Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Daniel 9

for our visitors. The refrain repeated twice each verse. Eh, kind of hard to catch on to that song. But isn’t it beautiful? If you can’t sing some songs sometimes, it’s all right just to listen to the glory of God’s people praising him. We know that’s a difficult song, but it seems so appropriate, of course, to this time of season as a response to Psalm 65. And in a strange kind of way, perhaps, but nonetheless, I think it’s appropriate for our sermon today as well.

We’re in Daniel 9 and take two weeks to deal with Daniel 9. This week, we’ll focus on the prayer of Daniel. And in Daniel 9, what sets the prayer off, we’ll see it in just a moment in the text, is he knows that God’s goodness is going to crown now, not just the year, but the 70 years are coming to an end and God’s people will go back and the temple will be rebuilt. So, turn, if you will, to Daniel 9.

Now, if you’re visiting with us, we have these handouts. They were on the bottom part of the little stand and I always in Daniel, these series of sermons on Daniel, have the text there laid out in a way that will help us as we think through what the text says. If you didn’t pick up one of those handouts or outlines, please feel free to go back and pick it up now as we prepare to read the text. I also have an outline of the sermon in that stapled set and a page for younger children to fill in blanks.

And it’s also helpful for the adults to look at that as well sometimes because it kind of gives the main points of what I’ll be saying. Usually those are three-hole punched so that you can produce a binder going through the book of Daniel. But I couldn’t, you know, I couldn’t get the copy machine to run the three-hole punch paper on Saturday. So we had to just use normal paper. There is a three-hole punch in the office.

You could feel free to use that sometime today to punch your sheets if you’d like. If you’re keeping a family binder on the book of Daniel, which I have kind of recommended you do. So, let’s turn to Daniel 9, either on the handout that I’ve provided or in your own Bible and we’ll read the whole chapter, but as I said, we’ll focus on the first half of the chapter, which is the prayer. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

In the first year of Darius, the son of Ahasuerus of the lineage of the Medes, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans, in the first year of his reign, I Daniel understood by the books the number of the years specified rather by the word of the Lord through Jeremiah the prophet that he would accomplish 70 years in the desolations of Jerusalem. Then I set my face toward the Lord God to make request my prayer and supplications with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.

And I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession and said, “Oh Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant and mercy with those who love him and with those who keep his commandments, we have sinned and committed iniquity. We have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from your precepts and your judgments. Neither have we heeded your servants, the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings and our princes, to our fathers, and all the people of the land.

Oh Lord, righteousness belongs to you, but to us shame of face as it is this day. To the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, those near and those far off in all the countries to which you have driven them because of the unfaithfulness which they have committed against you. Oh Lord, to us belongs shame of face. To our kings, our princes, and our fathers, because we have sinned against you.

To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness. Though we have rebelled against him, we have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God to walk in his laws which he set before us by his servants the prophets. Yes, all Israel has transgressed your law and has departed so as not to obey your voice. Therefore, the curse and the oath written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out upon us because we have sinned against him.

And he has confirmed his words which he spoke against us and against our judges who judged us by bringing upon us a great disaster. For under the whole heaven, such has never been done as what has been done to Jerusalem. As it is written in the law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us. Yet, we have not made our prayer before the Lord our God, that we might turn from our iniquities and understand your truth.

Therefore, the Lord has kept the disaster in mind and brought it upon us. For the Lord our God is righteous in all the works which he does, though we have not obeyed his voice. And now, oh Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and made yourself a name as it is this day. We have sinned. We have done wickedly. Oh Lord, according to all your righteousness, I pray, let your anger and your fury be turned away from your city Jerusalem, your holy mountain.

Because for our sins and for the iniquities of our father, Jerusalem and our people are a reproach to all those around us. Now therefore, our God, hear the prayer of your servant and his supplications. And for the Lord’s sake, cause your face to shine on your sanctuary which is desolate. Oh my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations in the city which is called by your name.

For we do not present our supplications before you because of our righteous deeds, but because of your great mercies. Oh Lord, hear. Oh Lord, forgive. Oh Lord, listen and act. Do not delay. For your own sake, my God, for your city and your people are called by your name. Now, while I was speaking, praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before the Lord my God, for the holy mountain of my God, yes, while I was speaking in prayer, The man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, reached me about the time of the evening offering.

And he informed me and talked with me and said, “Oh Daniel, I have now come forth to give you skill to understand. At the beginning of your supplications, the command went out, and I have come to tell you, for you are greatly beloved. Therefore, consider the matter and understand the vision. 70 weeks are determined for your people and for your holy city to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring an everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most High.

Know therefore and understand that from the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince, there shall be seven weeks and 62 weeks the street shall be built again and the wall even in troublesome times. And after the 62 weeks Messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end of it shall be with a flood until the end of the war.

