Isaac Newton had approached Daniel’s seventy weeks as a historic and scientific chronology which would remain aligned with the solar year. He had seen the danger in compressing the 490 years into fixed 360-day units. Writing more than a century before Darby and later dispensational scholars, Newton, the lauded physicist, was not impressed with the idea of calendar conversions and prophetic adjustments that would require a shift in dating the start and end of Daniel’s Messianic prophecy. He connected the 483 years to the Baptism of Christ rather than the Triumphal entry. Scholars should have paid more attention to Newton’s determination to honor God’s scarlet thread and divine intention.
In changing the timeline, futurists change Gabriel’s message in verse 27 to focus on a dark figure to appear 2500 years in the future instead of the fast-approaching appearance of the Messiah. They put a spotlight on the Anti-Christ instead of Jesus Christ. They use a converted 476-year period to focus on the wrong “appearance,” so that Christ’s supernatural baptism and ministry will be outside God’s final prophetic week. They also ignore the work and writing of the anointed scribe Ezra. The wrong story is being promoted so that the converted timeline will fit. The Word reveals the faithful Ezra traveled without soldiers in the time of trouble 13 years before Nehemiah with 1,496 Levites, temple servants, and singers who would need homes for their families. Refer to Figure 4, for the map showing how large the Temple area and Ophel were. Their work did more to rebuild the Holy City than any other mission.
Why have futurists been willing to replace Jesus Christ with Satan’s main-man the Anti-Christ and stick with it? Darby and others may have felt threatened by the rising popularity of Darwinian evolution and other philosophies. But why keep up the theory? Keeping a complete 360-day count while allowing for the conversion to 476 solar years might appeal to the science minded. The futurists may have felt that they could not change back to God’s original Solar Count since the “converted solar years” were so well accepted. This allowed them to keep Darby’s whole timeline and the meaning of Daniel 9:27. They created an exegesis that would use Nehemiah’s decree instead of Ezra’s. But why would they make such a drastic move away from the Messianic interpretation?