Daniel 9:27 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Daniel 9:27

Comments

This is the more controversial part of the passage. Here we have more detail on the seventieth week. ‘And he’ – we are back to Messiah now, not the prince that would destroy Jerusalem; Messiah is the principal subject. Look at verse 25: Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince [with a capital ‘P’] shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks.’ The wall would be built after seven sevens. ‘And after these periods of time’, verse 26, ‘Messiah shall be cut off’, and then our translators very wisely have spoken of a prince with a small ‘p’; that is Titus. And besides, it is not the prince, but the people of the prince who are the subject of the subordinate phrase. But now we are back to Messiah, the subject of the passage; it is a Messianic passage – ‘he [Messiah] shall confirm the covenant with many for one week.’ This is the seventieth seven. What is Messiah going to do in the seventieth seven? He will do the six things that verse 24 mentioned, all connected with Calvary. But he is going to do something else. He is going to confirm the covenant. He is not going to make a covenant (‘cut a covenant’ in Hebrew); he is going to confirm it, which is exactly what it did. This is not therefore the new covenant, but the old covenant of the Jews along with all its ceremonial teaching. He ratified the demands of the law, the covenant of the law. He ratified it for his people. He lived a perfect life, and he kept perfectly all God's demands enshrined even in the Old Testament covenant. He qualified as our Redeemer, and he kept the law on our behalf. ‘He shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease.’ What does that mean? Well we are looking now at the seventieth seven. Christ will come after sixty-nine sevens. So the seventieth seven is the period of the New Testament record: the coming of Christ to the very end of the Old Testament, the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. In the middle of that Christ will perish on Calvary's cross, accomplishing the six achievements of verse 24. ‘And in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease.’ When he died on Calvary, the rites and ceremonies and the sacrifices carried out in the temple were instantly obsolete, and ‘the veil of the temple was rent in twain’ (Matthew 27:51), God supernaturally signifying that the earthly temple was now superseded by the heavenly reality. Now the Saviour had accomplished all that the ceremonial law spoke of, and prophesied. So every sacrifice that was offered in the temple after Calvary – which is halfway through the seventieth seven – is an act of unbelief. It says, ‘We do not believe he was the Messiah. We have destroyed him by appealing to the Romans to enable us to do so on Calvary's cross. We do not believe him. We are going on with the rites and ceremonies of the temple.’ But they were no longer valid; they were finished, fulfilled; emptied of meaning. Christ had come and carried out, literally, all that they pictured. So he caused the sacrifice and the oblation to cease in terms of any efficacy, any usefulness, any predictive value. Does it go any further? It is interesting that this seventieth seven ends in vagueness. It's delightfully vague. Daniel isn’t told everything. There is just this little sentence here at the end of verse 27: ‘even until the consummation’, which refers no doubt to the very end, ‘and that determined, shall be poured upon the desolate’ – the final day of judgment, the destiny of the unbelieving. It is probable, because we are told by the apostle Peter that the prophets sat and studied their own prophecies and their own visions – that Daniel spent some time on that sentence. ‘When is that?’ That is outside the timeframe. You are being told in this vision, God says to Daniel, only about events up until the first coming of Christ, with the hint that that isn't actually the end. There is the church age and then the second coming and the final judgment. He is not going to be told about that. He is being told, ‘Look Daniel, what matters is not really Jerusalem and Judah; it’s Messiah. It is his coming. We are giving you this. We are not just telling you the history of the Jews, but the history of Messiah. This last part of the verse is translated in various ways. The KJV sees it as continuing to speak of Christ, and so links the two halves of the verse: ‘and for the overspreading of abominations he [Christ] shall make it desolate.’ Others allow a new individual or power to be introduced at this point: ‘and upon the wing of abominations shall come one that maketh desolate’ (ASV). The interpretation is greatly affected by this rendering. If it refers to Christ then the view may be that at the end of that seventieth seven, ‘for the over spreading of abominations’ – because these sacrifices were now acts of unbelief and defiance – ‘he [Christ] shall make it desolate’ – it was at his command that Titus destroyed Jerusalem. Christ took his protective hand away, and the Romans invaded, and that was the end of the temple and of the sacrifices. If a new individual or power is introduced, then this mysterious one is responsible for desolations until the consummation, the end of all things.That is the traditional evangelical view, but it isn't the dispensational view of this passage. The traditional view surely is the plainest and the most logical and the most straightforward way of approaching the passage. Viewed historically this has been the view of the vast majority of born-again people, until the rise of Dispensationalism earlier in the 19th century, which didn’t actually become popular until 1910 and afterwards, and may be on the wain.

Application

Questions

If Christ died in the middle of the last seven, the last week as it were, and ended the sacrifice, how could he confirm the covenant with many for a week? The traditional answer is that his confirming the covenant included the inauguration of the mission to the Gentiles. The confirming of the covenant had two aspects: Christ ratified the covenant of God and kept the law and deserved heaven for all his people, and also since it was the ancient promise of God that God's mercy would extend to the Gentiles, he – not personally because he died halfway through the last seven – through the apostles inaugurated the Gentile mission. So the confirming of the covenant meant that he ratified it, and extended the covenant of grace practically to the Gentiles, and there is the great mission work of the apostle Paul. So the seventieth seven sees the accomplishments of Calvary in the middle and at the end of that final period, there is the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

The Dispensational interpretation of this passage detaches this seventieth week, and puts it at the end of time. According to this view, the prophetic clock stops ticking with the coming of the New Testament church, and it will not restart until God’s purpose returns to focus on national Israel at the end of the age. It is not an idea which fits with Christ’s words that there will be one fold and one shepherd (John 10:16). Neither does it agree with Paul’s teaching that Christ ‘is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us [permanently]’ (Ephesians 2:14), that is, between Jew and Gentile. Nor does Scripture ever deal with numbers by splitting them in this arbitrary way. The natural sense is that the seventieth week follows directly and is a week when Christ has his ministry. The history of dispensationalism is interesting. Historically it was popular with people who had little interest in covenant theology. They have stopped rejoicing in the covenant. ‘In the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease’ – he theologically ended the usefulness of the sacrifice. Dispensationalism replies, but he did not end it; the sacrifices went on. We answer that he emptied them of their significance (their being required by positive law). ‘In the middle’ – the final week does not end with his death, but probably extends to the destruction of Jerusalem, although no terminus is given of this last week is given in the passage.

Outline

Purpose

Introduction

Daniel 9:27 Commentary and Bible Study