RDean/Daniel Lesson 39

Confession in Prayer – Daniel 9:6-9

Daniel 9 is a very famous chapter in Scripture because of what happens after verse 20, but the prayer of Daniel in the first 19 verses is really important for us to study and understand as a model for prayer.  Someday I'm going to do a study of all the prayers in the Scriptures because I think there's a lot that we can learn from the prayers of the Scripture that will challenge each of us in our own prayer lives.  What we see in Daniel is that Daniel is faced with a problem.  Now the particular problem that Daniel is faced with is a national problem, but it doesn't matter whether it's a national problem or whether it's a personal problem, it doesn't matter whether it is an economic problem, whether it's a problem of health or finances of career or marriage problems because the principles for solving problems are all the same and you are familiar with those stress busters and problem solving devices that we study.

Now sometimes people ask why isn't prayer considered one of the problem solving devices.  Prayer is a mechanism through which the problem solving devices function.  It is not, per se, a problem solving device and we'll see that in our analysis this evening because in this prayer Daniel is going to use the first stress buster which is confession of sin, and so we'll learn a lot about what is involved in confession of sin from an Old Testament perspective.  What happens in Daniel 9 is Daniel is relating, he's identifying the problem in his life, which in this case is a national problem, and that is the result of Israel's disobedience.  In effect, it's self-induced misery and divine discipline created through the problem of sin.  And because of their national sin they are outside of the land, they are outside the place of blessing and they're in captivity in Babylon.  Last time we began to look at prayer and there are several principles I highlighted as we began to go through this prayer of Daniels. 

First of all we saw that God may respond to prayer and actually alter history because of the prayer.  The principle in Scripture is that prayer changes things.  In James 4 James says you have not because you ask not, clearly indicating that prayer changes things and there are many examples in Scripture.  One that comes to mind is in Ezekiel when God, after the rebellion of the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai while Moses is up on the mountain getting the Ten Commandments he hears the sound of the people down below the mountain and they have enticed Aaron to build a golden calf and they're having an orgy down there while Moses is up getting the Law.  So Moses goes down and God is threatening to kill all the Jews except for Moses and Moses prays and he argues with God on the basis of the Abrahamic Covenant and the basis of the promises that God has made that he can't do that.  And so God relents, not that He was going to go through with it in the first place but we see that Moses' prayer has an impact in history.  The same is true for us, not every time, many times God may say no, and God is going to say no to Daniel in this chapter just as God said no to Paul when Paul prayed three times to have his throne in the flesh removed.  Nevertheless, the principle is we are to engage God in prayer and at times God will respond to that prayer and he will change history because of that prayer.

The second principle we saw is that prayer often needs to be formulated in terms of promises.  In the Old Testament a Jewish believer has certain promises that are much more specific than the promises that God gives a Church Age believer.  The promises that God gives a Church Age believer in many ways are more general.  But at times they are more specific, especially in dealing with certain kinds of testing and certain kinds of temptation.  So prayer needs to be formulated in terms of the promises that God has given.  That means that you have to have a certain knowledge of doctrine, there has to be some study preceding the prayer.

The third thing we saw was that prayer should utilize Biblical language from these promises, utilize the language; if we saturate our soul with the Word of God and with doctrine then that ought to characterize our prayer, so that when we pray we are using the same words that God uses in a prayer, not just that God uses in His promises, not just simply regurgitating the promises or reminding God of the promise but as we'll see in this chapter, Daniel's vocabulary throughout this chapter, throughout this prayer is vocabulary that is lifted out of Deuteronomy and Jeremiah showing that Daniel has just saturated his soul with these books.  When it says in Daniel 9:3 that Daniel is going to seek God, that word itself, as we will see, is a word that comes right out of the promise that God gives to Jeremiah as well as in Deuteronomy and it is a word that implies investigation, time, concentration, so we need to not only formulate our prayers in terms of the promises but also utilize the language in those promises.  That verb is one that is used again and again in the prophets and in the Mosaic Law.

