Daniel’s Prayer

I invite you to turn again to Daniel chapter 9. We’ve read part of the text for today together, and now we’ll pick it up and read the balance of the chapter that prepares us not only for this morning but also for the challenging study of this evening.

Daniel has acknowledged that the calamity that the people of God have encountered is directly related to their sin. And verse 14: “‘Therefore the Lord has kept ready the calamity and has brought it upon us, for the Lord our God is righteous in all the works that he has done, and we have not obeyed his voice. And now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and have made a name for yourself, as at this day, we have sinned, we have done wickedly.’

“‘O Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city Jerusalem, your holy hill, because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people have become a byword among all who are around us. Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his pleas for mercy, and for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate. O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name.’

“While I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my plea before the Lord my God for the holy hill of my God, while I was speaking in prayer, the man Gabriel, whom I[’d] seen in the vision at the first, came to me in swift flight at the time of the evening sacrifice. He made me understand, speaking with me and saying, ‘O Daniel, I have now come out to give you insight and understanding. At the beginning of your pleas for mercy a word went out, and I have come to tell it to you, for you are greatly loved. Therefore consider the word and understand the vision.’

“‘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. Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of … 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. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.’”

This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Let’s try that again. It’s okay. One is good, and two is better. This is the Word of the Lord. [Congregation: “Thanks be to God.”]

Gracious God, we turn to the Word, but we turn first to you, the Lord of the Word, asking earnestly, humbly, that we might know the enabling of the Holy Spirit, that the pages of our Bibles may be illumined to us, that our hearts may be softened before its truth, that our wills might be brought into line with its truth. Show us ourselves. Show us our Savior, we pray. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Well, here we are, back to our studies in Daniel. I know some of you, quite cynically, were suggesting that because chapter 9 is so hard, that I was going to go away and we would never return to it. But I must confess I’ve thought of it, but here we are. Chapter 9 contains the most difficult passage in the entire book of Daniel—in fact, having spent a long time on it, maybe the most difficult passage in the entire Bible. It’s up for question.

You’ll be delighted to know that this is for the honors course, which will begin at 6:00 p.m. this evening, and those of you in the morning hour who are doing something else at 6:00 will be saved the discursus on the most difficult verses in the book of Daniel.

For now, we need to move quite quickly through a large section of the text that will take us probably right to verse 19. This demands that I need to be selective in part. My assumption is always that you are reading the Bible; that you’re reading before, during, and after; and that you have access to material that will help to supplement that which we learn together on the Lord’s Day. Without that, I think it’s virtually impossible for any of us to really come to terms with the text of Scripture. The idea that one little dip into the Bible for thirty or thirty-five minutes once a week will be able to teach us the overarching themes of the Bible and an understanding of it is really a forlorn hope. And so, I say that just as a word of reminder and perhaps as a word of encouragement.

This is one of the great prayers of the Bible, of the Old Testament, and the key in Daniel itself. We know that Daniel prayed. Prayer for Daniel was not a spasmodic activity. It wasn’t a passing fancy. We saw in chapter 6 that it was the result of his unwillingness to submit to the overreaching of the state that found him in the lions’ den. And in that chapter, we’re reminded of the fact that Daniel, despite what the government was saying, still prayed in his room three times a day. And in the NIV, it makes that point by using the word “still pray[ed],”[1] as if somehow or another he just began to do it because he was a subversive character is not true at all. He was what he was, and prayer was at the very heart of his life.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that as this book unfolds, we find him here “in the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus”—which, incidentally, puts it as a parallel to what we’ve just referred to in chapter 6. And essentially, what we discover as the chapter opens is that Daniel was having his quiet time, if we can put it that way—that he was both reading the Bible and he was praying. This was part of the pattern of his life. Daniel knew that the Word of God was a lamp to his feet and a light to his path.[2] And here, as would be true for other periods of his life, he was paying attention to what the prophets of God had said.

