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The King Reigns!“Let Your Kingdom Come”
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[Box on page 135]
CALCULATING THE “SEVEN TIMES”
7 “times” = 7 × 360 = 2,520 years
(a Biblical “time” or year being the mean between a lunar year of 354 days and a solar year of 365 1/4 days)
607 B.C.E. to 1 B.C.E. = 606 years
1 B.C.E. to 1 C.E. = 1 year
1 C.E. to 1914 C.E. = 1,913 years
607 B.C.E. to 1914 C.E. = 2,520 years
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The King Reigns!“Let Your Kingdom Come”
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20. What question do we ask, and where may we look for the answer?
20 Counting from the time that God’s typical kingdom, with its Davidic king, was overthrown, how long would it be until God once again expressed his sovereignty through a kingdom involving the royal line of David, with Messiah as the ruling king? Daniel chapter 4 provides a basis for determining the length of the Gentile Times or “the appointed times of the nations,” during which those nations would trample on “Jerusalem,” or the kingdom of God.—Luke 21:24.
21. What do Daniel 4:15-17 and Job 14:7 indicate as to the situation following Zedekiah’s dethronement?
21 This trampling dates from the year in which Nebuchadnezzar removed King Zedekiah from the throne in Jerusalem. From then on, Jehovah’s exercise of sovereignty as represented in the line of Judean kings was ‘chopped down.’ It was under restraint, like the banded tree trunk of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Beastlike Gentile powers held sway over all the earth. But there existed a hope for the “tree,” that it would “sprout again.” And then people living would “know that the Most High is Ruler in the kingdom of mankind.”—Daniel 4:15-17; Job 14:7; compare Isaiah 11:1, 2; 53:2.
22. When and in what way does the Kingdom “tree” flourish again?
22 In this restored kingdom, the Most High rules by his Messiah. No, not at that One’s first appearance as a perfect man on earth, when the Jews despised him and rejected him as king. But the bands on the tree stump are released, and the Kingdom “tree” flourishes again, when this “lowliest one of mankind” arrives in his glory as heavenly King of the people of all nations. Then, as the Gentile Times end, the kingdom of the world becomes “the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.”—Revelation 11:15; Daniel 4:17, 25.
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