Daniel Lesson 36

Prayer Principles – Daniel 9:11-19

Turn to Daniel 9, Daniel’s great prayer of confession. Daniel 9 is one of the great, outstanding prayers in God’s Word. It’s from passages like Daniel 9 that you develop a true concept of what prayer is about and it will deliver your soul from all of the false notions of prayer that are prevalent in evangelical circles, like everyone getting a room and saying oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, and all the rest of it that goes on, because the great prayers of Scripture focus upon content. God is intelligent and He expects intelligent beings to communicate with. And we are intelligent by virtue of creation. Some have done something with our intelligence and others have not, but the point still remains that as far as God is concerned, He considers you an intelligent being, and that means you approach Him intelligently, not like a babbling idiot. That kind of praying shows disrespect to God’s fantastic character.

In Daniel 9 you see and will observe many details about true praying. We have seen at least five principles so far in this prayer. We have seen a complete repudiation of the heresy of fatalism, the dime-store Calvinism, theological amateurs who are involved in promoting in the name of Calvinism an absolute fatalism that decries means to God’s goals. Yes, God has sovereignly decreed certain goals for the universe but He has also sovereignly decreed things to occur in the present moment to bring those future things about. In other words, God’s goals have means and part of the means or one of the means of bringing about God’s sovereign will in history is prayer.

Prayer is not auxiliary to God’s sovereign decrees. God’s sovereign decrees include prayer, therefore God responds to prayer because He’s ordained that the universe operate by prayer. After all, rocks can’t pray, animals can’t pray, there’s only one creature that can pray and that is mankind. In fact, you don’t find angels really praying in Scripture. Of all the beings, whether they’re what we call sentient beings in the universe or non-sentient created objects in the universe, all creatures cannot pray except one—man. Therefore man is the priest of creation; he is the one that prays creation forward in history. The march of time is advanced through prayer. Prayer is vital on a moment by moment basis. God, then, responds to prayer. “You have not,” James says, for one reason, not because God hasn’t decreed it, “you have not because you ask not.” Prayer is the necessity of gaining certain goals in time.

So the first thing we’ve learned from this great, great prayer is a repudiation of fatalism. Daniel is not a dime-store Calvinist. Daniel is not someone who has sucked up fatalism. Yet you can never accuse Daniel of being a man who doesn’t believe in God’s sovereign will. He is one of the strongest believers in God’s sovereign will in all of Scripture, but he is not a fatalist.

A second principle that we have learned in this prayer is that there will come times in your life where such vital issues will be raised, having to do with your overall lifestyle and pattern; it may be a disaster, it may be the loss of a loved one, it may be a major job change, it may be choosing a wife, it may be some great basic decision that you’re going to face, and to resolve that issue would require that issue would require time out for strategic praying. And Daniel took time out from the details of life and taking time out from the details of life is called in the Bible “fasting.” Fasting is not giving up gum for lent; fasting is taking time out from the details of life in order to concentrate and most of the time out that is taken for strategic praying has not to do with the actual praying. Daniel is not taking time out because it takes him so long to talk with God, that he has such a big request that it takes him 12 hours to get that request out of his mouth to God. That’s not why Daniel is taking time out. Daniel is taking time out in order to prepare the request for presentation before God. So fasting, by and large, in these great prayers of Scripture has to do with you sitting down with the Word of God and designing an intelligent Scriptural relevant prayer petition.

Now if you have doubts or if you feel like you don’t really understand how to design good petitions of prayer, there are at least three things that are available here at Lubbock Bible Church to help train you to do this. The first one is the insert in the bulletin; requests are gathered from various people in the congregation, and sections of the Word are put in these requests; that is to train you that these requests ought to be grounded in specific physical references, why we are authorized to come before the Father and make this petition or that petition or another petition. We also have certain prayer groups, we have one on Israel, we have several others; meet with these people in these tactical prayer groups, they limit down, they focus down a certain field of fire, a certain area that has to be secured in prayer and they spend time studying the Word to design this petition to convince God that He ought to answer. Then on Wednesday night we have a discussion on needs of the congregation; this is a time when you can bring up certain crucial needs. People who criticize us that we’re not concerned with people’s needs are inevitably the nod to God crowd that pops in at 11:00 o’clock Sunday morning and stomps out.

The third principle of prayer that we have learned, besides repudiation of fatalism, and a concentration time called fasting, is the third principle that prayer builds upon one basic truth from God’s character, and that is God keeps His Word. God is, in the words of divine attributes, God is immutable; God never changes. God has said one thing in one century, He will never change and He intends to carry that out in other centuries of time. God does keep His Word. Prayer depends upon God keeping His Word.