I’m not going to do a lot of this, but you will be helped if you turn just to this one section of Jeremiah chapter 25 so that we can understand together what it was that stirred him to pray. Jeremiah chapter 25 has to do with the exile, with the captivity of the people of God. Daniel is in the midst of this. The people of God are wondering how long this is going to go on. Daniel is reading in the books of the words—and if we just read from verse 11, let’s say, 25:11—the word of God through the prophet: “This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation,” and so on. And so Daniel’s reading, and he realizes that the time of the exile is about to draw to a close. And since God was the one responsible for the beginning of the exile, so God will be responsible for the end of the exile.

You remember back in chapter 1, we noted that God gave the people into the hands of the marauding forces of the Babylonians.[3] God was responsible for his people being in this predicament, and God would relieve his people from this predicament in due course. Incidentally, the cry “How long will this go on?”—the feeling of “How hard is it to sing the song of the Lord surrounded by such oppression and so many alien ideas?”[4]—is not a cry that is anchored in the sixth century BC but is a recurring cry of the people of God throughout the periods of history and, indeed, throughout the geography of the world. And some of you, actually—I know from listening to you—have this question as a recurring notion in your heart and mind, because you will often voice it when I’m in your company: “How long is this going to go on like this? How long is it going to be where the forces of oppression seem so amazingly powerful and the people of God seem so incredibly weak and useless?”

Well, Daniel read his Bible. And as he read the Bible, although he was a man who had been given insight into visions and who could understand things, he was humble enough to listen to the word of the prophet and to pay attention. And as a result of that, he was then stirred to pray.

Let me just make one point here before we move on, and that is concerning a daily dose of the Bible, if you like. Without a daily diet of the Word of God, we will find ourselves living in immaturity. We will find ourselves living in immaturity. I’ve mentioned it already, and I want to say to you again that it is both foolish, and it is dangerous, and it will stunt your spiritual growth if the Bible is not for you, on a routine basis, the lamp and the direction of your life. Those who have been most useful in the kingdom of God have never deviated from this pattern. And when we’re tempted to do so, I think each of us would confess to the distinction that we then face.

Without a daily diet of the Word of God, we will find ourselves living in immaturity.

John Stott, who was in his life a classic example of Christian godliness, says of the importance of time alone with God, “One of the great purposes of daily Bible reading … and prayer is … to get ourselves correctly oriented, to remember who and what we are.”[5] And when we turn to the Bible on a daily basis, despite everything that is going on around us, we read in the Scriptures, and the Spirit of God brings home to us the things that are true, that are verities, that transcend time, and they transcend geography as well, and the various machinations of the political forces around us.

It is a striking thing to me, in reading this, that an understanding of God’s purpose, which he’s given, and a trust in God’s promise does not then lead Daniel to say, “Well, there’s nothing I need to do.” He reads Jeremiah, and he reads that the exile is going to come to an end after seventy years. But he doesn’t say, “Well, in that case, we can just relax and wait it out.” No! It is the discovery of that which leads to his prayer.

If you look, for example, at verse 16, here is his cry out to God: “O Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city Jerusalem, your holy hill.” Oh, but he just read in Jeremiah that that’s exactly what God is going to do. So why is he asking him to do what he’s going to do? Because somehow, in the economy of God, the prayers of God’s people are interwoven in the unfolding of God’s purpose. Now, you can think that out. You’re a sensible group. Essentially, what he’s saying is “Father, may your will be done on earth.”

