Singing the Songs of the Lord in a Strange Land February 6, 2005
Daniel 9
Singing Our Repentance
Transition
Narrative to Apocalyptic
We’ve been looking at the stories of Daniel to discover how we should live as Christians in a culture that is increasingly secular and pluralistic. How do we sing the songs of the Lord in our place of work, school, home?
After Daniel 6 there is a huge shift in genre in Daniel, he goes from chronicling his life in the life of Babylon, to apocalyptic dreams and visions. The next 6 chapters in Daniel are not easy to understand and apply. But, I don’t want to shy away from them just because they are difficult. So we are going to leap into the last half of Daniel. I’m not going to start with chapter 7, only because this Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, a traditional time of reflection and repentance in the church. Daniel 9 is a great example of repentance, so we’ll start here, and go back to Daniel 7 next week. Next week I’ll also deal further with how to read apocalyptic scripture like the last half of Daniel.
The Lead up History
In order to understand Daniel’s prayer, we need to understand the history of God’s relationship with the people of Israel.
As you read the Old Testament, you realize that It takes a while for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to catch on to the fact that their God is not just a tribal deity that they happen to serve, that he is the creator of all that is, that he is the God of all gods. This can be seen by how they start to worship the gods of whatever land that they are passing through in the exodus because they don’t quite trust God to protect them in those places. Even once they have a corporate understanding of who God is, they try to treat him like a tribal god by hoping that they can placate him through ritual worship rather than actually obeying his commands.
In the book of Deuteronomy, God makes a covenant with his chosen people. He has just rescued them out of the hand of Egypt where they have been enslaved for generations, and he is leading them back to the land he promised their ancestor. As he is leading them back he makes a treaty with them about what they need to do in order to stay in the land, and in his blessing.
This is what he says:
Deuteronomy 28
1 If you fully obey the LORD your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. 2 All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the LORD your God:
3 You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.
4 The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock-the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.
5 Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed.
6 You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out.
Curses for Disobedience
15 However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.
17 Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.
18 The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.
19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out. …
… 64 Then the LORD will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods-gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known. 65 Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot.
The laws set before them are actually not that difficult, as Jesus says their base in found in Deuteronomy 6: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ Jesus says: “This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[c] 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-40
There are many other Laws, in the Covenant; like the ten commandments, and property and economic laws, criminal laws and family law, but all of these are just expansion on these two great laws. Even so, it appears that the people of Israel almost never served God with their whole hearts – the lure of the power of other Gods, looking out for only themselves because of greed, and other sins of the flesh drew them away from God.
God constantly sent them prophets to call them back to relationship with Him, but generation after generation served would not hold up their end of the treaty. So, by Daniel’s time God’s patience is running out. You and I might put up with the behavior of Israel for a few weeks, a few years if we were really patient – God puts up with it for generation upon generation before he finally brings to bear his legal recourse in the covenant.
Even then, before he brought destruction on Israel, he increased the prophetic call, hoping that the people would hear and turn from their ways and serve him and stay in the promised land. They ignored the prophets because They believed that they could do anything they wanted to - they were God’s chosen people! Tremper Longman writes, “They wrongly reasoned that if God’s residence was the temple, there would be no way that an enemy, even one as mighty as Babylon, could defeat their city. They were safe as long as God lived in Jerusalem, and since the temple was immovable, they were safe forever.”
They always kept God in their life, but not as Lord and God, but more as a mascot. Before we get too self righteous and shake our heads and say “oh, those Israelites, isn’t it good that we’ve got it right where they got it wrong…” Listen to what Brian McLaren writes in his book “A Generous Orthodoxy” in the chapter that asks the question “Would Jesus Be a Christian?” “…the more one respects Jesus, the more one must be brokenhearted, embarrassed, furious, or some combination thereof when one considers what we Christians have done with Jesus. That’s certainly true when it comes to calling Jesus Lord, something we Christians do a lot, often without the foggiest idea of what we mean. Has he become (I shudder to ask this) less our Lord and more our Mascot?”
A mascot is kept like a good luck charm – it makes sure that we get what we want, a Lord and Master is completely different.
