Daniel Lesson 34

Daniel’s Prayer – Daniel 9:3-4

Turn to Daniel 9. Two questions on the feedback cards I’d like to respond to. Recently Mormons came to visit me; one point they made bothered me, they said that Roger Williams and John Wesley quit their respective congregations because “no one could start Christ’s church except Christ.” Is this true or out of context or what? I haven’t had the chance to run down exactly what Roger Williams and John Wesley did, but frankly it has nothing to do with the argument. This is just chasing out after periphery material because the reason that Roger Williams, John Wesley and I believer also in the Mormon Literature it states Martin Luther and John Calvin too made these remarks; it’s simply because all of these men being orthodox Christians agreed to the closed canon of Scripture, that prophecy had ceased and that there were no living prophets, and of course there were no living prophets and they weren’t a living prophet. So what the Mormons always try to do here is they sweep you over onto their presuppositions; their presupposition is that the canon of Scripture is not closed, that it has gone on in time, that it has been opened up in time, and because they hold that presupposition then they come along and take these statements by orthodox men where they admit to the closed canon and say see, these men were not claiming to be prophets. Well of course they weren’t claiming to be prophets. And it’s just a frank confusion on the part of Mormon historians about church history. They don’t seem to understand that no great orthodox leader ever claimed to be a prophet of God since 100 AD, because all great leaders by definition have held to the closed canon of Scripture and the cut off of revelation. So the argument just frankly doesn’t do anything.

You repeatedly call Daniel apocryphal last week; I thought apocryphal books were things like Maccabees, etc. You’re right, it should have been apocalyptic. So if you were confused, Daniel is apocalyptic literature, not apocryphal, two different words, two different meanings. Apocalyptic is the proper word.

Now in Daniel 9 we come to that chapter that is known in history and our circles for being the heart of all prophecy, and so we want to be careful as we study it. By way of review, we covered the first two verses which introduces the chapter. In Daniel 9:1-2 the emphasis is on the first year of Darius; it’s repeated in a sentence fragment in verse 1 and then it’s repeated as part of the main sentence again in verse 2. Your translations will note a repetition at the beginning of both verse 1 and verse 2. And the reason is that the first year of Darius is 538 BC, and by calculations based on the book of Jeremiah, the 70 year captivity was due to be over in 535 BC. So Daniel is saying he has lived through the great catastrophe of Belshazzar’s feast, he has watched the old Babylonian Empire crumble in one night, and because this great historic incident has occurred, obviously shaking the political structure of the ancient world, Daniel has been right there within an arms length when this crisis occurred and it deeply impressed him, and caused him to go back to Scripture and study what is going on in history. And as Daniel has done this he becomes very much aware that something big is about to happen. There is a foreboding that something is about to happen, God is beginning to put into effect the program that he had prophesied.

Last time we referred to several Old Testament passages that Daniel had studied. One of these was Jeremiah 25:12 and the other was Jeremiah 29:10. In Jeremiah 25:12 it said that after seventy years God would end the captivity by crushing Babylon. And as we have seen He has just done this, and so this is a tip off to Daniel, who was a very astute student of Scripture, that something big is in the wind. The second verse, Jeremiah 29:10 we said that after seventy years God would cause Israel to return to the land but there was an “if” clause in the contract. So if you hold the place and turn to Jeremiah 29 you’ll see some fine print that deeply concerned Daniel. Daniel is out of the land, he is serving as an advisor in the state department of Medo-Persia at this time. Daniel was a statesman of his day, and that’s why the book of Daniel is a book, not primarily of prophecy, but a book primarily of wisdom, skill in living.

Jeremiah 29:10 is the verse that bothered Daniel. He saw this, he read it and he studied it, and then he lived through the historic crisis. “For thus saith the LORD, After seventy years are accomplished at Babylon, I will visit you, and perform My good work toward you, in causing you to return even unto this place.” Since “this place” was written in Israel, “this place” must refer to the land of Palestine. And when it says at the end of verse 10, “I will cause you to return to this place,” Daniel can only interpret that that since this is the year 538 BC that within three years God will begin to pull Israel back into the land from the lands of captivity. He knows that, that’s pretty clear, verse 10 is unambiguous. But there’s some other things that are said after verse 10 that give Daniel great cause of concern.

Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know,” says God, “the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” That refers to God’s sovereign plan for history, “I know my thoughts which I think toward you” is an expression that God has a plan for the nation Israel in history, I know that plan God says, and I intend to carry it out, I intend to give you the expected end.

