Do you think Messiah was the abomination?
Who do you think was directing the Roman armies to carry out God's judgment upon Jerusalem?
What translation says "if you see"?
The people of the prince (
Daniel 9:26) refers to the Roman armies which were Messiah the Prince's (Daniel 9:25) agents and instruments to accomplish the judgment and destruction which He had prophesied. God's use of such instruments, and His characterization of them as "mine" even though pagan, can be found in several OT instances e.g.:
Jeremiah 25
9 Behold, I will send and take all the families of the north, saith the Lord, and
Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will bring them against this land, and against the inhabitants thereof, and against all these nations round about, and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, and an hissing, and perpetual desolations.
Jeremiah 43
10 And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will send and take
Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will set his throne upon these stones that I have hid; and he shall spread his royal pavilion over them.
God characterizes the pagan Nebuchadnezzar as "my servant" in using him and his armies against Judah and Egypt.
In the same way as Nebuchadnezzar, though a pagan, was God's servant in executing His judgment; so too were the pagan Roman armies (whose battle ensigns were abominations to the Jews) Messiah's people in accomplishing His purposes (the desolation of Jerusalem and Judea). (
Daniel 9:26,27)
In addition, the Jews themselves, as the historical people of Messiah the Prince, were equally responsible for the suffering and destruction. Their own actions in defiling and destroying the buildings and temple prior to the Roman invasion are described by Josephus:
The Lamentation of Josephus
War 5.1.4 19-20
The darts that were thrown by the engines [of the seditious factions] came with that force, that they went over all the buildings and the Temple itself, and fell upon the priests and those that were about the sacred offices; insomuch that many persons who came thither with great zeal from the ends of the earth to offer sacrifices at this celebrated place, which was esteemed holy by all mankind, fell down before their own sacrifices themselves, and sprinkled that altar which was venerable among all men, both Greeks and barbarians, with their own blood. The dead bodies of strangers were mingled together with those of their own country, and those of profane persons with those of the priests, and the blood of all sorts of dead carcasses stood in lakes in the holy courts themselves.
Oh most wretched city, what misery so great as this didst thou suffer from the Romans, when they came to purify thee from thy internal pollutions! For thou couldst be no longer a place fit for God, nor couldst thou longer survive, after thou hadst been a sepulchre for the bodies of thine own people, and hast made the Holy House itself a burying-place in this civil war of thine. Yet mayst thou again grow better, if perchance thou wilt hereafter appease the anger of that
God who is the author of thy destruction.
As seen, Josephus recognizes the Jews as complicit agents of their own destruction, and that destruction as Divinely orchestrated.
Contemporary Jewish historians concur:
"The scene was now set for the revolt's final catastrophe. Outside Jerusalem, Roman troops prepared to besiege the city; inside the city, the
Jews were engaged in a suicidal civil war. In later generations, the
rabbis hyperbolically declared that the revolt's failure, and the Temple's destruction, was due not to Roman military superiority but to causeless hatred (sinat khinam) among the Jews (Yoma 9b). While the Romans would have won the war in any case, the
Jewish civil war both hastened their victory and immensely increased the casualties. One horrendous example: In expectation of a Roman siege, Jerusalem's Jews had stockpiled a supply of dry food that could have fed the city for many years. But one of the warring Zealot factions burned the entire supply, apparently hoping that destroying this "security blanket" would compel everyone to participate in the revolt.
The starvation resulting from this mad act caused suffering as great as any the Romans inflicted."
The people, both Roman and Jewish, of the prince Messiah who was to come, were Messiah's agents and instruments in accomplishing His purposes of judgment and destruction upon those who had rejected Him.
