10: The Daniel 9 Prophecy

**Dave** (0:23)
Okay, welcome to this episode of The Chopping Block, where we take stuff that didn't quite make it into our message, got cut on the chopping block, but we're going to bring it to you.

**Ben** (0:31)
Yep, last week, Dave did a great job speaking, and someone actually raised their hand and said, why don't you have time to cover this now?

**Dave** (0:39)
That's right, which I really appreciate. And that's what this chopping block kind of thing is exactly for. So today we're going to do, we're going to look in to Daniel chapter 9 We're going to start, I think, in verse 24
And what we're going to do tonight is we're going to look in to one of the most remarkable passages in all of scripture. It's a little complicated, but if you follow it through, just a few simple helps will help you see that the prophet Daniel predicted exactly to the year and probably to the week, hundreds of years beforehand, when the Messiah would come and arrive in Jerusalem and then be killed. So that's Jesus for those of us who believe in Jesus.

**Ben** (1:22)
Which we celebrate this week, Holy Week.

**Dave** (1:25)
That's right, it's Holy Week. So if you're watching this and you tend to be relatively skeptical, that's great. The scriptures invite skepticism, and that's why they give evidence, which I love. And so this is gonna be hopefully helpful to you in that.
We really ask you to lean in and consider the evidence because I think it's gonna speak for itself, and it's pretty amazing. And what I love about predictive prophecy in the scriptures is it's not a subjective kind of thing. You can really tell whether it's happened or not. And even using extra biblical sources, we can confirm dates, confirm the writings of different books and stuff like that. And so it really gives you something concrete to look at.
If you already believe in Jesus, that's great. We're glad you're watching. Maybe you go to our church. Maybe you're a friend or someone else. Maybe you just found this. That's great. This week is Holy Week.
This will be a great way to kind of enrich your engagement with Holy Week, leading up to Easter this coming Sunday. Consider these things, and see how God would lead you to reflect and worship. Also, for those of us who already believe in God, this is a great way to bolster, to strengthen your faith, to give confidence to what you already believe.

**Ben** (2:34)
To galvanize.

**Dave** (2:35)
Oh yeah, you were really liking that galvanized word. Yeah, that's great. This can help galvanize your faith, because you probably don't come to Christ necessarily because of Daniel 9, you might.
But if you already believe in Christ, and stuff like this can really give you confidence that what you believe is real.

**Ben** (2:52)
Just one quick note on that.
So I've had different experiences with God, moments where I felt he was close to me, but a lot of my Christian life is when I'm discouraged, I'm down in the dumps, and he doesn't feel like he's close, but I can go back again and again and look to fulfill prophecy, and it can confirm to me again the truthfulness of these things I believe in. That's right.

**Dave** (3:13)
And we don't have time to go into this now, but I think you will find that if you look for this in other holy writings, other books, you're not going to find anything like this. This is where the Bible really stands in a completely unique place.
There's nothing like this.

**Ben** (3:28)
If you want to take Nostradamus and compare his super vague, odd prophecy to this.

**Dave** (3:34)
But his best ones.

**Ben** (3:35)
But his best ones to this, you'll be blown away with the clarity of difficult prophecy compared to the vagueness and things like that.

**Dave** (3:45)
Yeah, this passage we're going to look at talks about real people, real places, real dates that you can check from outside the scriptures. And the interpretation is not really vague. It's very clear. So hopefully it'll be fun. All right, so we're going to go ahead and dive in. I'm going to read the passage, and then Ben's going to kind of help diagram on the board.

**Ben** (4:02)
And Dave's going to help me.

**Dave** (4:04)
I'll pipe her in as we go. Okay, so we're in Daniel chapter nine. We're going to start in verse 24 And so just the brief background here is Daniel, an Israelite, is in captivity in Babylon because the Israelites have been exiled, conquered by the Babylonians, and you find out because God is judging them for their sins. And so that's actually going to come in a little bit here to the context. And Daniel is towards the end of his life, and it's towards the end of almost 70 years in captivity. And he's realizing that maybe these 70 years are about over because of some predictive prophecy.