Daniel Lesson 35

Daniel’s Model confession Prayer – Daniel 9:5-10

In Daniel 9 we have been studying one of the great prayers of all time, the prayers of Daniel and this is a model prayer given for our edification that we may understand how to pray when we recall that Daniel is a wisdom book, it’s a book designed to teach us how to live in a fallen world; in particular it is designed to give skills for the Christian citizen. That doesn’t mean that Daniel is not evangelistic or doesn’t present the gospel, it’s just that the Christian faith has a little more to say than just the gospel. And Daniel 9 is the content of what it has to say. In this chapter we have seen Daniel’s prayer divided into two parts. Daniel 9:4-10; Daniel 9:11-15, these two parts have to do with the lament of the prayer, the description of the problem, what the problem is, how you analyze the problem in light of the Word of God. The first part of it concentrates on man’s sin. The second concentrates on God’s holiness. Both of these must be prevalent in a true confession; if they are not both in a true confession then we do not have true confession, and we will still be studying the first part, verses 4-10, this morning, the confession of man’s sin. Later on, in verses 16-19 you have the petition section, besides the lament, besides the confession, and in this petition section Daniel starts to make a designed petition and is interrupted by Gabriel.

So we have learned various principles from this prayer. What are those principles that we have learned so far. The first one, a very important one, is that it is possible that God will respond to prayer petitions and alter history from the course it would have taken if the prayer petition had not been made. That’s the point made by James 4:2 which is that you have not because you ask not. The reason that this first principle is important, should be for you, is that all of us are liable to pick up this fatalism that’s just in the air around us. Just like germs, just like a virus, this can be picked up very easily and you don’t even know you have it until the disastrous effects begin to work out in your prayer life, and you won’t have an inkling that you’ve become a fatalist until you turn around and say what have you been doing with prayer for the last three months. When you ask that question that will give you a clue as to whether you have picked up this fatalistic mental attitude. And it goes like this: it says in effect that since God is omniscient and He is sovereign therefore there is no need to really pray because he already knows the request before I make the request, therefore why make the request. And this is fatalism.

God wants you to make the request even though He knows the request because God treats us as creatures made in His own image, with personality, language speaking creatures, creatures that have the knowledge of conscience and absolute right and wrong, creatures who can interact and creatures who have been designated in Genesis 1:26-28 to be lord of creation. Contrary to the ecologist man was created to reign over nature; not to worship nature and not to bow down to nature. Nature is under man’s feet; that does not mean we abuse nature but it means that man is not to be under nature, and if the ecologist had their way they would impose upon us a Baalism out of the Old Testament in which nature is over man; we can’t progress until we worship nature. Signs of that mentality exist all over the place; in dealing with the modern energy crisis we have the same mentality. The mentality goes like this; modern technology is the villain, modern technology has been the cause of all our problems, and what we have to do is go off into a commune some place and go back to the land, go back to the primitive style of living for that is man’s salvation. And that attitude is a passivism, it’s very passive toward the problems and pressures and it rejects the created ordinances of God.

Man was created to go on, not backwards, forwards, and to use technology to conquer nature even more. We have no energy crisis; all we have is a constipation of thought as to how to derive new forms of energy. God has not willed that man be groveling in the sand wringing his hands and die out because of lack of energy before Jesus returns. That is a pessimism that’s borne of a rejection of the Christian faith by the intellectuals and leaders of our land. Because they’ve given up the whole framework of Christian Bible doctrine, the results are going to play and one of them you see playing out before your eyes is this attitude toward the energy crisis. There is no energy crisis and never will be; Jesus Christ will return before the world’s resources of energy are used up.

So fatalism rubs off and it rubs off in our prayer life and it rubs off by showing itself as passive, it’s passivity toward problems in life. So the first principle that we have learned about prayer goes against every trend of thought in the media, every trend of thought that you have been brought up to believe. This principle is only present in Scripture. It clashes with every other religion, with every other system of man’s thought, and that is that we have a personal God who listens to prayer and then can alter history in response to that prayer. Daniel believed that and so did all the other greats of Scripture.