Desolations are determined. Then he shall confirm a covenant with many for one week, but in the middle of the week he shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering and on the wing of abominations shall be one who makes desolate even until the consummation which is determined is poured out on the desolate. Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you for your word. We pray that the Lord Jesus Christ would speak to us by means of your word. Lord God, transform us. Make us new people. Make us people who delight in your name, who understand the ways in which we sin against you, who affirm your law once more, who take upon ourselves the needed act of repentance before you and then are assured of your loving us and raising us up through Jesus our savior. Give us Lord God this text at the center of our being. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

What do you do when deliverance and blessing are on their way? You know, let’s say you’ve won the lottery and on such and such a day, you’re going to go pick up the check. Blessing is coming to you. You’ve lived in poverty, maybe bondage to debt. Now, you know you’re going to be delivered. The check’s on its way. You have a date set. What do you do to prepare for that? Maybe you’re locked up in prison. Maybe, you know, you were wrongfully there, you didn’t do the crime, but you’re there nonetheless.

And you get a pardon from the governor. You know, on such and such a date, you’re coming out of that prison. How do you prepare for that day? How do we prepare for the set time of Thanksgiving this Thursday? We all know where we’re going to be Thursday. God has decreed for nearly all of us that is probably all of us. We’re going to be sitting around a table with turkey or ham or friends, family, whatever it is, we’re going to give thanks to God.

That’s going to be a day when God’s blessing is poured out on us. How do we prepare for that? Well, normally, I suppose, you know, what we do is we sort of get into the Thanksgiving mood and we start being joyful and thankful on the Lord’s day of beginning of that week. And that’s good.

Daniel has read in the books, he’s read the prophet Jeremiah specifically, he says, and he’s figured out that the time is coming. Deliverance from the Babylonian captivity will be brought to an end. They’ll go back to the city. God will dwell in the city that he is desolated up to now. You’ll notice that in the text today, desolations, desolations six times. What does it mean? It means that God got fed up with the sin of the people in Jerusalem 70 years before and God left. And when God leaves, then he sends judgment and he makes you leave sometimes.

Ezekiel saw it. He saw the priest, weird carvings on the walls of the temple, fornications and adulteries going on. Not literally in either case, but that’s what was in the hearts of the priests of God. Ezekiel saw it. And Ezekiel saw God moving out of the temple, going across to a position from outside of the city. And from the outside of the city, he curses the city and he tears it down. Ezekiel saw it in a vision.

God leaves is what happened 70 years prior to this. The city had become desolate as it had several times before. Remember when Eli’s son’s sin in the context of tabernacle worship? What happens? God moves out. He leaves and then defeat comes in the context of that to God’s people. Well, that’s what had happened here for 70 years. There might have been some people living in Jerusalem, but God wasn’t there.

And God’s people were no longer there. They were in captivity. They were in exile in Babylon. But now he knows. He’s read Jeremiah 29. Jeremiah says these are the words. While you’re there, Jeremiah says, “In Babylon, get married, raise kids, go about ordinary life because these people in Jerusalem that tell you can get out of this exile in just a few years, they’re wrong.” Jeremiah says, “Let me tell you what’s going to happen.” He says, because in verse 10 of Jeremiah 29, Jehovah says, after 70 years are accomplished for Babylon, I will visit you and perform my good word toward you.

I’m going to bless you, but it’s not going to happen for 70 years. I’m going to take you back into Jerusalem. I will cause you to return to this place, to Jerusalem, to the temple, or have to a rebuilt temple. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says Jehovah, thoughts of peace, not of evil, to give you hope in your latter end.

Daniel knew this. He knew that the hope had been given to him in the latter end. And how does he prepare? He figures it out. The day is coming. The decree of God is established. In 70 years, we’re going back. And better than that, God’s going to be there with us. How do we prepare for such a joyous day? Well, Daniel prepares by prayer. He prepares by confessing his sins. He prepares by taking on sackcloth and ashes and fasting. He moves in terms of repentance. Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it?

In a way I mean we, you know, when he prayed when he knew he was going to get thrown when he prayed in the lion’s den and when he prayed when he knew he was going to get arrested. Okay, that’s somewhat understandable. In the midst of the troubles, we pray for deliverance. But the blessing is assured. The decree of God has been established. But Daniel didn’t rest in a slothful way in the decree of God. Daniel understood the covenantal nature of the God we serve.

Daniel didn’t see opposition between his works, what he was supposed to do in preparation for this day and the pure grace and sovereignty of God that would bring it to pass. That same text in Jeremiah said, “Pray about this.” Then God says, “I’m giving you hope and you’re going to pray for deliverance and I’m going to grant it.” And Daniel understands that part of it, too.

You know, much of the controversy in the last couple of years in reformed circles has to do with some people talking about the decree. God has established these things unalterably. And other people, and frequently in the scriptures, they talk with covenantal language. Hosea, you were my people. They’re the people of God. And now you’re not my people, he says through Hosea, right? He talks covenantally. Daniel lives covenantally. He doesn’t rest in the fact that we’re going to have a day of Thanksgiving and Thursday. He prays to bring it to pass.

You see, he knows that God works covenantally in history.

