A Perfectly Prophetic Palm Sunday

We all know that the prophet Daniel was thrown to the lions and not eaten, and that he interpreted the original writing on the wall.  His unshakable faith in God never changed, despite his circumstances.  He was a man of great gifts and spiritual depth, and his prophecies continue to awe and puzzle people of all faiths today.  But did you know that this same Daniel eerily and accurately prophesied–to the day–the time of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem?

Today we call it Palm Sunday.

Palm Sunday has become somewhat of an afterthought on many modern Protestant calendars.  Some churchgoers may be more familiar with Palm Sunday as “The Sunday Before Easter,” or “The Day When The Kids Get to Wave The Palm Fronds Around.”  Other Christians might know it only as a curious notation on wall calendars, a hazy, unfamiliar holiday which has always been there, but with which they feel few connections.

But what a day to celebrate and remember! Palm Sunday, if you are not familiar, is the day when Christians commemorate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the week before His crucifixion.  According to the Gospel accounts, it was an exciting day!  Here’s what Matthew says about it:

So the disciples went and did as Jesus commanded them. They brought the donkey and the colt, laid their clothes on them, and set Him on them.  And a very great multitude spread their clothes on the road; others cut down branches from the trees and spread them on the road. Then the multitudes who went before and those who followed cried out, saying:

“Hosanna to the Son of David!

‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’ 

Hosanna in the highest!”

And when He had come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, “Who is this?”

So the multitudes said, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth of Galilee.”

–Matthew 21:6-11 (NKJV)

Mark’s account says this:

Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their clothes on it, and He sat on it. And many spread their clothes on the road, and others cut down leafy branches from the trees and spread them on the road.  Then those who went before and those who followed cried out, saying:

“Hosanna!

‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’

Blessed is the kingdom of our father David

That comes in the name of the Lord!

Hosanna in the highest!”

–Mark 11:6-10 (NKJV)

Luke puts it this way:

Then they brought [the colt] to Jesus. And they threw their own clothes on the colt, and they set Jesus on him. And as He went, many spread their clothes on the road.

Then, as He was now drawing near the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works they had seen, saying:

“‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!’ 

Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”

 And some of the Pharisees called to Him from the crowd, “Teacher, rebuke Your disciples.”

But He answered and said to them, “I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out.”

–Luke 19:34-40 (NKJV)

And John remembers it like this:

The next day a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, and cried out:

“Hosanna!

‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’ 

The King of Israel!”

Then Jesus, when He had found a young donkey, sat on it; as it is written:

“Fear not, daughter of Zion;

Behold, your King is coming,

Sitting on a donkey’s colt.”

His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about Him and that they had done these things to Him.

–John 12:12-16 (NKJV)

As you can see, the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem is exciting, joyful, dramatic, and chronicles  an important event in the life of Christ.  It was so important, in fact, that all four of the Gospel writers include it in their accounts of Jesus’ life.  From an earthly perspective, Jesus’ triumphal entry into the Holy City was a crowning moment for His mission.  People whose lives had been touched by Christ joyfully testified in the streets of His omnipotence and divine identity; and why shouldn’t they?  The Messiah, the long-awaited King sent by God to liberate their nation and restore mankind, had entered the holiest city in Judaism during one of the holiest weeks on the Jewish calendar.  It was a great moment to be alive, and a joyful occasion to witness firsthand.  It was a moment of anticipation and happiness, a moment given to those alive at the time to praise God and declare Christ as the Son of God.

But it was also a moment for those who had died many centuries before and a moment for hundreds of generations yet to be born.  From a prophetic perspective, Palm Sunday is a vitally important part of Jesus’ assertion of His divinity.  As John pointed out, the apostles did not grasp the prophetic importance of the event until after Christ’s resurrection, and when they did, it was the words of the prophet Zechariah which spoke to them, written at least five-hundred years earlier:

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!

Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem!

Behold, your King is coming to you;

He is just and having salvation,

Lowly and riding on a donkey,

A colt, the foal of a donkey.

I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim

And the horse from Jerusalem;

The battle bow shall be cut off.

He shall speak peace to the nations;

His dominion shall be ‘from sea to sea,
And from the River to the ends of the earth.’