The second principle that we have learned so far from Daniel’s prayer is that like Daniel, when there are great crises in your life, spiritually, not always but when there are the great crises you are simply going to have to take time out from the details of life, with your Bible, with a piece of paper and pencil and go off by yourself, where you have some extended time to be alone with the Lord. It is the failure of men, particularly, to do this. It leads to some very sloppy decisions, sloppy decisions in their business, sloppy decisions in their marriage, in their family life because men who are supposed to be the leaders of their families are not being leaders of their families. The women are having to take over leadership.

The third principle that we have learned in the prayer life besides the first one which is God’s activity in answering prayer and the second one being that you have to have some concentrated timeout procedures, is the third one, that prayer builds upon one particular truth of God’s character. We don’t know all there is to know about God and contrary to popular imagination in heaven we are not going to know all there is to know about God, because if we were to know all there is to know about God, that would make you omniscient and that would make us God. Since that isn’t possible because we’re finite creatures, conclusion: you and I will never know all there is to know about God, even in heaven. However, we do know some things about God that He has chosen to tell us about, and one of those characteristics is His immutability or His faithfulness to keep His Words. And Daniel is going to bank on that attribute of God, that characteristic, His immutability, His faithfulness to stay with His Word.

Now that implies something else. This third principle implies that when you go to God in prayer you are going to have to know what His words are that He is going to be faithful to keep. It’s nice knowing that God is faithful to keep His Word, it’s another thing to know what the Word of God is that He’s going to keep. So that implies that you have to know Scripture and that to be effective in prayer you must know the content of Scripture. You must know what specific promises there are, not just gee, I think I remember a promise some place, it’s some place between Genesis and Revelation. That’s a good guess, but the point is that you ought to know the details of these promises. God expects us to come before Him and talk to Him like a creature made in the image of God that we are. We’re not like rocks and animals.

The fourth principle that we will learn from this prayer, one I failed to cover last week and it’s one that doesn’t really fit in with the content of what we’re going to do this week so I’ll just put it in as transition between the principles we’ve already learned and the ones we’re going to learn today, and that is that this entire prayer, particularly in the original languages, is what we call liturgical. That is, this prayer was made up before it was given. This prayer apparently either was made up in his mind very carefully or actually written down, we don’t know what, probably just made up in his mind. But Daniel did not just waltz into the presence of God and ramble to His face. Daniel had thought out very carefully what he was going to say to God, and treated God like you would treat a boss or an executive, you think what you’re going to say before you open the door to his office; it’s the same thing in prayer. And the reason we know this is because all of this is set up in syntactically beautiful language; that is, there’s a certain rhyme, there’s a certain rhythm to this prayer. That tells us it is a composed prayer.

Now in our circles, in the independent fundamental circles, there is a saying about composed prayers because many people who are circulating in our independent circles have come out of highly liturgical churches, where you have heard prayers rattled off, often by people who are unregenerate and unresponsive to the gospel, and therefore you have tired of hearing composed fixed prayers. An example would be the Lord’s Prayer, that kind of thing. And you have kind of a mental attitude against it. But you’d better examine that because most of the great prayers of Scripture do appear to be composed prayers; not that they were recited blindly but that before those prayers were made, they were carefully composed.

I’ll give two illustrations, both by women. I Samuel 2, Hannah’s prayer; this is her praise prayer that she gives to God because she has a son. She prayed about having children, she is finally the mother of a son and it’s her motherly prayer and her praise to God in 1 Samuel 2:1-10; the words in this prayer all fit together very beautifully and show evidence of composition before they were given. So Hannah didn’t just pray and ramble, she thought out, listen, I’m going to go up tomorrow and I’m going to give thanks to God for my baby son and I want to think carefully what I want to thank God about concerning my baby son. So during the night before she gave this prayer she probably went over this in her mind, didn’t have to write out every detail but she thought what it was that she was going to tell God. If you skim down very quickly you notice that she had some pretty contentful thinking; this woman knew doctrine.