A fourth principle that we have seen so far in Daniel is that crucial prayers, probably most of the time ought to be written out beforehand; they are not truly spontaneous prayers. Daniel did not just get up in his attic one day and pray the prayer you see here. It is too carefully composed for that. In the Hebrew there is meter, there is a logical organization to his materials. Daniel wrote this out. Maybe it would help you literally to conceive of the process on this fourth principle of prayer if you thought when you have a critical need, there’s a strategic issue in your life and you want to pray it through, if you would think in terms of writing a letter to God rather than just talking to Him, and then when you sit down with a piece of paper and write a letter to God, be logical about it, just as though you’d put it in the mailbox and God’s going to get it at the other end, here God is my request and here’s why I think you ought to answer it; 1,2,3,4,5,6, 7, and think in terms of that. Maybe that will help apply this fourth principle of prayer. This is what the tactical prayer groups do.

The fifth principle of prayer that we have seen and we saw it toward the end of last class, was that genuine confession of sin involves a conviction of sin and a [can’t understand word] perception of its nature. When these great praying men of the Old Testament came before God with their strategic need, immediately because they came before a holy righteous God they became convinced … the word “convict” I don’t like to use because in this part of the country the word conviction in evangelical fundamentalist circles has this idea of going around and weeping and coming forward and so on. I don’t like that word; I prefer the word “convince” because in the Greek that’s exactly what it means. The word to “convict” is the word to “convince,” is the word used in the courtroom, so that when an accusation is made it is made convincingly. That’s the same word used here. So there has to be a convincing on the matter of sin.

We saw several aspects of sin that Daniel listed. He listed all those verbs in verse 5, we have sinned, we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly, we have rebelled, we’ve departed from thy precepts and thy judgments. Daniel there is not just blah, blah, blah, blah, just repeating words to make the wind in the room move. Daniel is actually outlining the nature of sins itself. The first verb was the aspect of sin where it falls short of God’s norms and standards. So the first thing you see about sin is that God has a standard that’s absolutely authoritative, and on the score card on the graph, visualize it as a bar graph maybe, with your top part of the value system on the table in the bar graph up here, and the bars just reach up this high, it comes short of God’s standard. That’s one aspect of sin that’s on Daniel’s mind, my behavior, my life, the behavior of this nation, the national life, comes only up to here on the bar graph, when it ought to be up to this level; sin comes short of God’s norms and standards.

The second verb, “we have committed iniquity,” means that sin leaves damaged pieces in creation. Once sin has occurred we have damaged the creation. Sin always damages the creation in some way, shape or form. You remember that. When you are tempted to sin, when you are tempted mental attitude wise and say well, this is just a thought, you damage your mind by circulating this crud. And every time you commit your soul to circulate crud, it means that you damage your soul by that much, and that’s illustrated by that second word, “we have committed iniquity,” that is we have damaged our creation, the creation of our soul, the created beings around us with whom we have personal relationship, the inanimate creation, all this has been damaged by sin.

Sin is a violation of the operating instructions, when you get a new piece of equipment you have a guarantee or a warranty that comes with it, and usually there’s small print on the bottom of the warranty that says this warranty is good for this piece of equipment if you follow operating instructions. It’s the same with creation, creation is guaranteed by God only to the degree that we uphold operating instruction.

The third verse in Daniel 9:5 was “we have done wickedly.” That verb emphasizes the chaos of sin. It differs slightly from damage; chaos emphasizes the whirlpool of reaction and counter reaction brought about by sin. In personal relationship vindictiveness is usually answered by revenge tactics and so you have a cycle of sin that builds up, chaos in personal relationship, chaos in relationship with God. A creature sins, God disciplines, a creature rebels against the discipline, the creature hates God, God disciplines further—chaos. So the third characteristic of sin is chaos.

And then we found the other verb in verse 5 translated correctly, “we have rebelled” and that is the heart of sin, it is a rebellion against God’s authority. And this emphasizes God’s inherent authority, that God does not ask us, God tells us. And for a generation that tends to be very permissive in the area of authority this is the one verb of these four verbs that ought to, I think, be over balanced in our prayer life, because as a generation we resent authority of all kinds. We cannot stand authoritative people, they bug us. And the reason is because we can’t stand an authoritative God. And that rebellion against authority comes about ultimately because in our generation sin takes a particular form. Sin takes a particular form in every generation. In our generation the particular form it takes is humph toward authority. So that’s the one we ought to bear down hardest on in our confession.