I think one of the most important things in a book like Daniel, at least for me, I think it began in Poland for me six years ago. I went over there and I walked around in these castles and I thought, what kind of men were these men who built these castles, built these cultures? Very explicitly Christian in many cases, but they don’t seem like us, right? Different kind of men did this stuff. And when I read the scriptures now and particularly descriptions of men, you know, I think, who are these guys?

I have a videotape on body mapping for choir directors. And the idea is you’re supposed to have a good understanding of your body and how it works and the skeleton structure. Otherwise, if you’re up directing choirs all week long as a professional choir director, you’re going to have health problems. They want you to have a good map of your body, a good, you know, intellectual understanding of where your body is, how it works. And if you do that, you sort of know how to take care of yourself.

You know, teenagers shoot right up and they don’t have a good body map for a while, right? They don’t know how long that foot is, how tall they might be. They don’t know how to get all the joints going correct because their body map is off and they trip and they fall and they bang into things.

Well, Daniel, you know, can give us kind of a body map of what a godly Christian man is, right? We can look at this guy and say, “That’s the sort of man I want to be.” Now, ultimately, it’s the characteristics of Jesus that we’re seeing there. But Paul had no problem be imitators of me. We should be imitators of Daniel. Well, Daniel has shown us that he’s a man of strong, godly, forthright, but yet humble and servant-oriented kind of guy.

And he’s already showed us that he’s a man of regular prayer twice a day. But here he shows us again that the way to prepare for blessing, for thanksgiving, for the sure that God’s going to bring you out of deliver you out of a bad situation is repentance and prayer.

Daniel writes this very carefully composed prayer. I don’t believe this is just extemporaneous. On the third page of the handout, I got the actual prayer laid out in kind of a structure or a form and we don’t have time to go through it in detail. Now, I got this from James B. Jordan, but it’s kind of obvious that Daniel has structured this prayer again in one of these chiastic ways, where things kind of match up. And so it seems to be a carefully composed prayer, a written prayer by Daniel.

I was thinking about this at that joyous wedding we had yesterday. You know, I was given a prayer to pray written out when I’ve used before in weddings and Doug H. had written out some of the stuff that he said, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with that. A carefully composed prayer is good. You know, in the Psalms when David talks about praying, he says, Help my tongue. Let me not be careless with my speech. It’s not a bad thing. You’ve got a real important prayer to pray because this is going to be linked to you being you’re coming out of exile and being blessed and giving being given that lottery check, whatever it is. You want to be careful in those kind of prayers.

You want to think it through. And Daniel composed this beautiful prayer for us. I think that if we’re going to be praying men and if we’re not going to be praying men and women, boys and girls, then we’re not following the image of godly people in the scriptures. The scriptures say godly men pray, and they do it a lot. And if we’re going to do that, one of the things we should do to inform our prayers is to study these great prayers that are recorded for us.

Not only did Daniel write this out and with careful composition, but it’s then recorded for us in holy scripture and come down, you know, over 3,000 years later. We’re looking at this prayer for a reason. It’s part of the holy word of God now. And God wants us to think about it a little bit. He wants us to see the connections in it. He wants us to kind of meditate on it. And he wants us maybe to compose our own prayers in the same way.

We’re used to that in this church. We’re used in this church to taking and hearing our elders take a psalm for instance, and then put it into Christian language. You looking back on the coming of Jesus, the psalms look forward to, and then applying that psalm to ourselves. We should be over and over in our scriptures and our teaching at home taking that Bible and thinking, “Yeah, this is about the historical reality of Daniel going or his people going back to Jerusalem.” Ultimately though, it’s about any people who are being blessed with the presence of Christ leading them out of captivity.

And we can apply it then to our own day and age when we’re in times of difficulty and trouble that God’s going to deliver us. And he’s going to deliver us in relationship to these prayers that we pray. And so we can apply the scriptures in that way and we’re sort of used to that. But I want to take some time today to think that through a little bit.

On the outlines today, I’ve given you five elements of how Daniel prepares for this great deliverance coming upon him. How does he go about, you know, getting ready for thanksgiving and deliverance? And the way he does it is through carefully composed prayers that are laid out in a particular way. Turn back to that sheet of Daniel’s prayer, that chiastic sheet just before the outline if you will. And let’s I’ll just kind of give you a little bit of evidence here that this seems to be very carefully composed.

We’ve got fairly long beginning and ending sections. And then the B section, the indent at the right after the last section or right after the first section verse five, Daniel says, “We have sinned and committed iniquity. We have done wickedly and rebelled.” And then just before he concludes the prayer at the end, he says, “Because for our sins and for the iniquities of our fathers, your people are a reproach to all those around us.” So the repetition of sins and iniquities there.

And then next what he says in verse 7 is Lord, righteousness belongs to you. And before we in verse 16 down at the bottom of the page, oh Lord, according to all your righteousness I pray. So he’s kind of doing this thing where he is building in bookmarks that compare with one another. Look at the very center. Look at verse 12. At the very center of this thing, he has confirmed his words which he spoke against us and against our judges who judged us by bringing upon us a great disaster.

