of my plan, it's coming in seventy weeks. In other words, you've still got further to go. There's still a steep climb. but at the end of that 70 weeks, it’s gonna be the super jubilee! I’m gonna keep all my promises.

Look what God's gonna do at the end of the seventy weeks, verse 24: finish transgression, put an end to sin, atone for iniquity, bring in everlasting righteousness, and seal, or confirm, both vision and prophet, keep all my promises, anoint a most holy place. That's what God's gonna do at the end of these seventy weeks! In other words, when we get to the end of the seventy weeks, I’m not just gonna end your physical exile of y’all living in Babylon or Persia. No, I’m gonna deal with the problem that got you into exile. I'm gonna deal with your sin. I'm gonna put an end even to death itself. I'm gonna bring in the New Covenant that Jeremiah promised in that scroll that Daniel was reading.

Question: when Ezra and Nehemiah and all those folks go back from exile to Jerusalem, do they fulfill this New Covenant? Do they bring about all this wonderful stuff that God has promised? No, they do not. They physically return from exile, but spiritually they still remain in exile. They need God to do more. And there's only one person who can end the spiritual exile and keep all of God's promises. And his name isn't Nehemiah or Zerubbabel or Haggai or any of those cats that are living at that time! The only person who can deal with the problem underneath the exile is who? It's Jesus Christ! And I think that's what Daniel 9 is all about. It's all about God pointing Daniel beyond this first little hill of the exile in Babylon to this bigger plan of what he's gonna do through his son, Jesus, after 70 weeks of years. Jesus is coming to be the climax of God's great plan. And he will sound the jubilee. Does that makes sense so far? Alright, so we've got A Poignant Scene and A Patient Sovereign (in other words God is patiently working out this plan to send Jesus). And that leads us, verses 25 and 26, to:

Well God in verse 25 begins to lay out what this seventy week plan is going to look like. And it's going to start in verse 25 with a shorter phase. I think we can agree that 7 is shorter than 62. So there's gonna be a shorter phase of this bigger plan. And that’s going to last (v25) from the going out of the word to restore Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince.

Now look, there is room for lots of disagreement in this passage about what all this stuff means, even among people who agree on 99.9% of everything else in the Bible! I think what this means is that from the time of Jeremiah's prophecy that God's gonna send the people home to the coming of Cyrus, King of Persia, who actually gives the decree to send them home. Isaiah calls Cyrus "the anointed one." He uses him to send his people home. But anyway, you can disagree with that if you want to. The point is, it will be really exciting in this first phase because the people are getting to go back home.

This is what Psalm 126 is about when the people said, "when the Lord set us free from exile, we sang for joy and were filled with laughter! We said the Lord has done great things for us!“ Man it is exciting when they get to go back home. But then begins a much longer period of 62 weeks. And during that time, the prophecy says, Jerusalem is going to be rebuilt. I think that's the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. The end of your old testament. It's a longer period. Hey, that will be encouraging to Daniel! Right now, Jerusalem's desolate. The temple's in ruins. God is saying, it's going to be rebuilt over this longer period of time.

But notice if you will, it will be rebuilt in what kind of a time? A troubled time. A troubled time. In other words, just getting back to Jerusalem and rebuilding the city, rebuilding the temple, that doesn't end all the people's trouble. And I think that's kinda what Daniel is thinking. That's what a lot of the exiles are thinking. If we can just get back to Jerusalem and rebuild that temple, the troubled time will be over, but no, there's still lots of trouble when Ezra and Nehemiah and all those folks get back. Trouble lasts for 400 years. All the way up until the beginning of the New Testament from the end of the exile to the beginning of the New Testament. In other words, God's people are physically home but something deeper is needed to bring about those great promises of verse 24.

And so, we've now passed through the 7 week phase, a 62 week phase, and that leads to this climatic seventieth week in God's big plan. And that's when God really ends the exile, really does the verse 24 stuff. But he does it in a shocking way. And it's right here at the beginning of verse 26. An “Anointed one“ shall be cut off and have nothing. An Anointed one shall be cut off and have nothing. God brings the people back from Jerusalem. They rebuild the walls, they rebuild the temple, but there's still plenty of trouble because there's plenty of sin. It doesn't solve the problem. The only way that the problem for God's people gets solved is for God to take the shocking measure of sending a Messiah who will be cut off in the place of his sinful people. The only way it's gonna get dealt with is if a savior bears the sins of his people and deals with the problem underneath the problem. He's got to be “cut off“ to establish this new covenant so we can be brought in! He's got to be left with nothing so his people can gain everything!