Finally in verse 5 he summed it up by saying, “departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments.” And this goes back to the violation of the Word of God. Now so far Daniel has confessed his sin, and in verse 11, where we left off, he continues the confession until he gets to verse 14. Verses 1-10 have to do with man’s sin, what man has done. In verses 11-14 he shifts gears and we have a confession of God’s holiness. One is man directed or sin emphasized and the other is God directed with God’s holiness at stake, that’s His righteousness and His justice. God’s righteousness and His justice, why are both needed in a true confession? For this reason: being fallen creatures you all know what happens when you have this experience of having to confess sin; deep down with the innards of your soul you know there’s always that voice that comes and says “it ain’t all my fault,” now God, if you hadn’t put me in quite the same situation I would have done better. So there’s always that little degree of God-blame that’s associated with confession.

Therefore the great men of the Old Testament, when they made their confessions made sure that in their grappling of the issue, and when they wrote their letter out to God, they communicated very clearly to God that they were confessing their sins and they were not blaming it whatsoever in any way to the smallest degree upon God. They detached the responsibility from God and put it on their own shoulders. So that’s why verses 11-14 are there, it’s preventing a God-blame during the confession, that somehow God is to blame because God put me in this horrible overriding circumstance and I’m at the end of my rope, there’s no escape so I have to sin. But 1 Corinthians 10:13 says God will always make a way of escape that ye may be able to bear it. So that’s denying something about His character. Stated quite bluntly, and it’s very hard, I know, I grapple with this in my own life and in counseling with other people, problems in this area, it is the hardest thing to admit when you are under pressure or when you have done something wrong which was committed under pressure, that you could have done something other than that. It’s hard to confess that.

Verses 11-14 deal with that. “Yea, all Israel have transgressed thy law, even by departing, that they might not obey thy voice; therefore the curse is poured upon us, and the oath that is written in the law of Moses the servant of God, because we have sinned against him. [12] And he hath confirmed his words, which he spoke against us, and against our judges that judged us, by bringing upon us a great evil: for under the whole heaven hath not been done as hath been done upon Jerusalem. [13] As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this evil is come upon us: yet made we not our prayer before the LORD our God, that we might turn from our iniquities, and understand thy truth. [14] Therefore hath the LORD watched upon the evil, and brought it upon us: for the LORD our God is righteous in all his works which he doeth: for we obeyed not his voice.”

Now here he’s talking about God’s justice in disciplining sin. So verse 11, “all Israel has transgressed,” this is a summary of the entire national confession which must be confessed here. In Jeremiah 29:10 there was this prophecy of the seventy years termination of the dispersion in Babylon. Those seventy years were going to be up in the year 535 BC; the year of this prayer is 538 BC, just three years prior to the end of that seventy year period. Daniel sees that decree coming up very close in the immediate future. Thus he knows that the relief will come and that they will be returned from Babylon. However, also in Jeremiah 29 we have a situation where in the other verses, verses 11-15, there’s a discussion of an alternation national recall, and ultimate recall of all scattered Israel from all over the world and the end of history. But before this final recall and the recall of 538 BC something has to happen spiritually for the nation, and what has to happen spiritually for the nation is an entire repentance. Therefore Daniel is praying in this prayer to get that repentance to come about. He represents, he assumes the responsibility for the nation and confesses it in order that Israel be regathered in spite of the fact that there appears to be four Gentile kingdoms that have to be squashed between these two prophesies. He wants history to end in glory for his people and he wants it to end in his own lifetime.

So he prays that “all Israel has transgressed Thy law,” he takes upon himself the role of national intercessor, they have transgressed your Torah, and again we have an aspect of sin he did not mention in verse 5 where he uses the word ‘abar, which means to cross over. The idea is here you have a river, you cross over, ‘abar, from the word which we get Hebrew, the “b” is pronounced as a “v”, ‘abar, and it’s the people that cross over. So you cross over the Torah. What’s the Torah? The first five books of Scripture. We have “crossed over Thy law by departing,” the idea is that we have the bounds of the Christian life set for us by the Word of God. That’s the framework for the Christian life and we have crossed over that framework and departed from our zone of operations. We have copped out” would be a modern way of saying it.

