Okay, take your Bibles and turn to Daniel chapter 9. And we came down to about 19, verse 19 last time. And verses 20 through 27, we're going to look at probably one of the most remarkable passages of Scripture. because it deals with a specific calendar prophecy. A very specific calendar prophecy. In fact, it's the only one in the Bible. The one that comes close to it might be the 70-year captivity prophesied by Jeremiah. But this is a calendar prophecy and it is amazing. This one separates the men from the boys. It separates the Jewish rabbis and their thinking and even liberals and Christians. Now let me say this. We're going to be looking at this chart right here. I want you to have that. It's been passed out to you, that's what the chart looks like. You were told to save it, keep it, and we're going to test you as to, you know, what would you say to little kids in grade school if they didn't bring their homework? So you must always bring your little charts, keep them in your Bible, because we'll be using them along the way. Now, this chart was created by a friend of mine, I haven't been in touch with him for years, Dr. Harold Hohner, Dallas Seminary. Dr. Hohner did the classic work on Daniel's 70 weeks. He put together from astronomy and from history and from the Bible this chart of Daniel's 70 weeks. It is a masterpiece in his book entitled The Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ. It's a big, long, hairy title. It's a little bitty book, but it's a masterpiece. The Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ. And he demonstrates the accuracy of the Daniel 70-week prophecy. Now let me say this. The sheet I gave you, this chart that I gave you, came from his book. And this is very complicated. When you finish it, You won't understand it. I don't have a good mathematical mind. I look at it, and I get the point. But it's hard to grasp the significance. Now, this is based on a moon calendar, not a solar calendar. And to correct our solar calendar, we have to have leap years. Moon calendar does not. But this chart is based on, because this is what the Bible used. The Bible did not use a solar calendar. They used a lunar calendar. And so the chart is based on that. Let's read the prophecy first and then we'll go to the chart. Let's go to verse 20, chapter 9. Now, while I was speaking and praying and confessing my sin, and that fascinates me that Daniel In his latter years, he looked at his life and said, I corporately, we talked about this last week, I believe he's saying, I corporately, even as a young man, I was brought to Babylon, but I am part corporately of the Jewish people, and I'm part of the sinful fabric of the Jewish people, confessing his sin, the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before the Lord, the Lord my God, in behalf of the holy mountain of my God." He's praying for Jerusalem, and the holy mountain would be in the city of Jerusalem. While I was still speaking in prayer, then the man, Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision previously, came to me in my extreme weariness about the time of the evening offering." Now generally the Bible speaks of angels as angels. He said man because the angels are appearing to humans in human form. And so the angel Gabriel comes and presents himself to Daniel. I like verse 21 because Daniel didn't even finish his prayer. And bang, here is Gabriel already standing in his midst before he finishes his prayer. He gave me instruction and talked with me and said, O Daniel, I have now come forth to give you insight with understanding. At the beginning of your supplications, the command was issued, and I have come to tell you because you are highly esteemed, so give heed to the message and gain understanding of the vision. He's esteemed by whom? Well, he was esteemed by the kings he ministered under, but I think the context, he's esteemed by God. God esteems Daniel as a very righteous man. And so God is going to give to him one of the most fantastic prophecies in the word of God. 70 weeks have been decreed for your people and your holy city. Now, the word week is the word heptad, and it's actually 70 times 7. 70 times 7 is 490 years. This is going to be years. Everybody admits it's years. Liberals, conservatives, everybody says we're talking about 490 years. 