The fourth principle that we saw was that prayer at times needs to take priority over the details of life.  Prayer at times needs to take priority over the details of life and that is the purpose of fasting.  It wasn't that somehow God was impressed with their sincerity or their passion or their intensity because they decided to give up a meal.  I always laugh at fundies, they're so funny; we ought to laugh at ourselves and laugh at them because they always want to impress God with their fasting, and I go to different churches and I've been around a lot of different churches and it always sort of amuses me and I get a chuckle when I hear a pastor announce that the church this next couple of weeks is going to fast and the fast usually does not exclude juices, there's all these caveats in there, and the reason is of course, if somebody fasts and they're diabetic then they're going to get in trouble. 

They miss the whole point, the point isn't fasting, the point is that the individual praying is so consumed with the importance of his prayer and investigating what the Scripture says about the subject that it takes precedence over taking care of the details of life, so much so that he's not going to take the time to prepare a meal and to eat it.  And of course in the ancient world they didn't have microwave dinners, they couldn't run to Kentucky Fried Chicken and get a meal, it took hours to prepare and to clean up.  So rather than to be distracted by the hours of preparation and clean up they would forego the meal and just focus on the task at hand. 

The fifth principle we saw was that prayer should built in terms of a particular characteristic of God or, as we'll see in this prayer, Daniel is going to focus on two or three characteristics of God and then He is going to present his petition to God on the basis of God's character, on the basis of who God is. 

Last time we started with Daniel 9:3, Daniel begins to describe his prayer, he says, "So I gave my attention to the LORD God to eek Him by prayer and supplications, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes."  The phrase "I gave my attention," literally in the Hebrew means I set my face or gave my face towards God; set my face towards God which means now he is going to concentrate on God's plan and what God has said about His plan for Israel.  It's an idiom for concentration and for intensity; he is going to be so intent on developing his case for prayer that it's going to take place and set aside any time for meals or anything else.  And he is going to seek God by prayer and as we look at this verbiage the key word here is to seek which is a word that is found in various key passages in the Old Testament.

For example, in Jeremiah 29:12-13 we had a key promise that Daniel is relying upon here.  This presents the potential that was available to the Jews at this particular time in history.  God says, "Then you will call upon Me," the "you" here is a plural referring to the nation, "Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me and I will listen to you, and you will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with a whole heart."  And the key word here is to "seek" God and that implies a certain level of intensity on the part of Israel, and this promise in Jeremiah 29:13 has its root in Deuteronomy 4:29.  There we read, "But from there you will seek the LORD your God, and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and with all your soul."  So in Deuteronomy again and again this terminology is used, that the Jews are to seek the Lord their God and search for Him with all their heart and with all their soul.

The problem is that Daniel is seeking God with all his heart and soul but what's true for Daniel is not true for the rest of the nation.  Many of the Jews are not positive to the Word, even after 70 years of captivity.  Many Jews did not return at the end of the seventy year captivity.  There was a group that returned under Ezra in 535, there was another group that returned under Zerubbabel later on, about 518, there was another group that returned under Nehemiah about 444 BC, but these groups that returned only represented a small percentage of the Jews that were scattered throughout the ancient world and so those Jews still remained scattered.  There were pockets in Alexandria, there were pockets up in Turkey and Cappadocia, there were pockets of Jews scattered throughout what had been the Babylonian Empire and the Persian Empire, all the way to the Indus River.  There were these various groups of Jews that were scattered throughout the world.  There were Jews that were going even to as far as Greece and to Rome and that was the beginning of the Diaspora, but the nation as a whole, ethnic Jews as whole were not returning to God with all their heart and all their soul.  Therefore God was not going to allow them to have a complete return to the land; there's only a partial return in 535 BC.

Now one question that has come up, someone asked me the other day, and that is does Israel have a right to the land today, because they are not a regenerate people.  Obviously Scripture teaches and we've studied the passages that God is going to bring Israel back at the end of the Tribulation and that is as a regenerate nation.  So does Israel have a right to the land now?  And the way to answer that is even in 585 BC when God took them out of the land the land was still theirs; the title deed for the land of Israel still read to the Jews.  God never gave that land to anybody else and He never took that land away from them permanently.  So that land is always the land that God has given to Israel. 