And Daniel 9:26 is talking about the work of the coming Messiah just like Isaiah talks about it in a more famous prophecy, Isaiah 53, the suffering servant, who gets cut off from the land of the living so that his people can be forgiven and be brought in. This is the only way that God can end the real exile of sin and death by the finished work of Jesus Christ. That's what Daniel 9:26 is about. And when Jesus gives his life, God's son in the flesh, our Messiah in our place, dying on the cross, rising from the dead, when Jesus does that, in the words of verse 24, he finishes transgression! He ends sin! He atones for iniquity! He brings in for those who belong to him everlasting righteousness. He fulfills every vision, every prophet that spoke about him. He anoints this new holy place so that sinners can come to God through him.

I'm saying Jesus is the climax of God's big ol' plan that's here in our Bible. He's the centerpiece of it! And that's what God's pointing Daniel to too. And if we had time to walk through the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we would see this on every page! How Jesus is announcing he's the real end of the exile. He's the one who really keeps all of those promises that Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel made. He's the one who gets the people home and makes them clean before God. And that's the centerpiece of the plan. And God tells beloved Daniel, "you are going to have to wait a little bit longer. But Jesus is coming. The Jubilee is coming. I will keep every promise I ever made." A Promised Savior. It leads to:

Now so far so good.. well for some of you, so far so good. At this point a lot of folks are in agreement. A lot of people who love the Lord and love the Bible are in agreement. That sure sounds a whole lot like Jesus at the beginning of verse 26. We can sort of see where we are getting a lot of this stuff. But in the middle of verse 26, we reach a fork in the road. You have to decide what the rest of it means. You need to know that lots of faithful Jesus-loving, Bible-committed people see in the middle of verse 26 a big time gap where we jump suddenly from the historical first coming of Jesus to the end of history where suddenly you're dealing now with the coming of the Antichrist and a 7-year tribulation, and the second coming of Jesus at the end. Tons of people see that in Daniel 9:26. And I really respect that view. I agree with a lot of the things in that view. And I think the stuff they say is going to happen is going to happen in history and in the Bible. But I'm not sure that's what Daniel 9:26 is talking about.

Some of you are like, "can we just go to lunch?" Others of you are like, "where's my blackjack? I'm gonna meet that boy in the parking lot." There's a spectrum of perspectives on Daniel 9:26, but I think respectfully that the most natural reading in context of this prophecy is that it stays focused on Jesus' first coming, and his death for us, and the events that immediately follow it. I do think even Daniel is going to talk about the Antichrist and the end times, truly, in Daniel chapters 10, 11, and 12, but I think here that Daniel is still hearing about the first coming of Jesus and what God does immediately after that in the judging of Jerusalem in 70AD. Now you can decide and you should decide for yourself. Because I'm not the Lord. I'm just an interpreter of the Lord's word. And he calls you to be an interpreter of his word too. So you can wrestle with it for yourself.  

But let me just lay it out for you the way I see it and I promise we're bringing this to a close. So Daniel's heart in this chapter I think we'd all agree is on Jerusalem. He wants to get back to Jerusalem. He wants to see Jerusalem restored and built up. But when we get to the gospels, this is the whole point of the story of Jesus, there's a shocking twist in the story. The city that rejects the Messiah and crucifies him isn't Rome or Athens or any of these other places, or the Philistines. What city crucifies Jesus? Hello, it's Jerusalem right?! This is a huge, huge plot in the four gospels. And when Jerusalem rejects him, Jesus repeatedly predicts this (Mark 13, Luke 21, Matthew 23-24).. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, I just wanted to bring you under my wings like my little chicks, but you wouldn't have me. And so your desolation is coming." He uses the very words of Daniel 9. God is going to have to judge his once holy city for rejecting his Messiah. And that begins when Jesus dies on the cross. What happens to that big temple curtain that was so important for so so long? What happens when Jesus dies? It's torn. That's God saying p, “you don't go to that temple to get to me anymore! You go through my Son!” That's the beginning of God saying, "it isn't Jerusalem anymore, it isn't the temple, it's my Son."

And it's going to continue on as Jesus himself will predict within that very generation in 70AD. The Roman armies come in. And they lay Jerusalem desolate. And I think that's what 9:26b is talking about. Look at that: And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. I'm telling you Jesus uses the exact same words to talk about the end of Jerusalem. The siege and destruction of the temple in 70AD is just a bigger deal than I give it credit for, than I think that we give it credit for. It's just a huge deal in the Bible. Because it vindicates Jesus as God's Messiah, and as God's true prophet. It confirms that he is the way that we now get to God and it also previews God's final judgment on the world. I want to make sure I say this.

