4and I prayed to the LORD my God, and I confessed, and I said, “O Lord, the God the great, One being feared, keeping the Covenant and the lovingkindness to ones loving Him and keeping His commands…”
Continuing to think about how Daniel saw God, he describes Him as One “keeping the Covenant…” What is he saying? He’s saying our God is a Promise-keeping God. He does what He said He would do. We can count on Him – absolutely 100%, always. Another word we use to describe this is His faithfulness. Faith itself is, underneath it all, simply believing God’s promises, or should I say, believing He keeps those promises, that He is always, always, always faithful.
Peter references this in his second epistle, chapter 1 and verses 3 and 4: “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and goodness. Through these He has given us His very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the Divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.” Notice how it says we can participate in the Divine nature and how we escape this world’s corruption – through His “very great and precious promises.”
Daniel is a Jew and lived under the Mosaic Covenant. It is notable to realize first of all that the Jewish people are who they are not because of the Mosaic Covenant but rather the Abrahamic. God promised Abraham three things: to multiply his descendants like the sand on the seashore, to give them the land of Canaan, and that He would be their God and they would be His people (Gen. 17:6-8). What was enormously significant about that Covenant was that it was unconditional. Gen. 15 describes the strange story of the Lord promising Abraham His blessings, then of Him having Abraham cut the animals in half, then putting Abraham to sleep, and the flaming torch passing between the pieces.
The significance of all of that was that the Lord passed through the pieces alone. That whole business was an ancient ritual where two people made promises to each other, then created the path with the bloody pieces on either side, then walked through them together. Each was thereby saying to the other, “May I become like all these bloody dead animals if I fail to keep the promise I have made to you.” Abraham would have understood that completely. However, when it came time to pass through the pieces, the Lord went through alone. He was saying that Abrahamic Covenant was unconditional. Whether or not it was fulfilled was dependent on God’s faithfulness, not Abraham’s. That is why to this very day, we believers acknowledge gladly that the Jewish people are the special people of God. They simply are. They may be very unfaithful to God, but He will never be unfaithful to them. They are joined to Him by an unconditional covenant.
Then there is the Mosaic Covenant. This one is a different story. The people had said to Moses, “All that the Lord commands us, we will do!” The Lord responded to Moses, “O that they had such a heart in them.” He knew they didn’t. The problem was they didn’t know they didn’t! They said, “Give us the rules, and we’ll keep them!” and the Lord said, “Fine,” then proceeded to give them some 618 rules to live by. They couldn’t keep those, so they made up literally thousands more until, by the time Jesus came, they had become a nation of Pharisees. As it says in Romans 9:31,32, “but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works,,,”
We learn in Galatians that the Mosaic Law was intended just for that reason – it was a “schoolmaster” to “bring them to Christ.” From the very beginning, they should have realized they couldn’t keep God’s laws. They should have then cried out for a Savior, but they didn’t. When they couldn’t keep the rules they had, they just made more. Like the rest of the human race, they were determined to earn God’s favor.
So He gave them the Mosaic Covenant. In this case, He promised them blessings and threatened them with cursings – all dependent on how well they kept that covenant. Read Deuteronomy 28 to see it all in one place. Back to the matter before us, Daniel says of God He is One “keeping the Covenant.” God keeps His promises. What is scary, however, is to realize that is a two-edged sword. He promises great blessings to those who are found righteous and terrible judgments on those who are not. This very business will drive Daniel’s prayer here in this chapter. He will come to this faithful, covenant-keeping God, counting on the promise that the 70-year captivity will end, but confessing that the entire horrible Babylonian Captivity was simply more of God keeping His promises.
You and I too come to Him as our promise-keeping God. We born-again believers come to Him first of all by the blood of Jesus, confessing from the very start that we cannot keep His laws. We come acknowledging that, in fact, we do not have “such a heart in us.” He then promises to us to save us forever and to place His Holy Spirit in us, so that it turns out, we do have such a heart in us! It’s just not mine, it's His, and by grace, He does help us put off our old selves and be changed into His image. When it is true that our (His) heart is in it, then His faithfulness becomes our hope and joy.
All of this is why Daniel then says He is, “One keeping the Covenant and lovingkindness to those loving Him and keeping His commands.” Notice several interesting insights from just these few words. Note that Daniel says He is not only a promise-keeping God, but mixed right in with that is His lovingkindness. In Hebrew, He is literally, “One keeping the covenant and the lovingkindness.” The two are a package with our God. Uninformed people are always making claims that somehow the God of the OT is just a harsh, lightning bolt throwing, angry, rule-making god, while the NT God is loving and kind. Apparently Daniel would disagree with them!
Then note that Daniel says the Lord’s promise-keeping and lovingkindness are for “ones loving Him and keeping His commands.” The people who maintain the mean old God view of the OT would have simply said, “for ones keeping His commands.” Oh, golly, there’s another term in there: it is for “ones loving Him and keeping His commands.” For people who truly know God, everything is first of all about this love relationship. I discover (to my surprise!) that God really does love me. His love draws me into this relationship. As I described a few paragraphs above, what I find in His “commands” is simply an expression of what pleases Him and what does not. “Keeping His commands” is not the means to that relationship – it is the result. When you love someone, of course you care what does and does not please them. That is just part of any love relationship and maybe more so when we’re dealing with the God of the universe! And, the simple fact is that people who don’t love Him don’t care about His promise-keeping or His lovingkindness, so why should those qualities be “for them.” No. They are for “those who love Him and keep His commands.”
I would suggest it goes without saying that if people everywhere could simply see God through Daniel’s eyes, they would have a very different view of Him. The result of that would be to have a very different view of themselves, as Tozer said, “We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.” Of course, the whole reason the Lord moved Daniel to write these things down was for exactly this purpose – that we should see Him through Daniel’s eyes. That’s what a prophet does for us. It is only left to us to consider seriously what they’ve said and what it means for us.
I hope we’ve accomplished that here, even if it is just a tiny baby-step in the right direction!
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