Daniel’s Approach

Now, with that as the setting, let’s consider just very briefly, first of all, his approach—the approach that he takes. And you will see it there in verse 3: “Then I turned my face to the Lord God.” In another words, there’s nothing casual, nothing trivial, nothing banal. Rather, it is deliberate: “I turned my face,” or, in some translations, “I set my face.”[6]

You know, one of the challenges for young parents, and particularly young moms—I think they bear the brunt of it—is to make sure that their children look at people when they’re talking to them. Isn’t that what the young moms say? “Look at me when you’re talking to me. Don’t be looking out the window. Look at me. You’re talking to me.” And, of course, it is a strange and usually an unsettling kind of thing when somebody who is apparently talking to you is looking beyond you and is talking away to you. It’s like, “Am I here? Or what’s going on?” The picture is very clear. He’s not talking to God while working on his laptop. He’s not talking in some strange way. No, he’s very deliberately setting his face to the Lord—turning to him, seeking him, pleading with him, fasting in assessing him. He knows the words of the psalmist: “You have said, ‘Seek my face.’ My heart says to you, ‘Your face … I [will] seek.’”[7] That’s his approach. “I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears.”[8]

We could say more, but we must move on. I have a series of a’s this morning. First of all, then, his approach. It’s a very deliberate, humble, purposeful approach.

Daniel’s Address

Notice, secondly, how he addresses God. How he addresses God. “I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession, saying, ‘O Lord, the great and awesome God…’” In other words, he addresses God as God. You say, “Well, that’s, you know, that’s a brilliant insight.” Well, I wouldn’t say it’s brilliant, but I would think it’s necessary. Because we don’t always address God as God. In our prayers, both private and public, if people could hear us, they would say, “Are you really going to address the creator of the universe in such a casual and trivial manner? Who do you think you are?”

When Isaiah “saw the Lord,” in Isaiah 6, “high and lifted up,”[9] remember what he said? “I[’m] a man of unclean lips.”[10] Somebody else would have said, “Now, wait a minute! You’re the prophet of God.” Yes, he was. “And I live in a middle of a group of people who also have unclean lips.”[11] Well, that’s not very nice to say about people! What was it that brought this out of him? When he addressed God, he understood to whom he was speaking. God is great. God is awesome. God is holy. God is majestic. God is not like us. And his majesty is no barrier to intimacy with him. But we ought never to assume that intimacy is expressed with some kind of undue informality and easiness.

This is something that we as a church need to keep before us, and I bring it before you today as well. I know that some of you think that I just bring a bunch of little shibboleths from Scotland and, you know, I’m growing increasingly old and cold and settled in my ways and disgruntled and so on. That may all be true. But there is actually a reason why I talk about silence in the moments before we are led in praise and turn to the Word. There is a reason. Because we’re not at the Rotary Club. We haven’t met each other at Starbucks. We’re not on a trip. This place is not a sanctuary, but when we gather as the people of God, corporately, to engage with God, we are in a place and in a time that is unlike other times.

And so, when we have listened to the Word of God, the idea of sitting and being silent for a nanosecond, let alone time for the Word of God to settle on our hearts—the reason for that, in my mind, is all related to the way in which we come before the covenant-keeping God. And when people come into a place of praise and worship, and come into the study of the Word, they can tell how serious that congregation is about what is happening in the preaching of the Word, in the praising of God’s name. The visitor can understand. And therefore, we have a responsibility, not only in terms of looking to God but in encouraging one another and in letting those who come in and say, “Wow! What is this about? I thought it would be a lot more ‘cozy.’ I thought it would be a lot more jazzy. I thought… What’s with the silence?”

“O God, you are the great and awesome God. You keep your covenant love with those who obey your commandments.” Immediately, somebody runs their car off the road right there: “Obey the commandments? What’s this? This is Old Testament stuff. We’re in the New Testament now, aren’t we?” Yes, and the Old Testament. The whole Bible! What did Jesus say? “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”[12] Well, it’s very straightforward.

You see, that’s the nature of covenant love. God has entered into a covenant with his people. He’s told them, through Moses, “I will be your God, and you will be my people.[13] This is how it’s going to work. You do what I tell you. I’m going to give you my commands and my rules. You do that, we’re going to live together very happily. You disobey that, you’re going to be in all kinds of mess.”

Love without obedience is just sentimentality.

