When is or was Daniel’s 70th week, and what is it all about? In Daniel 9:24-26, he reports the message from the angel Gabriel, saying, “Seventy weeks are determined for your people and for your holy city, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy.
“Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince, there shall be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks. The street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublesome times.
“And after the sixty-two weeks Messiah shall be cut off, but not for Himself; and the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end of it shall be with a flood, and till the end of the war desolations are determined.”
In this prophecy, the angel foretells to Daniel (and anyone who desires to know the past and future as we stand in time today) what the future is for the Jewish people.
The first seven weeks of years are the times of Ezra and Nehemiah when they were writing of the restoration of the temple and the walls of the city. Then, sixty-two weeks until the time of the coming of Jesus Christ for a total of sixty-nine weeks of years. No specific 70th week is mentioned after that point.
The next event after the Messiah is cut off at the 69th week is His resurrection and forty days of instructions to His disciples with directions to go into all the world and tell of His death, burial, and resurrection, and that belief in Him would result in their everlasting life.
That commission has been ongoing and intentional until His return in the future. It was not for the Jews as a body of participants, however, for God had other intentions for them. The 70 A.D. destruction of Jerusalem and its temple had fulfilled God’s promise to scatter the Jews into all the world as punishment for disobedience to Him.
We see, then, that destruction of the city and its temple when Rome conquered Israel and fulfilled God’s pronouncement that He would scatter the Jews into every nation of the world. It took 65 years to see the total abandonment of Jerusalem by Jewish people, then 1,800 years of desolation came over the land of Israel. It was God’s way of preserving the land for the later habitation of His people.
His promise to restore the land to Israel began as nomadic Jews drifted into that desolate place. Annual rainfall, having been absent in any quantity during those years, began to increase, as did the Jewish population. Then many more years passed.
So where is that 70th week the angel proclaimed to Daniel?
After Messiah’s resurrection to heaven, He will return for His body of believers. It is a gigantic event at the end of the Christian church age, as Jesus said in Matthew 28:20, “And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Then we will be with Him.)
This “ingathering” is told in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 in detail, and in 5:2 as: “For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night.”
When that “ingathering of believers in Christ” called the Rapture happens, John describes their appearance before the Lord Jesus Christ on His throne and receiving the representative twenty-four “elders” who have golden crowns issued to them. This is recorded in Revelation 4, and further information on them is in John 14:2-4 and other chapters in Revelation.
That Rapture event clears the way for God’s full attention to the 70th week we are learning about. This Rapture is the “snatching away” of those who have been saved by believing in that One who was “cut off, but not for Himself,” mentioned earlier in Daniel 9. The Apostle Paul writes of it in his two epistles to the Thessalonians, as he says in 2 Thessalonians 2:1, “Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him ….”
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