Unlocking the 70 Weeks of Daniel

At the beginning of thy supplications the commandment came forth, and I am come to shew thee; for thou art greatly beloved: therefore understand the matter, and consider the vision. — Daniel 9:23, KJV

Dear reader, before you turn another page, I must ask you a question that I have asked congregations, Bible students, and fellow ministers for years, and I have yet to receive a satisfying answer from those who hold the popular view of these matters: if the seventy weeks of Daniel are four hundred and ninety years, and sixty-nine of those weeks were fulfilled, without interruption, leading directly to the Messiah — on what biblical authority do we now insert a gap of nearly two thousand years before the seventieth week is allowed to run its course?

I did not write this book to be clever, and I certainly did not write it to be controversial for its own sake. I wrote it because, over many years of teaching the Word, I kept meeting the same wall: faithful, sincere, Spiritfilled believers who had been taught a doctrine of the 'postponed kingdom' so early in their Christian life, and so often, that they had never once been shown an alternative — let alone been shown what the text of Daniel 9 actually says, sentence by sentence, in its own right.

This book began, as many of the best things do, in small pieces. Over a number of weeks, I shared a study — part by part — under the title 'Re-Examining Our Belief on Daniel's Seventy Weeks.' What you now hold in your hands is that same study, but no longer scattered across separate sittings. It has been gathered, set in order, expanded at every point where a reader might rightly ask 'but what about...,' and supplied with the historical detail, the cross-references, and the practical application that a single sitting could never have carried.