7 times 70. Now notice what the rest of the verse says. They have been decreed for your people, the Jewish people. This 490 years has to do with the Jewish people. And it has to do with your holy city. And it has to do with finishing up, completing the transgression. The transgression of the Jewish people against God would be the context. to make an end of sin, the Jewish people will have been in rebellion, to bring atonement for iniquity, to bring in eternal righteousness, to seal up or complete the vision and the prophecy, and to anoint the most holy place, which would be the temple area, okay? All right, all of that's gonna be accomplished in 490 years. Now this is a clock, picture a clock on the wall, and what's gonna happen, this clock is gonna start ticking, and it's gonna come right around, let me tell you where it's gonna go, it's gonna come right up to the last seven years. And God's going to put his finger on the hand of the clock and stop the clock. And so we're going to have 483 years that have to do with Israel. And God's going to stop the clock, 483 years. And then he's going to take his finger off the hand of the clock, and it's going to finish the seven years. And that seven years is a seven-year tribulation. So we're going to have 490 years. Now it's going to tell us when that 490 years will start and when it's going to end at 483 years. So it's going to start at a certain point, stop at 483 years, seven years left. Look at the next verse, 25. So you are to know and discern from the issuing of a decree To do what? The decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Messiah, the Prince. There will be seven sevens and 62 sevens. This comes up to 483 years. It will be built again with plaza and moat, even in times of distress. The city will be rebuilt. There was some building going on. There will be a period of duress and and distress when it's being rebuilt then after the 62 weeks After the 7 plus 62, that's uh, uh after 62 weeks the messiah will be cut off And he'll be lacking or he'll have nothing And the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. Now, the prince is the Antichrist. And he's going to come out of Rome. The people of the Antichrist will be the Romans. The Romans, this is the last of the four great empires that Daniel's seen about three times in his book. The people will come and destroy the city and the sanctuary. The city of Jerusalem and the temple. Okay? The city, the sanctuary, its end will come with a flood. Even to the end there will be war and desolations are determined. It will end dramatically. It will end in duress. It will end in terrible times. And he, verse 27, that's the prince. Go back to verse 26 that he's the prince, the antichrist. He will make a firm covenant with the many for one week, seven years. That's seven years. Seven years is the period of the tribulation. In the middle of the week, three and a half years, he'll put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering. In other words, somehow the temple will be restored. And halfway through, the prince, the Antichrist, will come in and stop the offerings in the temple. Now that's the book of Revelation. That's going to happen in the book of Revelation. Now look at the last part of verse 27. Nobody can translate the last part of 27 and make it make sense. The last part of 27 is like this. It's like a scream. It's a terrible period. Look what he says. It almost doesn't make sense. On the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction. One that is decreed is poured out on the one who makes desolate. And we paraphrase that, desolate, desolate, desolate, war, war, trouble, trouble, bad, bad, bad. That's what you translate the last part of verse 27. All right, let's go back and let me summarize again, then let's look at the chart. Let's go back. There's going to be 490 years determined on God's people and the temple, okay? If you calculate it, and stop to take minus seven, 483 years will come up to, now you look at your chart, A.D. 33, March 30th, A.D. 33. That is the week in which Christ was rejected before he went to the cross, okay? All right, now look what's gonna happen. After 62 weeks, but that's not 62, you have to add some other to that. You have to do, back from verse 25, you have to take seven weeks and 62, which comes to 483 years. So when you come to verse 26, it just says after 62 years, but it's assumed that there's another seven there. And so the 62 and the seven, then what happens, verse 26, the Messiah is cut off. When is he cut off? He's cut off, we know this, March 30th, AD 33. That's the rejection week, that's the week he will be crucified. All right, now back up a notch. Go back up to verse 24. I told you this is complicated. Get your Aspern out, okay? This is not easy stuff. When will this whole clock start? When will the 490 years start? It will start, he tells us when it's going to start. When the decree is given. When the decree is given to rebuild Jerusalem. Verse 25, when the decree is given to rebuild and restore Jerusalem. When was the decree given to build and restore Jerusalem? Now look at your yellow chart, right here, this chart. If you look on this chart to the bottom right, in fact, the very bottom on the red line on the right, very bottom red line, you will see 445 BC. And that's under the Persian king, Artaxerxes I. In 444 BC, Artaxerxes gave the command, 444 BC, to rebuild, that the Jews could rebuild the temple in 444 BC. Bottom right on