Jeremiah 29:12, “Then shall ye call upon me,” now this is what bothers Daniel, “Then,” beginning in verse 12, “Then,” this should be a response by Israel back to God at the end of this 70 year period. God announces His sovereign will in verse 10; at the end of 70 years I will carry you back to the land, no ifs, no ands, no secret clauses. But what bothers Daniel is this added thing, “Then shall you call upon Me, and you shall go and pray unto Me, and I will hearken unto you.” Now the second person, “you,” in verse 12 refers to the nation Israel. And it seems to be saying in verse 12 that there ought to be a spiritual revival at the end of these 70 years; the nation ought to call upon God. And if they would, then God would hearken to them.

Jeremiah 29:13, “And ye shall seek Me,” God says, “and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart.” Obviously words speaking of a transformation spiritually among the people of Israel. Verse 14, “And I will be found by you, saith the LORD; and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all nations, and from all the places to which I have driven you, saith the LORD, and I will bring you again into the place from which I caused you to be carried away captive.”

Now in Jeremiah 29:14 something else is added. If you look carefully and compare verse 10 with verse 14, those two verses are really saying something different. Although it’s all mooshed together as prophecy always is, actually there are two threads of thought here, just like there were two threads to the First Advent of Jesus and the Second Advent of Jesus but in Old Testament prophecy they’re all interwoven together. History unravels the prophecy but when the prophecy is given it’s all put together, woven together.

And here verses 10 and 14 are woven together, not yet separated by the process of time. Verse 10 is a prediction of a return from Babylon. Verse 14 is a prophecy of a return from all nations. There are two returns. The first return is obviously the return only of the Jews in Babylon, a small set of Jews. That’s one prophecy. And that’s what is coming off before Daniel’s very eyes. But what bothers him is that between verse 10 and verse 14 all those “if you will seek Me,” and “when you search for Me,” then you’ll find Me. So in order to go from verse 10 to verse 14 there has got to be a spiritual revival in the nation, and if this spiritual revival would occur, if, if, if this spiritual revival would occur, then verse 14 could take place. In other words, not only at the end of 70 years would you have a return from Babylon, but you would have a grand return of the Jews scattered from the four winds, from 721 BC as well as 586 BC dispersions.

In other words, what Daniel is thinking is verse 10 I know is going to be fulfilled but what I want fulfilled is the ultimate return, I want to completely solve the whole thing, rapid history and bring this thing to a consummation. I want blessing for my people, but I know, looking at verse 11, verse 12, verse 13, that this blessing cannot come, will not come until these spiritual conditions are met.

So now we come to Daniel 9 and we can understand what he’s going to do. Daniel 9 is Daniel’s prayer; it’s a petition that the spiritual conditions be fulfilled. So he is praying a very, very interesting prayer and in the course of going through Daniel 9 we are going to study many interesting things about prayer, tremendous things about prayer. This is one of the keys; this chapter and Daniel are probably two of the five most important chapters in the Bible on prayer. And you’ll see some things in here maybe you’ve wondered about for a long time about praying, and what prayer is like and how these men prayed, what the mechanics of praying are, how did they sit down and figure out what they were going to ask God and all the rest of it. All those questions will be answered in this chapter. So this is more or less a “how to” chapter. True, at the end of the chapter we have an exciting passage on prophecy, but the framework of the chapter doesn’t emphasize the last verse. The framework of the chapter emphasizes the prayer wisdom that is being used here. So it’s a very important passage.

Included in this chapter and as we start the chapter there’s one little theological shocker to some people, and it will shock what I call the dime-store Calvinists because dime-Store Calvinists or the amateurs get hold of one little doctrine, the sovereignty of God, and they think they understand it. The sovereignty of God is a very difficult subject and you master it only as you have studied and studied and studied and studied Scripture for a long time and had enough experiences in your own life to see how this works. But fundamentalism is filled with dime-store Calvinists and they get hold of one little doctrine and they think boy, I’ve got something here, and then they use this doctrine to clobber you on every single point, always the sovereignty of God, sovereignty of God, sovereignty of God everything. Well, it is true when properly understood sovereignty of God does apply and involve everything, that’s correct. But the way they are stating it is not balanced.

