Daniel 9:5,6 “Daniel’s Prayer”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁵we have sinned and we have perverted [our way] and we have acted wickedly and we have rebelled and [we have] turned away from Your commands and from Your judgments, ⁶and we have not listened to Your servants the prophets who spoke in Your name to our kings, our leaders, and our fathers and to the all of the people of the land.”

In vv.3,4, Daniel addressed the Lord Himself, acknowledging His greatness. Now in vv.5,6, we begin to hear what is on his heart. He has discovered studying his scroll of Jeremiah that Israel’s captivity was only to last 70 years and, doing the math, he realizes that time is at hand. Anyone else might have just concluded, “Oh, good! It’s about over,” and gone on with their day. However, our Daniel knows that passage in Jeremiah 29 goes on to say, “‘Then you will call on Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart. I will be found by you,’ declares the LORD, ‘and will bring you back from captivity’” (Jer. 29:12-14).

Daniel would also know, even the thought of that verse was based on Solomon’s prayer in I Kings 8, where he said, “If Your people Israel are defeated by their enemies because they have sinned against You, and if they turn to You and acknowledge Your name and pray to You here in this Temple, then hear from heaven and forgive the sin of Your people Israel and return them to this land You gave their ancestors” (vv.33,34). In that prayer Solomon later gets even more specific and says, “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 their enemies, who take them captive to their own lands, and if they have a change of heart in the land where they are held captive, and repent and plead with You and say, ‘We have sinned, we have done wrong, we have acted wickedly’; and if they turn back to You with all their heart in the land of their enemies, forgive Your people, and cause their captors to show them mercy” (vv.46-51).

Notice Solomon prayed, [if they say] “We have sinned, we have done wrong, we have acted wickedly…” – those are exactly the words Daniel uses in v.5 and in the same order. Our friend Daniel knows his Bible! He is very deliberately praying the very prayer that Solomon described in his prayer some 400 years earlier. He isn’t just arbitrarily speaking out of the miseries of their captivity. He knows his Scriptures. He knows His God. And he is conforming even the words of his prayer to the very words God spoke through Solomon to address this very situation.

Fortunately for us, our God is very gracious and will hear whatever squeaks and moans His children cry in His arms, but how much better when (like Daniel) we’ve spent the time studying our Bibles so that we know His heart and speak to Him in the very words His servants have spoken before to us? One of Daniel’s confessions in v.6 was that “We have not listened to Your servants the prophets…” Obviously, Daniel was doing all he could to make sure that wasn’t true of he himself. He has listened and listened well, and because he did, he is able at this time to pray exactly the prayer the Lord wished to hear to bring to an end the Babylonian captivity.

Forgive me my lathering over our friend Daniel, but I find it enormously encouraging to see him doing exactly what so many of us today are trying to do – to be sincere students of the Word and then to order our lives accordingly. Once again, what a fine example our Daniel is! Even in the privacy of his own devotions, we find him exactly the man he should have been! Lord, help us all to be like him!

And what of his prayer? What do we learn? The very first thing I’d like to note is how the entire thing is prayed in the 1^st person plural – “we.” This is something frankly foreign to us Americans. We are probably the most “individual” people in the history of the world. As I read Daniel saying, “We have sinned… we have not listened to Your prophets…,” it makes me want to say, “No! Not you, Daniel!” Yes, the people of Israel have been very wicked, but ever since we first met our Daniel, he has shown us nothing but an exemplary godliness. To me, he should be praying “they!” I know the answer in part is that, of course, Daniel is a sinner and could no doubt recount to us various ways he knows in his own heart that he himself has “sinned, and done wrong, and acted wickedly,” but still, it’s hard for me to lump him in with the immoral, idol-worshipping, child-sacrificing, God-ignoring people of Israel.

Clearly, he doesn’t have my problem! I’m suggesting part of that is because he naturally sees himself as only one small part of his nation as a whole. Their world is his world. Their sins are his sins. He is part of it. If we would think about it, his perception of reality goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. When Adam fell, who did he take with him? Us! When Jesus died, who did He die for? John states emphatically that He died, “not only for our sins, but also for the sins of the whole world” (I John 2:2). I would suggest it would do us Americans good to step back from our “rugged individuality” and think more sometimes how we are members of the entire human race, we are members of our nation, we are members of our family, we are members of each other. As the Englishman John Donne said (ca. 1623), “…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” His point was exactly what Daniel is saying, that each of us is an integral part of the whole, so that the loss of any part is actually a loss to each one of us individually – which then leads to observation that we are all involved one way or another in what we are all doing.