Well, it’s the exact same thing in the covenant of marriage—or it’s comparable, isn’t it? I mean, the real issue this morning is not whether you wakened up and you had a great surge of emotion in relationship to your spouse. You may have done. I don’t know. It’s none of my business. But the fact is that the real issue is that you made vows to that person, and you’re keeping them, whether you feel like it this morning or whether you don’t. And it is your commitment to the vows that are the indication of the nature of your love.

You see, because love without obedience is just sentimentality. It’s sentimentality. And when you think about the gathering of God’s people, and the nature of praise, and the significance of prayer, and all of these things, this catches us off guard, doesn’t it? Because it confronts us with the fact that we are so influenced by the culture around us. We are so influenced by the mindset of a generation that looks to itself as the be-all and end-all of what’s taking place and never actually gets to the place where it says, “O Lord, you are the great and awesome God. And we might want to think about that for just a moment: that you are holy, that you are righteous, and we are not.”

That’s his approach.

Daniel’s Admission

And then, thirdly, his admission. It’s really his confession, but I wanted to keep it with a’s. So, his confession. Where does he go from this? “You are the great and awesome God.” Verse 5: “We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, [and] turn[ed] aside from your command[s] and rules. We have not listened to your servants the prophets,” and so on.

Now, notice that Daniel’s relationship here with God is both personal and communal. He’s referred to him as “my Lord,” “my God.” “I prayed to the Lord my God”—verse 4. Now, in verse 5, “We have sinned.” It’s just a simple reminder of the fact that we’re brought into God’s family, and in that family, we have responsibilities to each other, and we share with one another.

He wasn’t casual in his approach, neither is he vague in his admission of guilt. This is not some generic statement, is it? There are no exceptions and no excuses. In fact, verse 5 just gives you the whole framework. And you can go through and see how many times he says, “We have sinned.” He says it in verse 5. He says it in 8. He says it in 11. He says it in 15. “We’ve sinned.” In other words, “We’ve gone the wrong way. We’ve done wrong. We’ve acted wickedly. We’re guilty. We’ve rebelled.”

“Well,” you say, “this is not a very nice way to begin the day, is it, being reminded of this?” Well, think about it: most of us don’t want to be reminded of this. Most of us want to pretend. We want to have just a sort of brief, passing thought about the fact that “Yeah, well, yeah, I know I’m a sinner. Yes, let’s get on now.” No, but I’m rebellious. I see what God’s Word says, and I want to rebel against it. I see that the path of righteousness is a narrow road that leads down here, and I fancy going on the wide street.[14] I know that God’s Word is there in order that I might hear it, but I don’t want to listen to it. I’m wicked. I’m rebellious.

You remember the story—the little boy, before the days of car seats, who’s standing up on the front seat next to his mom as she’s driving the car? And she tells him, “Hey, sit!” He sits for a moment and springs back up. This goes on a little while. She finally pins his little bottom to the seat. And as they continue to drive, the boy says, “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I am standing up on the inside.”

Loved ones, you know how easy it is to play that game: in the public arena, apparently seated; in the privacy of my heart, standing.

You see, when we confess our sins to God, both individually and as a church, it helps to be specific. In fact, I think in many ways, Daniel’s pattern here is the right pattern. He doesn’t just say, “Lord, you know, things are not quite going the way you like them.” No, he’s very specific. And I think the more honest we can be with God—not least of all when we tell him, “We haven’t listened to you. We haven’t listened to you. If we’d listened to you, we would be different from what we are. We are, as a people, without excuse.” And Daniel, you’ll see here, if your text is open in front of you, is aware of the fact that it is the righteousness of God that is the very basis of God’s judgment. And it is that same righteousness which is the basis for their deliverance. All of Israel is involved in this. You see that in verse 11: “All Israel has transgressed your law … turned aside, refus[ed] to obey your voice.” Nobody can claim that they’re not part of the position.