In this chapter you have the same kind of thing that was discovered recently when we had a person dying in the hospital and had a group of people get together and visit and pray, incidentally a footnote, the people who were visiting and praying while we had this crisis going on, they did something Biblical. It’s always amazing to watch who does all the criticizing and who does all the work and it’s very interesting, the people who got together to pray and visit have never complained about the lack of visitation in the congregation, or the lack of love in this congregation, but the people who are complaining about the lack of love didn’t go visit, they didn’t come to the prayer meeting for him, so it’s the old story, if you are doing things for the Lord you don’t have the energy to flap your tongue at both ends. You can either devote your energy to maligning, criticizing, or you can devote your energy to doing something about the problem instead of talking about the problem. These people got together and made a very interesting discovery; turn to 2 Samuel 12:14, I’ll get back to Daniel 9 but I want to show you a principle from another area. What had come up in the course of praying was the problem of whether you pray for a believer who is suffering very much to die, do you pray that they die to be out of their misery, out of their suffering, a very practical problem. But very few Christians do what these people did; they got together and decided 2 Timothy 3:15-16 says that all Scripture is all Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for doctrine, reproof and instruction in righteousness, though our pastor may be over in the Sinai some place, the Scripture hasn’t changed, so we’ll go to the Scripture, there’s got to be an answer to this problem, because we want to pray Biblically for him so our prayers will be answered. So they searched the Scripture and this one thing they came across.

In 2 Samuel 12:14 at the end of that verse God says that David’s little baby is going to die; the baby has not yet reached accountability, but it’s going to die, “the child that is born unto thee shall surely die.” It’s an emphatic construction in the Hebrew syntax. That means that there is not if, ands or hidden conditions, God announces sovereignly that child will die, period over and out. Now if David had been a dime-store Calvinist he would have said “what will be will be” and would have marched right on and done absolutely nothing about it. But to show you that David did not respond that way, 2 Samuel 12:16 says, “David, therefore, besought God for the child,” in spite of the fact that God told him his child was going to die David insisted on trying to change God’s mind. Furthermore, in 1 Samuel 12:22 after the child dies he gets up from where he’d been praying, puts his good clothes on, washes up and goes out and enjoys himself. And people say what kind of a strange behavior is this, David, you just lost your little son. And David says there’s nothing strange at all if you understand the Word of God. While my son was dying I kept on praying, “While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live?” Now what made David do that?

Why did David respond to that thing at the end of verse 14, where God said your child will die, with hours and probably days of intense prayer that the child not die. You can either come to one of two conclusions; David did not know what he was doing in this situation, which is highly unlikely since Nathan the prophet was right there with him, or we are misreading Scripture at this point. We are misreading what things like verse 14 are telling us. When we read statements like verse 14, if we are to read them correctly in the light of all the Scripture, in the light of the way the great men responded to those kind of statements from God we can only come to the conclusion that these men had a little thought in their head that went something like this: God, I know you said that, but I’m going to try to talk you out of it. Now that is the audacious attitude that these great men had toward God Himself. In other words, these men believed that they had something inside them that could change the very God of the universe. Now what was it inside them that was so big and influential at the bargaining sessions with God in prayer? Why did these men not react like the dime-store Calvinist, the fatalist, what will be will be kind of thing? Which often is just a lazy front for a lack of prayer.

But there’s something that we’ve got to master about the way we read these men’s lives; they don’t think the way a fatalist thinks at this points. David thought there was a chance that he could get God to reverse this thing. That same mentality pops up again over here with Daniel. Now turn to Daniel 9, he’s doing exactly the same thing David’s doing. Keep this in mind; it’s going to explain something about the prophecy that occurs at the end.

In Daniel 9 Daniel knows the seventy years are ended. Let me show you the conflict that Daniel has got here. He knows from Jeremiah 29:10 that the seventy years are going to be up in 535 BC. That much he knows. He knows there will be a return of the Jews that in Babylon back to the land in fulfillment of Jeremiah 29:10. But Daniel wants something more than just a fulfillment of 29:10, he wants a fulfillment of Jeremiah 29:14, he wants the whole thing. He wants a spiritual revival and he wants a massive blessing upon the nation. He wants Jerusalem to be built up like it was before. He’s going to say that petition in his prayer. He wants this.

Now if you have paid attention as we have gone through the Daniel series, and you look at that chart, and you scope out the petition, I think you’ll begin to see that Daniel is running against the tide, because what has been the thrust so far of all the visions we’ve seen. The visions are that first you’re going to have the Neo-Babylonian Empire, then you’re going to have the Medo-Persian Empire, then you’re going to have the Grecian Empire, then you’re going to have the Roman Empire, and it’s going to go on for centuries. In particular in the Grecian period you’re going to have the little horn and at the end of the Roman Empire you’re going to have the little horn. So he’s got all these prior given prophecies telling him that the world will be dominated by these Gentile powers. But in the face of all of these prophecies of what’s going to happen, Daniel tries to cut into them and get God to change.

