THE PRAYER OF ONE GREATLY BELOVED

Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on July 28, 2024 under 2024 |

Bethany Bible Church Sermon Message from July 28, 2024 from Daniel 9:1-23

Theme: We pray rightly for the sins of our people when we relate ourselves personally to the burden of their repentance.

(All Scripture is taken from The New King James Version, unless otherwise indicated).

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This morning, we come to the 9th chapter of the Book of Daniel … and to the story of a model prayer.

The Old Testament contains many prayers that were prayed by some of God’s greatest saints. We find prayers by Moses, and King David, and Solomon, and Ezra, and Nehemiah … and even a prayer prayed in the belly of a great fish. Many of these prayers were preserved by God for us as examples of prayers that pleased Him. And in the New Testament, the Lord Jesus even gave us a model prayer—a prayer we often call ‘The Lord’s Prayer’—that was very specifically given in order to teach us how to pray.

Well; in Chapter 9 of Daniel, we find a truly great prayer. It was prayed by Daniel—a man who was one of the most faithful of God’s Old Testament saints. He prayed his prayer at a very crucial moment in the history of his people—the Jewish people. And we find that it’s a prayer that God clearly received with much favor. In fact, even as the prayer was being prayed, God sent an angel to testify to Daniel that his prayer pleased Him greatly.

But there’s something even more significant about this particular prayer of Daniel. His prayer resulted in God graciously giving him a vision. It was a vision of His sovereign timeline for the prophetic events of the future. The vision that God gave Daniel at the end of this chapter is so important that you and I cannot rightly understand biblical prophecy unless we interpret this vision correctly. Someone has called this particular vision ‘the backbone of biblical prophecy’. And it was given to Daniel as a result of his earnest and faithful prayer for His people.

Now; that vision is so important that we need to devote an entire morning’s time to it; and if the Lord so wills, we’ll do that during our next Sunday together. But today, I ask that we just consider the amazing prayer that preceded it.

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So; let’s get right into it. Let’s begin by looking at Daniel 9 and considering …

1. THE CONTEXT OF THE PRAYER.

In Daniel 9:1-2, Daniel wrote these words:

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 by the word of the Lord through Jeremiah the prophet, that He would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem (Daniel 9:1-2).

First, we’re told the time at which this prayer was prayed. It was in the first year of King Darius—the Son of Ahasuerus—of the Median kingdom. Almost 70 years before this time, God had permitted the Babylonian empire to take the Jewish people captive because of their sins. Daniel was about 17 to 18 years old at that time; and he—along with his three friends—had been taken along with the other captives from Jerusalem into exile to Babylon. The city of Jerusalem and its holy temple were then destroyed, and the land of Israel was caused to lay in ruin throughout that 70-year period. But just a short while before Daniel prayed this remarkable prayer, the Median-Persian empire had conquered the Babylonian empire. The Babylonian king Belshazzar saw ‘the writing on the wall’, and was conquered and slain; and Darius was made the king of the new world empire.

Daniel was very obviously a remarkable man of God. Even though Daniel had served under the king of Babylon, Darius preserved him as part of his new royal staff. Daniel would have been around 85 to 86 years old at the time that he prayed this remarkable prayer; and he had remained faithful to the God of Israel throughout all those difficult years of exile.

Now; Daniel—as we know—was a prophet. God gave him visions of what would happen to the kingdoms of this world in the future. But he was also a good student of biblical prophecy, and he studied the writings of the prophets in the Jewish scriptures. He said that he had been carefully reading from the Book of Jeremiah. And that, by the way, was in itself a very remarkable thing! The people of Israel had been conquered and taken away from their homeland. The city of Jerusalem had been destroyed and the temple of God had been burnt. And yet—in spite of all that the Jewish people had gone through—God had graciously preserved His sacred word for His people; and a precious copy of the Book of Jeremiah had somehow been carried along with the exiles from Jerusalem and had fallen into Daniel’s hands. What an illustration that is of what the Lord Jesus Himself once said: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away”!

