The 490 was a Big Thing; I Believe in the Big Guy

The 490 years Daniel prophesied (chapter 9) was a big thing to the Jews. Their captivity in Babylon demonstrated that God is playing hardball, like it or not. They had their calendars marked and were counting the days till the Messiah's arrival. Daniel 9:24 was going to happen! They did not wonder if God existed, they KNEW it. The Jews had encampments in the Jordan Valley, schools preparing the way of their Lord. John the Baptist heightened their expectations. They correlated everything that was happening to the scriptures, just as Christians today correlate everything that happens to the end times. There was an obvious schedule being kept.

Then the end came, they didn't like it, and they erased every trace that it had occurred. Except for the belief in the people who escaped them. The Jews of that day couldn't erase the belief and the presently incurred evidence of God confirming the story was true. There is your evidence of spiritual reality: God's demonstrative, responsive action in the present. The Jews saw a dead man raised back to life and STILL disbelieved, and killed the man who raised him from the dead. Jesus died for them.

Unlike the de-converting "were-believers," I do not wonder if there was a historical Jesus Christ. I know there was, for I have ample evidence of Him in the present. Just WHAT He was is what has puzzled me for many years. I have worked out that God is the consciousness, the action of the Ineffable Being, God being as far as we can go in associating anything with It. Jesus is a quality OF God which promotes all of It to the highest representation of It, and Christ is Jesus' action. Kind of a purifier, a corrector of natures.

I have "got" that characters of scripture are symbolic representations of spiritual realities. Allegories--their stories were often formulated upon popularly known historical persons and events, customized to present the spiritual teaching. But the question comes to the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth's PHYSICAL event. It has occurred to me that the Season of Grace was a PHYSICAL picture in history of what God is doing in history, and thus for the Messiah to bring the promised eternal righteousness of Daniel 9:24 He had to actually PHYSICALLY be present and to die. Again, as I said above, I have ample personal present evidence that the Messiah is alive and seated in power in Heaven as God. So even knowing that the SCRIPTURAL story of Him is a symbolic representation of the spiritual reality He is, it must be based upon the historical person who lived that reality and now responds in the present to belief in His name.

The 490 years was a story, a picture of what God is doing. It was God's "Word" to man. And so the Son of Man came as a 490-day story, a 70-week picture of what God is doing. He was God's Word to man. He was a story--THE story--that lived, a story of that which saves and heals those who believe in it. I do not think Jesus could respond in the present if He was not physically the Man in the past. Here in the present is our evidence: the Son of God became the Son of Man that the sons of man might NOW become the Sons of God. Yea, Big Guy!!

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Edit: According to Irenaeus (130-202 AD), that Christ's life repeated history correcting and reversing all negative effects of man's errors and disobediences was THE basic Christian doctrine. The doctrine is called recapitulation. See my old term paper in this previous post.