These men do not passively sit by and accept God’s Word as, so to speak, the final Word. There’s always a chance, they think, there’s always a chance that they can get in there and try to talk God out of it. Now maybe this explains something about the Jewish character over the centuries; if you have the mentality you can talk God out of something you obviously have the mentality you can talk people out of something. But nevertheless, this was their mentality; it was emphatically not that of the dime-store Calvinist. These men talked very vigorously to God.

Maybe the best way to get my point across before we go any further is to go to one more passage, to show you the kinds of petitions that these people dared to give to God. Now in an average prayer meeting in a typical Christian group, if someone came out with these kinds of petitions, most of the time he would be considered either doctrinally naïve or spiritually out of it. But let me show you some of the vigorous requests that are shown in the book of Psalms and it all stems from this kind of thinking that God and I can discuss the issue; I, made in God’s image, am on talking terms with my Creator through Jesus Christ, I have this relationship and I intend to use it.

There are 3 or 4 requests in the Psalms I want you to look at; Psalm 13:1-2, David says, “How long will You forget me, O LORD? Forever?” Let’s look at the spirit and the mentality of that petition, [Clough says with raised voice and emphatically] “How long are you going forget me, forever! How long are you going to hide your face from me? [2] How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?” The spirit in that prayer… it’s not just [Clough says wimpy-like] “God’s will be done” kind of thing. There’s a real discussion going on between the man praying and the God who is listening to the prayer. They want history to be changed and they can’t change history until we can get God to change the history. That’s the grace oriented man. This is not works; don’t confuse this with some sort of a works program. It would be works if he said I’m going to go out and change history, but David is not doing that, watch carefully. He is trying to get God to do the changing. He’s not saying God has to change because he tells Him, he asking; he’s asking in a very strong petition.

Psalm 44:23, another request like this. You cannot explain these kinds of audacious requests unless you understand this kind of praying mentality. “Awake, why do You sleep, LORD. Arise, cast us not off forever.” Now here he’s accusing God of sleeping at the switch. God, You’re acting like You’re asleep! That’s the kind of praying that went on here. Again, not this wimpy kind of stuff, this was a man to man type praying that went on.

Psalm 74:3, in the original language it’s a lot more vigorous than the English text, “Lift up Your feet unto the perpetual desolations; all the enemy has done wickedly in the sanctuary.” This is an expression for “get walking!” Walk through Your messed up temple where the enemies have thrown rock down upon rock, take a good look at it God, are you pleased with that? That’s the kind of petition he’s saying [Clough harshly says] Get walking. Do you know who he’s talking to?

Psalm 74:11, this one reads very mildly in the King James translation, “Why withdrawest Thou Thy hand, even Thy right hand? Pluck it out of Thy bosom.” Now the “bosom” here is the fold in the garment and when the people had nothing to do with their hands, they didn’t have pockets so they put their hand in the bosom of the fold, carried their arm around like this, kind of like Napoleon always scratching his stomach or something for fleas. So you have them putting their arm in what would today be a pocket. Now converting culturally for a minute from the kind of dress of the ancient world with the fold in front that was acting as a pocket to the modern situation, what do we have and how do we translate verse 11. “Why do You put your hand away, get it out of Your pocket!” That’s what he’s telling God to do. Get Your hands out of Your pocket God and answer these petitions!!!

Now I think that you can see that these people were slightly vigorous in their prayer petitions. This was not being flippant with God, don’t draw that conclusion. These people are not demeaning God’s character at all by the way they are doing this; they have great respect for God’s authority. It’s precisely their respect for His authority that makes them come to God. After all, who else are they going to go to? They still have grace orientation; they still understand that nothing can happen unless God does it. They still understand the principle that God will supply their every need. But they do not take the dime-store Calvinist fatalistic view what will happen will happen. They believe man has been given a volition and he has a role to play with that volition.

Psalm 142:4; except in the King James it’s translated as an indicative mood, it should be an imperative mood. If you have a new translation you’ll see that these are imperatives. “Look on my right hand, and there was no man that would know me.” Now what does David mean by that? In battle the shield was held in the left hand, the weapon the right. And if you had a line of men, the man next to you on your right hand had his shield so that nobody could come in on your right side. See, your right side is all vulnerable; you can protect the left side but how are you going to come way around and protect the right side. It makes it very difficult because if you move your shield all the way over to protect your right side what happens to the spear in your right hand. You’re going to have to pull it through the shield, so it’s very difficult to defend on the right side, and so David is saying: In my position of maximum vulnerability I have no one there, and you take a look, look at it, he says. It’s as though he looks up at God and says: Take a look, do you see anybody here, nobody is here!!! That’s the kind of petitioning. I think you get the idea that these men expected God to do something about it.