I know this is inside baseball for a lot of folks. But for some, you're right here with me. I think that the Jerusalem destruction, the way the Bible talks about it is a preview of the final judgment on the world. I'm not asking you to pick one or the other. It's not like I'm telling you Jerusalem got judged in 70AD so there's not judgment at the end. It's not like that at all! No, God gives a preview of what happens when you reject his Messiah in 70AD. And then all that end time stuff that you've learned from your Bible, that's really gonna happen at the end. But the 70AD judgment is like a preview of that. Like Noah's flood was a preview of the final judgment. Does that make sense to y'all? Good enough? You're like just keep going Eric, just keep going.

Ok, what about verse 27? So I believe that the focus of Daniel 9 is not on the activity of the Antichrist at the end of time. Other parts of the Bible talk about that for sure, but I don't believe that's what Daniel 9 is talking about. I think the focus of Daniel 9 is the coming work of Jesus. And that's why I think verse 27 runs parallel to verse 26. So some stuff God said about the Messiah in verse 26 gets restated in verse 27 but kinda zoomed in. So when we read "and he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week," I don't think that's talking about this wicked covenant the Antichrist is going to make with people at the end. Now he may do that one day, but here in Daniel 9, I think we're actually talking about Jesus and the strong New Covenant that God promised through Jeremiah. The one that Daniel was just reading about that got this whole thing started. I think it's talking about that strong covenant that Jesus makes. When in the middle of the week, when Jesus is here, he gives his life for our sins. Because when Jesus dies on the cross, it ends sacrifice and offering. That's what that torn temple curtain means. That's what the whole book of Hebrews is about! We come to God through Jesus alone. Now, by his shed blood sinners like you and me and Daniel can go directly into God's presence and be welcomed and be forgiven. I think this is meant to be an encouraging word to Daniel--not a scary word, but an encouraging word!

So I think the rest of verse 27 zooms in then on Rome's destruction of Jerusalem, "On the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate." I think that abomination is Jerusalem crucifying their Messiah, rejecting the one God sent to save them. On the wings of that (after that), God judges Jerusalem by sending in those Roman armies and leaving them desolate and when God is finished using Rome as his tool of judgment, he brings them under judgment too until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator. And once again, I think all of that is a foreshadowing, or a preview, of how God's going to deal in judgment with the whole world when he returns at the end.

The point is at the end of all this, God has been showing us all throughout Daniel he rules history. Kingdoms rise, kingdoms fall, but God is sovereign. And his kingdom will endure forever. And it's decreed. It's decreed.

Now, we're gonna sum up with this. And we're gonna figure out how to have an invitation after Daniel 9. To sum up in Daniel 9: God is assuring his dearly loved Daniel, his dearly loved servant, that all of his promises will be kept. That the glorious Jubilee, it is coming, even if it takes a little bit longer than Daniel expects. Imagine what that must have meant to his faithful, aged servant. Daniel is still keeping time according to the evening sacrifices of Jerusalem. He hasn't been in Jerusalem in seventy years. You think it got down deep in his heart? You think he loves the Lord? He's living on the Lord's time no matter where his body may be. What an encouragement to hear that God is going to keep his promises in a magnificent way. What an encouragement for Daniel.

But y'all it should be a deeper encouragement for us, because we're not just looking ahead to what we think God is going to do. We're looking back at what we know God's already done. He sent his son Jesus, our Messiah. He was cut off in our place, at the cross, bearing our sin, bearing God's wrath that was due to us in his own body on the tree. And then he rose from the dead, and he's brought an end to our iniquity. If you trust in Jesus, it is done! Done! Your sins are paid for, you're right with God, you are welcome in his holy presence. Jesus did that for us! We are still exiles, our troubles aren't completely over as we make our way home to the new heavens and the new earth, but our Jubilee has already begun! And every single Sunday morning, we get together and we blow the trumpet, and we say, "look what Jesus did! Y'all remember what Jesus has done for us! We're gonna make it! It doesn't matter how steep the hill is or how long it might be! We've got Jesus. We know what God's already done and so we can trust that he will do everything that's still to be done as we wait for Jesus' return.

And so today, we've got weeks to come in Daniel where we will talk about end time stuff, and the Antichrist, and God's ultimate victory over them in him. But today, I think Daniel 9 calls us just to bask in the work of Jesus. And to bolster our confidence that God is in charge of history. We can trust him. He's directing this huge story of the world. We can trust him with the little story of our lives. Let's pray together.

Sermon by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church