The Greatest Promise | Dr. Conrad Vine

Uh, good evening everybody. I just want to avoid the possibility of feedback while I'm standing up here. What a [clears throat] beautiful week it's been. Yes, this has been my first ever week in Hawaii. Uh my wife and I have been truly blessed to get to meet some wonderfully warm people uh um beautiful friendships and see the beautiful nature that God has blessed you with here.

I'd like to say thank you, brother Danny, for that beautiful song pointing us to that beautiful day when uh the dead in Christ will rise first. Thank you for sharing that song with us tonight. And so uh so far we've had what three nights is it so far together. Uh the first night we were looking at uh the prophecy of Daniel 2 which tells us that God is in control of the flow of history. Can you say amen to that?

And there is a coming kingdom and God wants everybody to be a part of that kingdom regardless of the passport they hold on this planet. We can all have citizenship in heaven above. And then on the second night we saw the the reality we call it Star Wars that there's a struggle going on between Christ and Satan. And Christ has never lost a battle with Satan and he's willing to be your champion if you ask him to fight your battles for you. And uh then the other the third night we looked at last night how do we protect ourselves from the attacks of Satan.

So tonight I'm going to kind of shift gears somewhat. I'm going to talk about what I consider to be perhaps the most um profound prophecy in all of the Old Testament. And it's a prophecy about the coming of the Messiah and what the Messiah was going to do when he came. And so um uh let me ask you a question. Um are promises important to you?

Yes. When somebody makes a promise, you you you have to rely upon that promise. You know, when I asked my wife to marry her, she had to decide whether she trusted me before she said yes to me. All right? And so, uh, when you accept a promise, you have to accept that the person making the promise is trustworthy and their words can be trusted and you can believe what they're going to say.

So, tonight we're going to look at perhaps the most important promise ever made. That's going to be an outline of our journey here this evening. And here's a very famous promise made by an American president, made by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. This was just before he opened the floodgates of sending American soldiers to Vietnam.

And what he said to the American public was, "We are not about to ascend American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." That was 1964. And shortly thereafter, he sent many, many thousands of American soldiers into Vietnam. Maybe the most famous promise made by a politician, at least in my lifetime, was this one here, read my lips, no new taxes. And so, of course, we know that didn't quite work out so well for President George H. Bush.

But, uh, in the Garden of Eden, this promise was made. God said to the serpent, to Satan, God said, "I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers, and I will strike your head, and you will strike his heel." So, if a serpent strikes you on the heel, does it kill you necessarily? No, it doesn't. But if you strike a serpent on the head, what happens to the serpent? It's going to die.

So in the garden of Eden, there was a promise that God would send a redeemer to save humanity from the problem of sin. And not only to save humanity, but to deal with Satan as the source of all human suffering. So we're going to look at maybe the most impressive promise that there is in the Old Testament tonight, Old Testament, and ask ourselves, how does this apply to us? And as we begin, I invite you to bow your heads with me and invite the presence of the Holy Spirit. Our dear heavenly father, we thank you for the blessings of life.

We thank you for the promise of eternal life. We thank you that the Sabbath hours now upon us, a day of rest, a day of worship, a day when we can reconnect with you. Father, as we step into these sacred hours and a sanctuary of time, I pray that the voice we hear tonight will be the voice of your Holy Spirit speaking to each of our hearts, bringing us conviction for how we are to live our lives and bringing us joy and bringing us to the place of worship as we realize just what the Messiah means for each one of us. So, thank you, Father, for hearing this prayer. Please speak through me and for me.

In the name of Jesus, I ask. Amen. All right. So, let's go back to the um this promise [clears throat] that we find in the Old Testament. Now, this is the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.

And this this is an artist's impression. But if you actually go to the German city of Berlin into the Berlin Museum, they actually carried brick by brick this gate from ancient Babylon to Germany over 100 years ago. And the Ishtar Gate, as it's known, was literally covered in blue glazed bricks. and they've rebuilt it brick by brick in Berlin. And if you want a great place to go for a holiday, I'd recommend the Berlin Museum.

Um, and you just see the Ishtar Gates of Babylon. So, these artists impressions aren't that far off what it was really like. And we're going to pick up the story in the year 538 BC. And this is the prophet Daniel speaking. And he says this in the first year of Duras son of Ahazeras um I Daniel perceived in the books the number of years that according to the the Lord to the the word of the Lord to the prophet Jeremiah must be fulfilled for the devastation of Jerusalem namely how many years?

70 years. All right. So what prophecy was Daniel reading? Daniel was reading from this prophecy that you now see on the screen. Jeremiah was a prophet who was a contemporary of Daniel.

When Daniel was in Babylon, Jeremiah was back with the the Jewish the remnants in Jerusalem. And Ezekiel, the third prophet, was with the captives out in the fields of Babylon. So God had three prophets at the same time at the time of the Babylonian captivity become a ruin and a waste. And these nations shall serve the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Calaldanss, for their iniquity, says the Lord. So why is Daniel reading this prophecy?