For example, she starts off in 1 Samuel 2:1-2, “And Hannah prayed, and said, My heart rejoiceth in the LORD, mine horn is exalted in the LORD: my mouth is enlarged over mine enemies; because I rejoice in thy salvation.” Now who are her enemies? By immediate implication it’s the people that made fun of her because she was an infertile woman, but it’s larger than just that, “my horn is my power in my calling, Hannah was a woman who knew her place in life and knew that God had a purpose and a plan for her life, and that purpose and plan for her life included having a baby son and raising that son as unto the Lord. And she relates it in verse 4, “The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength.” There she goes over to the future role that her baby son will have in national history. So she’s already thought this much, she’s thought of her own position before God, she’s thought that that destiny that plan He has for her life includes having a baby son, that baby son is going to be somehow a great patriot and a great father of the nation. And she continues in verse 8, “He raises up the poor out of the dust, and lifts up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the LORD's, and he hath set the world upon them.” She uses very picturesque language to describe grace and works. So summary of this very quick examination of Hannah’s prayer, this woman thought before she opened her mouth.

Now another prayer also by a woman in Luke; this is the other side of Daniel 9, the New Testament, Luke 1:46. After Mary realized that she was going to give birth to Messiah she gives forth with a magnificat, verses 46-55, “And Mary said, My soul does magnify the Lord, [47] And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” She is very clear on the doctrines of soteriology, that is the doctrines that have to do with God saving man. [48] “For he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden; for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.” Now Mary, in order to say what she has just said in verse 48, has had to have already thought very carefully that her son, her baby son will be Messiah, and therefore because her baby son is Messiah, she as Messiah’s mother, will receive the thanks for fulfilling the role of woman in history; salvation comes through the female side, not through the male side and she recognizes this and that’s why she says all generations shall call me blessed. This is not Mariolatry of Romanism, this is a normal thanksgiving which is oddly missing in evangelical circles, giving due honor to the woman. [49] “He that is mighty has done to me great things; and holy is His name,” notice she has in her mind the future role of Messiah. Verse 52, “He has put down the mighty from their seats,” that hasn’t occurred in history yet but she’s referring to the deposing of the rulers of the world by her baby son. And on and on and on; so a second prayer that shows evidence of careful design, careful thought ahead of time.

Now back to Daniel 9, having seen our fourth principle of prayer, and that is that these great kinds of prayers are all preplanned prayers; they are composed and in practice today, such we don’t have such a good memory as these people had, it would behoove us as we pray, to work on designing petitions that line up with Scripture; you have to be careful that is in accordance with Scripture.

Daniel 9:5; in verses 5-10 we will study the rest of the confession. This is a model confession; it reminds us that we are, by virtue of the fall, totally depraved. This is why the Bible emphasizes over and over again the whole principle of the fall. Here’s the chart and there’s the two key events on our whole outlook on life. You must learn to color your thinking with the content of Scripture. This must be part of the framework of your soul. The creation and fall are vital truths and we cannot come before God in a prayer, in a panic, in any kind of situation, if you don’t interpret your problem in the light of the creation and the fall. Daniel is going to analyze this whole problem in the light of creation and fall. The doctrine that we are talking about in connection with the fall is the doctrine of total depravity. That doctrine is missing from American culture today. It’s very interesting that you couldn’t have a better evidence of the truthfulness of total depravity in the front page of the newspaper. When someone drops a one hour old baby in a waste paper basket you’ve got evidences of total depravity. But when you read the editorials they’re always looking around for a solution and they’re always looking in terms of changing the environment, greater and bigger government programs to solve our social problems, more funds voted for welfare, it’s always the fault of the environment, the fault of this situation in which this XYX group grew up in. It is never possibly could be the heart of man himself that’s the problem. Yet this is what the Bible insists and therefore, if we’re going to talk about sociology, politics, government or any one of these fields, if we are Bible-honoring Christians, we have to disagree right at the very start of the race; we don’t even get off the block before we are in radical disagreement with almost every concept of government and sociology today. And that is that the problem is man’s rebellious heart, he is a totally depraved, damned, miserable, creature, and that is the Biblical picture. It is to be expected that damned, miserable, creatures drop babies in wastepaper baskets to get out from responsibility; that’s what a totally depraved creature would do when their sin nature reaches its full extent.

