ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 9 · Ezekiel 10:18-19; Ezekiel 37:1-14; Daniel 9:20-27
The glory leaves the Temple by the east gate. In Babylon a valley of dry bones stands up, and Daniel is told how long until the Messiah, and what follows him.
Ezekiel was a priest, carried to Babylon in 597 BC, eleven years before the Temple fell. He never got to serve in it. In the sixth year of his exile God showed it to him in a vision, and what he saw inside was worse than anything the Babylonians would do to the outside: an idol at the gate, seventy elders burning incense to pictures of beasts in a dark room, women at the north gate weeping for Tammuz, and twenty-five men with their backs to the house, bowing to the sun.
Then he watched the glory of the LORD, the cloud that had filled Solomon's house, lift from above the cherubim and stop at the threshold. From the threshold it went up with the cherubim and stood at the door of the east gate (Ezekiel 10:18-19). Then it went up from the city altogether and stood on the mountain to the east (Ezekiel 11:23). When Nebuchadnezzar's men finally put a torch to the house, God had been gone from it for years.
When word of the fall reached the exiles they said, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost (Ezekiel 37:11). God took their own words and made a vision of them. Ezekiel is set down in a valley full of bones, very dry, and asked, Son of man, can these bones live? (Ezekiel 37:3). He prophesies as he is told, the bones rattle together, sinews and flesh and skin come over them, and then breath enters and they stand up, an exceeding great army.
God is promising to raise a dead nation, and in the same chapter he promises to put his spirit in them, make them one kingdom again, and set David my servant over them as king for ever (Ezekiel 37:24), four hundred years after David was buried. Ezekiel ends his book with a new temple measured out room by room, and a river running out from under its threshold that turns the Dead Sea fresh. The last chapter of the Bible picks up that river (Revelation 22:1).
Daniel was taken to Babylon as a youth in 605 BC and was still there when the Persians took the city in 539. He served four pagan kings and never once bowed to their gods, and God showed him what was coming. Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a great image of gold, silver, bronze and iron, and of a stone cut out without hands that strikes the image to powder and grows into a mountain that fills the earth (Daniel 2:34-35). In the days of those kings, Daniel tells him, God will set up a kingdom that is never destroyed.
In the first year of Darius, Daniel was reading Jeremiah and understood that the exile was to last seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11). He prayed, confessing the sins of his people as his own, and the angel Gabriel came with an answer bigger than the question. Seventy weeks (seventy sevens) were determined, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness (Daniel 9:24).
Careful readers have never agreed on how to count those sevens, or which decree starts the clock. But the order of events in the text is not in doubt. Messiah comes; then shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary (Daniel 9:26). The Anointed One is killed first. The city and the Temple are destroyed afterward.
When Jesus warned his disciples that the Temple would be destroyed, he sent them to this book: When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet (Matthew 24:15).
Jeremiah had written to the exiles telling them to build houses and plant gardens and pray for the peace of Babylon, because in its peace they would have peace (Jeremiah 29:7). They were to live faithfully where God had set them down, and wait. Daniel did that for seventy years. Peter writes to Christians the same way, as strangers scattered abroad (1 Peter 1:1). The Messiah who was cut off, not for himself, rose again on the third day, and the breath that stood Ezekiel's bones on their feet is the Spirit he poured out on his people.