This post title makes me feel like I’m at work and it’s about 5 minutes after the bell, and I’ve run into a few students who are taking their sweet time to get, well, basically anywhere.

“Where are you supposed to be?” I’ll say.

“Not sure, Miss,” would be the lethargic reply.

“Well did you check your timetable?”

I don’t even know why I bother saying it. Of course they didn’t. And it’s a beautifully blissful piece of ignorance that they’re playing with, that they actually don’t know where they’re supposed to be… and they don’t want to know.

Timetables.

They seem very earthy and methodical, to me at least. They don’t seem like something that’s supernatural and out of this world because they aren’t. They seem so tangible that it feels strange to me at least, that God operates with one.

And yet, perhaps I shouldn’t find it that surprising, because if he is really God, then he not only knows the timetable, he made the timetable.

As someone who has never been on the timetabling team at work, this thought actually helps me to realise that there is actually spiritual wonder in this thought about divine timetabling.

I’ve never been on the timetabling team because I know it is some organisational ‘fun’ that I can go without in my life. And that’s just for one school!

God timetables the whole world. Across all time. And he doesn’t just start working on it 6 months before the next school year. He planned the whole thing before he put it all in place.

OK, that’s thought is so out of this world I think it’s making me sick. Back to the puzzle pieces.

Puzzle Piece 5: Babylon to Jesus

Rewind back in time to when the Jews were exiled in Babylon and Daniel was a Jew who, despite his captivity, still feared God and obeyed him.

Here is what happened to him during one prayer session:

While I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel and making my request to the Lord my God for his holy hill— while I was still in prayer, Gabriel, the man I had seen in the earlier vision, came to me in swift flight about the time of the evening sacrifice. He instructed me and said to me, “Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding. As soon as you began to pray, a word went out, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed. Therefore, consider the word and understand the vision:

“Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finishtransgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place.

“Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed.

The prophecy is not easy to understand. However, what is clear is that God has a timetable for his people. It’s also clear that Daniel is someone important. The angel makes plain that God doesn’t just appear to whoever. Daniel is highly esteemed. That’s why Daniel receives the message.

Now, if you do all the maths – which isn’t my thing – you calculate 490 years from the time that the Jews return to Babylon (5th century BC) and rebuild the temple, until the time when the temple is then destroyed (AD 70).

In the middle of all that, there are two mentions of ‘the Anointed One’ in this timetable and the person seems to be killed not long before the destruction of the temple.

The Anointed One. This is a very pregnant phrase. There are all sorts of ideas here including king, favoured by God, empowered, set apart for a task and so forth.

These ideas seem very similar to ideas that were present in earlier pieces. And we’ve already seen that the 490 years that Daniel was told about include when Jesus was on the planet.

That’s because when Christians say ‘The Anointed One’ they mean Jesus.

The timetable and the foreknowledge of it really is mind blowing. But if God is God, what do we expect? He knows what he’s doing and when he’s doing it.

Yours in awe,

Alison