–Zechariah 9:9-10 (NKJV)

But the prophet Daniel had written of the event at least another century before Zechariah, and his prophecy was startlingly scientific in its accuracy.   For reasons unknown, however, we rarely hear mention made of Daniel on Palm Sunday.  This is a curious thing, for his prophecy seems to predict the exact date of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  Let’s take a look at it:

“A period of seventy sets of seven has been decreed for your people and your holy city to put down rebellion, to bring an end to sin, to atone for guilt, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to confirm the prophetic vision, and to anoint the Most Holy Place. Now listen and understand! Seven sets of seven plus sixty-two sets of seven will pass from the time the command is given to rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One comes. Jerusalem will be rebuilt with streets and strong defenses, despite the perilous times. “After this period of sixty-two sets of seven, the Anointed One will be killed, appearing to have accomplished nothing, and a ruler will arise whose armies will destroy the city and the Temple. The end will come with a flood, and war and its miseries are decreed from that time to the very end.

–Daniel 9:24-26 (NLT)

This prophecy is known as Daniel’s “Seventy Weeks” prophecy.  The King James Version of the Bible starts verse 24 by saying “Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city.”  The original text, according to Bible scholars, reads ”seventy sets of seven.”  This increment of time is somewhat ambiguous to the layman.  “Seventy sets of seven” could mean anything from seventy sets of seven minutes to seventy sets of seven centuries (say that three times fast!)

But most Christian theologians agree that this phrase indicates seventy sets of seven prophetic years each.  A prophetic year is 360 days.  Each time a biblical prophecy mentions a year, it is speaking of this 360-day year as opposed to the 365.2425-day year we now enjoy under the Gregorian calendar.  Using the prophetic year, we are given a period of 483 prophetic years from the rebuilding of Jerusalem to the arrival of the Messiah.

That being established, let’s take a look at verse 25: “Seven sets of seven plus sixty-two sets of seven will pass from the time the command is given to rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One comes. Jerusalem will be rebuilt with streets and strong defenses, despite the perilous times.”

As indicated from the phrase “until the Anointed One comes,” this is very clearly a messianic prophecy.  But Jerusalem is a city that has been conquered, destroyed, and rebuilt literally hundreds of times over the span of the past three millenia.  In all that history of conquest and destruction, which reconstruction could Daniel have meant?
 

At the time of Daniel’s prophecy, Jerusalem was in ruins.  The city and the temple had been destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, who had forced many of the Jews–including Daniel–into captivity in the city of Babylon (which is located today in Iraq) in 606 B.C.  Since Jerusalem was in ruins and defenseless when Daniel wrote his prophecy, it makes logical sense that Daniel’s Seventy Weeks prophecy concerned the most immediate rebuilding of Jerusalem from his perspective.

That first rebuilding of Jerusalem after Daniel’s captivity is recorded in the Book of Nehemiah.  In that familiar story, the Jewish cupbearer Nehemiah is dismayed that his people’s holy city still lies unprotected and in ruins two centuries after its destruction.  He obtains permission from his king to travel to Jerusalem and oversee the rebuilding of its walls under the king’s protection and authority.  This rebuilding is completed in a record fifty-two days in 445 B.C.

According to many scholars, when the final stone was set in place in Nehemiah’s reconstruction, the divine clock that had been described in the Book of Daniel began ticking.
 

Here comes the eerie part.  The Book of Nehemiah is a meticulous account.  Dates and names are preserved precisely throughout the Book. Four-hundred and eighty-three prophetic years to the day after Nehemiah’s reconstruction was completed, the date was March 30, 33 A.D., which was the Sunday before the passover in the year commonly believed by Christians worldwide to be the year of Jesus’ crucifixion.  It was the first Palm Sunday, when Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem “just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey.”  This is the exact day that Daniel predicted that the “Anointed One” would come to be killed.

 

In his Seventy Weeks prophecy, the prophet Daniel points directly, scientifically, and literally to the first Palm Sunday.  To Christians today, the fulfillment of this prophecy in such a real way should reconfirm the reality of Christ’s divinity; Jesus was not just a good man or a miracle-worker or a prophet.  He was and is God in the flesh, Messiah, the prophesied Anointed One sent to deliver mankind of their sin through God’s chosen people.

This Easter, as we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, I hope you will lay everything down for Him and allow Him to enter triumphantly into your heart, to cleanse you of your sins and restore you to fellowship with God, just as the prophets said He would.

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