Why is Israel called God’s prophetic clock?

Question 10182.

Israel is often called God’s prophetic clock, and the phrase is a good deal more than a slogan if you understand what it is claiming. It means that Scripture measures prophetic time by reference to one nation, so that when God is dealing openly with Israel the clock is running and when He is not it is stopped.

I want to show you where that idea comes from in the text, what it does not mean, and why it keeps us from a great deal of foolishness.

Where the idea comes from

It comes chiefly from Daniel. The angel tells Daniel in Daniel 9:24 that seventy weeks are decreed concerning your people and your holy city. Not concerning the world in general and not concerning the church, but concerning Daniel’s people and Daniel’s city. The measurement is national from the start.

That is why the prophetic clock language is used at all. God gave a dated prophecy, running from a decree to rebuild Jerusalem, in units the prophet could count, tied to a specific people and place. If you want to know where you are in the programme, you look at what God is doing with that nation.

The word behind weeks, shabua, means a seven, and the sequence divides into seven, sixty two and one. I have worked through the arithmetic and the gap in the article on the seventy weeks.

The measurement is also anchored to a datable starting point. Daniel 9:25 begins the count from the going out of the word to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, which ties the prophecy to an event in Persian administrative history rather than to a vague era. A prophetic clock needs a starting position, and God supplied one.

The clock that stopped

The sixty ninth week ends with Messiah cut off. Then Daniel 9:26 describes the city and the temple destroyed by the people of a prince who is to come, and 9:27 describes a covenant made and broken in the middle of a final seven. Between the sixty ninth and the seventieth week there is a gap which Daniel does not measure.

That gap is the present age. The prophetic clock has stopped, not because God has changed His mind but because He is doing something Daniel was not shown, which Paul calls a mystery hidden in God and now revealed. The church age is not counted in Daniel’s weeks.

Jesus marks the pause Himself in Luke 21:24, saying Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. Until is a time word. It implies a resumption.

Paul describes the interval as a mystery in Ephesians 3, something hidden in God and now revealed through the apostles, namely that Gentiles would be fellow heirs in one body. A mystery by definition was not in the earlier revelation, which is exactly why Daniel’s weeks make no room for it and why the prophetic clock reads no time during the church age.

Why the church is not the clock

No text gives the church a prophetic timetable. We are told to watch, to be ready and to expect our Lord at any moment, and we are given no dates whatever. That is the opposite of a clock, and it is exactly what imminence requires.

Israel is measured; the church is unmeasured. Israel has decreed weeks, a named city, boundaries and a calendar of feasts; the church has a promise that He is coming and no way to date it. Those are two different kinds of expectation, and confusing them produces either date setting or despair.

So the prophetic clock belongs to Israel, and the church lives in the interval. That distinction is the backbone of the whole dispensational reading, and I set it out in the article on Israel and the church.

There is a further contrast in the commands given to each. Israel was given feasts, a calendar, a temple and dates. The church is given a table, a commission and a promise that He is coming. One is a people located in time and place; the other is a people gathered out of every nation with no timetable at all.

The clock will start again

Everything in the seventieth week is Jewish in orientation. There is a covenant with Israel, a temple, a sacrifice interrupted, an abomination in the holy place, a flight from Judea, a sealing of twelve thousand from each tribe, and a time of distress which Jeremiah calls the trouble of Jacob. Whatever else the Tribulation is, it is God finishing His business with a nation.

Paul says the same thing in different language. In Romans 11 a hardening has come upon part of Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and then all Israel will be saved. Another until, and another resumption of the prophetic clock.

So the sequence is: sixty nine weeks completed, the clock stopped at the cross, the church age running unmeasured, the church removed, and the seventieth week resuming God’s open dealing with Israel. I trace the whole order in the article on God’s plan for Israel.

There is a further mark of the resumption which is easy to miss. The seventieth week ends with the six purposes of Daniel 9:24 accomplished: transgression finished, sin ended, iniquity atoned for, everlasting righteousness brought in, vision and prophecy sealed up, and a most holy place anointed. Those are national and temple purposes, and none of them has yet been completed in Israel. Until they are, the prophetic clock still has a week to run, and God has never yet left a decree unfinished.

What the prophetic clock does not mean

It does not mean that every headline from the Middle East is a prophetic fulfilment. The clock is stopped, and a stopped clock does not tick faster because the news is dramatic. Reading modern politics as a countdown has embarrassed the church repeatedly and I want no part of it.

It does not mean that Israel is beyond criticism. The prophets who announced her future also indicted her sin more fiercely than any modern commentator dares. Believing God keeps His promises to a nation is not the same as endorsing every action of a modern government.

And it does not license date setting. Jesus said in Acts 1:7 that it is not for us to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by His own authority. The prophetic clock tells us the shape of the programme, never the hour, as I argue in the article on date setting.

It does not mean, either, that the church can read her own future from the prophetic clock. Our instructions are moral rather than chronological: watch, be sober, love one another, occupy until He comes. A Christian who knows the sequence and neglects the instructions has missed the purpose of the revelation entirely.

Does 1948 mean the clock has restarted?

I do not think the re establishment of the modern state restarted the prophetic clock, because the seventieth week begins with a covenant, not with a declaration of independence. What I do think is that the return of a Jewish nation to that land, after nineteen centuries of dispersion, is a remarkable providence which puts in place something the prophecies require.

You cannot have a temple, a covenant, a sacrifice interrupted and a flight from Judea without a nation in the land. Whether 1948 is a fulfilment or a preparation is a fair question, and I lean towards preparation, as I explain in the article on 1948.

Either way the honest position is watchfulness rather than commentary. God has not asked us to keep score.

What I would say is that the situation now is more like the prophecies than it has been since the first century. A nation in the land, a functioning state, and a people who could conceivably enter into a covenant with a coming prince. Whether the prophetic clock is about to move is not for me to announce.

What I would resist most firmly is the industry that has grown up around dating the resumption. Every generation since 1948 has produced confident announcements, and each has passed. God has not given us the ticking of the prophetic clock as entertainment, and the appropriate posture towards a stopped clock is faithfulness rather than commentary on the hands.

So, now what?

Let the stopped prophetic clock do two things in you. It should make you patient with history, because God is not late and He is not improvising. And it should make you urgent with people, because the interval will end without notice.

If Israel is the clock and the church is the interval, then the question for us is not what time it is but what we are doing while it is stopped. Who has God put in your interval that you have been meaning to speak to?

Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity.

Daniel 9:24 (ESV)