In various passages in Jeremiah and Ezekiel there are the promises that God is going to bring the nation back to form an unregenerate nation and that unregenerate nation must be there in order for the antichrist to be able to sign a peace treaty with Israel at the beginning of the Tribulation.  There had to be a nation return to the land, a group of Jews return to the land and a Jewish nation in the land at the time of the incarnation, for the Messiah to come there had to be a nation there.  That was not a regenerate nation; there were regenerate leaders who led them back, Ezra, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel and others but as a whole the Jews after the exile in Babylon did not return as a regenerate people.  They were not positive.  What was one of the first things that happened within a couple generations?  They had given themselves completely over to the legalism of the Pharisees.  So the nation that returned in 535 BC was not a regenerate nation, they weren't seeking the Lord with all their heart and all their soul, they weren't positive to doctrine but God had to bring back a segment, a minority of Jews to the land at that time so there would be a nation there for the Messiah to come to.  And the same way, God is going to bring back and has been bringing back Jews to the land so there would be a nation there in preparation for what will happen at the end times. 

History turns on two things; one is the believer and the impact of the believer on his particular nation.  As goes the believer so goes the nation.  Secondly, history turns on Israel and if we are near the end of the Church Age, and the Tribulation is around the corner, 5, 10, 20 years from now, we don't know, it could be, it could be further away, we just don't know, but it stands to reason that at the end of the Church Age that as the Tribulation approaches God is going to start setting the stage for what's going to take place in the Tribulation.  So some prophecy may start to be fulfilled, as in the return of unregenerate Jews to the land in order to prepare things for what will happen after the rapture.  It doesn't relate to the rapture, it doesn't relate to the Church.  The rapture is not dependent upon those things. 

In fact, there are a number of people, prophecy scholars, good men, who believe that there could be as much as 10, 20, 30 years between the rapture and the beginning of the Tribulation.  In fact, if you go back and you read some of the writings by dispensationalist, some of you may be familiar with a guy named Clarence Larkin, he wrote a book called Dispensational Truth, most people remember because he was an architect and he had all these tremendous intricate charts and diagrams of all the ages and all the dispensations.  Clarence Larkin thought there could be as much as 70 years between the rapture and the beginning of the Tribulation.  Why?  When Clarence Larkin wrote Dispensational Truth back in 1917 or 1916, whenever it was, there was no Israel in the land so as he was looking at history he knew that the rapture was imminent and it could occur at any moment and if the rapture occurred in his day, there were so many things that still had to happen before the Tribulation could even begin, the Jews would have to be brought back to the land, they would have to organize as a nation, many other things would have to transpire. 

So at that time he and many others thought that 50, 60 70 years could transpire between the rapture and the Tribulation.  The rapture ends the Church Age.  The signing of the peace treaty, as we will see when we get to the end of this chapter, the signing of the peace treaty between the prince who is to come, that is the antichrist, and Israel is what starts the countdown of Daniel's seventieth week.  Now who knows how much time is in between, it could be a few weeks, it could be a few years, but if it's a shorter time and as we get closer to that time it just stands to reason that we are going to see certain things happening; while there may not be a precise fulfillment of prophecy they are certainly setting the stage for what will happen once the Church is removed.

Now Daniel is going to turn to the Lord and he is going to seek him, and his very terminology is a reminder of these Old Testament promises that God has made to return Israel to the land, and to return all of the Jews to the land.  That was not fulfilled because the Jews did not seek Him with a whole heart, as God had called for in Deuteronomy.  So Daniel says, "I gave my attention to the LORD to seek Him by prayer and supplications;" the word here for prayer is the standard Hebrew word for prayer, palal, which has to do with making a request before someone in authority, seeking something, and the second word is the word translated "supplication" which is the Hebrew word tachanuwn and that means a supplication or a petition, it means to humbly present your request to someone in authority and the emphasis in the word supplication is on humility, it's on grace orientation, it's on dependence upon the individual granting the request and when it comes to prayer it emphasizes the grace orientation of the person praying.  And if there's any concept that comes through from Daniel's prayer it's grace orientation.  Remember I said that prayer itself is not a problem solving device, it's not a stress buster, but the stress busters are often channeled through prayer so that you start with confession, but as we analyze Daniel's prayer we're going to see that he can't pray what he's praying if he's not grace oriented.  So once again his grace orientation affects the quality and the depth of his prayer.