Now Daniel at this point has meditated much on the sinful heart and he comes up with a purpose clause here that is very incisive exposure of our sin natures. It’s so incisive that most of us will only recognize this after we’ve thought about it quite some time. He says, purpose clause, “we have copped out in order that we might not obey Thy voice.” “…in order that we might not obey Thy voice.” In other words he’s saying there is an ultimate “under the table” agenda that’s operating in avoiding the Word of God. People avoid the Word of God in order that they not be held responsible for it. This is a very interesting point. Why do people avoid studying the Word of God? Why do people avoid coming where the Word of God is taught? This verse suggests there’s an ultimate reason for this. Now usually in the flow and chaos of life it’s always covered up with things like well, I just don’t have time, and I’ve got this and that and so forth. That’s just cover-up stuff, but if this purpose clause is valid we have to say no, the reason we avoid the Word is we want to avoid the responsibility that comes upon us after we’ve heard it. So people want to get out from underneath it.

So he says, as a result of that, “the curse is poured out upon us, and the oath that is written in the Law of Moses, the servant of God, because we have sinned against him.” Turn to Deuteronomy 28. Back in the Mosaic Law, the Mosaic Law was a covenant relationship for the nation and in Moses’ Law there were a set of blessings and a set of cursings. The blessings included economic prosperity. They were promised that if nationally they would hold to the Word of God they would be economically prosperous; if they, on the other hand, copped out and violated the authority of the Word of God there would be business depression and recession, and it’s prophesied in Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26. Also part of this blessing was that you would occupy the land that you owned by the Abrahamic Covenant, that is Palestine, and if you did not obey the Word of God you would be kicked out. Furthermore, if you did obey the Word of God you would have military victory; if you disobeyed you would have defeat. Part of the blessings if you obeyed you would be a testimony to the nations that would be glorious. If you disobeyed the Word of God you would also be a testimony to the nations of God’s fury. It’s either way because you’re elect, you’re going to play the role of being a testimony. Now whether you’re going to play the role of a blessing type testimony or a cursing type testimony it’s up to you but you will play a role.

So in Deuteronomy 28:1 we have a rehearsing of this curse; the curse is made centuries before Daniel but Daniel had studied Deuteronomy. “And it shall come to pass that thou shall hearken diligently unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep and do all His commandments which I command you this day, that the LORD thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth. [2] And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God.” You see the word “Blessed in verse 3, verse 4, verse 5, “Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field. [4] Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. [5]Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. [6] Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out,” and it goes on.

“But,” verse 15, “But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee,” and then you notice verse 16, cursing, “Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field.” Verse 17, cursing, “Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. [18] Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. [19] Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.” Cursing, cursing, cursing; so they were warned, God outlined exactly what happened, the rest of it was up to them. That’s the cursing written in the Law of Moses, servant of God.

Back to Daniel 9. Now he’s saying that because the curse, he says, “has been poured out upon us,” all this, the business depression, we have been kicked out of our land, we have suffered a great catastrophe of military defeat and invasion, and we are now a testimony all right, and he’s going to use a special word for that later on in the passage, we are a reproach, we are scorned among the nations. Nothing like this has ever occurred in history, either by way of blessing or cursing. So now he comes to utilizing the application of that. He says this has come upon us, so he takes the suffering and here’s how he uses the doctrine of suffering.

The doctrine of suffering says there are six reasons why believers suffer, four reasons why unbelievers suffer. The six reasons why believers suffer is because first of all, it’s the fall in general, we all suffer because of that. There is rebellion toward the specific will of God in our life. There is our association with others who are being disciplined and suffering. There is our identification with the Lord Jesus Christ in Satan’s world. There is the problem of learning doctrine which we can learn in no other way except through suffering, and then there’s the problem of being a testimony to unbelievers, believers and angels. These are six reasons why believers suffer, so next time you’re in a situation of suffering and you say why does God let this happen to me, you’ve got a starter right there. The unbeliever suffers for the same reason, the fall, rebellion, association with others and ultimately he suffers because he is in the lake of fire, final ultimate. Four reasons for suffering of the non-Christian, six reasons of suffering of the Christian.

Now Daniel knows that doctrine, and he’s involved in a suffering type situation, so he goes down his list and he says okay, we are suffering, that’s obvious; why are we suffering. So he starts checking them off; fall, rebellion, okay, right there. He stops at reason number two and he says I know that we’re suffering because of rebellion because I know the Word says is Deuteronomy the exact kind of suffering that we are now suffering, namely, deportation, military defeat, business collapse and being a reproach to the nations, that particular quality and kind of suffering would come about, Moses told us, when we disobey the Law. So he doesn’t short the suffering up just to being identified with God’s purposes in Satan’s world, he is not saying he’s suffering to be a testimony to the nations, he’s suffering because of rebellion. He has analyzed his experience in the light of doctrine. He has applied doctrine to his situation and now he understands something that he didn’t understand before. So what does he do about it? He is going to relate it back to the Mosaic Law.