At the very center of Daniel’s carefully composed prayer is a recognition of God’s judgment upon them. But either side of them that we have because we have sinned against him. And then we have the description of under the whole heaven nothing has been done as such as to Jerusalem. And then in verse 13, it is written in the law of Moses all this disaster has come upon us. And if we go up before the because we have sinned against him, what do we have?

The oath written in the law of Moses a servant of God. And just before that, therefore the curse which has come upon us. So we don’t have time to look at all of them. But there’s a careful composition that Daniel has done with this prayer and he does it in the overall structure and he also does it in the specific details of how he prays this prayer.

Now return to the outline. How do we pray? How do we pray preparing for God’s blessing upon us?

Well, number one, our prayers are to seek God’s face. Daniel uses three particular terms for God sprinkled throughout this text and mostly throughout the prayer section and all that bolding and italics and underlining stuff. That’s an attempt to help you to see how Daniel uses these different names for God. So for instance in verse the first reference to God is in verse two where he reads about how God had specified the Lord had specified through Jeremiah the prophet the term is in bold italics and whenever you see that in the text I given you to read that bold italic is trans is a translation of the word Yahweh it’s the covenant name of God and then in verse three I set my face toward the Lord that’s bold not in italics and it’s lowercase and that word is adonai—a d o n a i—Lord. Master might be another way to translate that to help us to think about that term in a separate way from Lord which is translated which a translation of Yahweh. And then the word God in verse three is the word Elohim. Elohim. And these are three separate and distinct names for God.

Daniel in his prayer sought God’s face. But he sought God’s face by addressing God in three separate and distinct ways. Now, there’s one God, of course, but there’s different names that God has revealed himself by and we seek God’s face first of all in the creator. Daniel’s prayer you know starts by referring to God as whatever it’s God and throughout the prayer that’s the word Elohim and that’s the name that’s used in Genesis 1 when God begins to create the earth. So Elohim—e l h i m—is really its primary aspect we can think about is the God who brings all things into being by his word. He’s creator God. And when we pray to God, we’re praying to our creator. And there’s a sense in which as Daniel prays for this return to Jerusalem and the new temple, he’s praying that the creator would bring a new creation.

And we know that ultimately Gabriel tells him that new creation will come in definitively when Jesus arrives. So that prayer for a new creation will be heard. But there’s a sense in which we’re always praying for that. When we go into a time of distress like Daniel into a pit and we come out of that in deliverance, we’re coming out as transformed people, new creations. So we pray to the creator, God, and we ask him to essentially bring about aspects of the new creation into our life.

It’s interesting because in the context of this prayer, Daniel says that your people to your people belonged shame of face and now we’ve been driven out into exile. And this is really identified with what the story of Adam was. Adam transgresses God’s word. To Adam belongs shame of face. He’s got to be robed by God, the shamefulness that him and Eve experience. And they’re driven out of their place. And so Daniel’s prayer has this allusion back to the garden in the way he describes the effects of their sin leading to shame and being driven out by God out of the promised land.

And he also alludes back to the creation account by using the word Elohim. So God is our creator, the one who brought creation into being.

Secondly, he uses the name as I said Yahweh—Lord in kind of small caps and I’ve used bold an italic to put it in the context of your of your outline. Yahweh when God comes to Moses to affirm covenant he describes himself as Yahweh. This is you know the word Yahweh is used to in the account with of creation and it’s used throughout the history of the Old Testament. When God reestablishes covenant and goes to Moses, he’s specifically identified as the name Yahweh, the covenant keeping God. Yahweh is the name that says that God has kept covenant in the past. Moses can look to the promises that God made to the patriarchs and fulfilled. And he can tell God’s people, “This is Yahweh speaking through me, the covenant keeping God. He’s done it in the past. He will do it again.”

When we pray to God, it’s very important to remember that we’re praying to the one who now for us has demonstrated his covenant faithfulness for 6,000 years. Over and over again, we have the record of God’s covenant faithfulness to his people. So, we pray for a transformation and recreation of our lives. We pray that God would, you know, establish us a fresh and covenant relationship with him. We pray to Yahweh, the covenant keeping God.

You know, to Abraham and to the patriarchs, God specifically identified himself to Abraham as El Shaddai or El Shaddai. And this name means the one who is powerful. He’d made promises to Abraham that weren’t going to be kept for a long time. Abraham was going to have to rely on God as the God who will keep covenant. He has the power and strength to do it. But when he gets around to renewing covenant with Moses and the people, now he’s the God who has demonstrated a history with the patriarchs of covenant faithfulness. And Daniel calls on that name, Yahweh, the one who has demonstrated covenant faithfulness.

And then he uses this word, as I said, Adonai—master, king of kings, lord of lords. This name is predominant in the monarchical period. David and following the word Adonai takes on a heightened significance. God now has established kings and rulers in the land, King David. But the king has to remember that there’s a master before him. You know, it’s kind of like Darth Vader referring to the dark lord as master.