We come to Daniel 9:4 and we read, "And I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed and said, 'Alas, O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and lovingkindness for those who love Him and keep His commandments."  Now at this point we're going to enter into the prayer itself.  What I want to do on the overhead is draw a bit of an outline to emphasize the main points of this prayer.  Let's break it down this way.  From verse 4-19 we have Daniel's prayer.  And from 4b to 14 the emphasis is on Israel's sin and confession.  It starts in the second part of verse 4 with the adoration of God.  Then verses 5-14 we have the rehearsal or the acknowledge­ment of sin, the acknowledgement of Israel sin.  In verses 5-6 he outlines Israel's history of disobedience.  Then in verses 7-9a the contrast is made between Israel's disobedience and God's righteousness.  And in 7-9a the contrast is made not only with God's righteousness but it's contrasted with Israel's shame.  So in 7a the emphasis is on divine righteousness; in 7b the emphasis is on Israel's shame, and when we get there we're going to look at the doctrine of shame.  In verse 8 the emphasis is again on Israel's shame, and then in verse 9 the emphasis goes back to divine mercy.  Then in verses 9-11 the emphasis goes back to Israel's rebellion and in verse 11-14 the emphasis is on divine righteousness. 

Now if you look at the way I have indented these verses there is a pattern.  It flows in till you hit 7a; 7a through 9a repeat each other, you have divine righteousness, then Israel's shame; Israel's shame then divine mercy so that this forms a classic pattern of a literary structure called a chiasm.  It looks, if you draw the letter X, which is the Greek word Chi, then it reflects the left hand side of that letter X, and the purpose of this kind of literary structure is to emphasize what's in the middle and what's in the middle here is the emphasis on divine righteousness in contrast to Israel's shame because of their disobedience.  And that is the core of understanding Biblical confession because what we see here is a perfect example of what is involved in confession.

Now Daniel begins by saying "I prayed," this is the hithpael imperfect of the Hebrew word palal which is expressed in the first person which is a cohortative of request.  It's not an imperative, it's not a demand, it's a request and the basis root meaning of palal is to intervene, to interpose.  It can also mean to arbitrate a conflict, to judge between options, to intercede.  In a few contexts it even means to investigate or to argue as a lawyer presenting a case before a judge.  So all of these meanings are involved in the word palal and so it has a certain intensiveness to it as an intercessor comes before God arguing for his case that God would grant him a petition.  He "prayed to the LORD my God" all of our prayers are directed and should be directed to God the Father.  The reason we say that is not simply because Jesus prayed to God the Father, who else would Jesus pray to except for God the Father, that's usually the argument you always hear.  The reason we pray to God the Father is because Jesus is interceding for us and the Holy Spirit is interceding for us, and since both the Son and the Spirit are interceding for us they are not to be the ones that we are to go to in intercession.  You don't go to the intermediate, you go to the one who's at the head of the chain of command, and so prayer goes to God the Father.

"I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed and said," so right here we're introduced to prayer and to the first two aspects of prayer.  As I've taught prayer many times we need to remember it in terms of an acronym; the acronym is CATS, the "C" stands for confession; the "A" for adoration, the "T" for thanksgiving and the "S" for supplication.  Now supplications come in two varieties, we have intercession for others which is the nature of this prayer, intercession for the nation Israel and then we have petitions which are personal requests.  So in this chapter we see an example of a prayer confession, we see the use of adoration, and we see the function of intercession as Daniel intercedes for the nation.

Now I want you to notice Daniel doesn't jump right into confession.  He begins by focusing on the character of God.  The word here for confession is the Hebrew word yadah in the hithpael stem and this word occurs 100 times in the Old Testament and 66 of those times or two-thirds of them occur in the Psalms.  So if you want to get an idea of what's involved in confession read some of David's confessional Psalms and what it means and it doesn't mean, as we so often think it does, to emote or to feel sorry for your sins.  Now you may feel sorry for your sins and as we're going to see here there is legitimacy to feeling sorry for sin at times, but it is not that emotion that goes with it that impresses God.  That's the point.  See, sometimes we're so adamant in making sure that people understand that feeling sorry for your sin isn't what impresses God that we overstate the case and people think it's wrong to feel sorry for your sin.  You know, sometimes when you disobeyed your parents when you were a kid you felt bad; there was nothing wrong with feeling bad but that's not the point and that's not the issue.  The issue is admission of guilt and then changing your behavior.  How you feel about it is merely a secondary thing and sometimes that's important in order to just get your attention.