Well, the math is simply this. Nebuchadnezzar captured Daniel in 6 Jerusalem in 605 BC. That's when he took Daniel captive. And this chapter Daniel 9 is written in 538 BC, which means Daniel has been in captivity for 67 years. And there's a prophecy that after seven um um country house every week and they do these Irish jigs and my grandma in her 80s and 90s would do this um country dancing and she was at the hospital they said Mrs.

Hill they said would you like a walking frame and she said a walking frame? She says what do you think I am old? Well she had a certain spirit to her. So Daniel, you might say had a certain spirit to him and he's now in his early 80s. The 70 years are almost up and Daniel is no doubt thinking, maybe when the 70 years are up, I can get to go back to my homeland, the land of my birth.

I can go back to Jerusalem and see it one last time before I die. So Daniel is personally invested in this prophecy of Jeremiah and he's praying about this [clears throat] and God sends the prophet Gabriel to give Daniel as the text says, "I've now come out to give you wisdom and understanding." And what the prophet Gabriel gives to Daniel is not an answer to Daniel's unspoken question, which is, "Am I going to go back to Jerusalem before I die?" As it happens, he never does. But the prophet Gabriel gives him a prophecy of the coming of the Messiah. And this is what the prophet ga the angel Gabriel says to Daniel. Gabriel says, "70 weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish a transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and profit, and to anoint a most holy place." And that's the summary of the prophecy.

There's a few more details we'll get into in a few more minutes, but this is the summary of the prophecy here. So, how are we going to understand this? Well, the first thing is let's look at the time element. And when we look at um these apocalyptic prophecies, there is something called the yearday principle, which means that a literal day um um in in prophetic terms is a year as we experience it today. And there are two verses in the Old Testament that establish the yearday principle in prophecy.

The first is in Ezekiel 4:6. 40 days I assigned to you, one day for each what year. And then after the spies came back from Canaan in Numbers 12 14:34, and God says to them, according to the number of days in which you spied out the land, 40 days, for every day a year, you shall bear your iniquity, 40 years, and you shall know my displeasure. So there is a principle in the Old Testament prophecies that a day equals a year. So if you come back to this prophecy of Daniel 9, it starts out with a time period.

It says 70 weeks. And so at the bottom I' I've can put some explanatory notes there. 70 weeks is 77s because there are seven days in a week. So 77s is 490. And so 490 days of prophetic time equals 490 years of human time.

You following me on this so far, everybody? That's 490 years. Now the prophecy is divided into three couplets in the Hebrew. There's uh there's A, B, and C in the prophecy. The first part of the prophecy, the first couplet is on the screen.

It says this, to finish transgression and to put an end to sin. What does this mean? That God was charging the Jewish people um to put away sin and develop a righteous society. And God was giving them 490 years to take care of the sin within their society. You know, if God is God is patient, he doesn't work in four-year election cycles.

He gives his people 490 years to get their spiritual house in order. The second um the second of these parts of the Hebrew poetry, it says this, and this is God's responsibility, it is to atone for iniquity and to bring in everlasting righteousness. So if the first phrase to finish transgression and put an end to sin was the responsibility of God's people, the Jews, the second part is this is what God is going to do. God is going to atone for iniquity and to bring in everlasting righteousness sometime during these this 70 year period or 490 years which was actually the coming of Christ. And Hebrews 9:26 talks about the coming of Christ.

And it says, "But as it is, he that is Jesus has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself." And so this is how God atones for iniquity by sending the Messiah. And the third couplet um two actions in this prophecy. So the first couplet number one on the screen is the responsibility of God's people. The second couplet is responsibility of God himself. And the third couplet which is to seal both vision and prophet and to anoint the most holy place.

That that is the that is the result. If if the first two things are complete, if God's people take care of their side of the bargain and God takes care of his side of the bargain, then the outcome for this will be the sealing up of both vision and prophet or prophecy and to anoint a most holy place. And uh this actually happened in the time of Steven. Steven was um he spoke to the Jewish Sanhedrin 3 and a half years after the death of Christ. Um they were so upset with him they put their fingers in their ears.

They nashed their teeth and they rushed at him and they dragged him outside the city walls and they stoned him to death. And he was the last of the prophets to the Jewish people. And from that moment on, God's prophets and apostles went to the entire world, Jews and Gentiles, rather than primarily being up until then to the Jewish people. And the anointing, the most holy place, um that would refer to when Christ ascended to heaven. Um he he inaugurated the high priestly ministry in heaven above because there was no earthly tabernacle left after AD.70 when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.

So the prophecy gives us a summary so far and then it goes into a time element and this is the time element here. It says know therefore and understand from the time that the word went out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the time of an anointed the word in Hebrew is Messiah. The anointed prince messiah we say in English is the Messiah. So that from the time to the command to rebuild and restore Jerusalem until the time of the Messiah prince, that's when the that's when the prophecy begins. So according to this uh this prophecy, there's a 490ear period and it begins with a command to restore and rebuild Jerusalem.