And notice what Daniel testified that he had read in the prophecies of Jeremiah. He said, “I, Daniel, understood by the books the number of the years specified by the word of the Lord through Jeremiah the prophet, that He would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem.” What might those passages have been that Daniel read? One passage would most certainly have been Jeremiah 25:8-12; in which God spoke to His disobedient Jewish people and said,

“Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘Because you have not heard My words, behold, I will send and take all the families of the north,’ says the Lord, ‘and Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, My servant, and will bring them against this land, against its inhabitants, and against these nations all around, and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, a hissing, and perpetual desolations. Moreover I will take from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones and the light of the lamp. And this whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years.

“‘Then it will come to pass, when seventy years are completed, that I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity,’ says the Lord; ‘and I will make it a perpetual desolation’” (Jeremiah 25:8-12).

God had said that—at the end of 70 years—He would punish and destroy the Babylonian empire. And that had just happened a short time before Daniel wrote these words—in the incident of ‘the writing on the wall’. Another passage that Daniel would no doubt have read would be Jeremiah 29:10-14; in which God made this promise to the Jewish people who were about to be taken as captives from Jerusalem:

For thus says the Lord: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity; I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you to the place from which I cause you to be carried away captive (29:10-14).

These things had been written by Jeremiah in the year 605 B.C.—just before the captives were taken away. And now it was 538 B.C.—just before the end of that 70-year period. Daniel could see from the prophetic Scriptures that God’s appointed time for His people’s exile had just about run its course. The realization of these things inspired great hope in him for his people.

Now, dear brothers and sisters in Christ; how might you or I have responded to discovering such news in God’s word? Would we have rested in the confident knowledge that our sovereign God was going to fulfill His prophetic plan; and then just sit back passively and watch to see what God would do? Well; that’s not what Daniel did. When he saw that the time had come, he took earnest action. Verse 3 tells us;

Then I set my face toward the Lord God to make request by prayer and supplications, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes (Daniel 9:3).

God had said through Jeremiah that His people would “call” upon Him and “go and pray” to Him. And in heartfelt obedience, that’s exactly what Daniel did. And he didn’t do it lightly either! He set his face toward the Lord—probably opening his window and praying toward Jerusalem (as we’re told that it was his habit to do in Chapter 6); and he fasted, put on sackcloth, and humbled himself in ashes. He did serious business with God on behalf of His people.

What an example his response is to us! Our situation is—of course—quite a bit different from that of Daniel. His prayer was for the restoration of his captive people to Jerusalem after exile. But don’t you and I feel the prompting of the Holy Spirit to pray for our own people and our own nation at this time? Haven’t our own people turned their backs on God? Hasn’t our own culture fallen deeply into sin? Don’t we feel the call of God to pray for a spiritual awakening in our own time? And if so, how seriously and how earnestly do we answer God’s call to pray?

May God make us—in our own time—more like Daniel in the earnest way that he prayed!

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So; that’s the context of Daniel’s exemplary prayer. And that leads us then to consider …

2. THE CONTENT OF THE PRAYER.

And before we look at this prayer in detail, I’d like to point out something truly remarkable about it. It’s the way that Daniel related himself to his own people in the way that he prayed it.

Daniel was—without question—an outstandingly godly man. Surely he would have admitted that he was a sinner; because he, just like all of us, was born with Adam’s sinful nature. But he must have kept short accounts with God; because we don’t read of any accusation of sin in him. He demonstrated over and over how faithful he had remained to the God of Israel. Even the fact that he prayed this particular prayer shows how faithful to God he was. He doesn’t seem like a man who needed to repent of the sins of his people. And yet—all the way through this prayer—he makes himself a sharer in their guilt; and identifies himself with their sinfulness and unfaithfulness. As I have read through this prayer, I have counted 23 times in which he specifically included himself in the guilt of his people—using such phrases as ‘we have sinned’, or ‘to us belongs shame of face’.

And I believe that that’s the most important lesson we can draw from this example of prayer. So often—when we pray for a spiritual awakening for our nation and our people—we pray in the third-person plural. We pray, “O God, look upon their sins; behold their transgressions; forgive them for their waywardness and rebellion against you.” But I believe Daniel’s prayer is meant to show us that God wants to hear us humble ourselves before Him and pray our prayers for repentance and revival in the first-person plural—just as Daniel did.

His example of prayer shows us that we pray rightly for the sins of our people when we relate ourselves personally to the burden of their repentance.