So Daniel says I prayed to the LORD and I confessed, this is the word yadah which means, in some cases to praise, in other place to thank, give thanks, and in other places to confess in the sense of admitting or acknowledging guilt.  Remember there are many different ways…we can confess the glory of God.  That means to admit that God has glory.  We can confess the attributes of God, that's the sense of prayer; confession simply means to acknowledge something.  So when you acknowledge the greatness of God or the glory of God or His omniscience you are confessing that, you are admitting it, you are acknowledging it.  So in that sense you can see that the word confession doesn't carry with it an emotional connotation.  What it means is to admit or to acknowledge guilt. 

We see this in passages like Psalm 32:5 which is in one of the confession Psalms, for David says, "I acknowledge my sin to Thee," see, that's a parallel with confess, "I acknowledge my sin to Thee and my iniquity I did not hide; I said I will confess my transgressions to the LORD and Thou didst forgive the guilt of my sin."  So by looking at the parallelism, the synonymous parallelism embedded in that Psalm we can see that confess means to acknowledge guilt, to acknowledge sin.  And by guilt I don't mean guilt feelings, I mean the fact that we have violated God's absolutes and God's standards.  Another usage of this word is in Proverbs 28:13 where we read, "He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper," that is to not admit or to cover up our sins; the result is he will not prosper.  Why?  Because there will be divine discipline.  "…but he who confesses and forsakes them," so confession is admission of guilt, forsaking them is staying in fellowship, it is abiding in Christ, it is staying inside the soul fortress and walking in obedience.  Paul puts it in Galatians 5:16, "walking by means of God the Holy Spirit.

Now as we look at the way Daniel starts this prayer we see that as he starts to address the problem he's recognizing the core issue is sin.  See, the problem wasn't national policies, it wasn't national politics, it wasn't that the Jews had some sort of historical flaw, the problem wasn't that they didn't have the technology or the military skills necessary to defeat Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, the problem was sin.  See, that is something that we've lost in our modern society is we don't want to acknowledge sin and even among many believers they will acknowledge it in an academic sense but when it comes to day to day living we don't want to admit sin, we don't want to really acknowledge sin and that our failures are our own.  We don't want to admit responsibility for our own failures and that's true for believers as well as unbelievers.  And we live in an age when a doctrine such as total depravity…total depravity means that man in every part of his being is affected by sin.  It doesn't mean he's as bad as he can be, it means that he is comprehensively affected by sin, every part of his soul has been impacted by Adam's fall and that the basic problem is sin and despite the fact that every day we're faced with the evidence of man's depravity. 

Whether we're watching films of what happened on September 11^th or those commercials where you see hundreds if not thousands of children who are starving to death out in Africa, whether it has to do with the horrible homicide bombers that are in Israel, whether it has to do with crime or poverty in our own country, every day we face that and yet you read the pundits in the paper, you read the editorials, you listen to the commentators on TV and there's this stubborn refusal to accept the fact that it's due to man's own bad decisions, because in their view man is inherently good and yet the view of the Bible is that man is inherently evil, man is inherently bad because of Adams original sin.  It's like that book that came out that was so popular, another form of pop psychology back in the 70s, I'm Okay, You're Okay; the Bible says I'm not okay and neither are you.  So God really doesn't want you to have a good self-image, He wants you to have a good understanding of what it means to be dependent upon Him. 