And if you do your archaeology and you know your history, you know that in the book of Ezra, there are three commands given. The first is in Ezra chapter 1:es 2 and 4. That was when Cyrus the great sent the Jews back to Jerusalem. But he didn't send them back to rebuild the city. He sent them back to rebuild the temple.

So that doesn't meet the criteria. The second decree that we find in Ezra 6 um was a decree from the Persian Emperor Das I in 520 BC and that was again emphasizing I need you to rebuild the temple. So that's not the starting point for the prophecy. But the starting point for the prophecy is in Ezra chapter 7 where the Persian emperor Artiserxes gave the command to rebuild the city, not just the temple. So the starting point for the 490-year prophecy is in 457 BC that was the time for the command to rebuild and to restore Jerusalem.

Are you all with me on this so far? Somebody say yes out there. Yes. All right. So and then the prophecy says until the time of an anointed prince that means the Messiah prince there shall be seven weeks and for 62 weeks it shall be built again with streets and moat but in a troubled time.

So this means that in this verse here there's two time elements. There's seven weeks and there's um 62 weeks. And if you add 7 weeks and 62 weeks, those are the time elements, that's 69 weeks. And 69 weeks time 7 days is 483 prophetic days or 483 literal years. So you say, well, is that what happened in history?

And well, would you believe it? That's exactly what happened. Because if you take the starting point of the prophecy of the command to rebuild and restore Jerusalem, which was 457 BC, and you add 483 literal years to it, what do you get? 27 AD. That would be the time for the coming of the Messiah prince.

So this is a prophecy given actually about 500 years before the coming of Christ. And it says that the coming of the Messiah prince will be in AD27. Now, I hope I know what's going to happen tomorrow. I'm going to get up. I'm going to go to church.

I'm going to preach. Going to come home, then come here. Going to preach again. That's what my day looks like tomorrow. That's what I hope is going to happen.

But I don't know. I trust God that it will happen, but I know for certain it's going to happen. But this prophecy, it says um almost 500 years out from the from 538 BC when Daniel receives this vision that go all the way forward to 27 AD. That will be the year that the Messiah prince will arrive. So let's ask ourselves the question, what year did Jesus begin his ministry?

27 AD. And how do we know that? Well, in Luke's Gospel chapter 3, it starts out with a bunch of historical detail. And when I was a kid, I would read this and my eyes would just glaze over. I say, "Why did Luke give us all this historical information?" says, "In the 15th year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip, ruler of the region of Ita and Trachonitis, and Lysanius, the ruler of Abelene, during the high priesthood of Annus and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zachariah in the wilderness, that is John the Baptist.

And he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance and for the forgiveness of sins. And in this chapter, he goes on to baptize Jesus. So, how do we know that this event, the baptism of Jesus, took place in AD27, which is exactly when the prophecy said that Jesus will be baptized? Well, if you noticed all the bits of red on the screen, those are historical figures, and we know when they ruled. So in those days they didn't have regular calendars like we have today but um they would say you were born in the certain year um of the reign of a certain king.

[clears throat] So let's say that you were born in February 2009 hypothetically wasn't that um when was President Barack Obama inaugurated as a president? January 2009. Yes. So if you were born in February 2009, you would say back in those days, I was born in the first year of President Obama. And if you were born in 9, 10, 11, 12, 1 2 3 4.

If you were born in 2014, October, you were born in the 8th year of President Obama. Is that right? I hope so. Um, if you were born and and so forth. And so what they would do is your birth date was calculated by what year the king sat on the throne of your country.

And what Luke is doing us here because he's a historian, he's wanting to pin down exactly the year that Jesus was baptized to show that the baptism of Jesus in 8 happened in AD27 in exact fulfillment of the prophecy of Daniel 9. And so the first detail he gives is emperor Tiberius. And it says John the Baptist was baptizing says in the 15th year of Emperor Tiberius and Emperor Tiberius was the co-regent the co-ruler of the Roman Empire from 12 AD. So if you add 15 years to the year 12 AD, what do you get? You get 27 AD.

And so the apostle at Luke, he includes all this historical detail. So if you lived in Judea, you knew when Pontius Pilate was governor. And when you lived in Galilee, you knew when Herod was the ruler. And if you lived in Ita and Trackitis, you knew when Philip was the ruler. And if you lived in Abalene, you knew when Lysenius was the ruler, and so forth.

And essentially, Luke is doing a triangulation. He's putting lots of historical reference points. And when all of these historical reference points are taken into account, this tells us that Jesus was baptized in the fall of AD27, exactly on time according to the 490ear prophecy of the prophet Daniel. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? That's pretty amazing that Jesus came as the Apostle Paul said to the church of Galatia, in the fullness of time, God sent his son.

