The Daniel Prophecy: A Reformed and Preterist View of the Seventieth Week

By Dr. Kelly Nelson Birks

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 18, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465319975

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Copyright © 2009 by Dr. Kelly Nelson Birks.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

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permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations unless otherwise indicated are from the New King James

Version in chapters 1 and 2. In appendices A and B, scripture quotations are

from the King James Version unless otherwise indicated.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

THE COMING OF CHRIST AS SAVIOR

CHAPTER TWO

THE COMING OF CHRIST AS PRINCE

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

As the human race finds itself at the conclusion of one millennium and at the beginning of another, it is to the subject of what is commonly called the last days that most of the church turns its attention to. Books and seminars abound concerning the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ. Themes about apocalypse and sensationalism abound with frenzied relish. I say frenzied because there is once again a fomenting plethora of speculation concerning the so-called things of the end. In fact, for as long as man has been on this planet in his sinful, fallen condition, he has always speculated about his own mortality. How long do I have? What if I take better care of myself, will I live longer? What is beyond the pale of our present existence? Questions like these that man is constantly concerned with ultimately have to do with his consistent preoccupation with the one thing that God has already conquered by his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. That thing that has been conquered is death.

This work is not intended to focus on man’s continuous quest for fulfillment in this life nor is it about the satisfactions that he can find in the here and now. However, since we are focusing on the Christ event and the master plan that the Eternal God has established in his infallible word about that event, there remain great ramifications concerning the existential aspects of the history of man and his ultimate happiness.

In short, this present work will be an extensive examination of the plan of God to bring about the redemption of sinful man and the ultimate glorification of God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ. This book will be an attempt to demonstrate the Christ event in two phases as it pushes itself into man’s space and time. The perspective of the author’s theology is what is known as the reformed faith. The conviction of his eschatology is exegetical and consistent Preterism. When we say that the theology of the author is reformed, it is to be understood that the hermeneutical perspective that is here followed comes from that period in church history known as the Reformation. Names like Calvin, Luther, and Knox may immediately spring to mind. We are not reformed because we are following the human luminaries of the Reformation. We are reformed because we believe that as a result of a serious study of the scriptures, the Reformers have best represented the original intention of the biblical authors as to their divinely intended meaning. We are Preterist because we are convinced that the eschatological events concerning the Second Coming of Christ, along with the corresponding judgments and general resurrection, have in fact already occurred within the time frame of the first century of our present era. This will, of course, be examined in greater detail as the author does not expect the reader to simply accept his assertions without firm scriptural proofs to back them up. To some, this view is too radical to be acceptable. To those of us who have come through our own paradigm shift in eschatology as a result of taking the Bible for what it means by what it says, there can be no other conclusion. We must lay our presuppositions firmly upon the altar of honest exegesis and light them by the fire of a thorough analysis in order for the truth of the text and the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ to be firmly effaced in this area.

Some of the author’s conclusions, I’m afraid, will not be to the liking of many who hold to more traditional interpretations found in the eschatological annals of historical exegesis. We believe that within the text of Daniel 9: 24-27 is contained the entire job description, if you will, of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ as well as the conclusion to all things pertaining to God’s revelation into human history. For these are the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled (Lk. 21:22). We will follow the book’s table of contents as our outline, which will focus on the two main headings of The Coming of Christ as Savior and then The Coming of Christ as Prince. While concentrating on the Christ as Savior, we will attempt to exegete what we see as the Lord Jesus’s job description. We will discover within the Daniel text that the Christ was manifested first of all in order to restrain Israel’s rebellion against God.

Essentially, by the time of the Christ event into human history, God’s chosen people had once again hurled themselves into the furnace of God’s wrath by committing gross spiritual and political fornication with the Roman world rulers. They had devolutionized themselves to the position of the necessity of divine judgment once again, only this time it would be for the last time. Christ himself in the Olivet Discourse establishes that the final outworking of the Deuteronomic curses (located in the twenty-eighth chapter of the book of Deuteronomy) would decimate the Jewish nation and bring their existence as the ethnic people of God to a close. The Christ will be manifested according to Daniel, in order to cut short or restrain the Israelites from further rebellion against God by causing the very acts of sacrifice in the Jewish sacrificial system to cease as a result of the Messianic mission. We will be establishing several biblical truths that we believe have been long neglected before the final page of this book is read.