Well, you know, in a positive sense, we have a good master over us. And as much as we’re made kings and priests under God, we have master. And so, master is the one that we’re submitting to. He’s the king of kings and when we pray we recognize Adonai. We recognize that we have a king over us who is judging and evaluating us as well. So we seek we when we prepare for blessing, we do so by seeking God’s face.

But Daniel also does it by confessing his sins. Of course, this is the main part of the prayer. But here too, the specific words that Daniel use are in are helpful to us as we think through perhaps writing a formal prayer of repentance for our family before Thanksgiving or before some other event. As we think about formulating our prayers carefully before God and being men like Daniel who would at times compose careful prayers, recognize how Daniel addresses different kinds of sins.

And here it’s a little complicated, but what I’ve done, we can look at verse five and we can look at most of these things we’re going to talk about. So he says that he he prays to God, the covenant keeping God, and he says in verse five, we have sinned and committed iniquity. We have done wickedly and rebelled. We have sinned. And where the word is sinned throughout this prayer of Daniel, that word is a word that does not mean the same thing as iniquity.

And it doesn’t mean the same thing as wickedness. The word sin means missing the mark. It means kind of wandering off the path. It means not doing as good as we should have done something. It doesn’t mean we deliberately violated God’s law. That’s not this particular word. This is the dominant word that’s used. This is used five times in Daniel’s prayer. And what he’s confessing, what we should pray to God and confess before God in preparation for blessing, in preparation for thanksgiving.

We should pray that we don’t meet the mark usually. We don’t love our wives as well as we should have. We don’t hate them. We haven’t, you know, punched them, but we haven’t done all the things for them that we probably should have done. We’ve strayed off. And in our straying off, we’ve violated, we have indeed not pleased God. But it’s not a high-handed kind of sin. This is an Eve-like sort of sin, right? Nobody was there with Eve telling her, “Don’t do that.” She was deceived. The scriptures say she was wandering. She was off the path, but she didn’t get there like Adam did by just saying, “Well, I know that is supposed to go on, but I’m going to let her do it anyway, and then I’m going to do it, too.” See, Adam’s sin is high-handed sort of sin. But this word translated sin means to miss the mark, to come short, to sort of drift away from the path.

Now, this is something we can confess to God all the time. Time that as we come before God in worship, we should do this. And when we get ready for blessing by praying to God, prayers of repentance, we should pray in this way. Please forgive us, Lord God, because we’ve wandered away from the right stuff to do. We sort of tried, but we’ve missed the mark. We didn’t try well enough. Yeah, we sort of knew that it wasn’t right, but we sort of got deceived and got led away.

That’s that’s one word that’s used here. Another word that’s used are these high-handed sins. Look at verse seven for in the use of this at the end of verse seven just before verse eight because of the unfaithfulness which they have committed against you. And actually those two words are the basically the same words. For the trespasses which they have trespassed against you would be another way to put it. And I use the word trespass because of Leviticus 5, there’s a trespass offering and there’s a purification offering, right?

And that’s to purify us from the sort of stuff we just talked about. So these wandering sort of sins, you know, these are impurities is another way to look at it. Leviticus 4, they’re impurities. We’re trying. We’ve got some gold in there, but there’s some dross mixed in. See impurities. But this word is the same word in Leviticus 5 for the trespass offering. This is a high-handed sort of sin. The one sin we do is we just kind of wander away from God and don’t attend to what we should be doing.

This sin is where we go right at God and sin right in his face. Adam does it, right? He goes right up to the tree, lets his wife take the forbidden fruit, and then he takes it, too. He’s the sin here is not drifting away from God. The sin is going to God and stealing what’s his, taking something that belongs to him. You see, this is high-handed sort of sin. And we do that sometimes. We know that something we’re doing is wrong.

We know that it’s not glorifying to God, but we still take it. We still do that kind of high-handed sin. And it’s a separate offering in the scriptures. It’s a trespass offering. And these trespasses are kind of high-handed sins. When we when we confess our sins to God, we seek his face as creator, as the covenant keeping God, and as our master. And primarily what we’re confessing are our sins of inadvertency.

You know, maybe om omission, impurities, and our sins of commission, things we’ve done absolutely wrong. We knew they were wrong. Third on your outline, a deliberately stepping over the line. This is in verse 11. Look at verse 11. And here we say, yeah, all Israel has transgressed, crossed over boundaries. So, you know, we’ve got wandering away from God, going at something that’s godly in the wrong way and stealing it for ourselves.

And now this word is God has established boundaries around us of things we shouldn’t do. And we cross over the boundaries. We tell our kids, “Don’t you step here. You stay over there because this is too close to the stove.” And they look at you and they step forward. You know, they cross over the boundary, the markers that you put and some of our sins are that God has established boundaries don’t cross over these lines and yet we do it.