Daniel’s Awareness

And Daniel then—fourth word with a—is aware of the reason for this dreadful predicament. He knows that this calamity—look at verse 12—this calamity that is upon them is as a result of the fact that they have not paid attention to the voice of God, they have “transgressed [his] law,” they have “turned aside,” and they “refus[e] to obey [his] voice.” That’s the significance of the second half of verse 11: “And the curse and [the] oath that are written in the Law of Moses the servant of God have been poured out upon us,” and justifiably so, “because we have sinned against him.”

God said to his people through Moses, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.”[15] And they said, “You know what? This is kind of boring. There are a lot of other gods around here, and we find them a lot more exciting. Why do we just have to do it this way?” He said, “I want you to make sure that you live in absolute holiness with one another.” They said, “We don’t like that so much. We think that maybe if we can just spread it a little on the fringes, we’ll be a whole lot better off.” And God had said through his servant, “If you violate these things, there are results to your disobedience.” And so Daniel now says, “Lord, we know that we’re in this predicament because we never paid attention to the very things that you told us.”

I mean, “As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.”[16] That’s why the challenge of parenting is so hard: “Look, I’m telling you this for your good,” and the child looks at you and goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” And then, somewhere along the line, they come back and they say, “Father, it was for my good. I didn’t need to go through that. If I’d only paid attention to what you said!” And the people have not paid attention to what God has said. And so here they are in exile, and Daniel now confesses the sins of the people.

The mystery in it is in verse 13: “As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this calamity has come upon us”—here we go—“yet”—yet—“we have not entreated the favor of the Lord our God, turning from our iniquities and gaining insight by your truth.” “Oh, the calamity has come upon us! Yet…”

It’s remarkable, isn’t it? Well, it is and it isn’t. You see, the aversion to repentance and the aversion to acknowledging a sense of sin is not something locked in the exile, 600 BC. What we see in the people of God in this calamity is actually representative of the nature of humanity itself. People on a routine basis are not acknowledging that they have acted wickedly, that they have rebelled against God—that they are this and they’re that and the next thing. They might say, “I’m not sure that my life is going the way I would like it,” “I’m not as spiritual a person as I would like to be,” and all those kind of things. That’s fine. That’s okay. We can talk about that. But you don’t usually find somebody sitting down in front of you in Starbucks and saying, “You know, I have rebelled against Almighty God. I’m a sinner. I’m in a dreadful predicament.”

And in fact, you don’t find many churches that would make any emphasis on that, because people don’t like that. They don’t want to be told—I don’t want to be told that I’m a mess and that I need to repent. I want to be told that I’m a masterpiece. I want to be told that I am the epitome of the dream. I want to be told what I get told on the back page of a book that is just out by a religious professional whose name shall be banished from the record. It reads as follows. (I just saw it the other day in the airport, turned it over to have a look.) Here’s the message: “Rather than being down on ourselves and discrediting who we are and focusing on all our flaws”—you mean like Daniel in chapter 9?—

I wonder what would happen if all through the day … we were … as bold … [to] say, “I am amazing. I am wonderful. I am valuable.” When you talk like that, amazing comes chasing you down. Awesome starts heading in your direction. You won’t have that weak, defeated “I’m just average” mentality. You’ll carry yourself like a king, [or] a queen … with a quiet confidence, with the knowledge that you’ve been handpicked by the Creator of the universe.[17]

Boy, I think if I started that, we’d have to build another auditorium. But if I keep with this, we might not need the one we’re building.

Remember when I was playing golf in California? I told you I was golfing, and at one of the holes, a guy suddenly said—realizing that no one had asked me anything about myself—he said, “And what do you do?”

“Oh,” I said, “well, I’m a pastor.” Stunned silence.

And then one of the other guys says, “Well, so how does that go?”

I said, “Well, it goes pretty good.” I said, “There’s no shortage of business.”

He said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “Well, you know, sinners everywhere.”

And on the next hole, one of those little guys came to me—if you remember, I told you this story before—he came up to me and vociferously said, “I don’t like what you said back there.” This guy had been telling some jokes that you wouldn’t want your grandmother to hear, and he said, “I don’t like what you said back there.”