So the prophecy tells us 483 years in advance to the to the the season of the year when Jesus was going to begin his ministry. But [clears throat] if the 20 if the um 70th week began the last week of that 490ear prophecy, if the last seven years began in AD27, that means that they finished in AD.34. Does that does that make sense? Add 7 years to 27, what do you get? 34.

I know it's Friday night, okay? I know our brains are tired, but work with me on this, okay? Normally on Friday night, my brain is like mush. All right? And there's no intelligent thought going on up there.

And so my wife knows not to ask me a hard question on Friday night because she's just going to get a blank stare in response. But um just work with me on this. So if the if the final seven weeks or 7 days or 7 years started in AD27 that means that the 490ear prophecy the end of the 70th week is in AD.34. And what happens in AD.34? The stoning of Steven.

Now does the book of Acts chapter 8 tell us that Steven was stoned in AD.34? No, it doesn't. So, how can we figure out the year that Steven was stoned? We have to a bit of um like um it's like a jigsaw puzzle working through here tonight. When Steven was stoned, who was present there holding the coats of the men who were killing Steven?

Saul who became Paul. So, the stoning of Steven happens just before the Paul meets Jesus on the road to Damascus. Okay, we know that from Acts chapter 8. And Paul meets Jesus on the road to Damascus in Acts chapter nine. So Paul [clears throat] was present at the toning of Steven.

And the stoning of Steven happened just before Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. So then you want to know, well, when was the road to Damascus experience? What year did that take place in? Because that's the key to the jigsaw puzzle. Well, you have to look at the book of Galatians.

And Paul is speaking autobiographically about his life. And in Galatians 1:18 Paul says this after 3 years that is after his conversion I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cphus that is Peter and stayed with him 15 days. So Paul's first visit to Jerusalem after meeting Christ on the road to Damascus was 3 years after his conversion. Then his second visit to Jerusalem he references in Galatians 2 verse one he says then after 14 years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas. So the second visit to Jerusalem was 17 years after his conversion.

Are you following me on this? It's 17 years. Now [clears throat] on in the second missionary journey of Paul in Acts chapter 18 we read this verse here. It says when Gallo was the proconsul or governor of Aaya that is ancient Greece the Jews made an attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal. Now Gallalo was the Roman governor of Greece in 51 AD.

We know that from Roman records and archaeology. And that second missionary journey took place 17 years after Paul's conversion. So if Paul met Gallo on the second missionary journey as the governor of Greece in AD51 and that's 17 years after his conversion, you take away 17 from 51 and what do you get? AD 30. That's exactly at the end of the final week of the 490ear prophecy.

It's pretty amazing, isn't it? How how God just lays out the future in advance. And this is why when Christ was born, there were so many people claiming to be the Messiah. Because in Judaism, people understood this prophecy. In fact, there were so many people claiming to be the Messiah that when the wise men came from the east following the star of Bethlehem, they come to Jerusalem and they say to the chief priests, "Where is he that is born king of the Jews?" They said, "Well, the prophet says in Bethlehem." The prophet Micah says that in Micah 5.

and and Bethlehem is 3 mi walk from Jerusalem. And you think, well, why didn't the chief priest just walk three miles to see if this was the Messiah? Because there were so many people claiming to be the Messiah because people understood this time prophecy. So Jesus was uh his ministry began exactly on time. What would happen in the middle of that 70th week?

The prophecy goes on to say this. After the 62 weeks, that is in the middle of the 70th week because you got 9 and 62. So after the 62 weeks, the anointed one or the Messiah shall be cut off and shall have nothing. That idiom to be cut off means he's going to be killed. And that phrase and shall have nothing can either be translated in the Hebrew as he will have nothing that is he died in poverty or it can be translated there shall be nobody for him which means he died rejected by his people.

And either one of those interpretations applies to the death of Jesus Christ. He died in poverty. He was betrayed by Judas. He was denied by Peter. And the other disciples fled when Jesus was arrested.

and they went and hid in an upper room of Jerusalem. The story so the text tells us that the Messiah would be k killed in the 70th week between 27 AD and 34 AD. He would die in poverty and he would be rejected by men. But the the prophecy gives you a bit more specificity about the time. We're going to come to that in a few minutes.

Then it says, "And the troops or the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. So what is this verse talking about? Um is the prince who is to come the Roman generals who destroyed Jerusalem or is the prince of this world of this verse the messiah prince who is to come.

Well when you look at um Daniel the Hebrew speaks about the messian nag that is the anointed one that is the ruler that is Jesus. In chapter chapter A, the first half of that verse, it speaks about just the Messiah or the Messiah, the anointed one that is Christ. And in 9:26B, it refers to just the the ruler or the prince. And again, it's referring to Jesus Christ. So this passage here, and the troops or the people, the prince who is to come shall destroy the city in the sanctuary.

