A Day is Coming
This last year, we’ve been in the Old Testament a lot. In our morning bible study, we’re about to start with Daniel chapter 9, and I want to take advantage of today to review the role that this part of Old Testament history plays in our modern faith. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter all that much if you remember names and dates in places in the Old Testament. But what is important is to understand why God’s ordained religion is the way that it is. We can’t understand that if we don’t understand what and why God has done things in the past.
Most of the Old Testament records the drama between God and His chosen people Israel. Under Moses, God made a brand new nation and gave them their own laws for the purpose of teaching mankind how to be in harmony with God. These Israelites were supposed to live moral lives, worship God, and show the nations how they could do the same. However, the Old Testament reveals a frustrating pattern: that Israel was so unable to keep God’s law themselves that they were rarely able to bring a knowledge of God to the nations beyond their borders. The book of Judges is the quintessential example of this. Each story in Judges goes something like this: there is a faithful generation; their children grow up wealthy and spoiled and forget God; Israel acts out in great sin; life gets bad for the Israelites as a result of their lifestyle; and then the Israelites cry out to God in repentance, and God saves them. But then after things are good for a while, the same pattern happens again, and most of the people forget about God. And this doesn’t just happen through Judges; this happens throughout the entire history of Israel for around a thousand years. No matter what happens, there seems to be something inherently hopeless about expecting an entire nation to keep themselves dedicated to God’s law.
There’s some problems with this pattern. First, things never seem to get better. It’s the same hopeless situation over and over again. Second, if things never get better, then the message of God will never go out to the nations and change the entire world, as was originally intended by God’s promise to Abraham. Third, every time that the nation is punished, the small amount of innocent, righteous people in the nation have to suffer along with everyone else. And for this reason, in the days of the exile, there is a proverb that is coined among the Israelites, in the words of Ezekiel 18:2: ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge’. Why do the Israelites say this? They are complaining that when one person in the nation sins, someone else also bears the punishment for this. We see this happen with Daniel. Daniel is innocent in the affair when God sends Israel to Babylon. He’s only about 13 years old. He’s faithful to God. And yet, he’s taken away from his family forever, made a eunuch, and forced to serve the king that’s destroyed his people. That’s not fair. And there were many others in Daniel’s position. This is the reality of having a single political nation called ‘God’s people’ that are disciplined all together. And as we are going to see later in the text, God agrees that this is unfair. This is something that needs to change.
Do you remember what happened to the flood? Mankind became so sinful that God intervened directly and cleansed the earth with a great flood, and God was regretful that such an action was necessary. And so God changed the way that He interacted with the world. He declared that He would never flood the earth again; and to prevent such a judgement, He was going to do things a different way: and in Genesis 9:6 He says, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.” In other words, God then appointed it to mankind to discipline each other by rule of law so that God would never have to destroy the entire earth again.
I would suggest to you that God does something similar in response to Israel’s pattern of disobedience. He looked at this hopeless cycle of disobedience and suffering and temporary repentance and decided that He was going to appoint a new way of having relationship with His people. And we actually see hints and foretelling of this all the way back to Genesis. Because as we are aware, God knows the future—and He intended to do something greater than the nation of Israel from the very beginning.
But the point where things actually start to change is the exile, when all of the Israelites are forced out of their land to live in servitude in either Assyria or Babylon. This exile is the time when God’s plan for His people starts to change.
In the words of Daniel 9:12, “Under the whole heaven there has not been done anything like what was done to Jerusalem.” Why would Scripture say this? There had been sieges and destructions and exiles and even genocides before. The reason that this was different was because God was punishing his own people and, for a time, ending his own covenant with Israel. And I mean that technically: all of the Mosaic worship which God commanded take place in Jerusalem could not happen when Jerusalem was destroyed and the Israelites removed from the land.
Turn with me to Jeremiah 31. The exile is the most talked-about event in the Old Testament. During this time and immediately after, God appoints prophets to record massive amounts of Scriptural texts for His people. Why is so much of the Bible written during this time? Because, just like the flood, the exile is an inflection point in history when God is changing the way He does things. Let’s listen to it in God’s words, starting in Jeremiah 31:27:
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man and the seed of beast. And it shall come to pass that as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring harm, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, declares the Lord. In those days they shall no longer say:
“‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.’
But everyone shall die for his own iniquity. Each man who eats sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge.
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
So God says things are going to change. God’s people are no longer going be under a situation where good people like Daniel suffer dreadfully because the rest of the nation has sinned. And they are no longer going to be in a situation where they have to try to force each other to serve God, because in this new covenant, everyone who is there will be there because they want to serve God. They shall all already know me, from the least to the greatest. And for these people, God says, I will forgive all their iniquity, and remember their sins no more.
Such a change can never happen in a political nation like Israel, in a covenant where people are forced to be God’s people by birth. If you’re an Israelite, you didn’t choose to be born in Israel. You didn’t choose to be circumcised when you were eight days old. But if you are in the church, you are here because you want to be here. You chose to be baptized into Christ. And God’s relationship with you is not filtered through the actions of a king, or a priesthood; for in the words of Revelation 1:6, “[Jesus Christ] has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father.” You will never be punished by God through war or famine or exile because the rest of the church has gone astray. How do I know that? Because in Jeremiah 31:29 God says,
“In those days they shall no longer say: ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.’”