Total depravity means this: It means that all of us have been affected by sin in every area. It does not mean that all men are as bad as they could be. For that reason I prefer to call this doctrine the doctrine of comprehensive depravity, that is it encompasses all areas rather than total. Total sounds like it’s saying that all men are as bad as they could be; no, that’s not true. Do you know why all men aren’t as bad as they could be? Common grace, God restrains the sin nature in the society of men, to a degree, so all men are not as sinful as they could possibly be. We all could be dropping babies in wastepaper baskets. This could be true of all men; by God’s grace it is not but just because it isn’t doesn’t mean we should be shocked when it happens. We should have obvious interest in babies, I’m not saying anything about that, all I’m saying is that that kind of an event is to be expected, and we should not react like the world reacts—what kind of a new program can we design to employ five bureaucrats to solve this problem. Wrong response! The response is going back to the heart of man himself and the restraints of the fourth divine institution of government.

Now Daniel, coming to God in prayer, touches the sin issue immediately. He’s got a problem; the problem has been that Jeremiah 29 says that God will end the captivity in seventy years, at the end of seventy years, in 535 BC the nation will be returned from Babylon. But obviously those that are returned from Babylon can only be those that are in Babylon to be returned from Babylon. And this means that the prophesied fulfillment of Jeremiah 29:10 has only the small group of Jews in Babylon, but Jeremiah 29:11-15 goes on to describe a future restoration, not just of the Jews in Babylon, but of all Jews. And it’s that total restoration of Israel that Daniel wants, not just the little bitty restoration from Babylon. In prophecy those two events are mixed together. And Daniel wants that whole prophecy to be fulfilled. Now the first part of the prophecy is going to be fulfilled within three years of this prayer. This prayer is prayed in the year 538 BC, there’s only three years to go before God’s clock of 70 years is reached.

So he has no problem with the first part of that prayer. The problem is with the second part of the prayer of getting all the Jews back in the land, and Daniel has two problems with this. First, between Jeremiah 29:10 and Jeremiah 11:15 there’s a little “if.” And the “if” is if the nation wholly repents, changes their attitude toward the Word of God, then and only then will this future restoration of all Jews from all over the world occur. So Daniel knows the first part is guaranteed because there’s no “if” attached to it, but this one does have an “if” so that if is what he’s praying about. Lord, let it be that in our day we have sufficient spiritual revival, a sufficient turning back to the Word of God to allow this entire restoration to occur. That’s what Daniel is praying about.

In addition to the “if” clause he has another problem, and that problem is that he’s already got certain visions that would seem to indicate that the space between verses 10 and 11-12 is going to be prolonged because of four kingdoms that are going to intervene, until Israel is wholly restored. So he seems to have contradictory evidence that God has already given him to postpone that final prayer. But nevertheless, like David in 2 Samuel, Daniel is going to try to talk God out of it and he’s going to try to get God to change his mind and try to get God to terminate this whole process now, in the year 535 BC. When Babylon is relieved and that restoration occurs, he wants the whole thing to happen then. So those are the prayers he grapples with, and coming before God he now begins to interact with his total depravity.

To come and make these kind of bold petitions requires dealing with the sin problem. One person asked in the feedback cards, can’t we get too bold in making these kind of requests that we talked about last week. We can if we ignore the fall and total depravity; we can’t if we keep total depravity and the fall in mind.

So in Daniel 9:5 he begins his confession, “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments,” now it sounds, when you first hear this, that Daniel is simply repeating words, just blah, blah, blah, blah. Here we have Daniel repeating, it appears, words, but he’s not saying we’ve sinned, we’ve sinned, we’ve sinned, we’ve sinned. That’s not what Daniel is saying here. He is giving us different Hebrew verbs to sin, and those Hebrew verbs describe what he’s trying to get across in his confession. So he’s repeating words that are not exactly synonyms. They sound like synonyms; they sound like synonyms but they aren’t. He is simply analyzing the whole problem of the depth of the responsibility of man.