We're talking about God's own people because of their failure to develop a righteous society. because of their failure to put away sin from the midst of themselves, because of their failure to to um to develop the level of righteousness that God wanted among his people and live in harmony with the law of God. So ultimately the people of the prince when they rejected the Messiah when Jesus came that ultimately led to the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in AD70. In the passage, the prophecy goes on to say, "He shall confirm a strong covenant with many for one week." So this is the 70th week of the prophecy. This is happening from AD 27 when Jesus was baptized to AD.34 when Steven, the last of the prophets of the people of Israel, when he was stoned.

And then the text goes on to say, "And in the midst of the 70th week, he shall cause sacrifice and the ablation to cease." What is this telling us? It's telling us that in the middle of the 70th week, the Messiah is going to cause all sacrifices to come to a complete end. If the 70th week began in AD 27 in the fall and you add 3 and a half years to that because that's halfway through 7, you get to spring AD.31. And what happened in spring AD31? That was the crucifixion of Christ.

So the prophecy says and in the midst of the 70th week or in the middle of that week that's three and a half years into that final seven seven-year prophecy the Messiah he's going to die. He'll die like die in poverty. He's going to there will be nobody for him. He'll be rejected by his people. And it says he shall cause the sacrifice and the ablation to cease.

That is the temple services are going to come to an end when Jesus dies on the cross of Calvary. Now, this is pretty impressive stuff. 490 years before it happened, D God gives Daniel a prophecy that says the Messiah is going to be born in AD 20 be baptized in the fall of AD27. And three and a half years later of his ministry, he's going to be killed or cut off in poverty and rejected by his people. And when he dies, he's going to cause the sacrificial system in the tabernacle to come to a complete end.

Like I struggle to know what's going to happen tomorrow. This tells me that God is in control of history. He is in control of history and he invites us to allow him to be the Lord of our lives because God does no harm to his children. When Christ died on the cross of Calvary, says Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

Now that temple curtain was about five stories high. It was like a curtain was you know higher than this here. It was not cut with human hands. The text says it was cut from top to bottom which means that God himself cut that temple uh that curtain. And when the temple curtain was cut in half behind the temple curtain where there should have been the shikina glory.

The shikina glory is like this fiery presence of God himself over the the the the ark of the covenant. What the priests saw when the temple curtain was taken away was that the shikina glory was gone. The sacrificial system had come to an end. God was no longer dwelling among his people which was the whole reason why they built the tabernacle and the temple in the first place. And so from that moment on, the Jewish priests and rulers knew that even though they went through the religious rituals of the Jewish religious year of Passover and tabernacles and and first fruits and all the sanctuary festivals that they had, they all knew that the temple had been torn aside by God and the the presence of God was no longer present in that temple.

And they kept it going all the way through to AD.70 knowing that the system had basically ceased. They were so invested in their rituals and their forms of religion that the actual meaning had disappeared. And the final verse of this prophecy says this, "Upon the wing of abomination shall come the desolator until the end that is decreed is poured out on him." And I'm not going to go through all the Hebrew of this tonight, but we interpret this as the Romans, they brought their abominations, their pagan standards. They brought it to Jerusalem. They besieged the city in AD66.

Then they withdrew and the Christians all escaped from Jerusalem because they accepted the warnings of Jesus in Matthew 24. And then the Romans came back and they built some walls around the city of Jerusalem. And they fought for two years to beat down the walls of Jerusalem. And when they finally got into Jerusalem, they burnt the temple to the ground. And it's estimated that two million people lost their lives in that siege.

And they sold so many slaves in the slave markets of Alexandria. They were selling them in batches of 30 because they had to get rid of so many people Romans as they conquered Jerusalem and wanted to destroy Jerusalem forever more. What you see on the slide there is a summary of this time prophecy. You see there that from this a 490ear prophecy of Daniel 9:24-27. And it starts with a command to rebuild and restore Jerusalem until the time of the Messiah prince is going to be 7 and 62 weeks or 483 days.

So from 457 BC to 27 AD is exactly 483 years. And then in that final seven years, that final week, um halfway through it, the Messiah was going to be cut off. He would die a life of poverty. He would die rejected by men. He would cause sacrifice to come to an end because his was the once and for all sacrifice for humanity.

And but God would still be merciful to the Jewish people. And he would still send the apostles to them. And finally, Steven. And when Steven was stoned by the Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin, from that moment on, the gospel went to the Gentiles. And you see on the screen there, um, a kind of a schematic of how this prophecy works out.

This is an amazing prophecy. Like if you want to know, does God know the future? Absolutely he does. So, we're not going to look at any other prophecies here tonight or uh maybe maybe through this series together, but there are plenty of prophecies about what God wants to do for his people and they're pretty beautiful. They're amazing.

What God wants for you, what God wants for me, we can trust him because we see the fulfillments of these prophecies um throughout history. If you want to summarize this Daniel 9 prophecy of the Messiah, you see it on the screen there. In Daniel 9:24 part C says the Messiah would make a great atonement for the sins of the world. Somebody say amen to that. And Daniel 9:24D it says the Messiah's atonement would bring in everlasting righteousness.