Next on the Savior’s job description will be the fact that along with Christ’s once-for-all sin offering unto God for the sins of the elect, there would of necessity come the cessation of Mosaic sin offerings in regard to expiation. This, of course, will coordinate with the destruction of the second temple structure along with the closing down of the old covenant age as it was manifested and maintained by the Levitical sacrificial system. Daniel next prophesies of Christ making atonement for iniquity. Focus will be made involving the reconciliation factor of the atonement. What is now interesting within our text is the fact that the preceding three actions taken by Christ through his intervening work on the cross, would result in three blessings received by all those who participate in God’s reconciling work through Christ. They are the bringing in of everlasting righteousness, the stopping of vision and prophecy, and the anointing of the Holy of Holies.

After the Savior’s job description is enunciated, Daniel brings up what we are calling the Savior’s calendar of events. In this subsection to the main point of the section of focusing on Christ as Savior, we shift into a yet future-to-Daniel chain of events. The event of the command to restore and to rebuild Jerusalem is considered. What is so amazing here is that at the time of Daniel’s prophecy, Jerusalem was lying in ruins as a result of the Babylonian army’s decimation of the same back at about 587 BC. One of the features of Daniel’s prophecy that demands that we consider it to be an absolute word from God, is the fact of the determination by Daniel to see these things fulfilled literally and within a specific frame of time. Before the Messiah can appear to carry out the previous six items contained within his job description, it is mandatory that the temple as well as the city of Jerusalem itself be rebuilt. Next, under the subheading of the Savior’s calendar of events, Daniel actually gives us the arrival time of the Messiah, the historical Jesus of Nazareth, who was to appear to complete the aforementioned items. It is the opinion of this author that the Scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees, along with those who were associated with the bureaucracy of the Herodian Temple, knew precisely when and who to look for and under what prophesied conditions the Messiah would appear to carry out these actions of biblical redemption. As we read through the gospel accounts and view the nature of the leadership within the then existing Judaism at the birth and times of Jesus the Nazarene, we find that instead of joyfully receiving their prophesied Savior and, thereby, ushering in the long-awaited fulfillment of the plan of redemption, they did all that they could in order to interrupt the sovereign plan of Almighty God. Why? Because by seeing this Savior fulfill all that was prophesied about him through the Pentateuch and the prophets, their leadership, power, and authority that held sway over the people of Israel, would naturally vanish. This left them in the position of subservience to the Savior, which is precisely what they did not want. These men were not servants of the Lord, let alone servants of the people. Rather, they had a comfortable position within the bed of Rome and the political processes thereof. For many long years, they had established themselves as the theological and political arm by which they gained their own recognition and self-worth. The Lord Jesus, of course, established precisely who these leaders really were by asserting that they were of their father the devil and that the desires of their father, they would do (John 8:44).

Lastly, under our current heading of consideration, we have Daniel’s prophesied event concerning what came to be Zerrubabel’s, Ezra’s, and Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the temple that was begun through the edict of the Medo-Persian king Cyrus, which experienced it’s political impetus under the Persian ruler Artaxerxes Longimanus. What we intend to demonstrate is the incredible accuracy of the specifics of Daniel’s prophecy that cannot be satisfactorily presented as being only partly fulfilled, but must be completely fulfilled by the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.

We have already explained in our introductory remarks that the seventieh week of Daniel is thoroughly about Christ. We will continue to show from its exegetical merits alone that there is nothing contained within the theological contents of the text some kind of a forced end of the world scenario that is so popular among those who hold to a form of a still-future-to-us mind-set. Far from it, there is nothing within the text under consideration that even comes close to a reference to a one world ruler known as the Antichrist or Beast. We believe that it is illegitimate to try to make an unwarranted connection between the Beast of the book of Revelation and the Prince of the people who is to come (Daniel 9:26) and the antichrist of First John, in the manner in which it is popularly expressed within much futuristic work.

As we come away from reviewing the first main heading of our material, we now proceed into the introductory remarks as to the second main heading that is drawn from the text. If the first half dealt with the focusing on Christ as Savior, then the second half falls open to us as focusing upon Christ as Prince. Essentially, the two pronged teaching that Daniel gives us shows that the first half of Daniel 9:24-27 is dealing solely with what the Savior would do as our Great High Priest, and what the results of those Christocentric actions would be. It is then clear that the second half of the text now deals with the cutting off or destruction of the people of Israel from a physical (ethnic) and covenantal (spiritual) prospect. In other words, the events that have historically become known to us as the destruction of Jerusalem and the desolation of the Jewish people in AD 70 is in this second section of Daniel 9:24-27. First, we find that the Prince is said to be cut off. We will attempt to demonstrate from exegetical and historically corroborated means that Christ was crucified at a date that allowed forty years until the date of the AD