Daniel 9

Empires have risen and fallen across Daniel's long life - he was carried off as a youth, grew old under one throne after another, watched Babylon itself collapse and a Mede take the realm. And in the middle of all that upheaval, what occupies him is a book. He understood by books the number of the years (v. 2), studying the words God had given through Jeremiah, and one number arrests him: the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. Jeremiah had written it plainly - after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you (Jer. 29:10).

Daniel does the arithmetic of his own lifetime and realizes the term is nearly up. Notice what kind of man this makes him. He does not wait for a fresh vision or a special sign; he reads what God has already said, takes it seriously, and lets it govern how he prays. The written word of God is for him a living summons.

Here is the response that catches us off guard. The promise was sure - God had said seventy years, and the seventy years were almost spent. A lesser faith would have reasoned, The deliverance is coming on schedule; there is nothing left to do but wait. Daniel reasons the opposite way. Precisely because God has promised, he sets his face unto the Lord God (v. 3) and prays toward that promise with everything in him. The phrase is one of fixed, deliberate resolve, and he comes the way the broken come: with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes, the marks of a man who is in earnest and knows his need.

This is one of the quiet lessons of the whole Bible about how promise and prayer fit together. God's declared purposes are the very ground on which we pray at all. Daniel takes hold of what God has said and turns it back to God in supplication - and the chapter will show that such prayer is heard.

Watch where Daniel begins - with the faithfulness of God, the very faithfulness the failure offends. He names God first as the One keeping the covenant and mercy (v. 4), the God who has held to His word even when His people would not. Only against that backdrop does he lay the failure bare, and pile the words up without softening any of them: sinned… committed iniquity… done wickedly… rebelled (v. 5). He is not wallowing.

Honest confession simply refuses to dress up what it names. There is no reaching for a gentler word, no half-excuse tucked in beside the admission. This is what it looks like to own sin plainly, with the truth about God held steadily in view the whole time - so that the very faithfulness being confessed against becomes the reason to hope it can be forgiven.

At the center of the confession stands a sentence that holds two truths in perfect balance: O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto thee, but unto us confusion of faces (v. 7). Daniel draws the sharpest possible line between God and his people. To God belongs righteousness - He has done right in everything, including the judgment that fell. To the people belongs confusion of faces - the burning shame of those who know they have no defense. He repeats it so it cannot be missed: O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee (v. 8).

There is no blaming the exile on bad luck or hard circumstances or even on God being harsh. The fault is entirely on the human side; the rightness is entirely on God's. This is the opposite of how wounded pride speaks. The natural heart, caught and suffering, looks for someone else to fault - and the last one it wants to clear is God. Daniel does the reverse: he clears God completely and accepts the shame himself.

Only a soul that has stopped defending itself can pray like this.

And yet the confession is not despair, because Daniel knows where the door of hope is hung. Right after owning the people's shame, he turns to the one thing that makes any prayer possible: To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him (v. 9). Notice the symmetry with verse 7. Righteousness belongs to God - and so do mercies and forgivenesses. Both are His. The same God who was right to judge is also rich to forgive, and Daniel reaches for the second without minimizing the first.

The little word though carries the whole weight of grace: mercies belong to God though we have rebelled. In the teeth of rebellion, mercy is still with God. The rest of the prayer (vv. 10-14) circles back over the people's long disobedience and admits that the judgment written in the law of Moses has justly come, ending with the steady refrain that even now the LORD our God is righteous in all his works which he doeth (v. 14).

Confession that knows God's mercy can afford to be this honest about sin, because it is not trusting in its own goodness to be heard.

Confession turns to pleading, and Daniel's first move is to reach backward. Before he asks for anything, he reminds God of the exodus - the God who brought thy people forth out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand (v. 15), the great rescue that first made this people His own and made His name famous among the nations. The logic is quiet but strong: the God who once redeemed with a mighty hand is the God being asked to redeem again.

Then comes the actual request: O Lord, according to all thy righteousness, I beseech thee, let thine anger and thy fury be turned away from thy city Jerusalem, thy holy mountain (v. 16). He appeals according to all thy righteousness - as though God's very rightness is itself a reason to restore. His prayer lifts higher than the people's comfort: Jerusalem and thy people are become a reproach to all that are about us - God's own city, His own name, lies in the dust before the watching nations.

Daniel is praying for the honor of God's reputation, the city His own name is bound to.

After everything - the fasting, the sackcloth, the long honest confession - the prayer reaches its summit and stakes itself on the one thing that is not Daniel. He is not coming with a résumé. He explicitly refuses to. We do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies (v. 18): it is one of the clearest statements in all the Old Testament of where forgiveness must rest. Not for our righteousnesses - we have none worth presenting - but for thy great mercies. The ground of the appeal is moved entirely off the human side and placed on the character of God.