Praise God for that. In Daniel 9:24 part E says the heavenly sanctuary will be anointed when Christ ascended to heaven after his earthly ministry and he started his heavenly high priestly ministry. In Daniel 9:25 says the Messiah would begin his ministry in 27 AD after his baptism by John the Baptist. Daniel 9:26 the first part A says the Messiah would be killed. The second part of 9:26 says he'll be rejected at his death and die in poverty.

927A says the Messiah would make a final offer of mercy within the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant to the Jewish people for another three and a half years, the apostles and then Steven. And in 9:27, it says the Messiah would bring the sacrificial system to an end through his once and for all sacrifice in AD.31, Passover AD31, right slam back in the middle of the 70th week of this prophecy. It's an amazing prophecy, brothers and sisters. Are you wonder if God is in control of the flow of history? We saw it in generic detail in in Daniel chapter 2 on our opening night.

And this prophecy tells us that God's plans, God's purposes, God's intent is was very precise. God was going to send his son as the Messiah with one purpose and one purpose only. To save me and to save you. We read John 3:16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have what? Everlasting life.

And the next verse says, indeed, God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be what? Saved. And so God's purpose in sending the Messiah and giving us these prophecies so we can pinpoint exactly how and when and where and what was going to happen in the ministry of Jesus Christ. It was all given for one purpose that through believing in the Messiah we might have eternal life. And that is why in Revelation chapter 5, [clears throat] it says, "Worthy is the lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing." And so we sit here tonight and we say, "Well, what does this mean for us today?" So I want to talk about the invitation.

Why is this significant for us today? Well, the New Testament says this. For Christ, for our Passover lamb, Christ has been sacrificed. Jesus died during the Passover festival. He died as the Passover lamb of God that came to take away the sins of the world.

And so the Bible describes the death of Christ in terms of the Passover story when God led the Israelite slaves out of slavery in Egypt out to the promised land under the leadership of Moses. And many of you are familiar with the story how the Jewish people were enslaved and their baby boys were being thrown into the Nile to kill them off and they were forced to build the storehouses of ancient Egypt. And we know we know where those storehouses are today. Rammeses and Python. And uh we read the story of how a little a mother a Jewish mother hid her baby boy in the rushes in a bull rushes in a little um uh little basket.

And the and the Egyptian princess found that baby boy and she suspected it was a Jewish boy and she saved that baby boy and she called him Moses because she says, "I have drawn him out of the water." and how [clears throat] that baby boy grew up to be a prince of Egypt and then he became a shepherd in the Arabian wilderness and how God spoke to him from the fiery bush and he said, "I'm going to send you back to is to Egypt and I want you to set my people free and lead them to freedom in the promised land." And how Moses went back to Pharaoh and the Pharaoh of the Exodus was a powerful Pharaoh. Um, and he was not going to let those slaves go. And every time that God brought a a plague upon Egypt, Pharaoh would say, "Okay, I'll let the people go." And then when the plague stopped, Pharaoh would say, "Oh, no. You're not going." And so there was this back and forth between God and Pharaoh. This is a picture of the first plague.

The water of the Nile turned into blood. Uh one of the other plagues was the land was filled with frogs. Another of the plagues was that um um God sent hail upon the land and it destroyed all the standing crops. And finally, God led the people out through the Red Sea when they were trapped by the Egyptian army. Many of us are very familiar with this story.

This is the story that was the the the the inspiration for the for the um the the Negro spirituals of the American deep south when they were living under slavery. It was the story of the Exodus that inspired the African-American slaves in the deep south of America. And many of their negro spirituals are based on the story of Moses and how God led his people out of slavery. But in the middle of that story, you have this scene here, and it's the night of the Passover. And this was the 10th and final plague on Egypt.

And God said to Pharaoh, said, "Okay, if you're not going to let my people go, then tonight the angel of the Lord is going to pass over the land of Egypt and he's going to slay the firstborn in every child, every firstborn in every home in the land." And so Moses, so you will know the power of God. And so God said to Moses, "Tell the Israelites there to take a lamb and they had to sacrifice the lamb. They had to collect the blood of the lamb and they had to put the the blood of the lamb on the doorposts and the lintils of their homes. They're to blot out whatever's on the doorpost and the lintils. And when the angel of death passes over, then the angel of death will not slay the the firstborn of that child because they have faith in the Messiah of God.

And so we ask ourselves, why did Moses tell them to put the blood on the lintil of the doors and the doorposts? Why not on the door itself? Why did Moses tell him to put the bloods on the lintils and on the doors? There's a reason for it. A very particular reason.

You [clears throat] know of the Egyptian mummies. Yes. Well, the Egyptians believe that if you were to live in the afterlife, five things had to survive. The first thing they believed had to survive was your shadow because they sh they believe the shadow never lied about you. I guess it's true.