His first word, “we have sinned” is chatah, means to miss the mark. It is used for throwing something, shooting an arrow, missing the target; throwing a rock, flinging a rock in the ancient world and failing to hit the target. So the basic meaning of chatah is to miss the mark. Its derived spiritual meaning, therefore, is our missing God’s standards. God’s character is +R, that +R is revealed in the Word of God. Those are the standards of God and those standards have been given to created man to be lived in accordance with throughout all history. So when chatah is used he’s simply saying we have missed the high standard You have set for us. So this verb concentrates upon God’s standards and our departure from those standards. So the image here that Daniel first gets across is Lord, we do not have to live by majority rule; we have been given absolutes that are true in every and all situations so we don’t have to go to the majority to find out the latest polls on whether this is right and this is wrong. We have the Word of God that tells us what is right and what is wrong. We have, therefore, a base in revelation, not in statistics. That’s the first word for sin, and by the way, you can’t confess sin in this sense unless you’re really soundly convinced to start with that Scripture is what it claims to be. Just forget confession of sin if you are weak in the area of inspiration of Scripture. You have first got to lick that problem in your own spiritual life before this kind of confession can proceed.

Daniel is saying “we have missed Your standards.” The second word, translated in the King James, we “have committed iniquity” but in the original Hebrew its ‘avah, and ‘avah means to damage something, originally it meant to be crooked, to be bent out of shape. If something is bent there’s been an action called ‘avah happen to it. That’s the primary basic meaning of this word, to bend out of shape. The spiritual meaning that came to be locked into this word is that sin damages the original creation, so I have been originally created in God’s image, not to sin in history; I have been created to subdue the earth in perfect submission to God’s instructions. I have been created to produce on earth and in history to glorify God, but as part of Adam I too have fallen, I have allowed Satan to gain the dominion over the world, I have damaged creation by my rebellion, I have damaged my own soul by my rebellion, I have damaged the way I think by my rebellion, I have damaged my life, I have damaged other people. So ‘avah takes into account the fallout from sin, the damage that has been done. Daniel has carefully, methodically, rationally thought through the problem and now he’s presenting it back to God. We have missed Your standards in the Word; we have caused fantastic damage in our lives and the lives of other people by our sin. So this shows the damage that has been done.

By the way, the word “wrong” in English for those of you who are bugs in the English language comes from an old English word, wrang, or to wring out; that’s where the word wrong came from, bent, twist, and we call it wrong today and we’ve forgotten the background of our own language, but that’s where the word wrong came from, to damage something. So ‘avah is to damage.

The third word, we “have done wickedly” in Your sight, another picturesque word for sin. rasha‘ this word, in its primary basic meaning is chaos, it’s used in Isaiah 57:20, “the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters are cast up mire and dirt, there’s no peace, says my God to the wicked.” So it’s a picture of turbulent water in motion, chaos. Chaos, and therefore rasha spiritually came to mean the spiral of chaos that is let loose, sort of like damage, the spiral of chaos is let loose when rebellion against God occurs in time. An example of this would be somebody sins, somebody else has a vengeance motive to get back at that person, somebody steals property so you have a loss economically of the property and then say the store owner has to, because people come in and thieve from the shelves of the store, he either has to pay insurance for lost goods, he has to hire guards, or whatever he does to fight against the crime he passes it on to the customer so the next time you walk in the store the price has gone up, not because of inflation, the price has gone up on the goods because of the crime. So the customer is always paying for the other people who walk in the store and steal stuff. That’s what’s so ironic about the customer who is standing there at a counter and he watches someone else steal and doesn’t report it because he (quote) “doesn’t want to get involved.” Now what such a shallow thinking person doesn’t realize is friend, you’re already involved because you’re paying for what that guy just did. So rasha‘ means the chaos that is caused by sin.

Now the last one he uses, we have “rebelled,” marad; marad in its basic meaning meant a political revolt. Its spiritual meaning, therefore, is rebellion against God’s authority. This emphasizes authority, God’s right to say what is right and what is wrong; God’s right to give instructions to the creatures that He has made to live in history; God’s right to tell you what to do and what you will not do. That area of sin is one that is often neglected and one that in our day must be restored to our [can’t understand word]. We have got to, as Christians, analyze our own sin more and more in terms of our own personal rebellion against God’s authority because our society outside tends to neglect this, and since we live in that society we tend to neglect it in our Christian spiritual lies. So to offset this we have got to over-emphasize, all most in our confession our own rebellious soul. Now I know this isn’t happening in Christian circles and you know how you can tell it’s not happening? Because everywhere you have pastor teachers who are authoritatively teaching the Word of God, and making authority the issue, you have Christians by the droves leaving, reacting, maligning, criticizing. Why are those Christians criticizing authority? Because they’re rebellious, that’s all. Now it comes out in all sorts of pious ways, but ultimately spiritually that’s the issue, marad, it is a rebellion against duly constituted authority. You see it in the street, attitude toward the cop; to be a cop and survive you have to have two bullet proof vests, weight 250 and be 6’5”.