Now I want to show you that this happens in the Christian life, and I want to give some guidelines on doing the same thing Daniel is doing in his experience that you can do in yours. Here we are in Jesus Christ, that’s our position, we are baptized in union with Jesus Christ, we share the indwelling Holy Spirit, the Father has elected us, He’s called us, He’s justified us and so on. So the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have done certain things or are doing certain things for us. That’s our position. But in experience we have various situations; sometimes we suffer because we’re in fellowship, that is some of the other reasons on that list, and sometimes we suffer because we’re out of fellowship; sometimes we suffer because we’ve been out of fellowship, picked up –R learned behavior patterns, gone back in fellowship but we still have to deal with those learned behavior patterns picked up while we were out of fellowship.

Now to show you the kinds of discipline that comes upon believers, turn to 1 Corinthians 11. Here’s some reasons, some shapes of discipline that God causes to happen in our lives. And these kinds of sufferings may be due to reason number two. Keep in mind the list of six reasons why believers suffer. We are not teaching… we are NOT teaching … we are NOT teaching that all these sufferings are due to reason number two all the time. We are only teaching that if these kinds of suffering occur in your life or the lives of your loved ones, reason number two may be a cause. What are some of the shapes of suffering? Paul lists them in 1 Corinthians 11:30, they have fouled up communion in Corinth, turned it into a drunken brawl. And therefore because they desecrated communion they suffered certain things. God takes communion and baptism with a very high degree of respect; too bad some of us don’t. Verse 30 describes some of the kinds of suffering that God brings into believer’s lives. “Weak” refers to general physical weakness but generally this word can refer to mental weakness; it means a general undisciplined mentality, general areas of mental problems. “Many are weak and sickly,” that is, disease, God permits disease; this is not always true so be careful. But verse 30 lists some reasons and the third thing that you see in verse 30 is “sleep,” that’s death. Now that may shock some of you who have not studied the Scripture carefully before, but because of rebellion in the life of a believer God can just wipe you right off the map. And the reason He does this is because He loves you and you are so stubborn that the only kind of lesson you ever learn is a 2 x 4 type right over the head. And therefore God will use it and He will kill you and that will be your sanctification. That’s what it’s talking about, the word “sleep” is death of believers. God will kill believers who continue to rebel against Him. This was taught in the Old Testament, when you had some adolescent brat that couldn’t’ stand authority they’d stone him to death.

So Daniel sees suffering, he doesn’t just say oh God, why does this happen to me, he looks at the suffering and he says now God is a rational God and this just doesn’t happen out of the clear blue, my life is not run by a divine roulette wheel. There has to be a plan and a reason why this suffering is happened to me and I am going to sit here and I am going to go to the Word, I am going to doctrine and I’m going to find out why I have this suffering in my life, I’m going to track it down to its cause. So in Daniel 9 we find he has tracked it down and that’s his point in verse 11. “Therefore the curse has been poured out upon us,” “the curse,” these specific forms of suffering of Deuteronomy 28, I can see in history and now I know the cause of that suffering and I’m going to do something about it. I’m going to confess our sin that led to that discipline.

Daniel 9:12, he goes on to describe this curse and why God did curse him, because remember from verses 11-14 he’s not primarily concerned with man’s sin, he’s concerned with God’s justice, he is trying to avoid blaming God for all this. He says God has cursed us in order to do something, verse 12, “He hath confirmed his words, which he spoke against us, and against our judges that judged us, by bringing upon us a great evil: for under the whole heaven hath not been done as hath been done upon Jerusalem.” In other words, there is a unique severity to the suffering and destruction of the Jewish people. In 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar’s army surrounded Jerusalem, later on we’ll see a special presentation of Masada and you’ll see another modern day illustration of it, the Jewish people have been subject to fantastic horrible sufferings and persecutions. As a race the Jewish people have suffered more than any other race in history. And there has to be an explanation for it, and the Jewish book, the Bible, tells us what the explanation is. Why are these people so uniquely blessed and why are they so uniquely damned in history? Because they are an elect people that will surely perform what God has said they will perform. And as long as they kick against the authority of their electing chosen Creator then He will beat them into submission. That is the kind of God that their history represents. That’s why He says there’s never, never He says, in all the wars of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, there has never been suffering like has come upon the city of Jerusalem. This is absolutely outstanding.

