Tribulation
View daily reading plan: Daniel 9.21-27
From Daniel 9.21-27 we learn that these events will take place during a certain “week”. This “week” means seven years not seven days, as the context of Daniel 9 shows. It will be the last or seventieth week in a sequence uniquely concerned with God’s dealings with the nation to which Daniel belonged.
In verse 24 we read the angel Gabriel’s words to Daniel: “seventy weeks are determined upon your people and upon the holy city”. That nation is of course the nation of Israel, and the city is Jerusalem. The nation and the city were both directly affected by what happened in the 69 weeks of years (i.e., 483 years) until Christ came. The events of the remaining seventieth week must likewise happen to this nation and they cannot be applied to the future of the church.
At the beginning of these seven years everything will seem to be going smoothly and well. Then suddenly, in the middle of this period (v.27) Antichrist will break his covenant with Israel. He will immediately require everyone to worship him and he will defile the Jewish temple. The Lord Jesus refers to this as “the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet” (Matthew 24.15). This is when a terrible persecution of the nation of Israel begins, described as the “great tribulation” in Matthew 24.21.
This period is also described in Revelation 6 as seals of a book (a scroll) which are opened, followed by trumpets being sounded to announce God’s judgement on earth (Revelation 8 and 9), and then bowls of His wrath are emptied out (Revelation 16).
Monday, 10 June, 2024