By Jack Kelley
"Know and understand this. From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until The Anointed One the ruler comes there will be seven sevens andsixty two sevens. It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench but in times of trouble. After the sixty two sevens the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary." (Daniel 9:25-26a)
This information was given to Daniel in 538 BC in response to a prayer asking God to release His people from their 70 year captivity in Babylon. The Angel Gabriel visited Daniel with a message that has become known as the 70 weeks of Daniel (Dan 9:24-27).
This passage is the single most important piece of prophecy in all of scripture because it chronicles the coming of the Messiah, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the coming of the Antichrist and the timing and duration of the Great Tribulation.
For our purposes today, the 2 verses of Daniel’s prophecy I’ve quoted presents us with a very narrow window of time into which we must fit the birth and death of anyone claiming to be the Messiah.
In Jesus we have someone who was born in Bethlehem though His family was not from there, and lived and died within the prescribed 38 years out of 6000. He was widely accepted as Israel’s Messiah but betrayed by a close friend and though innocent of any crime made no defense and was convicted and sentenced to death in an illegal trial. His enemies paid the prophesied amount of money for His betrayal and then when payment was returned to the Temple used it to buy a potter’s field. He was executed by a method foretold before its invention and his executioners split up His belongings just as predicted.
That’s only 4 out of over 300 fulfilled prophecies we could explore. But even with just these 4 the odds against them happening by chance are so astronomically high as to be ridiculous.