So Daniel's prayer focuses on the reality of sin and that Israel's national calamity and the crisis in Israel's history, the defeat by the Babylonians, is the result of their own disobedience, their own sin, their own negative volition, their own failure to put doctrine first.  So he says "I prayed to the LORD my God and I acknowledged," or "I admitted our guild and said, 'Alas, O Lord," notice how he begins, he begins with praise, "Alas, O Lord, the great and awesome God," this is his adoration, he takes this title from Deuteronomy and the first thing he's going to do in prayer is focus on the divine attributes.  He's going to focus on the character of God.  He doesn't just jump into confession; he focuses on who God is because that's the basis for forgiveness at confession.  So he doesn't just run right into confession, he takes a minute to focus on who he is confessing to.  It's not just an issue of admitting our sins; it is going to the sovereign God of the universe and admitting our violation of His law and His character.  And by law I don't mean Mosaic Law, I mean the absolutes as revealed in Scripture.

"And I prayed to the LORD my God and admitted and said, 'Alas, O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and lovingkindness for those who love Him and keep His command­ments."  He reminds God of who He is and what He has promised.  In the same way in the Church Age, we could go to the Lord in confession and remind God that You are the God who redeemed us and paid the price for our sin at the cross.  That's the basis for what's going to happen next, and that's admission of the sin.  We have forgiveness because of what happened at the cross.  So we can go to God and say Father, You have saved me, You redeemed me, You sent Christ to die on the cross for my sins, my sins are paid for and this is what I have done in my sin and that's verse 5. 

Daniel is focusing on who God is.  First, He is the God who keeps His covenant; he reminds God of the Mosaic Law, and the promises that God made in that covenant and then he focuses on His character as faithful, and that comes across in a word that is usually translated lovingkindness and this is the Hebrew word chesed.  The Hebrew word chesed is one that has driven translators crazy because it has a very complex meaning.  It's not simply love but it emphasizes God's faithfulness and His loyalty to His covenant despite the disloyalty of Israel.  So I like to emphasize the fact that it is the faithful loyal steadfast love of God.  It never changes, it does not waffle when we waffle, it doesn't increase, it doesn't diminish, it is always the same and it is based on His integrity and His promise in His covenant.  That's why we include love with God's integrity, His righteousness, His justice and His love are the core attributes in divine integrity. 

He emphasizes God as the one "who keeps His covenant and lovingkindness for those who love Him and keep His commandments."  Notice once again that love for God is related to keeping His commandments.  When Jesus summarized the Mosaic Law He said the Law is summarized in two commandments, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.  So all 613 commandments in the Mosaic Law are a definition of what it means to love God, and Daniel is reiterating that here, that God keeps His covenant and loving­kindness for those who love Him and keep His commandments."  Jesus said if you love Me, you keep my commandments.  So being obedient is how we demonstrate love for God, it's not how we feel, it's not any kind of emotion that's generated inside, it has to do with our obedience to Him, to study and learn doctrine, making it a priority and then applying it.

And then Daniel 9:5, he comes to the problem, but first, Deuteronomy 5:10, God is the One who shows "lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments."  And then again in Deuteronomy 6:5 we have the statement, "And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." 

Then in Daniel 9:5 Daniel gets to the confession proper.  He says, "we have sinned, committed iniquity, acted wickedly, and rebelled," four different key Hebrew words for sin, "even turning aside from Thy commandments and ordinances."  So here he begins to focus on the sin and the first word he uses is the Hebrew word chata, which means to miss the mark; it was used for shooting an arrow and missing the target, throwing a spear and missing the target and it came to refer to missing the standard of God's righteousness.  So when Daniel says "we have sinned," he says we have missed the mark of the divine standard.  Secondly he says we have "committed iniquity," this is the Hebrew word 'avah, which means to damage something, to bend something out of shape and it emphasizes the fact that sin damages the soul, sin twists it out of shape.  Sin has twisted God's original intent for the creation, the whole creation now suffers under the curse of sin, Romans 8, the universe, the creation even now groans waiting for its ultimate redemption when Jesus Christ returns at the Second Coming.

So, "we have sinned," we have missed the mark, we've "committed iniquity," that is we are bent out of shape, our thinking is twisted, our standards are twisted and misshapen, and human arrogance has distorted everything that we did.  Third he says we "acted wickedly," this is the hiphil perfect of rasha' which means to be wicked, to violate the law, to bring in chaos.  Isaiah 57:20 uses the word in that same sense, bringing in chaos.  So "wickedness" is bringing in chaos through disobedience to God's Word.  Isaiah 57:20 states, "But the wicked are like the tossing sea," notice the imagery here, the chaos of the wicked, "like the tossing sea, for it cannot be quieted and its water toss up refuse and mud." 