So we find the discipline function in the first part of verse 12. Why? To raise up the Word of God. What’s he walking about? It goes back to God’s character. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, and eternal. God has these attributes. One of these attributes is that God is immutable; that is, when He tells us something He keeps His word. Remember one of the principles of prayer, God keeps His Word. Well now what was the Word that God had to keep? The Word was blessings plus cursings. So if the people were on positive volition toward the Word God had to keep His Word, blessing. If the people went on negative volition God had to keep His Word also, cursing. That’s why Hebrews 2:2 says every transgression and disobedience receives just reward. And his point here, God confirms His Word, He confirms it by blessing and He confirms it by cursing.

Application today to the believers life: when we raise hell and we think we’re getting away with something, oh no we’re not, just look around carefully and you’ll see areas where you’re suffering, it may be slight, so slight when it starts that you don’t notice it, but the air has been let out of your spiritual blessing and it just collapsed. And you’ll begin to notice it in your relationship with other people, you’ll notice that you can’t get along with other people any more, loved ones are an irritation to you and so on, and finally this thing eats like a cancer into your whole life, and you’re down in a middle of a cesspool, and finally you’re just about ready to take your last breath and you look up and see the solution because God has confirmed His Word. He told us, He predicted ahead of time that this kind of thing would happen, and we have to learn it over and over and over and over again.

So Daniel 9:13, Daniel continues his defense of why God allowed this to happen. “As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this evil is come upon us: yet” he says, we have, “made we not our prayer before the LORD our God, that we might turn from our iniquities, and understand thy truth.” Here is the heart of his confession. The word “to make prayer” in verse 13 is very interesting etymology on this in the original language; it literally means to make somebody safe joyful; it’s a picture of frowning. Now if you get the picture you’ll see what’s going on in Daniel’s head in praying and why he said earlier prayer causes God to respond to it. Daniel has the image here of God with a big frown on His face. This verb says to change that face to a smile there has to be a change physically in the face of God. This is the way they visualize it; God frowns and then God becomes pleased.

Now what changes the frown to a smile on God’s face? He tells us in the last part of verse 13, “that” is just explanatory, it’s an epexegetical clause that explains content of the verb, “to turn from our iniquities,” that’s the word for damage, that’s the word for mess, “to turn from our mess and understand truth,” literally becomes “be skillful in understanding Thy truth.” And the word “Thy truth” goes back to God’s immutability. God’s immutability, in the Hebrew the same word you use to close your prayer, “Amen,” is the word from which we get immutability, steadfastness; God is perfectly reliable, God is perfectly steadfast, He has “amen” and it comes across in various forms in the language and in various roots, but that’s basically the idea. And when he says “Thy truth” he’s not talking about the Word necessarily, he’s talking about God’s essence, that we may understand skillfully Your essence. We have to understand that, he says; we haven’t understood God, that when You tell us something You mean what You say.

That’s what we haven’t understood. So here we sit because we have violated Your Word, we’ve had some excuse, we’ve been on negative volition, and we’ve got one big chaotic pile of junk, that’s the picture. And we haven’t turned from that and grasped the truth that You mean what You say; and it’s gone on for sixty-seven years since this thing started and we still have not made Your face shining; You still, in other words, disapprove of us, don’t you God. So it’s this tremendous perception behind this prayer, the perception that God has a frown on His face toward us. God loves them but He’s angry.

Therefore Daniel 9:14, “Therefore hath the LORD watched upon the evil,” now that’s very picturesque, verse 14 says God shepherds the evil, He makes sure that we get it, He watches for all the possible evil that He can do to bring into our lives to make the change that’s necessary. He “has watched upon the evil, and brought it upon us: for the LORD our God is righteous in all his works which he doeth: for we obeyed not his voice.” It is not God’s fault, it is our fault, we have refused to obey His voice, He is perfectly righteous to do this.