your chart. Okay, 444 BC, Artaxerxes. Now, look at this. Pick this up again now, okay? If you calculate from 444 BC down to 483 years by lunar calendar, not solar calendar, lunar calendar, You come to March, the week of March 30th, AD 33, that's the week that Christ was rejected when he entered Jerusalem. So the clock was stopped at that point when the Messiah was rejected. That's when the clock was stopped. There are seven years left for God to deal with the Jewish people, and that's the seven-year tribulation period. Who's God been dealing with since Israel rejected Christ? He started with Pentecost to deal with The Jews starting off, yes, but then the Gentiles. You come halfway through the book of Acts, you have the transition, message given to the Jews, they reject, reject, reject. The message goes to us, the Gentiles, okay? And so God stopped his dealing with the Jews in March, the week of March the 30th, 33 AD, okay? He stopped his work with the Jews when they rejected the Messiah. There are seven more years left for the tribulation. One more week. And that's the word heptad, which means a seven. A seven is left. The seven year period of tribulation. OK. So we're waiting for that. Now, if you're mathematical, you don't want to take this new calculation. If you want to do more, I suggest highly, I mean this, you can go to Mardell's, though I'm mad at him for having a psychology section, but you can go to Mardell's and get Dr. Hohner's little book, The Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ. Has verse 26 happened? Verse 26, oh yes, the Messiah was cut off. And when was he cut off? March 30th, 33 A.D. Well, the rest of the half, the other half of verse 26 is 70 A.D. when the temple was destroyed. when the temple was destroyed, the city of Jerusalem was destroyed, 70 AD. That followed the rejection of the Messiah. That followed less than 40 years later, after his death, 70 AD is when Titus destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. That's the last part of verse 26. Okay? He's not talking about Noah's flood. He's talking about horror coming like a flood. Terror coming like a flood. Yes. Okay. You're saying Dr. Conner's book on the chronological aspects. Yes. Is that the book that we, some of us may have? Yes. Because I think we've talked this before. I got that for some of you. Yes. I think we have a copy over there. I'll get it out just so you can see what the cover looks like just in case someone else wants to buy it. He also deals with the year of the birth of Christ and so forth, and it is excellent. He absolutely convinces you because he's done an absolute incredible job on looking at calendars as we know them from ancient times and archaeology and blah, blah, blah. It's an excellent little book. Okay, and others had done work on this before Dr. Hohner, but he just really made it all make sense. So yeah, some of you have that book, I'm sure you do. All right, let's, by the way, notice verse 27. Your antecedent is the prince from verse 26. The prince, the prince is in verse 26. And the people of the prince, in verse 26, will destroy the city and the sanctuary. That's the Romans. The people of the prince, and the prince is the Antichrist. But that becomes the antecedent for verse 27. So verse 27, he, the prince, the Antichrist, will make a firm covenant with many for seven years, one week. That's the tribulation period. That's the tribulation period. Now let me tell you the problem that everybody in this room has, including myself if we don't think hard. I want you to picture this table as 2,500 years, 2,000 years, okay? When you're dealing with history this far back and prophecy as far back as we're going with Daniel. God did not give every detail, and he shoved a lot of things together. So some of these verses, look, we're jumping from 44 BC. We're jumping to 33 AD when Christ was rejected. We're jumping to 70 AD when the temple was destroyed. Then we're going to leap forward to some point in the future when the seven-year tribulation comes. But in these verses, look, it's all squeezed together. The breaks between we don't see and Daniel didn't see. If you told Daniel, this is all going to last, Daniel, for 2,500 more years, he said, what? 2,500 more what? I mean, Daniel would not have conceived another 2,500 years of world history. People couldn't understand. 