Daniel 9-1-23 Learn to Pray like Daniel

Prayer is important, so today we’ll see what we can learn about prayer from Daniel.

If you asked most people who Daniel was, they would get it wrong.  They would focus on the peripherals, the externals, the nonessentials, the unimportant, the little things.  They would say things like, oh, he was a Jewish captive who became third in command over the most powerful empire in the world.  YAWN!

That would be missing the important things like who Daniel really was.

He is referred to three times in the book of Ezekiel.

Ezekiel was appointed by God to explain to the Jewish people who had been taken captive to a foreign country the reasons why God had them taken captive, which was their continual rebellion against the ways of God.

In chapter 14, God tells Ezekiel (Ezekiel 14:14):  even though these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job were in its midst, by their own righteousness they could only deliver themselves,” declares the Lord GOD.

And then again in verse 20:      even though Noah, Daniel and Job were in its midst, as I live,” declares the Lord GOD, “they could not deliver either their son or their daughter. They would deliver only themselves by their righteousness.”

Noah, of course, is the one man God thought worthy of saving when He destroyed the whole world by a flood for their evil.  And then God saved his immediate family as well.

Job was the most righteous man in the world in his time, who the devil singled out as needing some severe testing in order to prove if he was really worthy of that title.

And then there is Daniel.  Everybody knew who Daniel was, but in God’s eyes, he was one of a very small group of people.  One of the most righteous persons who ever lived it seems.  And that says a lot considering those people who didn’t make the list.

God didn’t mention Abraham, the one to whom God made a covenant that would bring salvation to the world. 

He didn’t mention Moses, the man who talked with God face to face.

He didn’t even mention David, a man after God’s own heart, who wrote most of the Psalms in the Bible.

The Bible is not shy about talking about a person’s foibles, to put it mildly.  Abraham, Moses, and David all had foibles, if you want to call them that, and the Bible talks about them.  Not so with Daniel.

Then in Ezekiel 28:3, Ezekiel was prophesying against the ruler of one of the major cities of the region.  Most scholars believe that this prophecy was likening that nation’s king to Satan.  And God said to this king:

               3      Behold, you are wiser than Daniel; There is no secret that is a match for you.

Now we all know of people who we think are really smart, even wise.  But God judges wisdom by a whole different standard than we do.   

The Bible says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  (Job 28:28; Ps 111:10; Prov 9:10; 15:33; Eccl 12:13)

Now if somebody was told that they are wiser than Larry, you’re not saying much.  But when God says that this man was wiser than Daniel, you know that Daniel’s wisdom was legendary. 

Besides all this, three times in the book of Daniel, Daniel is told that he is highly esteemed by God. 

The angel Gabriel, the same angel who in the book of Luke came to Mary to announce that she would bear the child Jesus, came to Daniel after Daniel had prayed this prayer and told him that he is highly esteemed by God.  That word ‘esteemed’ doesn’t quite do it justice.  The word is preciousness, and the word is emphasized.  It is put first in the sentence.  Many languages use word order to emphasize things.  We can do that sometimes in English, but not always.  And the word is a plural form, which can also be used for emphasis.

Gabriel told Daniel, Preciousness are you. 

I think this is the only time that that word is used of a person.  Usually it speaks of a person’s valuables.  One German Hebrew lexicon translates this as Liebling, like you would say to your little granddaughter.  My grandmother used to call me Schatze, which is like treasured one, or treasure.  Which is a close equivalent for this.

When God gave the Ten Commandments and said, Do not covet, this is the word He used.  Something you want so much you want to take it from somebody else.

Now it is true that, as far as we know, the first time Daniel was called this was after his prayer here, so some might think that he didn’t know how special he was to God when he prayed this.  But prior to this, Daniel had had supernatural revelations from God where he could see and interpret dreams that other people had had.  This had to have been more than just subconscious impulses.  He wouldn’t have gone as boldly as he did before kings, unless he was fully certain that God had spoken to him.

   

In Daniel 9:23, after Daniel had prayed the prayer that we are going to look at, the angel Gabriel came visibly to Daniel in answer to his prayer. 

Now why did we spend so much time talking about what kind of person Daniel was, both in God’s eyes and in the eyes of other people?  Because in Daniel’s prayer, he spends most of the time confessing his sins.  And these weren’t sins that he actually committed himself.  They were the sins of his people, the sins for which God had judged them. 

Daniel’s prayer lasted 15 verses, and he confessed his sins in 12 of them.  That’s 80% of his prayer.

Daniel’s nation was in ruins.  It had been conquered by a foreign power and totally decimated.  Daniel read in the book of Jeremiah that this was to be only for a limited time, and God would then restore the nation. 

So Daniel prayed for his country.  I don’t think a lot of Christians pray for their country or even get involved in politics.  They think the Bible puts a big wall against that: Caesar and God. 

But something has changed here.  We don’t have kings and Caesars anymore.  We have representatives.   That means that there are people in government who represent us.  They are there to see that my interests affect the policies that my country enacts.

Well, my representatives in my state and Congress all support abortion.  It doesn’t matter that I didn’t vote for them.  They represent me.  They speak in my name.

If Daniel confessed the sins of the Israelite people as his own sins, all the more Christians who have representatives who vote for, pay for, and stand up for things that Christians find appalling and abhorrent should confess before God the sins of our people. 

It doesn’t matter that I didn’t vote for them.  What am I doing to see that somebody truly does represent my interests? 

Our country is like an enormous table where everybody is invited to sit down together and decide the best way to run our country.  Actually, the table is too big, so we choose people to sit in for us. 

It’s absurd for Christians to let the heathen decide what to teach your children in school, how to deal with crime, poverty, and immorality.  You give way more money to the government than you give to church or other Christian organizations.  Shouldn’t you care how they spend your money?  Talk about stewardship!

If a man like Daniel prayed for his country, feeling responsible for the sins of the country, how much more should Christians feel in some ways responsible for the sins of our country? 

The Bible says to love your neighbor as yourself.  I feel like we spend more time, money, and energy on people we’ll never meet, in places we’ll never see, for causes for which we will never see the outcomes than the people who live and work right around us.  We say it’s because those others are more needy, when the bigger reason is probably that we feel so inadequate to reach out to those close by.

The first step is prayer.  And Daniel shows us the way here.