Fourth Daniel says, "we rebelled," and then he intensifies that through an intensive use of the Hebrew conjunction, vav, he says "we rebelled," that is "we turned aside from Thy command­ments and ordinances, that's what rebellion is, it is a rejection of God's revelation.  It's a rejection of God's commandments and ordinances.  In order to avoid violating God's commandments and ordinances we must first study Scripture.  Now rebellion is a key to understanding what Israel did and their rebellion, their revolution, had its core in rejecting divine authority.

So let's briefly look at what the Old Testament says about revolution, the doctrine of revolution.  First of all, the Bible never authorizes revolution in any sphere of life.  And revolution is defined as rejection of authority.  The Bible never authorizes revolution whether it is in a personal realm of family, marriage, or in a corporation or in a nation.  Numbers 16 is a perfect picture in the Old Testament of a revolution taking place in the nation Israel as they rejected God's provision when the spies went into the land, they reject the provision.  Again they reject the provision during the revolt that takes place after that among the priesthood. 

Second point, revolution is a rejection of divine established authority, whether that is a national authority, a President, a King, a dictator, remember one of the greatest passages on the importance of obedience to a national entity was written by Paul in Romans 13 when Nero is ruling Rome, one of the most wicked evil rulers in all of human history.  1 Samuel 15:23 states, "For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and insubordination is as iniquity and idolatry.  Because you have rejected the Word of the Lord he has also rejected you from being king."  That was Saul's rebellion against God when he disobeyed God; God compared that rebellion to witchcraft.

That brings us to point four and that is that revolution is anti-God, it is against God, Isaiah 31:6.  Now the reason revolution is against God is because it is a rejection of His authority and it is a picture, it is a reflection of exactly what Satan did when he began the angelic conflict, when Satan in his arrogance rejected God.  That is why rebellion is like the sin of witchcraft is because it has its roots in the initial rebellion of Lucifer against God. 

Point number five, revolution on a national scale is caused by a breakdown in the thinking ability of a nation, but it doesn't start there, it starts on the individual level.  First individuals in a nation begin to violate the revelation of God, they begin to disobey His commandments, they disobey the Scripture, then as they are going through revolt in their own personal soul, in their own soul they're rejecting doctrine, then it works its way out in terms of the next divine institution which is marriage.  Just lay them out in terms of divine institutions.  We need to emphasize the five divine institutions.  The first divine institution is individual responsibility.  The authority in the soul is volition and when the volition goes negative to God then you start to have a breakdown in the soul.  Eventually this is going to impact the second divine institution which is marriage.  When marriage begins to break down and women begin to reject the authority of the husbands you start having a role reversal between men and women in society; men become feminized and women become masculinized and we are seeing that in our own culture. 

The next thing that happens is divine institution number three, which is the family, begins to break down, the family unit begins to break down and you have a situation now in our nation where at least half the marriages end in divorce and so you have kids being raised in a broken home or with one parent and they have all kinds of extra problems that they have to deal with and they learn that the way to solve problems is through rejection of authority, so that builds into the kids of the next generation this attitude of arrogance and rebellion.  That begins to affect the fourth divine institution which is human government and there is a rebellion against an individual government and then the fifth divine institution, which is the creation of nations and the independence of nations and so you begin to reject God and move towards internationalism.  Internationalism, and we're seeing a lot of this today, in fact it's interesting that last week in the midst of all the things that are going on in Israel right now the world court met and the first action they took is to review whether or not to bring Ariel Sharon up on war crimes.  So we can see the whole thrust of the international community is against Israel and we can thank our former President for being the one who signed the U.S. into membership for the World Court.  So there's a breakdown.