Now understand Daniel 9. Daniel 9:3, “And I set my face unto the LORD God, to seek by prayer and supplication, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes,” what does all this mean. “I set my face” refers to a point in time when Daniel decides to devote much effort to this prayer business. Now it’s true you can pray small prayers during the day, but when you have a major thing in your life that is going to involve changing not only your character but changing the character of people around you, it may be in your business, which is going to have to involve changing the allocation of resources in your business, it’s going to mean changing markets in your business, it’s going to mean changing the use of your time, it’s going to mean all sorts of management and administrative changes that have to made, when you start contemplating all these changes you’re getting into big business. And when you have petitions that involve big business, that is the kind of praying that can only be done by setting aside some time to devote to the issue. This can’t be done waiting at the stop light. This requires a lot more concentration. So there will be times in your life, and I always advise this to people who are having these tremendous problems and it involves massive amounts of adjusted relationships and so on, that before you get into all those details you’ve got to go off by yourself half a day, a day, maybe two days, some place where you can go with just the Bible, just a piece of paper and pencil and work this thing out, just between you and God plus no one else. You’ve got to get the whole thing scoped out.

So when he says, “I set my face unto the Lord God” it means that Daniel says I’ve got a big one now, got a big problem here, and I’m going to have a special time or prayer. “I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek,” now this is the first of a series of words that are used in the subsequent verses that tip us off to something about how Daniel studied the Word of God. This prayer is literally saturated with vocabulary and expressions and phrases that have been lifted primarily from two books of Scripture; (1) the book of Deuteronomy; (2) the book of Jeremiah. It was those two books that saturate this prayer. You can tell for yourself, you can go to a concordance and look up these words and ask yourself where these words are occurring elsewhere in Scripture. And you check the frequency of occurrence and they also will be in two books: Deuteronomy and Jeremiah. Now does that make sense? Sure it does, because what does verse 2 tell us? Verse 2 tells us that one of the books that Daniel was studying was the book of Jeremiah, and we don’t know when he studied the book of Deuteronomy but he obviously did. Probably he did it because that was the whole theology of the Mosaic Covenant, it controlled the situation. Obviously if Daniel is going to deal with a prayer involving the nation Israel, what was the national covenant, the national agreement between God and the nation? Where do you go in the Bible to find that? The book of Deuteronomy; you can go to other books too but Deuteronomy is a good one because it’s all together there.

So now what have we learned right off the bat, besides the fact that Daniel was not a dime-store Calvinist and that he was a man who believed that he could influence God by talking to Him. Just stop and think of that; it sounds easy to say, but we’re talking about influencing THE most powerful personality that exists, by talking to him. And that’s what we’re going to learn in this prayer; what is it that we have that has such power to influence God Himself, that He’ll listen to us. We’re going to learn what that thing is. But one of the things to notice here as we start into the prayer is that Daniel has been a student of the Word. He has studied “the Bible,” we’ll put it in quotes because it wasn’t complete in his day, but he studied what there was of the Bible up to his day. He was a student of Scripture, which is important because you can well, in this day of charismatic movements and so on, you can say Daniel didn’t have to study the Bible, all he had to do was crawl in his closet for a hot vision.

Daniel was not the kind of person that depended on visions, as we saw with John the Baptist. 99% of the information of even the greatest prophets in the Word of God did not come by vision, except one, that’s Moses. All the others got most of their information from previously written books of Scripture, which shows you that these people had saturated the mentality of their soul in the Word of God. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week they studied, not as drudgery; they enjoyed it, go to know God better that way. I’ve never been able to understand people’s attitude, ho hum, we’ve got to study the Scripture. The Scripture is God’s Word; it should be the most exciting thing that you can ever study. And that ho hum attitude, do you know what you’re doing? You’re condemning yourself, because every time you have that attitude it just shows you’re ho hum toward God Himself, because He’s the author responsible for the doctrine and you’re saying ho hum. So you’re ho humming him. You must have fantastic knowledge to be able to say that in comparison with yours God’s knowledge is ho hum.

Daniel 9:3, “I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek,” remember that promise in Jeremiah 29, “when you shall seek Me with all your heart,” there it is coming out, and the seeking here means effort. Daniel is going to investigate. The word seek is a word that means to seek or investigate. By this we mean that it takes time and effort… effort required to make this prayer. Said another way, not only is he going to set aside some time, he is going to do research before he begins to open his mouth. This is a quiet prayer by one man who before he goes before the Lord says now look, if I’m going to walk into the presence of God I’m going to prepare to carry on a halfway intelligent conversation with Him before I get in there. It’d be like going to the boss’s office, going to the President of a corporation, you don’t walk in there and say now what was it I was going to say, I had something on my mind this morning, I forgot what it was, well it’s a nice day out. What kind of stuff is that?

