Everlasting righteousness, brought in

It is the Sabbath of this week, and there is nothing new to prove. So instead of pressing forward, hold still over one verse the whole week has been carrying.

Daniel had been counting. Reading Jeremiah, he reckoned that the seventy years of exile were nearly spent (Daniel 9:2), and he prayed – confessing sin, asking God to bring His scattered people home. He prayed about a release measured in years. Gabriel came in answer and spoke not of seventy years but of seventy weeks, and he gave Daniel six things those weeks would accomplish: to stop transgression, to put an end to sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy Place.

Notice the shape of the list. The first three verbs clear something away – transgression stopped, sin ended, iniquity atoned. The last three bring something in – righteousness ushered in, prophecy fulfilled and sealed, the holy place anointed. Daniel asked for an end to exile. He was answered with an end to the deeper exile, the one that began in a garden when shame first sent two people into the trees. The man counting seventy years was told about a rightness that would never need counting again, because it belongs to all the ages.

A woman I know kept a running tally of every wrong she had done, the way some people keep a budget. Not on paper – in her chest. She could produce, on demand, the exact figure of who she had hurt and how, going back decades. She called it being honest about herself. What it actually was, was exhausting. The column of debts kept lengthening, and there was nothing in the column of credit she trusted.

Someone finally asked her a strange question: who told you the books were yours to keep? She had assumed that getting herself right was her own work, that if she ever stopped reckoning, the debt would simply be ignored. She had never considered the third possibility – that the atonement might already be made, settled by someone else, and the only thing left was to stop adding to a sum that had already been paid.

That is the difference between exile measured in years and exile ended for good. One says: keep counting, maybe next year. The other says: the atonement is finished, the righteousness is brought in, you may put the ledger down. On the seventh day, God rested from His work. The week, finally, is about resting in a work that is finished.

Carried from Jerusalem to Babylon as a youth, Daniel served under a succession of pagan kings while keeping faith through a long life in exile. In his old age, reading Jeremiah’s promise that the exile would last seventy years, he turned to God in fasting and confession on behalf of his people. The answer he received reached far past his prayer: not only a return to the land, but the appointed coming of an Anointed One who would be cut off to make atonement and bring in everlasting righteousness. Daniel asked for a homecoming; he was shown the deeper homecoming of all who are far from God.