Dan. 9:1-2, 1 Kings 8:46-53, A Prayer of Confession (1)

 During the captivity in Babylon the Jews added two days of fasting to their religious calendar, in the 5th and 7th months.  After the return, and after the second temple was built, some of them came to the prophet Zechariah and asked if they should continue those times of fasting.  God’s first question, through the prophet, was to ask, when you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months during those seventy years, did you really fast for Me – for Me (Zech. 7:5)? 

That is a question that must be asked when any religious activity is prescribed for everyone to perform.  Was your heart really in it?  When you mourned, was it for your sins?  Were you willing to identify and confess, your sins?  Did you really come to agree, that you were to blame for the judgment of seventy years?  Or did you maintain that God was unfair or unrighteous in pouring out His fury?

What is before us is a prayer of Daniel, prayed at the end of the seventy years, when he knew it was about time for God to fulfill His word and bring the people back to the land.  Jeremiah had made this clear: after seventy years God would punish their captors and deliver them (2 Chr. 36:21; Jer. 25:11-12; 29:10).  It is a perfect prayer of confession.  It is prayed by a man whom God Himself placed alongside Noah and Job as the most righteous men who ever lived (Ezek. 14:14,20).  We know it is a prayer that comes from someone whose heart is genuine before God.

It is around 536BC, seventy years from the time of the first carrying away of people from Jerusalem to Babylon in 606BC.  Daniel knows the promised time of return is near.  So, he prays that God will be merciful and not delay in bringing them back to the land (v19).  Why?  Why would he pray for something God has promised? 

·       First, what else should he pray for?  This is the classic illustration of praying God’s word back to Him.  You can do no better in prayer than to pray for the will of God.  Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.  And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him (1 John 5:14-15).

·       But Dan. 9:13 gives us another reason for this prayer.  Daniel, realizing the time for return is near, also knows that after seventy years the people have not come to grips with the point of the captivity.  They have not acknowledged their sin and God’s righteousness: yet we have not made our prayer before the LORD our God, that we might turn from our iniquities and understand Your truth (v13).  Daniel is not just praying personally; he is praying for and in the place of the Nation!  He is doing as Solomon said at the temple dedication: when they are taken captive, and in their captivity, they turn to you and pray and confess their sin, then hear and forgive and bring them back (1 Kings 8:46-53). 

There is so much we can learn from this prayer.  LORD, teach us to pray!