I said, “What was that?”

He says, “About being a sinner.” He says, “ʼCause I’m not a sinner!”

I said, “Wow!”

He says, “I’m only describing, you know, what a sinner is like when I do these jokes and things like that.”

“Oh,” I said, “well, I’m delighted to meet you!” I said, “’cause there’s only one other person that I’ve heard of that wasn’t a sinner.”

And he, who wasn’t paying attention, led with his chin, and he said, “And who is that?”

And I said, “Well, that was Jesus of Nazareth.”

And he says, “Well, if you’re going to put it like that…”

And I said, “Well, how else do you want me to put it? Those are the facts.”

Listen to this wonderful quote from a Dutchman that gets to the heart of it. And we need to stop soon, but we always have this evening to come back. “What distinguishes us”—namely, the people of God—“what distinguishes us from the world is not that we are less wicked.” Think about that. It’s “not that we[’re] less wicked but that by the grace of God we have learned to see our wickedness for what it is and [to] confess our sins. The church is the only body on earth that confesses sin.” Think about it. You go to the Rotary Club, they don’t start with prayers of confession. And “where the confession of [sin] dies out, the church is no longer church.”[18] That is a striking statement. “When the confession of sin dies out…”

Take the average evangelical church, it’s preoccupations—and we are not immune to this observation—and say, “Where in the framework of the thinking of this body is a genuine, deep-seated acknowledgment of the fact that by nature, I am—we are—in the wrong and that in Christ we are placed in a position of acceptance with the Father?” Sin no longer reigns, but it remains.

And so, Luther was right to make sure that we understand that the confession of sin is not something that happens once in your life when you’re trying to get into a position with God but that it is a life of daily repentance. Because daily I am aware of these things. That’s why we sang, again, “Come Down, O Love Divine,” so that we would have the line: when God is really at work in this kind of heart, the mature Christian “o’er [his] own shortcomings weeps with loathing.”[19]

I don’t know about you, but the longer I go in my Christian life, the more I’m aware of what a sinner I am. This isn’t getting less. I hope I sin less. I don’t know. But the nature of sin confronts me far more today than what it did before, driving me again and again to the gospel. That’s why Daniel is so magnificent. He says, “It is your righteousness, God, which demands our punishment. Your wrath is a right response. And it is your righteousness which will prove the basis of our deliverance”—which, of course, takes us all the way to the end. And to the end we must come.

Daniel’s Appeal

My final a is Daniel’s appeal, which begins in verse 16, doesn’t it? “O Lord,” he says, “according to … your righteous acts,” and here he goes. It’s only at this point that he moves from confession to petition. Isn’t that amazing? Again, when you think about it in the nature of things, in terms of the structure of public prayer, confession in the average church, including our own, is a bit like somebody walking up to the front door of your house and cleaning their feet just momentarily and then walking in and getting on with things. And so the average notion of confession within the church, it’s just like that. It goes, “Lord, we need you to know that we’re aware of the fact that we’re sinful. But listen, we want to ask you about this and tell you about that. And could you please help us with this? And we’re not doing so well on that,” and so on. So it’s petition, petition, petition, supplication.

Daniel, he goes forever before he even gets to something. He says, “Lord, and by the way, I’d like to ask you…” And when he makes the appeal, it’s not about Daniel and the people. It’s not about Daniel, the people, and their need; it’s about God and his glory. And I’ll leave you to read the text yourself, because it is, once again, his knowledge of God that underpins all that he does. He says, “You are the God who brought us out in the exodus. Therefore, you’ll bring us out of the exile. Your name is like no other name. There’s no God like Jehovah. Your wrath is justifiable. It’s your city. We are your people. It’s your glory.” And he, Daniel, knows that God has “exalted above all things [his] name and [his] word.”[20]

It is Daniel’s knowledge of God that underpins all that he does.