And this is a third word for sin that Daniel confesses. Fourth, your actions that bring liability. Go back to verse five now in the text. So we have in we have committed impurities and we have committed li iniquity. And maybe one way to translate that, we have incurred liability to ourselves. Iniquity, committing iniquity is to do something that incurs liability. Now, it might be one of these things we just mentioned.

But here’s the focus is we do things that draw forth liability, guilt to ourselves, and God’s punishments. We do things that mean that we deserve whatever we get. So, we’ve acted impurely. We’ve done things that have incurred liability upon us. This is used three times in this text. Translated as iniquity here. Actions that bring God’s judgments, just judgments upon us. Fifth, wickedness. This has to do primarily with injustice.

Again, in verse five, we have acted impurely. We have incurred liabilities. We have done wickedly. We have done unjustly. The opposite of wickedness, the Hebrew word here is righteousness, which usually has to do with relationship with people. So, you know, we’ve been unthankful for people as we prayed in our prayer. We have hurt somebody’s name. We have not done what’s right and just toward our husband, our children, our parents.

That’s wickedness is the word translated wickedness means that we have sinned in an unjust fashion. We have sinned in ignoring God. We’ve sinned in going too close to God and taking what’s his. We’ve incurred liability to ourselves. And we’ve sinned against the image-bearers of God, the people around us. You see, and Daniel confesses all these sins in the context of this well-constructed prayer. And then in verse five, we’ve done wickedly and we’ve rebelled.

And that’s obvious enough. All of this represents rebellion against God. And then finally, apostasy is given to us in verse 24. There’s this apostasy that’s happened as a result of this. And we don’t do this very often, hopefully. But some people do. Some people just turn away and they stop coming to church. They commit apostasy. Some people keep coming to church, but in their hearts, they’ve just kind of given up on the whole thing and they’re not trying to please God at all anymore.

And that’s apostasy. That’s a turning away. And that’s what’s led to God leaving them desolate without him.

So, we prepare for blessings by going to our creator and asking that we might be transformed. We go to him and ask him to be faithful in covenant keeping with us the way he’s faithfully kept covenant in the past. We go to him as our master and we confess wandering from him taking what’s his incurring liability to ourselves right acting unjustly toward our fellow man.

And we say that all of this is rebellion against master. And we confess all these things the way Daniel did.

Third, we focus on God’s word. As Daniel describes his sins against God, he focuses on the word of God. And again here, different terminology is used. In verse four, we have the normal we have the word for commandment, right? Verse four, oh Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant and mercy with those who love him and with those who keep his commandments.

Commandments. And this means like a law. Do this, don’t do that. And we’re pretty familiar with that. And we can think through the commandments of God as we pray our our prayers of confession before him and what specific laws have we broken commandments. The second word is so we can translate that as a commandment. It is a command a particular command. The second word is mishpat. This is in verse five. In verse five we have departed from your precepts and your judgments.

And judgments is the second word that we have on the outline. So God has these judgments. It’s related to the commandment, but now the idea is kind of more of a law that has civil sanctions and the judgments of God relative to that law. The third word used as God as Daniel meditates on his state is the word instruction. Look at verse 10. Verse 10. Yes, all Israel has transgressed. They’ve crossed boundaries.

They’ve transgressed. What have they crossed the boundaries of your law. And now this is translated law, but this is the word Torah. This is the word that’s usually translated law, but it doesn’t mean law, it doesn’t mean a specific commandment. It means the instruction of God. When we read responsibly the Ten Commandments, we’re not reading ten commandments, are we? We don’t read 10 singular commandments of what we’re supposed to do and not do.

We read instruction. We read a sermon from God. You know, it’s not ten commandments. It’s ten words from God. It is the Torah or instruction for how we’re to live our lives. Now, that’s important because it means we meditate on that instruction. It isn’t just a singular command. Our job is not just to take the specific commands. Our job is to look at the instruction of what it means. That first word and set it in the context of God having delivered us.

So, you know, normally what we have in the scriptures are not laws. They’re instruction from God that contains specific commands. And a meditation on that instruction is what we are responsible to do. And a violation of that instruction is incurs God’s liability upon us and should be repented of. So, not enough just to say, “Well, I keep the ten commandments.” Do you understand the ten words? Have you heard the instruction in them?

Have you meditated upon not just on Sunday what the implications of the fourth commandment are, but throughout the rest of your lives? Are you committed to helping people get out of bondage to sin and to civil structures? Are you doing that kind of thing or not? Are you honoring your parent not just, you know, by not swearing at him, but are you actively thinking about what that means? That instruction and how it works in your life.

So, instruction is broad. And when we come to God, we come confessing our sins not just against his specific commandments, but by failing to have our walk, our way, our lives informed by the instruction theonomic set of things that God gives us in his word. So Daniel prepares for his Thanksgiving day, that great day after 70 years in captivity where they’re going to restored back the land. And better than that, they’re going to be in the presence of God and that cornucopia is going to be flowing.

He gets ready for that by praying and confessing before his creator, his covenant keeping God and his master. He confesses his sins and he affirms God’s law in the confession of those sins. And then fourth, what he does is he takes death upon himself. Daniel before he starts saying these words that he writes out, he does he prepares for it in verse Three, I set my face to the Lord God to master creator to make requests by prayer and supplication with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.

