Having attended Seventh-day Adventist schools for twenty years and scratched my head through camp meetings, weeks of prayer, and evangelistic series, I ought to be more appreciative of the significance and reliability of date charting—a core principle of this week’s lesson. Until this writing, I had been uncertain that prophecy can serve as a reliable lens through which to view current events.

This week’s lesson made me wonder why we should emphasize dates and proofs that Jesus was Messiah at all, as if by charting time and comparing texts we could prove it. However, a closer reading of Daniel 9 suggests to me that the prophetic voice of Scripture, as reflected in prophecy, has much meaning for people today, as for governments and principalities to come.

I have been consumed recently by the news from Lebanon. Mercilessly, Israel has been firing missiles and dropping bombs across the Gaza Strip and Lebanon for the past three weeks. More than five hundred thousand people are internally displaced moving targets. The United States not only approves; it has covertly provided ammunition to Israel. To date, Israel’s offensive against Hamas and Hezbollah’s resistance has led to the death of more than 750 noncombatant Lebanese and 141 Palestinians, as well as 51 Israelis (BBC statistics).

For me, such events are a grim indictment of prophecy as it stands today. Advocating its significance in the midst of this war and dismissing the effect that policy and politics have on the events in the region seems disingenuous, irrational. The question of Daniel 9 is not when the end will come, but what we will learn in the meantime from the story of the ancient Israelites two and a half millennia ago.

Christian Zionism and dispensational prophecies about the end of time grew during the Second Great Awakening in England and the United States, forming the perspective British and American policy makers had of Palestine a century ago and informing their perceptions of Palestinians, Arabs, and perhaps by extension all Muslims today. The focus on Daniel 8 and 9 and its subsequent land-based eschatology (which is thankfully minimal in Adventists’ nondispensationalist premillennialism) therefore plays a direct role in the very suffering and irreplaceable losses that people are enduring today both personally and collectively. This bias, inspired by economics and national interests as well, leads both secular and religious analysts to see the impasse as irreducible.

However, when I reread Daniel 9, I discovered the prayer that precedes the prophecy and Daniel’s reference to his study of the prophet Jeremiah’s warnings to the Israelites during their captivity in Babylon (see Jer. 2–29).

Daniel, conventionally believed to be writing from Babylon in 530 B.C. after its capture by the Medes and Persians, sees an end to the desolation of Jerusalem and pleads with God on behalf of his people. He confesses their wickedness and acknowledges their disregard for the original covenant and subsequent warnings. His prayer is interrupted by a vision that predicts trouble for Jerusalem after it is rebuilt, which will last for 70 "weeks," or the 490-year period from when the Medes released the Jewish captives in 457 B.C. to the climactic crucifixion of Jesus in A.D. 33.

Gabriel’s oracle in Daniel 9 about the destiny of Israel is complex. The ancient Israelites are given the chance to rebuild their temple and are called on to restrain transgression, put an end to sin, and atone for their wickedness, or war and desolation would continue to the end. Eventually, the vision from Gabriel announces, the "Anointed One" will confirm his covenant with "many." The lesson study reminds the reader that this seventy-week prophecy is parallel to the twenty-three hundred day prophecy in Daniel 8:14, and that both are key to understanding the meaning of 1844 for Adventists.

I believe one need not be a theologian to glimpse the meaning of Daniel 9 for all people. The Israelites did bad things, ignored prophetic warnings, and broke their covenant with God. Even after God had led them out of Jerusalem, Jeremiah and Daniel in toe, the purpose and meaning of the Israelite’s submission was lost on them. Rather than seeing their trials as cause to return to God, they sought comfort in their own wisdom and self-centeredness.

Daniel knew God would not desert the sinful Hebrews despite their fickleness, wickedness, and repeated belligerence. However, Daniel 9 is not a passage about God or God’s view of time, but about a people and what they do with time. It is about what is happening now and what we are doing or supporting that is sinful.

Thinking of Jesus’ prophetic warning that "by their fruits ye shall know them," the study of Daniel 8 and 9 shifted from a shallow proof that Adventists are right about something to a conversation about the deeper call within the texts, when considered against Israel’s war on Hezbollah and the Lebanese and its offensive against Hamas and the Palestinians.

The timing of Gabriel’s oracle after Daniel’s prayer in Chapter 9 suggests to me that prophecy and our beliefs about salvation and Christ’s return should be evaluated in the context of the prophetic critique of both individual weaknesses and collective sinfulness. They are a call for reformation, not just because of past evils but also because of present and future ones.

We are called to study the Scriptures in the cyclical, self-critical tradition of reading that motivated Daniel and Jeremiah. Adventists must consider ourselves within the context of the respective social and political orders in which we live and operate, finding unity against injustice as our forbearers did. Egoism, corruption, and arrogance prompt the violence before religion or prophecy do, and this is a moment when our call for peace cannot be silent on the factual results from the imbalance of power and atrocity in certain regions of the world.

Only by reapplying the prophetic critique to the events of today and to the meaning of prophecy can one fully appreciate the fact that Jesus was more than a Jewish prophet, that the "seventy-week" prophecy is relevant to the price of life in Beirut and Gaza City, and that prophecy in the context of the prophetic rebuke against injustice and idolatry can be a guide to current events.

Daniel, a man of deep faith who knew the cost of war, became respected throughout the Babylonian empire because of his ability to speak truth to power. Cognizant of the broader meaning of his people’s suffering, he stood honestly before God. He bore the weight of the sins of his whole people, even after chastising them. They did not deserve his loyalty, much less God’s. Yet he acknowledges his own collective responsibility without losing sight of the Israelites’ ability to be redeemed of their individual and collective sin.

As we try to live our faith, let us learn from Daniel and Jeremiah and the painful lessons of the ancient Israelites.

The views expressed in this commentary are the author's alone and do not necessarily represent those of her employer.

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