All those words in verse 5 have to do with confession of sin. Now he summarizes all those four words by another statement. What is it? He says we have “departed from Thy precepts and from Thy judgments.” So in essence, tying all those four words together, what is Daniel saying? Sin is departure from the Word of God; that’s what he’s saying. What are “Thy precepts?” What are “Thy judgments?” Where do you get the judgments and the precepts? Some minister making it all up in his own head, reading a book review describing what the latest theologian has said, describing what the politician or sociologist has said, or exegeting what the Scripture says. Obviously “precepts” and “judgments” come only in the canon of Scripture. Therefore any sin can be… you can put a flanking maneuver around it by avoiding the concept of precepts and judgments. Let me show you some clever ways we have of doing this, because immediately there’s a defense, oh well I don’t do that? Don’t be so sure.

Let’s see some ways we get around the precepts and judgments of Scripture. One of the ways that’s very convenient, we use this is an illustration, is in connection with the women’s right’s movement. I’ll use that because the reasoning here carries over into many areas. In this discussion that has been going on, a whole bunch of ministers are insisting that the precepts and judgments of the New Testament regarding the role of women in the local church are only relative, that is, since you find them in, say the epistle to the Corinthians, those precepts and those judgments apply only to Corinth. Now if it’s really that the precepts and judgments apply only to the church at Corinth, then we do not sin as a local church in, say, putting woman in the pulpit. That’s true. But it all hinges on whether the precepts and judgments applies to all local churches in all times in all places or whether that admonition in Corinthians applies only to the church at Corinth only in the first century. That’s the issue.

Now if you make the precepts and judgments very, very small you can get around sinning. But unfortunately for such ministers, if you look at the admonitions given to the role of women in the Church in both Corinthians and Timothy, you find in the very context him saying here is why I want women to be in the particular roles they are; because they were created in such and such a way, and they fell in such and such a way. Now does creation and fall have only to do with the church at Corinth only in the first century, or are creation and fall good for all churches in all times in all places. Obviously the latter. Therefore the precepts and judgments having to do with women’s role in the church applies throughout the church age, and any denomination, and any organization that puts a woman in the pulpit is sinning and departing from the precepts and judgments of God’s Word. So there are subtle ways and not so subtle ways of sinning but verse 5 is apparently a pretty comprehensive statement.

Daniel 9:6, he goes on further in his confession. You can tell this man has done some thinking about his sin and his country’s sin because it’s “we,” he puts himself with the country. “Neither have we hearkened unto thy servants, the prophets, which spoke in thy name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land.” And in verse 6 Daniel is fighting something. First of all he is using the words of Jeremiah. That phrase, “thy servants, the prophets, who have spoken” throughout the nation, you see he lists “kings, princes, fathers, all the people of the land.” Why does Daniel do that? Because he’s pulling out the excuse, he says we’ve got no excuse. It isn’t that the people up here north of Jerusalem heard it and the people down there in Hebron they never got the word so that was the problem? Ignorance? Huh-un, verse 6 cuts out from under another often encountered excuse for sin, “oh, I didn’t know.” He says oh yes we did know, we knew very well what God’s precepts and judgments were, we had it taught to all areas of society, there were no minority groups that didn’t know, all people knew, majorities and minorities both knew the precepts and judgments.

