Then there was given me a measuring rod like a staff; and someone said, “Get up and measure the temple of God and the altar, and those who worship in it. Leave out the court which is outside the temple and do not measure it, for it has been given to the nations; and they will tread under foot the holy city for forty-two months.”
—REVELATION 11:1-2
FORTY-TWO MONTHS—IN OTHER PLACES EXPRESSED AS A time, two times, and half a time; as 1,280 days; or as three and a half years—became a biblical paradigm or symbol for a period in which God’s people suffer oppression and persecution. Historically, this is drawn from the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Greek who hideously and viciously conquered and oppressed Israel from 168 to 165 B.C.—approximately three and a half years. Passionate to spread and enforce his version of Greek culture, he outlawed the practice of Judaism on pain of death, erected an image of Zeus in the temple of the Lord, and sacrificed a pig on its altar.
Much later, after Jesus had been crucified and resurrected, and after Stephen the deacon had been stoned to death, a rebellion of the Jews broke out against Rome with a messianic pretender named Menachem exerting significant influence. The rebellion surfaced in A.D. 66 and ended with the utter and catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, approximately three and a half years after it began.
This is where the seventy weeks of years in Daniel come in.
Seventy weeks have been decreed for your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy place. So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress. Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined. And he will make a firm covenant with the many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering; and on the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction, one that is decreed, is poured out on the one who makes desolate (Daniel 9:24-27).
The seventy weeks of years completes the prophecies of the coming of the Messiah and fulfills every prophecy concerning that manifestation of the nation-state of Israel in that particular expression of history. Sixty-nine weeks of years works out rather perfectly from the decree of Artaxerxes that the Jews could return to the land after the Babylonian exile, until the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. Jesus ministered three and a half years before His perfect sacrifice on the cross put an end to sacrifices once and for all.
If we then suppose that perhaps three and a half more years passed until the stoning of Stephen the deacon, marking the formal rejection of Jesus by the Jewish nation, we have the completion of the seventy weeks of years, the fulfillment and sealing up of the prophecies applying to Israel up until the time of Jesus. Then in A.D. 70, the Romans utterly destroyed Jerusalem and decisively crushed the Jewish rebellion. Once again, therefore, we see this pattern of three and a half years repeated.
Much popular teaching separates the seventieth week out to the end time two millennia later. This is illegitimate use of Scripture. It imposes a supposition not intrinsic to the actual words used. Absent any textual indication that the seventieth week should be separate from the sixty-nine, accurate interpretation of Scripture in context requires that the seventy weeks be consecutive, thus ending in the ministry of Jesus and then the stoning of Stephen. Sacrifice ends in the middle of the seventieth week, three and a half years after the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, not by decree of the antichrist as is so often taught, but rather because Jesus fulfilled the sacrificial system by becoming the final and complete sacrifice for sin. Satan was then defeated when Jesus rose from the dead, a victory that should inform our own lives and the manner in which we carry ourselves as believers.
Prophecies of the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem were fulfilled after the return from exile seventy years after the exile began. In light of an accurate interpretation of the seventy weeks of years and the end of sacrifice brought about by the crucifixion of Jesus, there remains no need to expect a third temple to be built as so many have assumed. As I have previously stated, a leading Jewish rabbi from the Los Angeles area was invited to address a class I took on Judaism and Christianity at Fuller Seminary in 1976. One of my fellow students asked about the rebuilding of the temple. The answer was, “No. We’re not rebuilding the temple. We don’t need a temple for sacrifice. We have repentance.”
As for Jerusalem being trampled under foot by the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles would be fulfilled (see Luke 21:24), consider this. From the time of the destruction of Jerusalem forward, the gospel went increasingly to the Gentiles. Messianic congregations faded away until at last, in A.D. 325, the Council of Nicea expunged Jewish influence from the life of the church. Tragically, centuries of persecution of the Jews by the church ensued. Messianic congregations virtually ceased to exist, and the body of Christ lost the balance God had originally put in place. In this figurative sense, Jerusalem was trampled under foot by the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles would be fulfilled.
I realize that many believe the current nation of Israel and the recovery of Jerusalem fulfills this prophecy concerning the dominance of the Gentiles coming to an end. Jerusalem was indeed held by Gentiles until the Six Day War in 1967 when the city was occupied once more by Israel. I would never minimize the significance of that event, nor would I deny that God had a hand in the victory, but I’m saying there may be more to it. As a sign of the end times, our victory, and the return of the Lord, the rise of the two witnesses in Revelation 11 may be more significant than the rebirth of the nation of Israel in 1948 or the recovery of Jerusalem by the Jews. Pay close attention to these things because I’m leading up to something important in the next chapter.