And when you read the text for yourself again, you will notice this great juxtaposition: “You, O Lord, are righteous, and we are justifiably covered in shame.” “We are justifiably covered in shame.” So he says, “This is what I want you to do, Lord, please: Will you shine into the desolation of our lives?” Basically, it harks, really, doesn’t it, to the Aaronic blessing?

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious [un]to you;
the Lord lift up [the light of] his countenance upon you and give you [his] peace.[21]

You remember, that’s how Jesus left his disciples before the ascension. He lifted up his arms in blessing.[22] I would guess the Aaronic blessing.

We are covered in shame. How, then, can our faces no longer be covered in shame? Well, the psalmist tells us: “Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces [are] never [covered in shame].”[23] And the story that unfolds through Daniel—even through this hard section, to which we will come… You say, “Is it harder than this one?” Yes. And what it’s doing is it’s pointing us forward to the ultimate way in which God deals with our shame—that on account of his mercies, we’re “not consumed, because his compassions fail not,”[24] so that we could sing of one who, “bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place condemned he stood,” and he paid “my pardon [in] his blood.”[25] Why, that changes everything!

He ends with just a staccato burst of stuff: “O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive,” “O Lord, heed; O Lord, act.” And before he’s even really finished his prayer, as you’ll see in verse 20, he has a flying visit from an angel. Well, we ain’t gonna get no flying visit from an angel, but I’ll tell you what we can do: we can acknowledge, both individually and as a church, that we are in need of God’s grace, his mercy, and his forgiveness.

The real question, you see, about the ongoing work of the gospel in this place has little to do with numbers. It has little to do with, you know, multiple ministries. It has everything to do with God and his glory, the majesty of his name—the acknowledgment on our part that we are in need of his grace because we are, by nature, sinful. We’re not any less wicked. We are simply those who have understood our wickedness and have cast it upon the Lord Jesus Christ.

And if today you’ve come here and this is alien to you, and you’d like a Bible, you’d like to think this out, you’d like to talk with someone, that will be my privilege to point you in that direction.

So…

Lord, we commend ourselves into your care. We thank you that in Christ, we are more loved and accepted than we could ever imagine. Outside of him, we’re in such a mess. And we try and fix it for ourselves, and it’s just a futile endeavor—telling ourselves we’re great, deciding that if we have more stuff, trying to create our own identity. Lord, set us free from all of that, individually and as a church, we pray, that Jesus Christ might be all in all.

May grace, mercy, and peace from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be the abiding portion of each one who believes, today and forevermore. Amen.

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[1] Daniel 6:13 (NIV). Emphasis added.

[2] See Psalm 119:105.

[3] See Daniel 1:2.

[4] Psalm 137:4 (paraphrased).

[5] John R. W. Stott, The Message of Galatians: Only One Way, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1986), 110.

[6] Daniel 9:3 (KJV).

[7] Psalm 27:8 (ESV).

[8] Psalm 34:4 (ESV).

[9] Isaiah 6:1 (ESV).

[10] Isaiah 6:5 (ESV).

[11] Isaiah 6:5 (paraphrased).

[12] John 14:15 (ESV).

[13] Exodus 6:7 (paraphrased).

[14] See Matthew 7:13–14.

[15] Luke 4:8 (ESV). See also Deuteronomy 6:13.

[16] Psalm 103:13 (KJV).

[17] Joel Osteen, The Power of I Am: Two Words That Will Change Your Life Today (New York: Faith Words, 2015), 5.

[18] Herman Veldkamp, Dreams and Dictators: On the Book of Daniel, trans. Theodore Plantinga (St. Catharines, Ontario: Paideia, 1978), 202.

[19] Bianco of Siena, trans. Richard F. Littledale “Come Down, O Love Divine” (1867).

[20] Psalm 138:2 (ESV).

[21] Numbers 6:24–26 (ESV).

[22] See Luke 24:50.

[23] Psalm 34:5 (ESV).

[24] Lamentations 3:22 (KJV).

[25] Philip P. Bliss, “Hallelujah! What a Savior!” (1875).