GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
DANIEL 9:4-6
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4 I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed, saying, “O Lord, great and feared God, you keep your covenant and you show mercy to those who love you and keep your commandments. 5 We have sinned. We are guilty. We acted wickedly. We rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and your judgments. 6 We did not listen to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, to our princes, and to our ancestors, and to all the people of the land.
Daniel begins with a confession of his sins, and of the sins of his people. He does not say “They have sinned,” he says, “We have sinned.” But he begins with God’s faithfulness.
God is great and is feared. God’s greatness is shown in all of creation. God is outside his creation, for he cannot be contained in it, but holds it all as if it is in the palm of his hand; he is God “who holds in his hand your life and all your ways” (Daniel 5:23). Therefore God shows his greatness most brilliantly and unexpectedly by entering into his creation as nothing more than a human man, for “Christ is all, and is in all” (Colossians 3:11).
God also keeps his covenant and shows mercy. A covenant is an agreement, formally sealed by two parties to keep their side of the agreement, such as two kings who want to end a conflict, or two landowners who want to establish a relationship of business or land boundaries, or a covenant of marriage in which the husband and wife want to join into one family and be faithful to one another. But God has made a covenant with mankind that has only one side. He will be our God and will forgive us our sins. A modern business man or some great dealmaker, ignorant of mercy or compassion, would call this a terrible deal, but God is gracious (thanks be to his holy name!) and he forgives.
Daniel lists the accusations of the guilty conscience: “We have sinned. We are guilty. We acted wickedly.” To sin is to attempt to keep God’s commandments and fail, to miss the mark, to try but not to succeed. This is why we are guilty; we have acted wickedly. The form of the verb “we acted wickedly” is often used of those who condemn the wicked, to say “we have condemned (others) as guilty.” But here the prophet condemns himself and his people. This is a public confession of sins, just as we do together in worship near the beginning of the service. It is a public admission of guilt. They had rebelled against the Ten Commandments and against the other commands and judgments of the Lord.
“We did not listen to your servants, the prophets,” Daniel confesses. Here the whole nation is at fault, since the generation before Daniel’s had gone so far astray in its rebellion that this exile was called down by God to put an end to their sin and to call them to repentance. Jeremiah said, “Do you think the LORD did not remember the incense you burned in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem– you, your ancestors, your kings and princes and the people of the land? Do you think this did not enter his mind?” (Jeremiah 44:21). Since Daniel said that he had been studying the book of Jeremiah (Daniel 9:2) it should not surprise us that some of the other prophet’s words and turns of phrase had remained in Daniel’s thoughts. His people, the people chosen by God to be his very own, had become, in one poet’s words, “apes of idleness… scum and ruffians that will swear, drink, dance, revel the night, rob, murder, and commit
the oldest sins the newest kind of ways.”
This passage proclaims the law to us and proves the cause of our salvation. There is without any doubt the will of God for mankind to be with him forever in heaven, so that he chose us already then in eternity (Ephesians 1:4). But there is also the terrible reality of man’s sin. “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12). But sin is not a cause of salvation. It is the reason that salvation was necessary. Without it, man would have lived on earth until he was translated by God into Paradise, perhaps as the old theologians say, after a thousand years for each person. For Adam lived very nearly a thousand years in his sinful state, but the perfect and flawless Scripture tells us that Adam died after 930 years. Now, Moses tells us that the length of our days is seventy years (Psalm 90:10). Therefore, I think that the ancient theologians guessed that Adam had one lifetime, as it were, removed from his supposed thousand years, and he was not translated into Paradise at all, but died the death we all shall die. But God’s plan is to raise us from death, and to restore to us the perfection man once had, so that we are able to live guiltless and with perfect holiness the everlasting life he desires for us all. Until then, may the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Daniel 9:4-6 A confession of sin