2,500 more years of world history? That's about how far we are from Daniel, OK? He wouldn't have conceived of that. And so he would have understood all the twists and turns of world history. People couldn't conceive of that. You and I have calendars. By the way, I don't know how it worked. My little, my computer at home, remember they're all supposed to be fouled up because they had Daylight Savings Time start three weeks earlier. My little computer read it perfectly. I don't know how it did that. It's time is perfect. Well, so I'm working with computer time. I'm working with computers and I can reach back with calendar computers and do all this. Daniel couldn't do that. And so God did not give him every detail of world history. He gave him these big globs. And so we do leaps from verse to verse to verse here. That's our problem. That's what we're struggling with. But when you take time to do it, and I'm trying to slow down to do this here, I want to educate a bunch of folks. I want you to be educated. And remember, to be educated doesn't mean you remember it all. It means that you're exposed to it all, but it doesn't mean that you know it all. I went through seminary. I learned a lot of things. Then I went, huh? I was exposed to it. draw on it later. So to be educated doesn't mean that you've got this perfectly figured out. And especially if you're not good in mathematics, and I'm not, you have to sit here and really study this to get Dr. Horner's point. But he's done it. And by the way, he has a doctorate from Dallas. He has a doctorate from, I believe, Oxford. At least from Oxford. Cambridge, Cambridge. Doctorate from Cambridge. And when he was finishing his doctorate at Cambridge, he had lunch with all these liberal professors he had at Cambridge. And he had worked this in his dissertation. And these liberals were absolutely fascinated. They just couldn't believe that a conservative had made this make sense and pulled all this together. Dr. Homer is a genius and he did this for us. Now let's stop here before we go on and see if you have any questions. And you probably do, but we probably can't answer them all. But then we can try and try. Yes. The lunar calendar is 360 days a year. Yes. The solar calendar is 360,000. Yes. And we have to correct it by leap year. because you got on this chart 476 years? With the lunar, is he trying to- He had to recalculate this. Between the lunar- He had to recalculate from lunar to solar to make it make sense for us. So with the lunar, are you saying Jesus was crucified on March the 30th? Yeah, that's the week of the triumphal entry. So he was crucified on April 3rd? Well, something like that. Okay. Yeah. This would be the week that he entered Jerusalem. Well, I mean, you've got, well, what, when he entered the city, how many days, five days more? Something like that. But he's rejected by the leadership when he entered the city. When he entered the city, that's the rejection. We call it the triumphal entry. Boy, that's a misnomer. It's the triumphal rejection. The crowd came out and followed him and believed that he was a messiah. But that wasn't the million people in Jerusalem who believed he was a messiah, nor the leadership. I think it's better called the royal entry. The what? The royal entry rather than the triumphal entry. I don't call it triumph, and royal may work, but it was really rejection. And we grabbed hold of the fact that some people did honor him when he entered the city, but they were a sprinkling compared to the fact that the majority of the city didn't pay attention to him. The leadership hated him, but he'd come into the city. Right, absolutely. But not everybody was accepting that, just a sprinkling. All right, is there any questions now? And you've got to be careful if you want to, you know, Kathleen, you know, well, four days later and 23 hours, straight up at noon at 1 o'clock, and you can't do that. I mean, we've got to let this breathe just a little, a few hours, right or left, because this is complicated. But I have to fall back on Dr. Hohner, because he spent hours and weeks and months on this. And I think his little book has proven itself. So I urge you, I can't, my brain doesn't think this way. To answer a calendar question, I can't do it. But Dr. Hohner does in his book, he spells all this out and shows you his twists and turns in his book. I really recommend you get it. It's a very good little book. Yes? In all the lunar calendar, is it 483 years, not 490? Because if you've got 476 seven years from that, it's 483. Kathleen, all I see is a bunch of numbers. You've got to get his book, because that's what he's done. He's worked from the lunar calendar to the solar calendar. And you've got to read how he came to this. Yes, son? What difference does it make? What difference does it make? In what context do we answer that? What difference does it make? We know it's coming. And we know what's coming. That's right. We're going to be here. Because this is important, I mean, this whole thing is important for the Jewish people. And you and I are Gentiles, we're, I mean, you cannot, when we study the Bible, we cannot ask the Bible, well, why do I have this and why God did you give that? It all plays- No, that's not my point. Okay, okay. Because, I mean, it's here. So it's scripture. So that's the difference. And not every truth has the same weight to our specific moment. But it does play a totality with us. I mean, Duke