Now Daniel 9:15-19 is his petition. And as we read verses 15-19 you want to look at what is in this petition for we’re going to learn several principles; three great principles are going to be added to those previous five principles of prayer as we look through this. “And now, O Lord our God, that hast brought thy people forth out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and hast gotten thee renown, as at this day; we have sinned, we have done wickedly. [16] O Lord, according to all thy righteousness, I beseech thee, let thine anger and thy fury be turned away from thy city Jerusalem, thy holy mountain: because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and thy people are become a reproach to all that are about us. [17] Now therefore, O our God, hear the prayer of thy servant, and his supplications, and cause thy face to shine upon thy sanctuary that is desolate, for the Lord’s sake. [18] O my God, incline thine ear, and hear; open thine eyes, and behold our desolations, and the city which is called by thy name: for we do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies. [19] O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do; defer not, for thine own sake, O my God: for thy city and thy people are called by thy name.”

Now you notice that as he gets into the petition he drops the emphasis upon the Mosaic Law, he does not use the word Yahweh, he shifts completely over now to the word for Elohim, and throughout this petition he’s going to fall back on a prior truth of God, a truth that is underneath even the Law. And out of that we have a very powerful lesson to learn in the Christian life.

“And now, O Lord our God, that hast brought thy people forth out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand,” that’s a reference to the Exodus, it’s a reference to the fact that God began a historic work in 1440 BC. God expended energy in space/time history to do something in front of the eyes of fallen men, that they may have evidence on which to trust Him; He began to do that, it showed His power, and then he says, You “have gotten yourself renown,” that is, through Your work with this nation You have revealed enough data to show Your character to men, so they can believe. “We’ve done wickedly” but You still have Your name intact. Now watch what He does, it’s a very clever prayer request that he’s got going here. It’s a fundamental principle of praying. Notice in verse 15 again, to catch the trend, “You have gotten Yourself a name though we have sinned.” YOU have gotten Yourself a name, a reputation.

Now verse 16, notice what he does again, he says, “according to all thy righteousnesses,” literally, plural, these are individual acts that God has done, during the conquest and settlement period He delivered them, He delivered them, He delivered them, all these point acts are described as “your righteousnesses.” That word when used in the plural usually refers to God’s saving acts. “According therefore to Your righteousnesses, I beseech thee,” so the word righteousnesses in verse 16 coupled with the Exodus in verse 15 is making an argument. He’s saying now look God, here you are, You started something in history, You’ve attached Your essence to that, You have shown people Your essence, Your character by the work You started back up here in 1440 BC, it is not 538 BC, we have had six hundred years of Your continual work, over and over and over and over and over with the nation Israel. You have had this thing organized, You have worked very methodically and sequentially, now he says keep it up, don’t quit now.

And his argument basically is that if You quit now, then what’s going to happen to Your reputation that was attached to this work, won’t people say well, look at that, God started a work, and He’s like man, He doesn’t finish it. So what Daniel is doing, very cleverly, is saying if You don’t answer my request God, it’s going to make it look like to all men in history that You are a quitter. That’s the basic form of his argument. In other words, he is praying for vindication of God’s character before the eyes of men. He is praying for God’s glory. He is not saying God, You’ve got to answer this prayer because we’re hurting; he’s not answering us. He’s saying God, You’ve got to answer this prayer not because we’re hurting, not because we’ve sinned, but because Your character is at stake, Your very essence, Your reputation in front of people, that’s at stake. And so for Your sake, not for ours, for Your sake answer this petition. Do you see the persuading effect that this petition has toward God? Do you see that this wasn’t prayed just off the top of his head? Daniel had to think this petition through.

That’s why if you look down through it he’s concerned with Jerusalem, verse 16, “let thine anger and thy fury be turned away from thy city Jerusalem, thy holy mountain: because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and thy people are become a reproach to all that are about us.” Jerusalem is becoming a reproach, he says You originally set Jerusalem up to be a testimony to the nations, now what are they going to do? He said in verse 17, “…cause Thy face to shine upon Thy sanctuary that is desolate,” he is again concerned with the physical manifestations; Jerusalem is a pile of rocks. Look at it, it’s a mess.

And then in Daniel 9:18-19 as the prayer, the petition is getting going, because he’s going to be interrupted in verse 20, as the prayer petition is really going on, he insists that God incline His ear, that He opens His eyes, “and behold our desolations,” not because of our suffering, he says, but because “the city which is called by Thy name,” Your reputation is attached to that pile of rocks over there, look at it, do you want Your name to be blotched in history because of the pile of rocks; is that the reputation You want God? And that’s why in verse 18 you notice that tremendous point, “we do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses,” we don’t have any merit before you, we pray for “Thy great mercies.” We are basing our prayer upon Your grace and our objective is a vindication of Your character. So therefore he concludes in verse 19, “for thine own sake, O my God: for Thy city and Thy people are called by Thy name.” That’s the aim of the prayer.