What is fasting? Well, when you’re dead, you don’t eat. When you fast, you don’t eat. You are going into ritual death. Daniel becomes dead. Sackcloth is a description of burial clothes. That’s what people would be buried in. So Daniel as he writes his prayer of confession, he gets ready for blessing by dying and taking upon himself death. You see, by saying my desserts here, the liability I have incurred is death.

But it’s worse than death because he doesn’t stop with just not eating like a dead man and putting on burial clothes. He puts on ashes. And we think of this as ashes to ashes, dust to dust, back to dust. He those. But no, ashes. What are ashes a result of? They’re a result of combustion and fire, right? We deserve hellfire. We deserve to become toast, right? That’s the liability we properly incur through our sins is we get burnt to a crisp.

We get burnt the way I burn toast. My house, you know, I like toast really dark and we had this toaster that wouldn’t pop up at the right time and I’d just crank it all the way to the right. I’d walk away. I’m starting to get forgetful the way some of us are. And you’re reminded, of course, because the house starts to smell like toast. And you push the button and it comes up flaming. That’s just dark. It’s flaming.

Whoa. You know, now the whole house smells like burnt toast. Well, that’s a reminder. Ashes. Daniel puts ashes on himself. Not just I should die, but I should die eternally in hell. This is what Daniel confesses in his sin. This is the way he gets ready for thanksgiving. This is the way he gets ready for blessing is by taking death upon himself. Do we do that? You see, I know that what we like to do is thanksgiving and the rejoicing and the feast.

And that’s all good. And we’ve said that over and over again in this church. Nobody’s going to fall into the ditch in this church of not feasting enough, I don’t think. But Daniel says that godly men at certain times, at important times, at set times, takes upon themselves death. And they acknowledge that I should be burning in hell and I’m not going to eat as a reminder not to clean your colon out but a reminder that you’re supposed you’re dead as a result of your sins.

Only through the power of the resurrecting strength of Jesus Christ. Him providing a death that actually provides atonement for our sins can we come back up.

And then fifth, like Daniel, as we pray this kind of prayer, we should eagerly anticipate the gracious response. All throughout this prayer, Daniel is saying, “Boy, you’re covenant keeping. I know we broke your word. You’re merciful. We’re wicked toward one another, right? You’re strong, and we have not even we have not, you know, kept that strength. We’ve wandered away from what we were supposed to have done.” He’s repeating over and over again the attributes of God that cause us to look forward with great anticipation and joy to the answer to these sorts of prayers.

Your prayers are effectual. What does Gabriel tell him in verse 23? From the moment you started praying, I was sent.

You see, when we pray this way, preparing for God’s blessing, we can pray with the sureness of knowing that God sends that response in response to our prayers. Cornelius, his arms to arms and prayers went up before God as incense, God said, and he heard him, saw him, and boom, he gets ready to send somebody to Cornelius to bring him fuller knowledge of Jesus Christ. Our prayers are important. We talked last week, the corporate prayers of the church are effectual for changing the world.

And your prayers modeled after those corporate prayers are effectual as well. Right? Your prayers modeled after Daniel’s wonderful prayer is effectual. We can pray with eager anticipation even as we’re repenting before God because we know that our prayers are effectual. God hears and as soon as we start praying as Daniel did, boom, help is on its way.

Secondly, we’re desirable. What does God tell Daniel as he’s praying this prayer, you know, of supplicating himself before God? You know, we read, “Oh, Daniel in verse 22, I have now come forth to give you skill to understand. At the beginning of your supplications, the command went out, and I have come to tell you. Why? For you are greatly beloved.” Maybe a little better translation, you are desirable. Remember the tree in Eden? Desirable. Look good. Something we want. You know, pagan husbands and wives were desirable. Same words used in the in the scriptures, Old Testament, to talk about those beautiful women that men desired who were not the right women to marry.

Desirable. Beautiful. You know, he stands up here yesterday and he sees his bride coming down the aisle. She’s desirable to him, right? And he’s desirable to her. Their hearts are focused in love one to the other. Well, that’s who you are. You’re the bride of Christ. You are desirable to him. You pray this kind of prayer confidently knowing that God will hear it. And as soon as you start to pray, the answer comes because you are desirable in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

You are highly desirable. And then third, we pray confidently knowing that our memorial will be heard. You see Daniel as he’s praying this he says that what he’s doing is bringing a memorial before God. He said about the time of the evening offering all this is happening. So Daniel composes this prayer and he actually starts praying it about the time of the evening offering.

But the word isn’t offering in the last half of this chapter. The word is mincha. The word is tribute offering. And in the Bible, in the Old Testament, there were these memorial offerings. Some of the offerings are called memorials before God. You remember the rainbow in the sky, right? The sky, you know, God cursed the people with the flood. I’m never going to do that again. And I’m going to put my bow in the sky as my memorial.