We might be fond of quoting the passage “If God is for us, who can be against us? When we need to concentrate less on the fact that God is for us, and more on being sure we are for God.
I say this to help us realize that as we look at Daniel’s prayer of repentance, we need to see it as a model, because there are certainly things that we need to repent of.
The Word
1 In the first year of Darius son of Xerxes (a Mede by descent), who was made ruler over the Babylonian kingdom- 2 in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures, according to the word of the LORD given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. 3 So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting, and in sackcloth and ashes.
Daniel is reading Jeremiah, which was written only a generation before him, but he calls it scripture, and he sees in Chapter 29 and a few other places that God told the people that the exile would last 70 years. Daniel was taken in his teen years and now was in his 80’s – but he doesn’t get out his eschatological charts and figure out 88 reasons why salvation would come in his 88th year!
He doesn’t get up and leap for joy that salvation would be coming soon. No, he is heartbroken by the fact that God had to send them to Babylon in the first place. He trades his royal robes for sackcloth and ashes and he fasts and cries out to God in repentance for his people.
We need to see this way of reading prophecy, even as we embark on reading the apocalyptic sections of Daniel. Prophecy is not about figuring the specific times and places where God is going to work in specific ways. Prophecy is about us getting right with God.
Repentance
4 I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed:
"O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with all who love him and obey his commands, 5 we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws. 6 We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes and our fathers, and to all the people of the land.
Corporate repentance
The first thing that might strike you with Daniel’s prayer is that he is a little hard on himself. We know from the first 6 chapters that Daniel was and amazingly righteous man – there was no corruption to be found in him. But he says “we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws.”
Daniel is deeply aware of his identity with the corporate identity of Israel. Even if he had not sinned, he came from a peole who did, and he was guilty by association. As western Christians, we are very individualistic and very quick to separate ourselves from a group that we might be part of, but has gone bad. Daniel doesn’t separate himself from his people, he prays, not for them, but as one of them. You might be disheartened by some things that our government does, our our country does, or all people everywhere do, but the biblical response is not to just pray for them, but to pray as one of them.
The Righteous Daniel does this, and by Identifying as one of his own people and Confessing the sin of his people, he effects the fulfillment of the prophesy that he has just been reading.
Daniel also knew 1 Kings 8 which says:
33 "When your people Israel have been defeated by an enemy because they have sinned against you, and when they turn back to you and confess your name, praying and making supplication to you in this temple, 34 then hear from heaven and forgive the sin of your people Israel and bring them back to the land you gave to their fathers. …
… 46 "When they sin against you - for there is no one who does not sin - and you become angry with them and give them over to the enemy, who takes them captive to his own land, far away or near; 47 and if they have a change of heart in the land where they are held captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their conquerors and say, ’We have sinned, we have done wrong, we have acted wickedly’; 48 and if they turn back to you with all their heart and soul in the land of their enemies who took them captive, and pray to you toward the land you gave their fathers, toward the city you have chosen and the temple I have built for your Name; 49 then from heaven, your dwelling place, hear their prayer and their plea, and uphold their cause. 50 And forgive your people, who have sinned against you; forgive all the offenses they have committed against you, and cause their conquerors to show them mercy; 51 for they are your people and your inheritance, whom you brought out of Egypt, out of that iron-smelting furnace.
When you read the stories of the return from the exile, you see the pivotal role that Nehemiah and Ezra had in seeing the people return and the land restored, but you don’t see the pivotal role that Daniel and other intercessors had in partnering with God in prayer to change history in prayer. If you are impacted by the sin of the world, or the church, don’t just walk around with a sour look on your face. It may be possible that God is calling you into a history changing partnership of prayer with him. If you are burdened by the sin of the world or the church, don’t gripe and complain, get down on your knees and repent for us. You may bring about salvation for us!
You are right, we are not.
7 "Lord, you are righteous, but this day we are covered with shame-the men of Judah and people of Jerusalem and all Israel, both near and far, in all the countries where you have scattered us because of our unfaithfulness to you. 8 O LORD , we and our kings, our princes and our fathers are covered with shame because we have sinned against you. 9 The Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against him; 10 we have not obeyed the LORD our God or kept the laws he gave us through his servants the prophets. 11 All Israel has transgressed your law and turned away, refusing to obey you.