Now let’s summarize the principles we’ve learned. In addition to the five we have learned so far in prayer from this chapter we can now add three new ones, three other principles of prayer. Principle number 6, adding to the previous five, is that the ultimate objective of all great praying is God’s glory. The ultimate goal of all great mature praying is God’s glory. Just add a footnote that a baby believer, a new Christian can’t make this kind of praying. Daniel is an old, old man who has had many decades of experience in praying and applying the Word. Daniel has gotten to be able to make this kind of prayer over a time period. Don’t be discouraged if when you get in a jam you can’t think out all this great eloquent prayer that you’ve learned all six points or ten points or something. They come with time, just be patient. But be patiently diligent to aim to get to this place in your prayer life, where you can consciously think to yourself, wait a minute, before I make this prayer does this really have anything to do with God’s reputation or not. So principle six: the ultimate objective of all prayer is God’s glory.

The seventh principle taught to us in verse 18 particularly is that the basis of our appeal for the object of our prayers, the basis of appeal is solely the grace of God… solely the grace of God, it has to be an entirely grace oriented prayer, not for something that we have. You see, Daniel could argue, oh God, you see, we’ve got all this and we’ve got this and that, and we’ve got this and because we’ve got all these things you’ve got to add one more to the pile. No, because of Your mercy.

Now let me show you where fatalism creeps into our thinking with just this point. In this idea, we have out here the idea that in the past our position, Christ has done all this for us, we’re elected, we’re justified, and so on, this is past and we know in the future that we have this glorious destiny, we call it glorification. And we then get sloppy; every one of us has a tendency to do this. We see that, oh yeah, we’re locked down in the plan of God, but if you notice, there’s part of time left out of that… present tense, what about the present. There’s the past, there’s the future, but where’s the present when we have to act in history at the present moment.

In the New Testament in Hebrews balances this out by saying you know how we are kept saved? By Christ’s intercessory prayer today. If Jesus quit at 12:20 we would all be damned this afternoon. Now we know Jesus won’t because of the decrees of election and justification, but let’s always understand, those decrees by themselves do not keep us saved. Those decrees predict we will be kept saved; what keeps us saved is the constant intercession of Jesus Christ, and if we’ll remember on a present moment by moment basis that we hang by a thread over the fires of hell, except for Christ’s intercessory work, it tends to discipline your mental attitude to become more grace oriented, that if Jesus let go of His intercession, down we would go, crackling and frying all the way. The doctrine of the intercession of Jesus Christ is what is the gap that’s missing in most expositions of eternal security. Christ, in the present, constantly keeps us saved. We do not have merit within ourselves. People think somehow at regeneration you get a little hunk of merit, and you walk around, it’s grace in that God gives it to you, and it lodges somewhere in your heart and it just has to get poked around the system and then God just has to keep us saved. He doesn’t have to keep us saved at all, the only reason He keeps us saved is because He wants to. Always remember our continuing salvation hinges not upon a few kilograms of merit; it hinges upon God’s continuing gracious attitude, and that’s why principle seven is so valid. The basis of our entire appeal must be God’s continuing grace.

Finally, the eighth principle that we learn from this great prayer of Daniels is that the great prayers of the Old Testament betray the petitioner’s deep study of the Word. These prayers betray a tremendous interest in the Word. We know two books that were Daniel’s favorite, just by looking at the language of this prayer, Deuteronomy and Jeremiah. This prayer is built on the vocabulary of those two books. Illustration from the passage we’ve just gone over. In verse 11 the words, “we have not obeyed Thy voice” is a quote from the book of Jeremiah. “The curse is poured out upon us” is a quote from the book of Jeremiah. In verse 12, “Thou hast brought great evil upon us” is a quote from the book of Jeremiah. “That which has been done under the whole heaven” is a quote from Deuteronomy. In verse 13, “all this evil is come upon us” is a quote from the book of Deuteronomy. In verse 14, “the LORD has watched upon the evil” is a quote from the book of Jeremiah. In verse 15, “Thou hast brought Thy people out of the land of Egypt” is a quote from Deuteronomy. “You have given Yourself and have made Yourself a name as of this day” is a quote from the book of Jeremiah, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. down every verse. 50% of the vocabulary we have just gone over is verbatim quote from two other books of Scripture.

So the eighth principle of prayer is that God answers prayers that are well designed on the basis of Scripture. A challenge we leave with you is: learn to pray Biblically.