Now it’s the same attitude here. God is on friendly terms, that’s fine. We can come into His office, so to speak, any time we want to, the privilege has been extended, but it’s a sign of disrespect to walk up to God and go yeah, uh, duh, uh, like this. He has given us a mind to think with and the word to search here means that Daniel said okay, now I am going to spend some time with God but before I get in there and open my mouth I’m going to have something to say to Him that is coherent, intelligent and Biblically based. So I will, therefore, research the book of Deuteronomy and Jeremiah until I can frame my petition Biblically, until I have some bargaining with Him. He’s not going to listen to me if I come in here uh, duh, duh, duh; He’s going to listen to me if I can present, all right God, now this is what You ought to do for this reason, this reason, this reason and this reason, because if You don’t do it then this will happen, this will happen, this will happen. Now we’re talking about bargaining with God. And all the reasons can be sound, and God likes this because He responds to this kind of prayer. So the seeking is this research that is done.

“…to seek by prayer and supplications,” this is the same phraseology Paul uses in Ephesians 6:18, that we ought pray always with all prayer and supplications in the spirit. This is a word pair you see a lot in Scripture. “Prayer” is a general word; “supplication” is the petitions. Now you see the word “supplications” is put in there because that gives evidence that it’s worthwhile asking. You see, again if Daniel was a dime-store Calvinist and a fatalist, he would say well God, now what You have said will automatically come to pass and there’s no need for me ever to ask you a thing because you already know what I have on my mind and so we just won’t make any petition, we’ll just thank you for the birds, the bees and the flowers and tune out. But that’s not the kind of praying that’s done here in real praying; it consists of petitions, that’s what supplication is.

Then it adds three words, “with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes.” The first word, “fasting,” refers to the fact of concentration. Daniel has got to get rid of some of the details of life in order to concentrate on the task at hand. It would mean, all of you have fasted at one time or another and you never even realized it. By fasting we’re not talking about giving up bubble gum for lent, we’re talking about being so preoccupied with the task at hand that you forget to eat. Haven’t you had that experience, you’ve gotten some job and you just had to get it done, so you just forgot lunch or dinner or something. All right, that is a fasting, that’s the attitude of fasting in Scripture. There’s not merit in the giving up of the food; the point is that in order to concentrate on the job at hand you give up the food, because in those days you didn’t have TV dinners. Daniel, to get food, would have to get it all prepared, have a servant set the table, a big oriental procedure. They didn’t just eat sandwiches, they had a regular meal. So he said to heck with all that stuff, I got too much work to do here in prayer so I’ll just bag it.

So fasting means I got rid of the details of life. Then it says “sackcloth and ashes,” what’s that? This is the way they had of empirically testifying to their sin nature. When these prayers of repentance, as this prayer is going to be, were prayed, they often did this. We don’t know exactly why but apparently this would create a mentality. You can imagine what your face would look like if you just stuck your hand in some ashes and wiped it all over yourself, nice clothes, just dabbed it all up with ashes, and then start praying. Now why do all that? Because you’re setting in your mind a clear perspective of your own demerit in God’s sight, that in spite of these fantastic petitions that you’re going to make to God, there is no merit that you have that forces Him to answer those petitions. See, there’s a balance here, vigorous petitions yes; does God have to answer them because I’m such a good boy? No. And to remind myself while I’m praying that I’m not a good boy I’ll smear on all the ashes, tear my clothes and so on. Now notice it’s sackcloth, they didn’t tear their good clothes, they had special clothes that they used.