There is not even a hint of “how could you do this to us?” Or of trying to convince God that his ways were too hard, or that the temptations were too great, or what did he expect, they are only human.
I remember hearing what someone described as the shortest three point sermon
1. God is good
2. We are not
3. God is good
True repentance doesn’t try to bargain with God, or try to explain our actions, it just lays it out on the line – I was wrong, I have no excuse.
The situation we find ourselves in is our own doing
"Therefore the curses and sworn judgments written in the Law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out on us, because we have sinned against you. 12 You have fulfilled the words spoken against us and against our rulers by bringing upon us great disaster. Under the whole heaven nothing has ever been done like what has been done to Jerusalem. 13 Just as it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us, yet we have not sought the favor of the LORD our God by turning from our sins and giving attention to your truth. 14 The LORD did not hesitate to bring the disaster upon us, for the LORD our God is righteous in everything he does; yet we have not obeyed him.
In Daniel’s case it would be easy to blame the Babylonians for the mess that his people were in. You can see that sentiment in the psalm that I allude to in the title of the series, where the writer calls oiut for justice against the evil Babylonians.
I think that this point is something that we the church need to learn. With church attendance failing in the west, churches closing and many having a rough time, it is very easy to point to the secularization of society, the lure of wealth, the draw of entertainment as reasons for the bad shape that the church is in. The harder work, the work that Daniel does is to look inside – to see that the hardships might be a sign from God. He begins his book by saying That the Lord delivered Jerusalem into Nebuchadnezzar’s hand. It wasn’t because of the exterior forces that Jerusalem fell, it was because of the interior sin.
Terry Virgo – The Devil doesn’t close churches, God does.
I repentance we must start with ourselves. If the church no longer has a voice in society, is that society’s fault, or is it the church’s? We must ask, are we being the people that God called us to be, is that the reason that we are going through hardship?
On the other hand, we need to be careful when we individualize this principle – I often meet people who are going through difficult times and are convinced that God is judging them. They can’t often find the thing that God would be Judging them for, but they have this overriding feeling of shame and unworthyness. I would say that God doesn’t use hard times to judge us as much as he uses them to draw us back to him, just as he did with the people of Israel in Daniel’s day.
We rely on Your mercy, not our righteousness
15 "Now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of Egypt with a mighty hand and who made for yourself a name that endures to this day, we have sinned, we have done wrong. 16 O Lord, in keeping with all your righteous acts, turn away your anger and your wrath from Jerusalem, your city, your holy hill. Our sins and the iniquities of our fathers have made Jerusalem and your people an object of scorn to all those around us.
17 "Now, our God, hear the prayers and petitions of your servant. For your sake, O Lord, look with favor on your desolate sanctuary. 18 Give ear, O God, and hear; open your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears your Name. We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. 19 O Lord, listen! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, hear and act! For your sake, O my God, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your Name."
Daniel doesn’t try to tell God that they really are a good bunch of people, and they’ll get it right this time – he doesn’t ask for forgiveness and salvation because of any merit that he and his people might have – The only reason why God should forgive us is because he is a forgiving God, he is full of mercy, full of grace. He doesn’t ask for restoration so he can do better next time, he asks because it would give Glory to God. True repentance always has the focus on God, over our own guilt or need.
The other piece is that it is God’s love that compels us to repent, it is because he is the Lover of our souls that we are able to repent
Bono sings on U2’s latest CD
I can feel your love teaching me how
Your love is teaching me how, how to kneel…
Yeah yeah yeah yeah
Daniel’s repentance and God’s great forgiveness brings about the restoration of Jerusalem and the Jewish people, and it looks forward to the coming of Jesus.
As we enter into Lent, a time of reflection, fasting Repentance and prayer. Seek God out, Just as Daniel did in Scripture, and as the word speaks to your soul, come to God in repentance, Repent for yourself and for your people, don’t hide behind excuses, but lay it all out for him to see – he sees it already! Come knowing his Promises, just as Daniel did – that when we confess our sin, he is Holy and Just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Come knowing that God loves you and wants nothing more than to forgive you and restore you to health and true living.