You may kid yourself when you look in the mirror, but when you see the sun shining down on the ground, it's altogether a different view. The shadow doesn't lie. The the ancient Egyptians in the book of the dead, as they called it, spoke about the car. The car was the life force similar to the breath of life of Genesis 2. And that life force was supposed to dwell within the mummified body in the tomb.

and who eats the food offerings that were left with the deceased person when they were buried. Then there was what the Egyptians called the bar. Those were the character traits of the individual and they would leave the body at night and they'd roam the area around. Then they'd come back to the body at night before the morning. Then you had the physical body.

The body had to be preserved for that person to live into the afterlife. So they would take out all the internal organs and they would um put them into jars of clay. They had mixed them with a salty mineral that pickled the body. They then smothered the body in linen bang bandages and they dorbed it with resin, beeswax or bumen. And the Persian word for bumen because they had bumen back there is mamia.

That's where we get the word mummy from because they were covered with bumen. That's how they preserved and intombed those bodies that were all wrapped up there. And then the most important thing if you wanted to survive in the afterlife was your name had to be recorded. That's why in Exodus chapter 1, it says Pharaoh was trying to kill all the Hebrew boys, but it doesn't give Pharaoh's name because as far as Moses is concerned, Mos Pharaoh isn't going to survive into the afterlife. He's a wicked man.

But we do get the names of the Hebrew midwives who saved the boys. Moses gives us their names, but doesn't give us the name of Pharaoh because as far as Moses is concerned, those women are worthy of the the afterlife, but not Pharaoh himself. And so in the ancient Egyptian world, and if you ever he go to Egypt today, there were certain kings that put their names everywhere across Egypt. They chiseled their names on the tops of cliffs. They chisel their names on on on obelisks.

They chisel their names on the pyramids. They put their names in in the valley of the kings and the underground tombs. There were certain kings and queens who were so desperate to survive into the afterlife, they chiseled their names everywhere. And there was one famous queen [clears throat] called Hatchepsut. Maybe you've heard of her.

Her son hated her. And when she died, he became Pharaoh. He sent stonemasons all across the land of Egypt, chiseling out her name wherever they could find it. He was erasing his wife, his mother's memory, erasing her name from Egypt so that she would die in the afterlife. That's how the Egyptians viewed the importance of the name.

Well, again, why did Moses tell them to put the blood on the door lintils and on the and on the doorposts? Well, it's simply this. The the Hebrews were slaves. Their homes were mostly made of mud, but we know from archaeology that there was one thing made of stone in the Egyptian in the Israelite homes, and it was the doorposts and the door lintils. Everything else was made of mud.

And when the Nile flooded every year, the homes would be washed away. They'd have to rebuild them. But the thing that would survive was the doorpost, the doorframe. And the Egyp the Israelites at the time of Moses were basically pagan. And many of them had chiseled their names onto the doorposts and the door lintils.

They'd adopted the pagan beliefs that if their names were written somewhere, they were going to survive in the Egyptian afterlife. So Moses says to them, "This is the acid test of your trust in the lamb of God to guarantee you eternal life." He says, "I want you to blot out your names on the door lintils and the doorposts with the blood of the lamb." So your name's no longer visible. And when you blot out th your names on the door lintils and the doorposts, you're saying to the world, you're saying to the Egyptians and you're saying to God, "We trust the blood of the lamb of God for our eternal salvation and not the Egyptian gods." It was the acid test of faith. If you put your n your blood, the blood of the lamb around those doorposts, you expressing faith that the lamb of God was the guarantee of your eternal life, not the pagan gods of Egypt. And so the Israelites, they all blotted out their names with the lamb's blood.

None of them perished that night. Every Egyptian home lost their firstborn. But in that process of the Exodus story, God was inviting the Israelites to show in a tangible way their rejection of the gods of Egypt and their trust in the lamb of God for eternal life. putting the blood of the Passover lamb on the lintils and doorposts, smearing out the names of themselves and their children was the acid test of their trust in God for eternal life. So why am I talking about this?

Because even today in 2026, it matters where your name is written. My name, all of our names are on government databases. social security, driver's licenses, passports, maybe the patent office, maybe your name is in a criminal justice system somewhere on some database. I don't know. But there is one place where you do want your name to be written.

The book of Revelation says this, "Anyone not found written in the book of life was cast into the fire." Revelation 3:5 speaks about the lamb's book of life. It says, "If you conquer, you'll be clothed like them in white robes, and I will not blot out your name out of the book of life. I will confess your name before my father and before his angels." This book in Revelation is referred to in Revelation 21:27 as the lamb's book of life. It matters where your name is written. It matters where your name is written.

The prophecy of Daniel 9 was fulfilled um it was given in 538 BC and it found an exact fulfillment exactly on time in AD27 the baptism of Christ um spring AD31 the crucifixion of Christ and AD.34 the the stoning of Steven and the gospel goes to the Gentiles. That prophecy tells us that God is in control of history. That his Messiah, what his Messiah was going to do, the Messiah came on time in the fullness of time. And he died on Calvary exactly as foretold in prophecy in order to cause sacrifice to come to a complete end because the ultimate acrifice for my sins and your sons had been paid once and for all. And that lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, he has the book of life in heaven above.