Daniel 9:4, “And I prayed unto the LORD my God, and made my confession, and said, O Lord, the great and dreadful God, keeping the covenant and mercy to them that love him, and to them that keep his commandments,” and he goes on and confesses. So now beginning in verse 4 we have another principle of prayer. What have we learned so far? The first thing we’ve learned is that Daniel approaches God not as a dime-store Calvinist; Daniel approaches God as though God is a businessman, that He’s a thinking individual, that we can converse on a scale through language and ideas, we can talk to God, we can reason with our God. That is the hidden presupposition of all this praying. And I would suspect that if you think you have trouble in praying that one of the things that’s causing you the trouble is not that you don’t have time, or is not that you don’t know how. I think you already know how to pray; you already basically have enough time. I think, based on my own experience why we don’t more interest in prayer is because we have subtlety bought the line of fatalism, whether intentionally or unintentionally, whether we’ve thought it through as a philosopher or whether we just picked it up on the street, just kind of caught it, we have gotten tubed out by the spiritual idea that God is up there, He has His big prophetic plan for history and I can’t tamper with it. I can’t talk to Him, my words are just meaningless, they just kind of bounce off. I can talk to God about His plan; I can even make Him change His mind. Not, however, and this is the second reason, not however because of moral merit on my part. Whatever this influence is that we have on God it can’t be our moral merit, our righteousness. It can’t be that, that won’t influence God. It’s got to be something else, but obviously we’ve got something in our souls that has some sort of influence on God. The other thing that we have learned is that this kind of praying takes a special period of concentration. You cannot do this under the normal activities of life, these kinds of prayers.

Now we come in verse 4 to a third principle that we see and that is this kind of praying, when it involves a massive change, Daniel is praying for the whole nation, in most cases what we would be doing is praying for ourselves, our marriage, our families, something like that, our business. We’ve got a massive change but it’s more on a personal type level. And in that kind of a situation we start out confessing any sin that is currently blocking the solution. That’s got to happen, so before we get involved in the details of the changes, we’ve got to deal with the obstacles to change which are sin. So he starts confession. And from verses 4-10 is a confession of man’s sinfulness, it’s a lament. From verses 11-15 we have a confession of God’s holiness, also part of the lament. So we have two parts: verses 4-10, man’s sinfulness; verses 11-15, God’s holiness, together they make up a confession. Why is it the confession isn’t limited to just one?

Why is it that true Biblical confession requires both a confession of our sin and a confession of God’s holiness? Why are both of these elements needed or you don’t have real confession? Do you know why? Because if you just confess your sin and you don’t at the same time confess God’s justice and his holiness, see what goes through your mind… these aren’t really sins because in some way God is also responsible, after all, He’s the One that gave us the circumstances, God if you wouldn’t have put me in a bind I wouldn’t have done it. So that kind of thinking has got to be purged and lifted up out of the soul. So in this Biblical confession there are always two parts to it, yes God, I broke Your commandment, and no God, You can’t be blamed for it. So that’s the complete form of confession. Then verses 16-19 is the petition, the personal lament and then the petition, verses 16-19, it would have gone on longer and probably gone out into a praise section except for the fact he got interrupted by Gabriel. Daniel was interrupted in this prayer; we’ll see why when we get there.

Okay, what is he saying in verse 4, we’re going to learn another principle here, and we’re going to get closer to answering that question we began with, what is it that we have that acts as such a device to influence God? We’ve already eliminated our righteousness, and just simple common sense tells you it can’t be because I say Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, and say it 2500 times. It is not the mere repetition of words; it’s not even getting the pulse all excited, breathing heavy. That doesn’t influence God. So if it’s not heavy breathing, if it’s not moaning and groaning in the prayer room, if it’s not repeating Jesus’ name 2500 times, and it’s not personal merit, what is it that these men are exploiting in their very successful prayer life? We’ve got to pin this down; that’s the question I keep throwing out to you because as you read this text, keep asking the text that question, and asking the Holy Spirit to make you see what is the secret that these guys had. What is it that carries such fantastic weight with God when it isn’t what was normally accepted?

“And I prayed unto the LORD my God, and made my confession,” this particular verb is a verb which one stem in the original language means to confess God’s attributes, like we’ll say I confess I’m a Christian, or I confess that God is omniscient, I confess that God is omnipotent, it’s a creedal confession, I confess a truth about God that gets it outside of me. So in one particular stem of this verb, that’s what it means, confession of a truth that’s outside of me. But here it is used in another sense, the hithpael which is a reflexive stem in the Hebrew language, and when this is used it’s confession of a truth that’s in me, and thus it’s translated correctly as confession; not as a truth about God, he’s going to get to that later, but a confession of a truth about me. I “made my confession, and said, O Lord,” and notice, by the way, this burden he has, he just doesn’t come, a man in a white suit science approach with test tubes, completely objective and detached from the whole thing. He’s personally involved with this. “O Lord,” emotions are all right in prayer as long as they are directed by the Word, that’s all. We’re not saying it has to be a flat thing.

