The Rabbi Who Counted the Years
Daniel 9:25-26 "Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks. Then for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time. And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing."
Hungary, the late 1880s. A young Orthodox rabbi named Leopold Cohn, raised in the Hasidic tradition of eastern Hungary and trained in the great yeshivas of Pressburg, was reading the book of Daniel. He kept circling back to one passage. Daniel chapter nine. Verses twenty-four through twenty-seven. The prophecy of the seventy weeks.
Daniel had written it during the Babylonian exile, around 538 BC. The prophecy gave a specific timeline: from the issuing of a decree to rebuild Jerusalem, sixty-nine weeks (483 prophetic years) until the Anointed One, the Messiah, would come. Cohn did the math. He knew the decree of Artaxerxes had gone out around 444 BC, and sixty-nine weeks of years from there landed somewhere in the early decades of the first century AD. Then Daniel said something even more troubling. The Messiah would be cut off, and shortly afterward the city and the sanctuary would be destroyed.
The Temple was destroyed in AD 70. Cohn could find no Jewish account that placed the Messiah's coming before then.
He took his question to an older rabbi, his mentor. The older rabbi told him to drop the subject; to pursue it would cost him his rabbinate. The older rabbi himself, he confessed, had stopped asking. Then he gave Cohn a strange piece of advice: go to America, where people knew more about the Messiah.
In 1892, Cohn boarded a ship for New York. He walked the streets looking for the answer Daniel had told him to look for. One day he passed a building with a sign in Hebrew: meetings for Jews. He went in. He heard the gospel preached in Yiddish, by a Jewish believer in Jesus. Within days, Cohn understood that the Messiah Daniel had pointed him toward was named Yeshua of Nazareth, who had been cut off thirty-some years before the Temple fell, exactly as the prophecy had said.
In 1894, Cohn opened a small mission in Brooklyn, in a renovated horse stable. His first meeting was attended by eight Jewish people. The mission grew. Today it is called Chosen People Ministries, and it gave rise, decades later, to Jews for Jesus, the ministry our brother David Brickner now leads, who our church sat under on Sunday.
Daniel chapter nine, written by a Hebrew prophet in a Babylonian palace twenty-five centuries ago, is still finding sons of Abraham today.
Read Daniel's words slowly. "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, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place" (Dan 9:24). The list reads like a job description. Finish transgression. End sin. Atone for iniquity. Bring in everlasting righteousness. Anoint the most holy place. There is exactly one figure in the history of the world who could be said to have done all five of these in any meaningful sense, and Daniel was writing about Him five hundred years before He was born.
And here’s the wonder underneath the math.
God didn’t just send His Son into the world. He told His people, in advance, when to expect Him. Daniel gave them a clock. Isaiah gave them a portrait. David gave them a description of His death (Psalm 22). Micah gave them an address (Bethlehem, in Micah 5:2). The Old Testament isn’t just a witness to Christ; it’s a meticulously dated, geographically specific, prophetically detailed announcement of His arrival, written across a thousand years by men who had never met one another, who somehow agreed on every essential feature of a Messiah none of them lived to see.
This is why we shouldn’t be ashamed to share Jesus with our Jewish friends.
Their own Scriptures are still doing what they did for Cohn. The Spirit who moved Daniel still opens eyes through Daniel. We don’t bring something foreign to a Jewish friend when we point them to Jesus; we point them to the One their own prophet was waiting for. Paul, a Jew himself, said it without flinching in Romans 1:16, the gospel is the power of God for salvation to the Jew first and also to the Greek. The to the Jew first is not a footnote, but a posture.
Today: Name one Jewish person in your life. A friend, a coworker, a neighbor, a family member. Pray for them by name. Pray simply: Lord, would You let them see in their own Scriptures the Messiah they have been waiting for. Then ask the Lord whether there is one specific way you can love them this week. A meal, a question, a presence at a hard moment, a quiet word of testimony when the door opens.
Prayer: "Father, I worship You for prophecies kept across millennia and a Messiah who came exactly when You said He would. Thank You for every Jewish believer who carries that lineage of light into the world. Open the eyes of the Jewish friends we name before You today; let them see the Messiah of their own Scriptures. In Jesus' name, Amen."
-PK