We are under a different system. And our system is different from Israel for two reasons:
1) All of our sins are atoned for forever by the sacrifice of Jesus if we choose to join Him in His death.
Under the old system, a person was reminded of their sins all the time by the requirement to sacrifice animals to cover that sin. But this is not so with us. Hebrews 9:12 says,
“Jesus entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.”
2) We have a direct relationship with God because He has sent His Holy Spirit to dwell in us.
1 Corinthians 3:16 says, “Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?”
I don’t think we take seriously how blessed we are by that. In John 16, Jesus is comforting the disciples, who are distressed that Jesus will have to leave. And in verse 7 He says to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” Do we really have a sense of why it is better for us to have the Holy Spirit than it is for us to have Jesus here? It’s a hard thing to accept, but if we don’t, we are missing out on part of the blessings that God has in store for us. They Holy Spirit comforts us and intercedes for us and helps us in life, and we don’t have to fear that God has abandoned us, because He is always with us.
But for Daniel, and people like him living in exile, he can’t see all these things that are going to happen. Daniel knows nothing of churches and communion and God’s people dwelling in every nation on the earth. And that’s one reason why there is so much Scripture written during and after the exile. God is trying to prepare His people, Israel, to be ready for the next thing. Jeremiah 31 says that explicitly.
However, God has been hinting through his prophets for years that something is going to change. Daniel knows that. Daniel has been reading Jeremiah. And Daniel already knows that God promised to end the exile after 70 years. So when Daniel starts to pray in to God in Daniel chapter 9 to deliver his people, he’s asking for something more than just to go back to the promised land. And God’s answer reflects that.
First, we read in chapter 9 that Daniel has been reading the scroll of Jeremiah. In response, Daniel fasts and prays and apologizes to God for his own sins and the sins of his people. He asks God to have mercy and honor His promises for the future. And God sends Daniel an angel to tell him what is to come.
This is the introduction of Daniel’s answer, in Daniel 9:24. The angel says:
““Seventy weeks [that is, sevens] are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place.”
This is a period of time: roughly 490 years. God is telling Daniel that in this timeframe, the promises that he is asking for, the promises that he’s read about in Jeremiah, will be fulfilled.
And if we take a look at the historical records, we see that from the time that the Jews rebuild Jerusalem, to the time when Jesus comes, is almost exactly 490 years.
So what is promised? Daniel 9:24 gives 6 promises. God will:
1. Finish the transgression
2. Put an end to sin
3. Atone for iniquity
4. Bring in everlasting righteousness
5. Seal both vision and prophet
6. Anoint a most holy place
Much could be said about how Jesus fulfilled these promises. How did Jesus end the transgression? Well, in light of what Daniel is confessing about his people, this is probably the transgression of Israel against God, the very reason they are in the exile. How did Jesus put an end to sin? He ended the consequence of sin for everyone who trusts in Him. How did He atone for iniquity? His righteous sacrifice removed all of our guilt before God. How did He seal both vision and prophet? Jesus fulfilled what the visions and prophets predicted. And how did Jesus anoint a most holy place? Jesus appointed a place where we can enter into the holy presence of God. Remember Hebrews 9:12? It says, “Jesus entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.”
And verse 24 clarifies further for us: “For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.”
And we enjoy the benefits of these promises today. Do we understand what they mean? Do we appreciate them?
Hebrews says that everything under the old law was a shadow for spiritual things to come. That means that everything that God did for Israel in the Old Testament, through the means of laws, temples, priests, and sacrifices, He does for us today in a better, permanent, and personal manner.
So what’s the application for us? We are under a different system today than we were before Christ: but we are serving the same God. So today, if our fellow Christian sins, if the congregation down the street sins, if your family sins, you are not going to be disciplined for that person’s sin. But if you sin, God is going to discipline you to teach you and improve you, just like He did for the Israelite nation back then. And that is actually a much more hopeful proposition. Because you, as an individual, have the ability to choose to change. And you, as a Christian, have already been cleansed from iniquity. And you, as a priest of God, have the Holy Spirit within you. Those things mean that we are not subject to the same cycle of futility that Israel was. We have every ability to learn, to grow, to improve, and to learn more about life every day with all these gifts that God has given us. In the words of Hebrews 12:1, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.”
The hard part about the New Covenant is that it is so individual. The Holy Spirit has a relationship with each one of us, so for each one of us our journey through life is going to be different. For some people, they would rather go through the motions of a Mosaic Law and a temple system where everything is simple and we don’t have to deal with God directly. But our system is better. It’s the system that God had planned from the very beginning. Accepting it makes life an adventure where we get to change and grow and learn more about God all the time.
Under the Mosaic Law, a person entered the covenant when they were 8 days old by being circumscribed by their parents. Today, we enter the convenient by voluntarily choosing to be baptized. Colossians 2:11 says that we are circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, and it’s by this baptism that God raises us into a new life. This new life is welcome to anyone, of any race or status, who wishes to know God.