And it doesn’t mean to remind you. It means God says I will look at that rainbow and I will remember and I won’t do that again. I’ll remember I saved you Noah through the flood and I will save you again but I won’t cause the flood. A memorial is to remind God of past actions of grace and mercy to us and call on him to do the same thing now for us. So what does Daniel pray? He reminds God that like we’re like Adam and Eve, but you clothed them.

You graciously forgave them. You gave this law to Moses, right? We broke it and God’s people went into captivity in Egypt, but then you brought them out and you renewed covenant with them by giving them your word again, right? So Daniel, the specific offering he connects his prayer to is a tribute offering which is linked to the memorial offering. And so what Daniel’s doing in this prayer is he’s going back through covenant history making specific references to God’s actions of faithfulness and mercy bringing his people out.

Look at verses 15. Look at verse 15. Now, oh Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with the mighty hand and made yourself a name as it is this day. We have sinned. We have acted impurely. We have done wickedly. We have been unrighteous to one another. Oh Lord, according to all your righteousness, I pray, let your anger and your fury be turned away from your city Jerusalem, your holy mountain, because for our sins, our impurities, our liability that we have incurred of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people, our reproach to all those around us.

Now therefore, our God, hear the prayer of your servant and his supplications. You brought them out of the land of Egypt. We’ve been restored to the land of Egypt, so to speak. We’ve become Egypt, and now we’re calling on you to do what you’ve done in the past. The memorial of Daniel. This prayer is a memorial before God, calling on him to act toward his people in the way he has always acted in times past in covenant history.

Psalm 141 says this, “Lord, I cry unto thee, Make haste unto me. Give ear unto my voice which I cry unto you. Oh Lord, hear. Master, hear. Daniel concludes his prayer. Master, forgive. Master, save. You see, and Psalm 141, we cry to you. Make haste to us. Give ear. Hear is what he’s saying. David is in Psalm 141. Let my prayer, David said, be set before you as incense and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.

And this is where he goes on to say, “Set a watch before my mouth. Keep the door of my lips.” This is what Daniel’s doing. He’s writing a prayer so that his lips and his mouth might be careful. He’s counting on that prayer ascending up as the incense of the tribute or memorial offering before God, reminding God of his great actions of creation and recreation in the flood and in saving Noah through the flood in his great action of recreating the world again as he brings his people out of Egypt after they repent to him and cry out for help and now he’s desolated the place where Daniel is and Daniel is once more asking God to act the way he has always acted.

We come to the memorial of the Lord today and what we do is we ask God to remember what he has done through Jesus Christ and to do the same thing for us now to hear us, to hear our prayers, to forgive us, and not just to forgive us, but to save us and give us victory over our sins and against all those who would oppose God.

God is being asked by Daniel to do just what he has always done. Daniel is pleading for recreation, for a return on the part of God’s people to faithfulness, so that the God who is always faithfully covenantal will save them. God is being called upon by Daniel to do just what he’s done in the past. That’s the essence of our prayer. God has said blessing is ours. We get to come to the table. We get to go to thanksgiving.

We get to do these great things. But he said that how we get there is to remind him of his grace and mercy to us because we never deserve any of this. We deserve the damnation of hell, hellfire, death and destruction. But God is pleased to hear the prayers of his people when we prepare for this kind of deliverance. In this way, God says he’ll bring to pass exactly what he has promised to us.

Next week, we’ll look more at exactly what it was that Daniel was looking forward to seeing happen. And as you read the second half of chapter 9 in preparation for next Sunday’s sermon, you’ll know what we look what that they looked forward to. What happened when Jesus came fully? What’s God’s answer to this prayer. But today, we want to model ourselves after Daniel. We want to learn to pray in this fashion. And we want to remember that as we send these prayers up, we are greatly beloved by God.

He will hear our prayers. He will perform once more his response to the memorial offering of his people. We don’t have tribute offerings anymore, memorial offerings in that sense, but our prayers just like in Psalm 141, you know, Psalm 141 was in the context of exile, how can we sing our song in a strange land? He’d said few psalms before this in this sequence of psalms. In an exile, what they could do is instead of doing a tribute offering, their prayers could ascend and Daniel’s prayer ascended up.

Well, this side of the cross, the same thing happens in our homes. Our tribute, our memorial to God goes up, confessing our sins before him with the knowing that it is his delight, his eager anticipation to answer those prayers to forgive our sins and establish us as his people once more. This is because we are greatly desirable through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Let’s thank God for that.

Father, we thank you for Jesus, the apple of your eye. And we thank you that because we are united to him, we are also your beloved, your desirable. We praise you, Lord God, for this time of season. But in our thanksgivings, help us, Father, to pray sins of confession before you, knowing that the great blessings you have in store for us on Thursday and throughout the rest of our lives are not our deserves, but rather come to us through the merits of Jesus Christ alone.

Thank you, Lord God, for Daniel. Thank you for this prayer. May we each use it in a form in the context of our homes as we prepare to celebrate with joy this Thursday. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.