Now to show you what an avid student of Jeremiah Daniel was, remember we said he was a student of Deuteronomy and Jeremiah, these prophets. Turn to Jeremiah and I want to take you through some verses. When you read these verses think of what you have just read in the book of Daniel. Jeremiah 1:17, remember Jeremiah would be the age of Daniel’s father or his grandfather, so Jeremiah is one generation before Daniel in time. So he has listened to his elders; Daniel follows the teaching of the fathers. One of those fathers is Jeremiah, and in Jeremiah 1:17 God speaks to Jeremiah, “Thou, therefore, gird up thy loins and arise, and speak unto them all that I command thee;” and notice what he tells Jeremiah, what every pastor teacher ought to look at, “be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound you before them.” In other words he instructs, when you teach the Word of God and you have someone out there that doesn’t like it you just keep on teaching it, and if they don’t like it, the moment you start back up and compromising I’m going to publicly embarrass you in front of them all. So Jeremiah, if you don’t want Me to embarrass you in front of all of them, you just go ahead and teach the Word of God and if you drive everyone away, go ahead and drive them away but I told you to teach the Word, I did not tell you to gather a big following; I told you to teach the Word.

Jeremiah 1:18, “For, behold, I have made thee this day a fortified city, and an iron pillar, and bronze walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah,” notice the repetition here and compare it with what you just read in Daniel, “the kings of Judah, against its princes, against its priest, and against the people of the land. [19] And they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with you, saith the LORD, to deliver you.”

Jeremiah 7:25, another passage that obviously reflects in Daniel’s prayer. “Since the day that your fathers came forth out of the land of Egypt unto this day I have even sent unto you all my servants, the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them, [26] Yet they hearkened not unto me, nor inclined their ear, but hardened their heart; they did worse than their fathers.”

Jeremiah 25:4, “And the LORD has sent unto you all his servants, the prophets, rising early and sending them, but you have not hearkened, nor inclined your ear to hear,” and so on.

Jeremiah 29:19, “Because they have not hearkened to my words, saith the LORD, which I sent unto them by My servants, the prophets, rising up early and sending them; but ye would not hear, saith the LORD.”

Jeremiah 35:15, “I have sent also unto you all my servants, the prophets, rising up early and sending them, saying, Return now every man from his evil way, and amend your doings, and go not after other gods to serve them….”

Jeremiah 44:4, Jeremiah was explaining to his nation why it fell. “Howbeit, I sent unto you all My servants, the prophets, rising early and sending them, saying, Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate.” Jeremiah 44:21, “The incense that ye burned in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, ye, and your fathers, your kings, and your princes, and the people of the land, did not the LORD remember them?”

Now back to Daniel. So Daniel, having been a student of Jeremiah reflects Jeremiah’s vocabulary, he reflects Jeremiah’s phraseology and thinking. And so he confesses the extent and scope of sin in verse 5; he says it was against knowledge, it was not done in ignorance, verse 6. Verse 7-10, the last part of this prayer is one block of material all together.

Daniel 9:7, “O Lord, righteousness belongs unto thee, but unto us confusion of faces, as at this day; to the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and unto all Israel, that are near, and that are far off, through all the countries whither thou hast driven them, because of their trespass that they have trespassed against thee. [8] O Lord, to us belongs confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee. [9] To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him; [10] Neither have we obeyed the voice of the LORD our God, to walk in his laws, which he set before us by his servants the prophets.”

Now there’s a contrast theme in verses 7-10, a theme which you ought to know as a believer because of the very practical idea here. It applies in every area of your life, it’s something to take encouragement from in times of disaster, it’s something that will give you patience to stay with it, and that is the Bible views God’s righteousness, His standards, not in His own character, we’re not talking about righteousness just in His own essence but righteousness communicated in His Word to man. When there is this kind of righteousness that comes from obedience to the Word, it’s like building a house on stone. When there is –R it’s like sand. The Scriptures argue time and time and time again that if you operate the creation according to the Creator’s instruction, you get lasting benefits. If you fail to operate the creation according to the operating instructions given by the Creator you will ruin it. And this is why he uses this phrase, “O Lord, to You belongs tsedaqah, or righteousness,” to us [can’t understand, Hebrew words] to us confusion of faces.”

What is “confusion of faces?” “Confusion of faces” means embarrassment, basically, that is it happens after you have trusted something, falsely, you have trusted something and then you’ve seen it cave in. That’s where the expression [Hebrew words] comes from, that is you are embarrassed because you placed your faith here and it caved in. Now when I used the word “embarrass” I use it with hesitancy because I mean something more than just embarrassment, I don’t mean just how we use the word. This kind of embarrassment would include mental illness.

