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"For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation" (Luke 19:42-44),. But there's more. "And after threescore and two weeks 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; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined" (Daniel 9:26). Verse 26 deals with events after the 62 weeks (therefore, also after the earlier seven, thus making it after the total of 69 weeks), and yet before the 70th week begins, which will be dealt with in verse 27. It is important to recognize that there are specific events specified between the 69th and 70th week, and, thus, not all the weeks are contiguous. * One of the events is that the Messiah shall be "cut off (karat, execution; death penalty). It comes as a surprise to many to discover that the Old Testament predicts that the Messiah of Israel is to be executed.305 the city and the sanctuary. Indeed, just as Jesus had predicted, 38 years after the end of the 69th week, in A.D. 70, Titus Vespasian and the 5th, 10th, 12th, and 15th Roman legions laid siege to the city and slaughtered more than a million inhabitants. Inadvertently, the interior of the Temple caught fire, causing its extensive gold coverings and fixtures to melt, and so the Temple was subsequently taken apart, stone by stone, to recover the gold. The specific prediction of Jesus was precisely fulfilled 38 years after his crucifixion. While there are specific events that required at least 38 years between the 69th and 70th weeks of Daniel, thus far this interval has lasted more than 1,900 years.°”° This interval is the period of national blindness for Israe1*°’ which Jesus announced. It is also the period that includes the Church (used here in its mystical or spiritual sense rather than in any organizational sense), a mystery kept hidden in the Old Testament. (It seems that the Lord deals with Israel and the Church mutually exclusively. A chess clock, with its two interlocked representations, is an illustrative example; one clock is stopped while the other is running.) 137 VERSE 26: THE INTERVAL Other events that intervene between the 69th and 70th weeks are the destruction of both Evidence is accumulating that this interval may be about over, and the famed 70th week