Faithful Under Fire - The Answer No One Saw Coming

Readings: Daniel 9; Jeremiah 29:10-14; 31:31ff; Leviticus 25:8-10; Matthew 18:21-22; Luke 22:20

Daniel is on his face before God. He has been reading Jeremiah's promise of the seventy years of exile, and the calculation tells him the end is almost here. He does not relax. He prays. He confesses the sins of his people in seven waves of penitential honesty. He makes seven petitions. And the spine of the whole prayer — the phrase that anchors both the appeal and the urgency — is this: for your own sake, O Lord. Not our merit. Not our righteousness. For your name and your glory and your own sake.

The prayer of Daniel 9:1–19 is one of the greatest prayers in Scripture. Its structure, its grammar, its Christological depth, the way it connects to Moses's intercession at Sinai and ultimately to the Savior who makes intercession for the transgressors on the cross. But I want you to note one of the most breathtaking things in the entire book of Daniel - the unexpectedly expansive answer God gives to Daniel’s humble prayers.

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When Gabriel arrives — in swift flight, while Daniel is still praying — he announces seventy weeks of years are God’s answer to the exile of his people. Daniel was praying about the promised deliverance of his people after seventy years in Babylon, and now the answer is seventy x seven? Yes, God will fulfill the promise he made via Jeremiah, and Cyrus will issue the decree, just as Isaiah had foretold. But something more - something far more! - was in view: a greater exile was going to end, brought to conclusion by the ultimate Messiah.

Sevent sevens is about comfort, not calendar: it’s a number that does not invite calculation but proclamation. What God is doing is so much larger than the return from Babylon that it requires a number that speaks of completion on a cosmic Jubilee scale. And then Gabriel names six world-redeeming purposes that the Anointed One will accomplish: finish the transgression, put an end to sin, atone for iniquity, bring in everlasting righteousness, seal vision and prophet, and anoint a most holy place.

And then, in the middle of the answer, comes this: "an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing" (v.26).

The Messiah was put to death. Having nothing. Apparently defeated. If you are Daniel, hearing this for the first time, it sounds like the reversal of the answer rather than its fulfillment. But it is not the reversal. It is the mechanism. The six purposes of verse 24 are accomplished precisely because the Anointed One is cut off. The cross is the center of the seventy weeks.

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Here is what stopped me in my tracks this week, and what I cannot stop thinking about.

Daniel prays for the exile to end. The exile — the banishment of God's people from the land, from the Temple, from the presence of God, under the judgment of a holy God who will not ignore the treachery of his covenant people — is what the whole prayer is about. O Lord, hear and forgive. O Lord, listen and act. Do not delay — for your own sake — bring us home.

And God answers the prayer for the end of exile with the ultimate exile.

Not the cancellation of exile. Its completion. In one person. In one act. Jesus, the Anointed One who is cut off, is not merely executed. He is expelled from the city under a death sentence imposed by the fourth beast — Rome, the terrifying unnamed creature of Daniel 7 with its iron teeth, the very empire whose rise Daniel's visions have traced throughout the whole book. He is driven outside the gate and placed outside the camp. Carrying his cross into the wilderness of death. The reproach of exile — the shame, the expulsion, the being-cast-out — is gathered up into his death and borne in his body.

"So Jesus also suffered outside the gate to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore, let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured." - Hebrews 13:12–13

Outside the gate. Outside the camp. The language of Leviticus — the language of exile, of expulsion, of the unclean driven out from the presence of the holy. This is where Jesus dies. Not in the Temple. Not at the altar. Outside. Where the scapegoat went.

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Consider the scapegoat. Leviticus 16 — the Day of Atonement — requires two goats. One is slaughtered as the sin offering. The other is the scapegoat: Aaron lays both hands on it, confesses the sins of the whole people of Israel over it, and then it is driven into the wilderness, into a solitary land, bearing their iniquity away from the presence of God and sent away. Expelled. Carrying what the people did into the place of death, so that the people can remain in the presence of God.

The scapegoat is the exiled animal. The sin-bearing creature is driven out so the people can stay in.

Jesus is both goats simultaneously — the slaughtered offering and the scapegoat driven out. The one who bore the world's sin was driven outside the city under a Roman death sentence, carrying his cross, going where the scapegoat went. Into the wilderness of death. Bearing what we had done. The Anointed One cut off and having nothing — because he took everything we owed and carried it to where it could be dealt with, once, finally, completely.

God answers the prayer for the end of exile with the ultimate exile — the one who carries our sin outside the gate, driven out under a death sentence imposed by the fourth beast, the scapegoat bearing our iniquity into the wilderness of death, so that the Great Jubilee of Sunday morning can set every exile free.

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There is one more layer. The Day of Atonement and the Jubilee are structurally twinned in the Levitical calendar. The Jubilee — the year of release, when debts are canceled, slaves are freed, and the whole order of creation is reset — is proclaimed on the Day of Atonement of the forty-ninth year. The trumpet sounds on the Day of Atonement. The release is declared because the atonement has been made. The Jubilee is only possible because the Day of Atonement has done its work. The scapegoat must go first. The sin must be dealt with before the prisoners can go free.

Jesus on the cross is the Day of Atonement that enables the Great Jubilee. The scapegoat is driven out into the wilderness of death on Friday. The prisoners go free on Sunday morning. The stone rolls away — not as an escape, but as the announcement that the debt has been paid, the sin has been borne away, the exile is over, and the new world has begun. The first day of the new week. The eighth day. The day of new creation.

The fourth beast, which persecuted the people of God across the whole sweep of Daniel's visions, imposed the death sentence on the Anointed One — and in doing so became, in the hands of the sovereign God, the unwitting instrument of the world's redemption. The empire that devours is the tool by which God ends the exile of his people. This is the irony that runs through the entire book of Daniel and arrives, in chapter 9, at its most devastating and most beautiful expression.

The Pattern of Daniel 9

Daniel prays for the exile to end.

God answers with the ultimate exile — the Anointed One cut off, driven outside the gate, bearing our sin into the wilderness of death.

The scapegoat goes out on Friday. The Great Jubilee begins on Sunday morning.

The stone rolls away from the garden tomb — and every exile, in every generation, in every Babylon, is invited home.

Every time I consider this, I am astonished at the mercy of God and the beauty of the Scriptures. The God who scattered his people into exile sent his Son into the ultimate exile so that the scattering could end. The God who said for your own sake through Daniel acted for his own sake at the cross — so that his name would be glorified and his people would be free.

Daniel could not have imagined any of this when he fell to his knees with Jeremiah's scroll in his hands. He prayed for the seventy years of exile to end. God answered with the Jubilee of Jubilees, with the end of sin itself, with a Temple that death cannot destroy and a righteousness that will never wear out.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think — to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

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