And it matters where your name is written. I have two minutes left. I need to bring this home. [clears throat] Your name is written in many places. We can't stop that as we go through life.

But what really matters is whether your name is in the lamb's book of life or not. You can't control where the government put you into what databases. But everybody here has a choice. Everybody here can make a choice tonight that they will accept the sacrifice of the lamb of God on Calvary who came exactly on time in the fullness of time in the right place. And he died in the fullness of time at the right time.

and he died for me and for you in order that my name and your name might be in the Lamb's book of life. It's an amazing prophecy. Daniel 9. And I don't want you to go home tonight and say, "Yeah, that's an amazing prophecy." And just get on with life. I want to invite you to think about this.

These prophecies are given so that we may believe that Jesus is the Messiah of God. and that through believing in him as Jesus said to doubting Thomas, we might have eternal life. We've s we saw last night that Jesus has authority over Satan and he can fight the battles against Satan that we cannot fight. We see tonight that Jesus paid the penalty for my sin and for yours. He did a once and for all sacrifice and if we accept his sacrifice on our behalf, we have the promise of eternal life with him.

So, if you want the lamb of God, if you want Jesus to make sure that your name is in the lamb's book of life, maybe you want to raise your hand tonight. It's a lamb's book of eternal life. It's not just life today. It's not just life tomorrow. The lamb's book of life is the register.

And everybody who's to receive eternal life is found in that book. So if you want to be if you want your name to be the lamb's book of life and you want to accept the death of the Messiah foretold over hundreds of years in great precision you want to say that his death isn't just historical curiosity but it was for me personally may just raise your hand tonight and praise God and praise God you know I gave my life to Jesus when I was 13 years of age was the best decision I ever made in my life and he's done me no harm calm all the years I followed him. And whatever life throws at me, and some of you know I'm saying through a particular storm in my life right now, I don't worry about those storms because if my name is in the lamb's book of life, I'm going to live for eternity. And this life and all its troubles is but the blink of an eyelet. But when you know and you have the assurance of eternal life with the lamb of God who loved us and handed himself over for us, then today's problems fade into insignificance.

And God gives you a peace in your heart that this world cannot give you, you cannot buy, and more importantly, this world cannot take away from us. So next Sabbath, I'm hoping and praying we have a baptism. I'm hoping and praying that we're going to have people saying, "I'm going to follow the Lamb of God. I'm going to follow him wherever he leads. I'm going to follow him through whatever life throws at me.

Because if I follow the lamb of God, who is the good shepherd, he will lead me ultimately by still waters and green pastures. And one day in the 23rd Psalm, if I follow the good shepherd, I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever, which means I will receive eternal life. Life is too short to mess around with these questions of eternal significance. So, if you're interested in baptism, we're going to talk about baptism maybe Sunday night. But if you're interested in in going through the waters of baptism, I'd invite you to speak to me or brother Doug or pastor uh that's standing at the back there waving his hand.

Um speak to us tonight, speak to us tomorrow, maybe on Sunday as well. And we want to talk with you about what it means to follow Jesus through the waters of baptism and have our names put in the Lamb's Book of Life. Jesus' promise in Mark 16:16 is this. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved. And it's a simple promise.

And nobody can undo that promise of the Messiah to you or to me. So I invite you to bow your heads with me now. We're going to close this evening with a a prayer, a prayer of consecration. And as we go through these Sabbath hours, I want to invite you to be thinking about these questions. Do I want my name in the Lamb's Book of Life?

And if so, um, am I willing to follow Jesus through the waters of baptism? Let's bow our heads and close with a word of prayer. Our heavenly father, we thank you for this incredible promise of the coming of the Messiah. Father, given over 500 years before it came about, we thank you, Father, that you are the Lord of history. You're in control of the passage of time.

And you did not send your son into the world to condemn the world, but that everyone in Maui might be saved through faith in him. Tonight, Father, we've heard the story of the Messiah. We've seen the significance of the blood. And I pray, Father, that everyone whose head is bowed here tonight, that each and every one of us will respond in faith and say that Jesus of Nazareth is not just a historical figure for me, but he's my savior and he's my Lord and he's my good shepherd and he's my sooncoming avior. And I pray Lord that everyone whose head is bowed here tonight that our names and those of our loved ones and our family members and our children and our parents that all the names of those who are near and dear to each one of us will be found on the lamb in the lamb's book of life when Jesus comes again.

And Jesus, when you come again in the clouds of glory, we humbly ask, please come looking for me and please come looking for every head head that is bowed here tonight. In your name, we humbly ask. Amen. Amen. So, tomorrow morning, we have a regular church service at the Calvary Chapel down in Kihei.

Uh the Bible study starts at 9:30. Everybody's welcome to come to