God’s Word for You

Daniel 9:22-24 The end of transgression

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, December 21, 2025

22 He taught me, saying, “Daniel, I have now come out to give you insight and understanding. 23 At the beginning of your prayers for mercy a word went out, and I have come to declare it, for you are highly favored. So consider the word and understand the vision. 24 “Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city: to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most holy place.

Remember that Daniel had been thinking about the prophecy from Jeremiah about the seventy years (Daniel 9:1-2). His prayer was about the desolation of the people, the city, and the Lord’s temple. While he was praying, the angel Gabriel came to him with this answer. We notice right away that the Lord gives Daniel another “seventy” to consider, since he correctly identified the previous “seventy” as being the time that his people would spend in Babylon. This time, it was seventy “sevens.” The “sevens” are the Hebrew word for “weeks.” This would be a strange way of saying “a year and a little more than four months,” which is what 70 weeks comes to. Theologians in Pentecostal circles think that these “weeks” are “weeks of years,” or seven-year cycles or periods, but they also want to add a pause or gap in the counting at some point to make everything add up the way they want it to. Some Lutheran and Catholic theologians have taken these as more literal groups of seven years and therefore look for a way to get from Cyrus’ command for the Jews to return home up to the coming of Christ (such as his baptism) by adding things up to 490 years, which is close but not quite right. Cyrus’ decree in about 538 BC plus 490 years takes us to 48 BC, about the time that Jesus’ grandfathers Heli and Jacob were born. There are many other possible explanations. Jerome lists nine different interpretations, from Africanus, two from Eusebius, Hippolytus, Apollinarius, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, and a ninth from the Jews of his time.

Martin Luther’s general warning about interpreting the Bible fits very well here. “The devil is trying to mislead theologians by two ways: 1) By work-righteousness, and 2) by inducing them to leave the essentials to discuss less important things in religion.” If the time comes when these devotions are printed together as a book, I will include an appendix that summarizes the various explanations for these seventy “sevens,” but at this time I know that it is more important for us and wiser to focus on the six gospel blessings proclaimed in verse 24. So for the next few days we will contemplate the gospel instead of a theoretical future or past chronology.

The work of Christ will be (1) “To finish transgression.” Jesus Christ “has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26). Gabriel describes the forgiveness of sins in many ways, all together, to show the same wonderful work from many points of view. First, he begins with bringing an end to transgression. The verb is calle’, in the piel stem, which here means that Christ will cause the finish, the end, the conclusion, of crossing the line of God’s holy commandments. “To transgress” means to step over something, like a sign that says “keep off the grass.” Adam and Eve crossed the line of their only commandment, which was not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They did it, and they fell, and through them we all have fallen. But we also commit our own sins, too many to count.

The Old Testament sacrifices pointed ahead to the one sacrifice of Christ to put an end to the guilt of our sin. Just as a man would set aside an animal, a goat, a lamb, a dove, or whatever it would be, and declare it to be the sacrifice he was going to make on account of his sins, so also Christ was set aside by God to be the sacrifice. But he was also declared publicly to be the correct sacrifice by the words—unwitting as they were—of Caiaphas in the year, even in the month, in which he was crucified. For the high priest of Israel said to the Sanhedrin, “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish” (John 11:50). And John tells us, “He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation, but also for the scattered children of God to bring them together and make them one” (John 11:51-52). For “every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices, and so it was necessary for this one also to have something to offer” (Hebrews 8:3). But the writer to the Hebrews was not talking about Caiaphas, but about Christ. For Christ is the true High Priest who did not come offering a goat or a lamb or a dove or even a handful of salt, but his own flesh, to put an end to the guilt of mankind’s sin forever.

This end to guilt was a reconciliation that meant a change, not in the one who offended God (for man remains a sinner until the hour he dies), but rather a change in God who has been offended by man’s sin. For God has gone from offended, angry, full of wrath, and justified in this attitude in every way, to one who is no longer offended, who is compassionate and forgiving, and who does not need to have this attitude in the least, but does nevertheless, for the sake of Christ his Son. He loves us because he loves his Son, and his Son entered into the created world to rescue us from his Father’s wrath. And this was not merely his attempt, but his victory. For what he set out to do, he did. We can say with absolute confidence: “I say unto you, what he hath done famously, he did it to that end.” And that end was to rescue us from sin.

It is interesting to ponder what the angel Gabriel meant by “seventy ‘sevens,’” but it is more glorious to ponder what he clearly said, which is the reason that Christ was going to come into the world was “to finish transgression.” And so the guilt, the crime, the deed of your transgression and mine, is done with and done away with and paid for by the blood of the Messiah, the Christ of God, our Lord Jesus. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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