And then he twice anchors it to God's own name and honor: for the Lord's sake (v. 17), and again defer not, for thine own sake, O my God (v. 19). This is the deepest reason a soul can give God for hearing it - not because I deserve it, but for your own sake, because your mercy is who you are and your name is bound up with this people. Forgiveness, Daniel knows, is finally about what God is like, not what we have managed to be.

The careful structure of the earlier verses gives way to something raw and almost breathless. Four imperatives tumble out - hear… forgive… hearken… do (v. 19) - with God's name repeated at the head of each like a hand laid again and again on the same door. There is a holy boldness here that only confession can produce. Daniel can be this direct, this importunate, precisely because he has stopped pretending; a man who has fully owned his need is free to ask without hedging.

And the final reason he gives is the same one he has leaned on throughout: for thy city and thy people are called by thy name. The honor at stake is God's own. He says, in effect, your name is on this people; act for the sake of your name. It is prayer standing on the firmest ground there is: the character of God Himself.

The answer arrives before the prayer is even finished: And whiles I was speaking, and praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel… even the man Gabriel… being caused to fly swiftly, touched me about the time of the evening oblation (vv. 20-21). The timing is its own small sermon. Daniel is still mid-sentence, still confessing, when the response is already on its way; and Gabriel will tell him that the word went out at the beginning of thy supplications (v. 23) - before Daniel had finished his first petitions, the answer had been released.

Heaven was not slow. The detail that Gabriel comes about the time of the evening oblation is tender: the temple lies in ruins, no evening sacrifice can be offered, and yet at the very hour the offering would have risen, God meets the prayer of one faithful man with a word from heaven. Gabriel comes caused to fly swiftly - in haste, with urgency - and says, I am now come forth to give thee skill and understanding (v. 22).

Daniel had sought understanding from the books of Jeremiah; now understanding is sent to him in person. The God who hears prayer does not merely tolerate it; He answers it swiftly, and gives more light than was asked.

Before Gabriel says one word about the seventy weeks, he tells Daniel who he is in heaven's eyes: for thou art greatly beloved: therefore understand the matter, and consider the vision (v. 23). This is said to a man in exile - far from home, a captive under foreign kings, an old man who may well feel like the forgotten remnant of a defeated people. And heaven's assessment of him is greatly beloved. The phrase is striking precisely because of who hears it and where.

Daniel's circumstances shout that he is small and overlooked; God's messenger says he is precious. And mark the order: it is because he is greatly beloved that the great revelation is given to him. Understanding flows from God's love for him; the deepest things God shows are shown to those He holds dear. And if you have ever prayed feeling small, forgotten, like one more voice from a defeated corner of the world, this is for you too: that prayer rose as the prayer of one greatly beloved, heard by a God who loved him - and who was about to show him the longest reach of His saving purpose.

Gabriel begins with the goal. Before a single date is mentioned, he names six things this appointed span exists to accomplish (v. 24) - and not one of them is political or military. Read them slowly. To finish the transgression. To make an end of sins. To make reconciliation for iniquity. To bring in everlasting righteousness. To seal up - to confirm and complete - the vision and prophecy. And to anoint the most Holy. These are the words of atonement and restoration: sin dealt with and ended, iniquity reconciled, a righteousness brought in that does not fade.

They reach right past Daniel's own day to the far horizon of God's plan. Whatever else the seventy weeks involve, this is their deepest burden: the undoing of sin itself.

The prophecy frames its great span around a single coming figure. It runs from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince (v. 25), and the rebuilt city is mentioned only in passing - the street and wall raised again in troublous times. The reckoning of the weeks has been counted in more than one way across the centuries - where the count begins, how the “weeks” are measured, and how the final week is understood are all read differently by careful readers - and the chapter itself does not press a single calendar on us. What it does hold up, unmistakably, is the figure at the center: the Messiah the Prince. A rebuilt Jerusalem, even amid troublous times, is the lesser thing; the whole span runs toward the coming of an Anointed Ruler.

The verse fixes the eye on a Person. Whatever scheme a reader follows for the years, the prophecy bends them all toward one arrival - the Messiah, the Prince, the Anointed One whose coming is the point of the count. Daniel is being shown that the end of the seventy years of exile is only a small foretaste of a far greater appointment God has set: the coming of His Anointed.

Then comes the line that has arrested readers for two thousand years: And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself (v. 26). The expected story of an anointed prince is that he comes to reign - to take a throne, to rule. This One comes and is cut off. The phrase is the language of death, of being severed from the land of the living. And then the qualification that changes everything: but not for himself. The death falls on Him; the cause of it lies elsewhere.

The rest of the verse turns to the aftermath - the city and the sanctuary destroyed, desolations determined - and verse 27 speaks of a covenant confirmed with many and of sacrifice and oblation made to cease. Readers have understood these closing details in more than one way, and it is no part of this passage's power to settle every clause. The load-bearing word stands clear of all the debate. An Anointed One is put to death - and not for His own sake.