Today, I am reading and commenting on Daniel 9-10.

Central to my thinking about today’s passage is verse twelve in chapter ten.  There the messenger who came to Daniel in the second of his two visions in today’s passage (I am unsure as to whether this is Gabriel, who had spoken to him in his earlier visions) said to Daniel, “Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them. ” The first part of this is that Daniel, in both his prayer in chapter nine, and again in chapter ten, sought to do two things.  He sought to gain understanding, and he humbled himself.  The first is only possible if we do the second.  When we go before God with prayers and supplications, we must humble ourselves.  That means acknowledging out sins, and turning from them.  It means acknowledging that God will not answer our prayers because we deserve it, but solely because He is merciful.  We do not deserve the good things God gives to us.  There is another thing for us in that quote above.  God will set His answer in motion from the moment we begin to humble ourselves and to seek His face.  That answer may be delayed for many reasons, but God sets His answer in motion immediately.  We need to patiently remain in a state of supplication until we receive His answer.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

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Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 9-10.

When Daniel realized that Jeremiah had prophesied that the Exile would last seventy years, and that seventy years had almost passed, he began to pray.  I was struck today by the part of Daniel’s prayer where he said, “We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. ”  We do not pray and expect God to answer our prayers because of our righteousness.  In fact, as Daniel’s prayer makes clear, we are sinful and deserving of God’s judgement.  We expect God to answer because He has said that He will and because we know that He is merciful.  And even though Daniel expected God to answer his prayer, before he made his request of God he acknowledged that he and the Israelites had sinned and deserved God’s judgement.  We need to follow Daniel’s example and both confess and repent of our sins before we put our petitions before God.  I realized something else as I wrote this.  The phrasing I used about us expecting God to answer us suggests that I think we have the right to expect an answer.  That is not the case.  God is under no obligation to answer our prayers.  God answers our prayers out of His great mercy, not because we deserve those answers.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 9-10.

When Babylon fell, the passage tells us that Daniel understood Jeremiah’s prophecy concerning the devastation of Jerusalem lasting for seventy years was almost up.  This inspired Daniel to pray for the restoration of Jerusalem.  The first part of Daniel’s prayer acknowledged that the people of Israel deserved God’s judgement against them.  He continued by acknowledging that even now the people of Israel did not deserve to be restored.  Finally, Daniel asked God to restore the people of Israel to Jerusalem for His name’s sake and because of His mercy.  We can learn a lot about petitioning God from Daniel’s prayer, especially about things which we understand Scripture to say that God has promised to do.  First, we need to acknowledge our sinfulness.  Then we must acknowledge that we do not deserve God’s mercy.  Only then should we petition God to act on our behalf.  I took the title of today’s blog from Daniel’s prayer.  Our prayers should easily fit into that format: a plea for God to listen as we confess our sins, a plea that he forgive those sins, and finally a plea that He hear our requests and act on them.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 9-10.

My lovely wife married me 22 years ago on the 23rd of this month.  So I am going to wish her Happy Anniversary every day from now until then.

Happy Anniversary, Darling!

When Daniel realized that the time which Jeremiah had prophesied for Jerusalem to be desolate was coming to an end he began praying to God.  Daniel starts his prayer by praising God and by acknowledging that the punishment which God had meted out was deserved.  Only after confessing the sins of his people does Daniel beg forgiveness and restoration.  Then he makes a point which we must understand and internalize: Daniel does not ask God to restore them because of their righteousness.  He asks God to restore them because of God’s mercy.  In the same way, we need to recognize that we do not deserve the blessings we receive from God.  When we request things from God in prayer, we do not deserve to receive those things because of our righteousness, not even the things which we request for others.  No, our only basis for expecting God to answer our prayers is His goodness and mercy.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 9-10.

I want to start by focusing on Daniel’s prayer.  In particular, this line, “We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. ”  God does not answer our prayers because we deserve it, because we are such good people.  In fact, we deserve for God to reject our requests, even those we make for the benefit of others, because we are such sinful people.  Nevertheless, God is merciful and He will grant our requests (I am not going to discuss today those times when He seems to reject our requests).  I just said I was not going to discuss when God seems to reject our requests, however, Daniel gives us a hint as to what we should do before we make requests of God.  Daniel admits to his own sins, and to the sins of the people for whom he is about to make a request.  One final point about Daniel’s prayer: our sin brings shame on both ourselves and on God.

When I read chapter 10 here I am reminded of Ephesians 6:12. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

Before I get to what I want to write about this I want to state that it is not clear to me if chapter 10 refers to a distinctly different occasion from chapter 9, or the same one.

The messenger who came to answer Daniel’s prayer tells him that he started on his way immediately when Daniel began praying, but the “prince of the Persian kingdom” resisted him for 21 days until Michael, “one of the chief princes”, came to help him.  When I compare this with what Paul said in Ephesians it strikes me as suggesting the the kingdom of Persia had a spiritual being which represented it in the spiritual realm, and that this being opposed God’s messengers.  This leads me to the understanding that all human organizations (nations, businesses, non-profits, etc) have spiritual beings associated with them.  Further, those spiritual beings will generally oppose God.  My conclusion from looking at organizations of which I have knowledge is that we need to work very hard to ensure that the spiritual being which represents organizations of which we are part do not oppose God.  It seems the longer an organization is around the more likely it begins to serve itself and not its members or whatever goal it was established to promote.  Some organizations take longer to reach such a state than others and that appears to me to be a result of key people actively and knowingly working to prevent that from happening.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Daniel 9-10.

When Daniel read that Jeremiah had prophesied that Jerusalem would lie in ruins for seventy years and that those seventy years were almost up, he began to fast and  pray for Jerusalem’s restoration.  In his prayer, Daniel focused on the sins of his people, on their failure to obey God’s commands.  However, he did not list specific sins of which they were guilty.  Instead, he prayed for God’s mercy despite their sins.  His prayer was an acknowledgement that Jerusalem’s restoration would not occur because the Jewish people deserved it, but rather would be because God was merciful.  God does not bless us because we deserve it.  He blesses us in order to bring honor to His name.  If we live our lives in order to bring glory to God, He will bless us.  That last statement is an absolute truth.  However, those blessings may not be the type which those who preach “prosperity gospel” would recognize.  As an example, Jim Elliot was blessed by God (if you do not know who Jim Elliot was, look him up).

When I read the portion of today’s passage about Daniel’s vision of the messenger I read the translation notes.  It strikes me that the attempt by the translators to make the passage make sense leads us to fail to realize just how confusing the entire vision really was.  In particular chapter 10 verse 13, which reads in the New Living Translation as:

But for twenty-one days the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia blocked my way. Then Michael, one of the archangels, came to help me, and I left him there with the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia.

This is an example of where the King James Version actually contains a much better translation:

But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.

Notice how in the KJV it refers to the one who blocked the messenger merely as “the prince” of the kingdom of Persia, not the “spirit prince”.  It refers to Michael a “one of the chief princes”.  And finally, even after Michael arrived the messenger remained with the “kings of Persia”.  If the messenger remained with the kings of Persia, how did he come to speak with Daniel?  More importantly, the KJV translation allows us to see that Michael is a superior version of the same sort of being who initially blocked the messenger from coming to speak with Daniel.  There is another important fact we learn from the end of Chapter 10.  Michael, one of the chief princes, is prince of Israel in much the same way that there is a prince of Persian and prince of Greece.  All of this takes us into interpretations and ideas which go way beyond the scope of this daily Bible study.