So; let’s look at how Daniel did this. We can divide his prayer into four parts. And the first part was worship. Such a prayer should always begin with an acknowledgment of God’s holiness and an appreciation of who He is in His majesty and attributes. At the very beginning of his prayer, Daniel acknowledged and honored specific things about God that related to the needs of the Jewish people. In verse 4, we read;

And I prayed to the Lord my God, and made confession, and said, “O Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and mercy with those who love Him, and with those who keep His commandments …” (v. 4).

When we come before God to pray for our people, we shouldn’t just barge into His presence and pour forth our complaints. We should slow down and, first, acknowledge Who it is to whom we pray. What an appropriate acknowledgment of God this was! He was about to pray concerning the unfaithfulness of his own people; but first, he worshiped God and acknowledged Him for His own faithfulness. He recognized God as the great and awesome God “who keeps His covenant and mercy with those who love Him and keep His commandments”. This sounds very much like what God testified of Himself before Moses long ago; when He passed before Moses and declared,

“The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation” (Exodus 34:6-8).

Taking a good long hard look at God’s faithfulness makes it much more likely that we ourselves will acknowledge our own failures with greater humility and honesty. So; let’s begin with such worship!

Then; after taking a look at God and acknowledging His faithfulness in worship, Daniel’s prayer moved—very naturally—to confession. In verses 5-7, he prays;

“… 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. O 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” (vv. 5-7).

Not only does Daniel acknowledge his own unfaithfulness and the unfaithfulness of his people when they dwelt in the land that God had given them; but he also confesses that they had continued to dishonor Him in the lands into which He had allowed them to be taken captive. It may have been that Daniel also read from Ezekiel 16:27; where God said to his people;

“Behold, therefore, I stretched out My hand against you, diminished your allotment, and gave you up to the will of those who hate you, the daughters of the Philistines, who were ashamed of your lewd behavior” (Ezekiel 16:27).

Daniel went on in verses 8-10 to bring the shining light of God’s faithfulness upon his sins and the sins of his people when he prayed;

“O 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” (vv. 8-10).

What a painful confession this must have been!—to acknowledge that he and his people had rebelled against the God of mercy and forgiveness! He even speaks to God in the third person—objectively—as if to emphasize the horribleness of the fact of their sin in the light of His mercy. If God’s people rebel against God’s mercy and forgiveness in such an unrepentant and persistent way, then what’s left but punishment? And even after punishment, how dreadful it must have been to have to confess even further rebellion!

It’s in the light of such a confession that Daniel moved to the third part of his prayer; and that is the recognition of God’s justice. In verses 11-12, Daniel prayed;

“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 on 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” (vv. 11-12).

What was ‘the curse and the oath’ that Daniel spoke of as ‘written in the Law of Moses’? I believe it would have been the warnings that God had given to the people of Israel—right at the time when He called them out of bondage in Egypt and established them as His people—that if they departed from Him, He would send them into exile to hostile foreign lands. In Leviticus 26:33-35, God warned them through Moses that—among other things—

“I will scatter you among the nations and draw out a sword after you; your land shall be desolate and your cities waste. Then the land shall enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest and enjoy its sabbaths. As long as it lies desolate it shall rest—for the time it did not rest on your sabbaths when you dwelt in it” (Leviticus 26:33-35).

Apparently, one of the ways that Daniel’s people had been unfaithful to God was in the way that they had neglected to honor the appointed Sabbaths of the land as God had commanded them. And did you know that the Bible tells us that God had sent them out of the land by the hand of the king of Babylon so that the land itself would then be able to keep those sabbaths? In 2 Chronicles 36:20-21, we’re told;

And those who escaped from the sword he carried away to Babylon, where they became servants to him and his sons until the rule of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths. As long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years (2 Chronicles 36:20-21).

And so; all of this had happened to Daniel and his people because of their disobedience—just as the Lord had warned them. God was absolutely just in what He did to them. Daniel went on to pray;

“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, O 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!” (vv. 13-15).

Daniel lays it out plainly. He and his people had repeatedly ignored God’s warnings. And so, it had happened exactly as God said would happen; and Daniel couldn’t do anything but acknowledge that the punishment that he and his people had received was absolutely just. He himself owned the guilt along with them.