here, what's your degree in? You probably had a lot of courses that you never drew on again, right? After you studied it? No? Okay, you drew on most of them. You just popped my little balloon there. My point is we learn a lot that creates a fabric, creates a pattern. In fact, if you ask me the biggest reason that I think this is important, is because it confirms that we're dealing with the Word of God and the Word of God is detailed and the Word of God is accurate. And the liberal cannot answer this. He cannot answer this. And it also, it leaves for us the last big issue. What's the last big issue? The seven years, the final seven years. The final seven years of the Tribulation. That tells us how long that period is going to be. And Christ speaks of it in terms of the length of it, and especially Revelation also gives us the details of the fact that it's a seven-year period. Any other questions? If I can't answer, I will defer to his book because it's a classic. Another, give me another question. There are several well-known Jewish writers who did come to Christ because of this. Now, many Jews do not want their rabbinical students to study this. Because it will calculate out, you know, to the rejection of Christ. It really will. And you can't escape it. And Dr. Horner goes into the whole issues of the change of the calendar from B.C. to A.D. I mean, he covers the whole bit. And it's an excellent little book. Yes, hon? My preacher in San Antonio never went to a seminary. He just studied Greek and the Word. And he explained it very simply. 25, 30 years ago to me, which made sense then. Then Bob Fien came along 15 years later, and he explained it real simply. And this is the first time I've ever seen it this complicated. Well, because he's breaking it down. Well, listen, I mean... Yes, I'll tell you. It just answers the thing that God had said earlier. If you've got super simplicity, somebody was missing something because it's not simple. Especially to transfer from lunar calendar to solar calendar. I've never heard that either. That's what you've got to do. You've got to do that to make it make sense. Yes? He puts the church age in here. Yes. So far, Daniel hasn't been told about the church. Thank you, Duke. You just hit something very important. The church is not in the Old Testament. Thank you, Duke. You get the A tonight. Look at the chart. On the right side of the chart. The church is not there. The church is not there. If I walked up to Daniel or any of the other Old Testament prophets and I said, see all these dirty, rotten, filthy Gentile pagans around here? They're all going to, in a pristine way, come to the Lord and they're going to have these little cells called churches where they meet, you know, all these Babylonians and Persians and blah, blah, blah. They'd say, what are you talking about? Well, if these Gentiles come to God, they're going to have to come into the synagogues. What are you talking about? They had no idea that God would set them apart in a certain sense, although it was prophesied, but in the sense of just almost just rejecting the Jewish people for a period and coming online and dealing worldwide. World, I mean, Daniel said, what do you mean by the globe? What do you mean globe? What do you mean equator? What are we talking about here? These men did not have that orientation. And so the church is not in the Old Testament. This is what separates Clifton Bible Church and most of the other churches in Clifton. They believe that the church is just an extension right on from the Old Testament, from the Old Testament right on, you know, it's just all one big ball game. And it's not. It is not. This is why people get confused. Do we keep the law or not? This is why you have pastors who came out of the Reformation. Do you realize that the Lutheran pastors here, and the Episcopal pastors here, and the Catholic pastors here, their robes and candles, they're acting like priests from the Old Testament. Even the Lutheran pastors. They picked up certain things that they can move right on from the Old Testament. And this is not true. This is not true. The whole idea of an altar that you come down in front of is from the Old Testament, the Holy of Holies. The candles and the fact that even calling, don't get me wrong, I don't think this should be a profane room, but to call this room a sanctuary comes from the Kodish, Kodishim, the holy of holies in the temple and the tabernacle. The holy of holies in the Catholic church and the Lutheran church, the Episcopalian church is picked up because they say, hey, we've just, the church has just replaced Israel. We've just replaced Israel. We're going to pick up certain forms and kind of things that they did. We're going to have priests. We're going to have a, we're going to have a sacrifice in the communion. We're going to, to a certain degree, Christ is going to be in that