For example, if a person had begun to trust in something, say they had begun to trust in some idol down here, and they built their whole life on that idol. It might be success, one of these high drive types that has to succeed in everything they do, it’s all or nothing, so they enter a marriage and this is usually where you see it reflected most. They are perfectionists at heart; perfectionists are simply people that deny the doctrine of total depravity. They are people who have never understood what the Bible is talking about when it says you are all fallen; you are all imperfect so stop trying to be perfect, Christ alone is perfect. So this person is a perfectionist. Along comes number two and they have a match, and they have this high standard of all or nothing. Now this marriage is going to be the perfect marriage or I’m going to smash the whole thing and get a divorce; we are going to have perfection or we’re going to have nothing, either/or—perfectionism. So they enter this kind of a relationship and everything else this person has done, maybe in business, on sales and everything else, success all over the place, far in excess of all his peers, and then all of a sudden he meets maybe Mrs. Right, this is the best woman for him. The first thing that happens in this relationship is boom, arguments, discord, disharmony. And here’s the success drive, you’ve got to be successful, you’ve got to be perfect. So all sorts of gimmicks, try this gimmick and that gimmick, it doesn’t work on this woman, for some strange reason. The guy has made multi-billion dollar deals and yet he can’t even swing one woman around to his way of thinking. How come? Women have a humiliating influence often times, and so you have this situation develop and he begins to get discouraged, this marriage can be perfect. This imperfection I can’t get of it, so therefore what does he do? Get rid of the marriage. What’s really bothering them isn’t this problem of the marriage, what’s really frustrating them is the idol of perfection is being smashed and crushed by God’s sanctifying moves in the marriage relationship. That’s what’s happening. We could sit and talk about a problem here or a problem there, but that’s not the problem; the problem is the fact that we’ve got this idol and we’ve got a person with “confusion of faces,” shattered because the idol has been shattered. So that’s the picture of this embarrassment; it’s not just simple embarrassment, its profound embarrassment and that’s what Daniel keeps insisting in verses 7, 8, 9 and 10.

“Lord, to You belongs tsedaqah,” to You is righteousness, and the word righteousness not only means righteousness but it’s something this is firm, solid, sound standard. But to us all we get is [says Hebrew words], all we get is confusion of faces. Now why is that? At that point in history what was God teaching Israel? Not to trust in idols. So every time they trusted in idols, crush; they’d trust in Baal to give rain for the crops, drought; they trust in Baal to make the soil fertile, nothing comes up but weeds; frustration, frustration, frustration. Why the frustration? Why that crushing effect? Because God loves you and He is trying to show us that we are trusting the wrong thing, and He will continue to give us “confusion of faces” until we put our trust in Him, until we become grace oriented creatures instead of works oriented creatures. Until we recognize His authority instead of our own autonomous authority; until we turn the problem over to Him instead of trying to solve it ourselves, and until that point is reached Daniel very perceptively argues in this part of his confession… remember verse 10 ends the confession of human sin. He says, Lord, You have the standard, it always sits there, never changes, it’s always stable. And to us its roller coaster, up and down, up and down, up and down, confusion of faces.

But then to resolve the tension he concludes… actually the conclusion logically is in verse 9, not verse 10, verse 10 just simply repeats what he said, we disobey. But in verse 9 he says, Lord, to You belongs grace, “mercies and forgivenesses,” that is the only way you can get the Creator, who has this absolute standard of perfection, and the imperfect creature with his imperfections together. They are united by the cross. The cross is perfect; the cross is the perfect solution to God’s righteousness and our sin. It is perfect! We didn’t plan the cross; we had nothing to do with the cross, that’s where grace is. Now Daniel doesn’t know all the details about Jesus being crucified outside the west wall of the city of Jerusalem in the first century. He maybe doesn’t know about the crucifixion but he knows one thing, God is going to do something like that in the future because He says Lord, I know that we can never get this stuff together…never! There’s only one way that solution is going to happen, it’s with your “Mercies and forgivenesses.” And so You belongs that kind of thing.

Now this whole section of Daniel is important because all of Daniel’s grappling with his sin problem is what we as creatures have to do again and again and again. You ought to follow the logic Daniel uses in this passage, and if you will, you’ll find yourself just swept along in the stream to the point you have to become grace oriented.