But God is a God of great mercy. His grace is always greater than our sin; and He is always ready to forgive us if we will acknowledge that sin, confess it, and cast ourselves upon Him. And so; Daniel closed this marvelous prayer for himself and his people with a plea for mercy. In verses 16-19, he prayed;

“O 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 fathers, Jerusalem and Your 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. O my God, incline Your ear and hear; open Your eyes and see our desolations, and 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. O Lord, hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and act! Do not delay for Your own sake, my God, for Your city and Your people are called by Your name” (vv. 16-19).

Dear brothers and sisters; I don’t believe that Daniel could have prayed for God’s mercy the way he did unless he had first begun with worship; then confessed the sins of His people honestly; and admitted the justice of God in punishing them as He did. And I truly believe that the key to it all was that Daniel didn’t pray in an arrogant, self-righteous manner. Instead, he sincerely identified himself with the sins of his own people and included himself personally in the guilt along with them.

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Now; was such a prayer an acceptable way to pray? Did God receive this prayer—prayed so humbly as it was? Look now at what Daniel tells us about …

3. THE RESPONSE TO THE PRAYER.

In verses 20-21, he tells us;

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 (vv. 20-21).

You recognize Gabriel once again, don’t you? He was the mighty angel who had appeared to Daniel to explain to him the vision God gave him in Chapter 8. Even though he is an angel, Daniel called him “the man Gabriel”; and that’s probably because Gabriel graciously came to Daniel in the form of a man so that Daniel wouldn’t faint again at the sight of him! Daniel said that he came at the time of “the evening offering” that his people were commanded by God daily to observe … but had probably forgotten to observe while in captivity. But clearly, Daniel remembered it; and Gabriel came even as Daniel was finishing up his prayer for God’s mercy. Verses 22-23 went on to say;

And he informed me, and talked with me, and said, “O 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 …” (vv. 22-23).

What Gabriel then did for Daniel—as we will see in our next time together—was to lay before him a prophetic time-table that God has ordained for the Jewish people … a plan that led all the way to the time that Jesus returns to them as the King of kings and Lord of lords. But notice the wonderful thing that Gabriel tells Daniel. God heard his prayer; saying, “for you are greatly beloved”.

Daniel’s prayer matched the heart of God. He identified himself with the sin of his people in his appeal to God for mercy. And he thus prayed in a way that truly pleased the heavenly Father.

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Dear brothers and sisters; this doesn’t just set before us an example of a prayer that pleases God. It also sets before us an illustration of the heartbeat of the Lord Jesus Christ for the people He came into this world to redeem.

Do you remember how—in Matthew 3—we’re told that John the Baptist was baptizing people in the wilderness of Judah? The Scriptures explain to us that he was baptizing people in the water “unto repentance”. He was announcing that God’s promised Redeemer was coming; and he was calling people to prepare themselves for Him by stepping into the water and being baptized as a symbol of turning from their sins. But then, the Lord Jesus Himself—the promised Redeemer—the sinless Lamb of God—also came to John to be baptized.

John was shocked at this. It didn’t seem appropriate for the sinless Son of God to step into the waters of a baptism for repentance from sin. We’re told;

And John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I need to be baptized by You, and are You coming to me?” But Jesus answered and said to him, “Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed Him (Matthew 3:14-15).

And do you understand what our Lord did in that remarkable act? He who knew no sin willingly and personally identified Himself with our sin so that He could fully atone for our sins on the cross. It was—as He put it—“fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness”. As a result, the Father publicly declared that He was “well pleased” with Him.

And so; while it’s certainly true that we could ever relate ourselves to the sins of others in the way that Jesus did for us, Daniel’s prayer nevertheless shows us that we shouldn’t pray for the sins of our people—our city, our nation, our family and friends, or our church—in a way that distances ourselves from them. That’s not what Jesus did toward us. Rather than pray in the third person plural, we should pray in the first person plural—saying, “we” and “us” as we pray.

It pleases the Father when we pray for the sins of our people in a humble way that models our Lord’s humble identification with us. For as Daniel’s model prayer shows us; we pray rightly for the sins of our people—and truly pray in a way that honors our Savior—when we personally relate ourselves to the burden of their repentance.

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