Chapter 9: Vision 3- Answers to Prayer
Intro.
Repentance and Faith
Time
Key Point: God’s will is for His people to Repent and renew Faith with Him on the basis of His promises to them. God is orchestrating the events of world history with a view toward consummating His heavenly reign on earth.
Read the Text
Replay the Text
Prayer of Contrition and Petition
The LORD spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, 2 “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you come into the land that I give you, the land shall keep a Sabbath to the LORD. 3 For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its fruits, 4 but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath to the LORD. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. 5 You shall not reap what grows of itself in your harvest, or gather the grapes of your undressed vine. It shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. 6 The Sabbath of the land shall provide food for you, for yourself and for your male and female slaves and for your hired worker and the sojourner who lives with you, 7 and for your cattle and for the wild animals that are in your land: all its yield shall be for food.
“But if you will not listen to me and will not do all these commandments, 15 if you spurn my statutes, and if your soul abhors my rules, so that you will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant, 16 then I will do this to you: I will visit you with panic, with wasting disease and fever that consume the eyes and make the heart ache. And you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. 17 I will set my face against you, and you shall be struck down before your enemies. Those who hate you shall rule over you, and you shall flee when none pursues you. 18 And if in spite of this you will not listen to me, then I will discipline you again sevenfold for your sins, 19 and I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like bronze. 20 And your strength shall be spent in vain, for your land shall not yield its increase, and the trees of the land shall not yield their fruit.
21 “Then if you walk contrary to me and will not listen to me, I will continue striking you, sevenfold for your sins. 22 And I will let loose the wild beasts against you, which shall bereave you of your children and destroy your livestock and make you few in number, so that your roads shall be deserted.
23 “And if by this discipline you are not turned to me but walk contrary to me, 24 then I also will walk contrary to you, and I myself will strike you sevenfold for your sins. 25 And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall execute vengeance for the covenant. And if you gather within your cities, I will send pestilence among you, and you shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy. 26 When I break your supply of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in a single oven and shall dole out your bread again by weight, and you shall eat and not be satisfied.
27 “But if in spite of this you will not listen to me, but walk contrary to me, 28 then I will walk contrary to you in fury, and I myself will discipline you sevenfold for your sins. 29 You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters. 30 And I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars and cast your dead bodies upon the dead bodies of your idols, and my soul will abhor you. 31 And I will lay your cities waste and will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your pleasing aromas. 32 And I myself will devastate the land, so that your enemies who settle in it shall be appalled at it. 33 And I will scatter you among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword after you, and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste.
34 “Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbaths. 35 As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, the rest that it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were dwelling in it. 36 And as for those of you who are left, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. 37 They shall stumble over one another, as if to escape a sword, though none pursues. And you shall have no power to stand before your enemies. 38 And you shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up. 39 And those of you who are left shall rot away in your enemies’ lands because of their iniquity, and also because of the iniquities of their fathers they shall rot away like them.
40 “But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers in their treachery that they committed against me, and also in walking contrary to me, 41 so that I walked contrary to them and brought them into the land of their enemies—if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled and they make amends for their iniquity, 42 then I will remember my covenant with Jacob, and I will remember my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. 43 But the land shall be abandoned by them and enjoy its Sabbaths while it lies desolate without them, and they shall make amends for their iniquity, because they spurned my rules and their soul abhorred my statutes. 44 Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not spurn them, neither will I abhor them so as to destroy them utterly and break my covenant with them, for I am the LORD their God. 45 But I will for their sake remember the covenant with their forefathers, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God: I am the LORD.”
46 These are the statutes and rules and laws that the LORD made between himself and the people of Israel through Moses on Mount Sinai.
The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah (that was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon), 2 which Jeremiah the prophet spoke to all the people of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem: 3 “For twenty-three years, from the thirteenth year of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, to this day, the word of the LORD has come to me, and I have spoken persistently to you, but you have not listened. 4 You have neither listened nor inclined your ears to hear, although the LORD persistently sent to you all his servants the prophets, 5 saying, ‘Turn now, every one of you, from his evil way and evil deeds, and dwell upon the land that the LORD has given to you and your fathers from of old and forever. 6 Do not go after other gods to serve and worship them, or provoke me to anger with the work of your hands. Then I will do you no harm.’ 7 Yet you have not listened to me, declares the LORD, that you might provoke me to anger with the work of your hands to your own harm.
8 “Therefore thus says the LORD of hosts: Because you have not obeyed my words, 9 behold, I will send for all the tribes of the north, declares the LORD, and for Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants, and against all these surrounding nations. I will devote them to destruction, and make them a horror, a hissing, and an everlasting desolation. 10 Moreover, I will banish from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the grinding of the millstones and the light of the lamp. 11 This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. 12 Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity, declares the LORD, making the land an everlasting waste. 13 I will bring upon that land all the words that I have uttered against it, everything written in this book, which Jeremiah prophesied against all the nations. 14 For many nations and great kings shall make slaves even of them, and I will recompense them according to their deeds and the work of their hands.”
In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to accomplish the word of Yahweh by the mouth of Jeremiah, Yahweh stirred the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia and he sent a message to all of his kingdom and also put the message in writing:
2 “Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: Yahweh, the God of the heavens, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth. And he himself has appointed me to build a house for him in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. 3 Whoever among you who is from all of his people, may his God be with him and may he go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and may he build the house of Yahweh, the God of Israel. He is the God who is in Jerusalem. 4 And let every survivor, from wherever he ⌊resides⌋ be assisted by the men of that place with silver and gold, with possessions and domestic animals, and with the freewill offering for the house of God which is in Jerusalem.”