sacrifice as he was in the scene in the animals that were sacrificed. We are not Israel. Israel is not the church. And this is a big divide. This is a huge, big issue. And I mentioned two weeks ago something very important, and I don't know if I said this on a sunny morning, I think it went over y'all's head, but I know the Presbyterian Church in Dallas where they have Dallas Seminary graduates that brag in that Presbyterian Church, we are recovering Dispensationalists. They're thrown off their Dispensationalism. They're thrown off their Rapture. They graduated from Dallas Seminary and threw away the Tribulation, threw away the Kingdom. and see themselves as reformed and see to a little degree, not as much as Episcopal or Lutheran, but a continuity. You can't find it. Give me the verses. I want the continuity verses from Old Testament right on into New Testament. They are not there. They're not there. God, now here's the deal. God is not through with the Jews. We're living in the generation. And then in the era in which we saw Israel go back to the land, the nation reestablished, the Jews coming back in unbelief, we are seeing that. And this Daniel 70 week is very important because it tells the Jews and tells us God's fingers on the hand of the clock. He's going to remove his finger, and the clock will go seven years, his final work of purging the world and purging the nation of Israel. That's the great purge. That's the great period in which he really cleans up the Jewish people and has his remnant who survived the tribulation. Now, there are other questions on this, and thank you, Duke, for pointing that out, because that's biggie. That's biggie. Daniel didn't see the church. No prophet saw the church. None of them. By the way, when they speak of Gentiles coming to the Lord, coming to God in the Old Testament, they're talking about the Gentiles being blessed in the kingdom. The Gentiles being blessed when the Jews are back in the land and they're blessed and the Gentile nations will come up to Jerusalem, have pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They're not talking about the Gentiles in the church. When Gentiles are blessed in the Old Testament, are seen in the Old Testament, the nations being blessed. And this is something brand new. Now you've got to get that straight because that's one of the most important issues. that I know of. And once that collapses, and it's not fabricated, I'm not sitting up here dispensational saying, well, you know, I was given a system of Dr. Schofield and Dr. Ryrie, and it's a man-made system. And I want to give you my take on this man-made system. The Bible does not show the church in the Old Testament. The Bible gives no revelation about the church in the Old Testament. And this really threw the disciples away. As the church began to develop, that's what the first council, the Council of Jerusalem, was all about. You want to catch Act 15 of Acts? The apostles coming together and some of the elders saying, now what's going on? What's God doing? What's he doing? Well, he's giving to those dirty, rotten, filthy Gentiles the Holy Spirit like he did with us in Acts 2 at Pentecost. And then the issue, well, should we put these Gentiles under the law? Should Malkiach become a Jew? Should we turn the churches into synagogues? That was a legitimate question. And then what was our answer? No, no, no. Leave them alone. God's working with them differently than He worked with our nation, the Jewish nation. They're not under the law. Don't put those Gentiles under the law. And remember, was it James or Peter? I think it was James in Acts 15 says, we couldn't even keep it. Much less trying to make the Gentiles keep the law. We can't even keep it. And so that's a very important issue, and thank you, Duke, for pointing it out on this chart. So we're waiting for, what are we waiting for here? We're waiting for the rapture of the church before this seven-year tribulation begins. And that seven-year tribulation is the last part of Daniel's 490 years, or seven times 70, okay? It's the last part. That's what we're waiting for. Any questions? And you can go home and study this. And you know, when I recommend a book, I want to see some maturity in this room. I want to see all y'all. Listen, I'll go down to Mardell's tomorrow and buy about six or seven of these books. And I want to see some folks who say, by golly, I want to know. I want to know. because Dr. Homer's book, it's not that complicated. He writes very well, very simple, but he really handles this issue and gives you all the evidence for his arguments, okay? Any other quick questions before we move on? Okay, take out a piece of paper. We're going to have a test. We're going to run you through a test now. I want you to calculate from the lunar calendar to the solar calendar. No, no, joke, joke, joke, joke. Alright, let's take a break. Let's take a break.