“O Lord, the great and terrifying” or “awe-inspiring God,” that’s a title taken from Deuteronomy, the “great and awe-inspiring God,” this is a confession of His essence. Please notice again in this secret of a good prayer, what is the first thing that hits you when the prayer begins? The essence and attributes of God. It is a Theocentric prayer first, not an anthropocentric prayer; it concentrates on God’s character, that’s the base. “O Lord, the great and dreadful God, keeping” shamar, it’s a participle, “keeping the covenant” the covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, “and chesed” the word for “mercy” is chesed, that word that is used for love in the Bible; the two words, ahav and chesed, two kinds of love, ahav would be the single man picking out a girl for his wife, he chooses her and that’s ahav, and then chesed would be the married man who’s already locked down to a marital contract or covenant and he’s faithful to the covenant, that’s chesed. So chesed is a covenantal love, loyalty to a standard, loyalty to a covenant; ahav is not. So it’s chesed used here, “keeping the covenant and chesed,” keeping His Word, that’s the point Daniel is making.

Now this begins to answer something that we asked in the beginning; what’s the secret of good praying? First of all it’s a realization of who God is, “the great and awe-inspiring God who keeps His Word.” That’s going to lead to a little device in praise that will pop up later, but God, no matter how big, no matter how dreadful, how great and awe-inspiring he is, there’s one thing about God that I am sure of and I’m going to bank on that one thing. I don’t know all things about God because is infinite and I am finite; I’ll never know all things about my God, but there’s one thing I do know about His character, He keeps His Word. Ah, now I no longer have to be like the Greeks, like the Assyrians, like the Egyptians, who had to wave magic wands to get their gods to work, or the Canaanites, the Baalists up on Carmel when Elijah was trying to get them to see who was God and they cut themselves, God, here’s my prayer, I’m going to cut myself, and going through all this. There’s none of that magic stuff needed if our God is really a God who keeps His Word. So this becomes a very vital tool for good praise, realization of who God is and that He keeps His Word.

Daniel 9:4b, “to them that love Him, and to them that keep His commandments,” “them that love Him” is reference in context to those “that keep His commandments,” notice there is not this artificial bifurcation of some spooky mysterious, oh I love Jesus concept. The one who loves the Lord is one who obeys His Word, and you can’t obey His Word unless you know His Word, so you don’t love God if you don’t know first His Word. That’s the first step to loving God. These people that get this creepy thing in their voice and say oh, I love Jesus in a way that’s supposed to incriminate your or something. But then when it comes down to some doctrinal issue, oh well, I don’t get involved in that, we just deal with the Spirit. It says right here he that loves Him keeps His commandments. How do you keep something that you don’t know? Obviously you have to know, and do you know how many commandments there are in the Old Testament, in the Mosaic Law alone? 613, so at least 613 things had to be known from the Word before they could love the Lord. And John 14:21 is a cross reference where Jesus says, “He who loves Me is the one who keeps My commandments.” And do you know what Jesus commandments are? The New Testament epistles, so you can’t love the Lord Jesus either until you know the New Testament.

We’re going to stop at the end of verse 4 because of our time and we want to summarize what we have learned so far about this prayer, things that we can use in our own prayer life. The first thing is that a belief that prayer is part of the thing that makes history, that shapes history, that we shape history in prayer, your history, your individual history can be different than it is today, if you will agree with Scripture that this universe that we live in is run by a sovereign God who can be talked to and who can be influenced by your talking to Him. Now if you’ve got that, that’s 90% of the problem, right there. If you don’t have that and this is troublesome for you, my suggestion is to re-read Daniel 9 and 10 over and over and over and over until some of these things click. And take particularly good notes as you go through Daniel 9 and 10 as a base for later on.

Secondly, understand that this kind of praying is a type of praying that requires time out, Daniel “sets his face;” you don’t have to do this for every little thing in your life, this is just a major kind of thing, but if you learn how to pray for the major things, then the other things are easy. So for crisis, major type praying, it requires time out away from the details of life.

Another thing we have learned from all of this is that Daniel recognized clearly that what was inside of him could not have been his merit, his good works, his scintillating personality; that was the “sackcloth and ashes” confession. I have nothing but filth in God’s sight.

So another principle of praying is that you have to be a student of the Word, we’ve seen that, because the prayer is saturated with the vocabulary that just kind of automatically came out of his mouth as he began to speak because he was such a good student of the Word.

And then finally, the real thing about this was that he was a person who knew one key thing about God’s essence; God, as awe-inspiring as He was, was a God who lived up to contracts, He was not a covenant breaker, He was a covenant keeper. God keeps His Word, and if then, in your prayer you can so raise the petition to show that if God would keep His Word, then He ought to answer the petition, you are on powerful grounds for influencing Him. To show God that it would be part of keeping His won words if He would answer that particular petition that you have.