Trusting the Lord's Equation

Scripture: Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-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 put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. Daniel 9:25-26

Observation: Recently, I learned a lesson that this passage is one of the most key verses to understanding the timing of how Jesus as Messiah comes to the world. It is about "seventy 'sevens'", which are then broken into units of 7+62+1 'sevens'.

The trigger moment becomes the royal order to rebuild the temple. That rebuilding will require 49 years (7x7), then it will be 434 years (62x7) before the Messiah is revealed and immediately put to death. Sure enough, these numbers work out perfectly, with some scholars mathing out the timeline and stating that from the date the King of Persia declared the temple should be rebuilt to the day Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey ("the Anointed One, the ruler, comes") is 483 years to the exact day (and he was "put to death" five days later). What happens next is the Romans - "the people of the ruler who will come" - destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, re-scattered the Jews, and they have not had a true day of peace since.

(Side note: By this text, the final 'seven' clearly takes place in some other timeline, and many believe it is the seven-year period of the rapture/tribulation associated with Messiah's second coming, the confirmation of the Messianic covenant to "many", aka Christians.)

Application: When I watched the video where I learned about this timing, I was a bit shocked. There is so much of this that just ... fits, and I don't understand why people doubt it. Okay, the original language is vague when it talks about "sevens" with no explanation of what a seven is (most would assume it's weeks), then also says there are 70 of them but explains what happens after 62 of them. I would admit that much of this only makes total sense after the context of Jesus, and therefore sceptics could think we are forcing all of these pieces of the puzzle together.

Then again, at this point in his life Daniel was in charge of the Magi, and was teaching them about the future movement of a specific star in the night sky that would signal the arrival of a great king of Israel who would rule the entire world. He was teaching this at a time when such movement of this specific star had never occurred before, and when Israel didn't exist! Daniel was a man of math and science, who could both solve complex problems AND function within abstract uncertainty. Or, perhaps a better way of putting it, he was like a mathematician that knows all the variables in an equation, but doesn't know their values.

As a Christian ... how does that work for me? Am I okay knowing the names of the variables, but since I don't know their values I can't calculate the result? Am I okay knowing that the result is already fixed and known by the Lord, and someday I'll be able to work out the variables and see how they all came together in the end?

Prayer: Lord, I thank you for your love, and for the mysteries of your plan that continue to move around us. Please forgive my sins and continue to help me overcome my mistakes and moments of weakness, by your Holy Spirit. I desire to continue to work the equation as it were, to place my faith in Jesus and strive to obey his teaching and love others in your name, even though I don't understand how it all fits together within our modern society. I don't need to know the outcome, only that you do know it. Amen.