Angelic Response
Prophetic Vision
Seventieth Week
Dealing with the time:
A profoundly significant concourse pulses together when the possible historical referents of Daniel 9:24–27 meet its use of earlier Scripture, and these waters flow on, roiling through later Scripture. We should expect Daniel 9:24–27 to address history in a way that corresponds to and builds on the way that previous passages of Scripture have addressed history. Most significant are two related passages, one in Isaiah, and the other in Ezekiel.
The Isaiah passage shows us that Babylon was not the only foreign power for whom seventy years was appointed. Isaiah 23:15 states, ‘In that day Tyre will be forgotten for seventy years, like the days of one king. At the end of seventy years, it will happen to Tyre as in the song of the prostitute …’ Then again in 23:17, ‘At the end of seventy years, the LORD will visit Tyre …’ The seventy-year period appointed for Tyre in Isaiah 23:15 is compared to ‘the days of one king’, a description reminiscent of Psalm 90:10:
The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty …
Isaiah 23:15 and Psalm 90:10 indicate that seventy years was a period of time associated with a typical human lifespan. People tend to live for roughly seventy years. This reality, particularly the comparison of seventy years with ‘the days of one king’ in Isaiah 23:15, indicates that the seventy years Jeremiah prophesied for Babylon need not be a literal seventy years, but can be seen as roughly seventy years, pointing to a typical human lifespan.
Isaiah 23:15 compares the seventy years appointed for Tyre to ‘the days of one king’. If Jeremiah, a prophet clearly influenced by Isaiah, prophesied that seventy years were appointed for Babylon, it would seem reasonable to understand this also to refer to a period corresponding to ‘the days of one king’. If this was a widely shared assumption among those who knew Isaiah 23:15, it would explain why Daniel, having perceived the seventy years in Daniel 9:2, immediately begins to call on the Lord to act in 9:3–19. Daniel does not call on the Lord to act once a few more years have passed and seventy years have been literally completed. Daniel seems to take the seventy years as a round number that broadly corresponds to an individual’s lifespan. Just as every person does not live exactly seventy years, no more no less, Daniel seems to read the prophesied period of time as completed.
If Daniel counted from the time of his own exile to Babylon in 605 BC, the first year of Darius in 539/538 BC would be roughly seventy years. As noted above, Daniel prays for the Lord to act and makes no reference to the exact number of years needing to scroll by, apparently because he understood the seventy years the same way that period of time is referenced in Psalm 90:10 and Isaiah 23:15—as a round number roughly seventy years in length, corresponding to the typical human lifespan.
Read in the light of Isaiah 23:15, Jeremiah’s seventy years for Babylon were not intended to be interpreted literally, and thus Daniel, correctly, does not demand that they be literally completed. In keeping with this, I do not think that Daniel intended the seventy weeks to be understood literally either. To get traction on how Daniel intended the seventy weeks to be understood, we want to accustom our feet to time-reckoning on prophetic terrain. The enacted parable in Ezekiel 4 will train our toes for treading these paths, as it provides a way of thinking about time and history analogous to the seventy weeks prophesied in Daniel 9:24–27.
Dealing with the history:
Matt. 24 and Rev. 11, 12:
These are the very beasts to which the first three kingdoms were likened in Daniel 7:4–6, and yet John also clearly specifies that this Revelation 13 beast is the fourth beast of Daniel 7. He accomplishes this identification by noting that the beast was ‘rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads’ (Rev. 13:1). This description ties the Revelation 13 beast to the fourth beast in Daniel 7:7, which ‘had ten horns’, which ‘made war with the saints’ (Dan. 7:21), whose ten horns are ten kings (7:24), after which shall arise one who speaks ‘against the Most High’ (7:25; cf. 11:36). Similarly, the Revelation 13 beast ‘was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words’ (13:5–6) and ‘was allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them’ (13:7).
Not only does the Revelation 13 beast have the characteristics of the Daniel 7 fourth beast, but he is allotted the same period of time. The Daniel 7 fourth beast is given ‘time, times, and half a time’ (Dan. 7:25; 12:7), which Daniel 9:27 indicates will be half of the seventieth week.
And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. 2 And the beast that I saw was like a leopard; its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority. 3 One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth marveled as they followed the beast. 4 And they worshiped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”
5 And the beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and it was allowed to exercise authority for forty-two months.
Interpretive Considerations:
Reality of the Text
Since therefore it remains for some to enter into it, and the ones to whom the good news was proclaimed previously did not enter because of disobedience, 7 again he ordains a certain day, today, speaking by David after so long a time, just as had been said before,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts.”
8 For if Joshua had caused them to rest, he would not have spoken about another day after these things. 9 Consequently a sabbath rest remains for the people of God. 10 For the one who has entered into his rest has also himself rested from his works, just as God did from his own works.
11 Therefore, let us make every effort to enter into that rest, in order that no one may fall in the same pattern of disobedience. 12 For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, both joints and marrow, and able to judge the reflections and thoughts of the heart. 13 And no creature is hidden in the sight of him, but all things are naked and laid bare to the eyes of him to whom ⌊we must give our account