In my American heart, I don’t like this idea. I want to insist that I’ll own my own sins but no one else’s. What I’m suggesting is that Daniel is a whole lot wiser than me (us) and we’d all do well to think more of how much we are each a part of a whole. That would probably go a long way towards humbling us and stirring more of a sense of gratitude and concern for those around us.

Then notice Daniel’s words. He seems to catalog almost every known Hebrew word for sin! “We have sinned,” is the most general Hebrew word for sin and has a meaning something like “missing the mark” or “missing the way.” “We have done wrong” is actually a word meaning “to twist.” Probably the closest English word today is “to pervert,” although that word itself has taken on such a sexual connotation, we risk missing the meaning if we simply call ourselves perverts. However, if you let the term extend out to all the ways we’ve “twisted” our standards of right and wrong, that is exactly what we are. Then he says “We have acted wickedly.” The word is the opposite of “righteousness.” It is a word where our behaviors are compared to God’s holy standard. In that sense, of course, we all fail miserably.

He then says, “We have rebelled.” It means exactly that. The Lord is our Master and we have defied His rule over us. “We have turned aside from Your commands and from Your judgments.” Elsewhere, the Lord says to us, “Here is the way; walk ye in it,” but our hearts get drawn aside by all of this world’s promises of pleasures, possessions, and applause.

Finally, Daniel says, “We have not listened to Your servants the prophets who spoke in Your name.” You and I live today in a world that utterly denies there is a God and then that He has spoken. They would leave us believing that the people of God were either deluded fools or else bald-faced liars, since nothing they said was true. As we noted above, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This world hasn’t even made it to “the beginning!” How well do you think the team will do that doesn’t even show up for the game?? To “not listen” to the Lord’s prophets is, in fact, to cut one’s self off from reality. God’s prophets were not deluded. Living in a world ignoring them is in fact a delusion!

If we would not be like the people of Daniel’s day, then you and I first of all need to give “the more earnest heed” to what God’s prophets have said, and we will find that most clearly and most assuredly in the pages of our Bibles. We also today still have our pastors and teachers and we should sit through every service very deliberately listening to what they say. In their case, we like the Bereans, need to ourselves “search the Scriptures” and “see whether these things be so.” I don’t want to devolve into a whole discussion of the state of Bible teaching today and what we do about it. What is important to you and me is to answer the question, “Are you listening?”

What we need to admire in Daniel today is that, for one thing, the very reason he’s praying this prayer is because he’s been doing exactly that. He’s been “listening.” He’s had his Bible open. And that said, he is able to give a very thorough and frank evaluation of exactly where things stand. “We have sinned.” The reason why the people are in Babylon to begin with is not that somehow the Lord has failed. Daniel will go on to make that very clear. The fault lies entirely with us sinners. God is good. He is perfectly wise, perfectly just, perfectly kind, and it is utterly impossible that He has in any way “done wrong.” No, we’re the ones who’ve done wrong. We deserve the troubles and trials and pains we suffer.

One of the common themes I’ve heard all my life is Jewish people challenging God for all they’ve suffered in this world. They see all of that as a reason to in fact condemn Him and renounce any sense of faith. I’ve always marveled that none of them reads Deuteronomy 28. What that should tell them is that what has and continues to go on was predicted some 3,500 years ago! Way back then, the Mosaic Covenant promised them blessings for their obedience and terrible curses for their rebellion. I don’t know anywhere in the world you could find a more detailed and specific prediction of the Holocaust itself. If they read it (and believed it), they would pray just like Daniel. “We have sinned.” But then, that’s where “We have not listened to Your prophets” is unfortunately still true.

That said, we should all agree they are still God’s people and worthy of our deepest respect and support. This is the year 2023 and the nation of Israel is at this very time engaged in a terrible conflict with the terrorist group called Hamas. I’m very thankful that, as a nation, we are still publicly supporting Israel. That itself is somewhat of a miracle, that our very, very wicked, crooked, immoral, lying government would actually do something godly, but I’ll take it for what it is! God told Abraham, He’d “bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.” I definitely know which side of that equation I want my country to fall on!

Back to us, may we be challenged like Daniel to own our own sins and even the sins of this wicked nation of ours. May we pray like Daniel and seek the Lord’s favor for us, our families, and our nation. May we be the more determined to “hear” the Word of God, and, who knows? Maybe the Lord will then hear us and, like the Jews in 539 BC, show us His mercy!