That leads to point six, when the majority of people in a nation are in soul revolt through drugs, pornography, sodomy, sexual perversion, feminism, liberalism and socialism, then the result is the fragmentation of the nation.  When the nation fragments, that leads to point 7, these mental attitude sin and overt sins motivate revolution, they motivate rejection of authority because authority seeks to bring the sin nature under control, and the result is that the nation begins to fall apart.  Some Scripture on this: Isaiah 11:13; 1 Kings 12:19 in comparison with 1 Chronicles 10:19.  Point number eight, the only solution is the communication of doctrine and positive response to doctrine.  That alone will stabilize society; Ezekiel 2:3-10.  So the problem in Israel is they've rejected God, personal revolt against God eventually led to national revolt against God and the nation fragmented on the inside.

Then we come to Daniel 9:6, he begins to expand on his confession, first he says we've sinned, we've missed the mark of Your righteousness, we've committed iniquity, we've twisted Your standards all out of proportion, we acted wickedly, we brought in chaos and we revolted against Your commands.  Furthermore, verse 6, "Moreover, we have not listened," negative volition, they violated the principle of James, being quick to hear, "we have not listened to Thy servants the prophets, who spoke in Thy name to our kings, our princes, our fathers, and all the people of the land."  The prophets represented God, they spoke "in Thy name," that is a Hebrew idiom indicating they were God's representatives.  God sent the prophets to Israel representing Him and often when the prophets, when Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel are presenting their charge against Israel they use a Hebrew word called rib, and rib was a technical legal term for bringing a lawsuit, and what has happened is that God, as the author of the Mosaic Covenant is sending His emissaries, the prophets, to the nation, to challenge them with a lawsuit that they have violated the covenant, and because they violated the covenant, then God who is the initiator of the covenant has a right to come in and fulfill the cursing or judgment categories that are listed in that covenant, all the different areas of judgment.  So the prophets functioned almost as a prosecuting attorney bringing a charge against the nation. 

Daniel says again and again, you rejected the prophets and this is what Jeremiah says; Jeremiah 7:25, "Since the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt until this day, I have sent you all My servants, the prophets, daily rising early and sending them," but they were continuously rejected.  God says it again, Jeremiah 25:4, "The LORD has sent to you all His servants the prophets, again and again, though you have not listened nor inclined your ear to them."  Jeremiah 29:19 reiterates this same principle, "Because they have not listened to My words, declares the LORD, which I sent to them again and again by My servants, the prophets; but you did not listen, declares the LORD."  And then Jeremiah 35:15, God says again, "Also I have sent to you all My servants, the prophets, sending them again and again, saying, Turn now every man from his evil way, and amend your deeds, and do not go after other gods to worship them, then you shall dwell in the land which I have given to you and to your forefathers; but you have not inclined your ear or listened to Me." 

So because of their failure to listen to the prophets, to respond and apply doctrine, then God is going to remove them from the land.  So in Daniel 9:5-6 we have a rehearsal of Israel's disobedience.  This is an illustration of what it means to confess sin.  And then in verses 7-9 we're going to see the emphasis on God's righteousness, that's the standard that we violate.  That's why it's important to remind ourselves of God's righteousness; that's the standard in the midst of confession of sin and there is a contrast between God's righteousness and Israel's shame. 

Notice these verses: Daniel 9:7, "Righteousness belongs to Thee, O Lord," it's an emphasis on God's perfect righteousness, that's the absolute in the universe, "but to us open shame," now this is a strong contrast in the Hebrew, in fact literally it says, "Righteousness belongs to Thee, O Lord, but to us open shame."  "Open shame" indicates public humiliation, historical humiliation as the nation was defeated by the forces of New Testament, and national embarrassment, and what the Scriptures are emphasizing here, what Daniel is emphasizing is disobedience to God left unchecked, left undealt with through confession of sin will lead to public humiliation and shame.  The principle is it's better to be shamed and humiliated in time than at the judgment seat of Christ, and so if we don't deal with the sin in our life by keeping short accounts through confession of sin, then God is eventually going to lower the boom and He uses shame and embarrassment and public disgrace as a 2 x 12 to get our attention.  When he starts off with a 2 x 4, then He goes to a 2 x 6 and then a 2 x 8 and by the time He gets up in an area of 2 x 10 and 2 x 12 there's going to be some public humiliation because of our disobedience to Him.

The word for "shame" is the word bosheth, which emphasizes disgrace, humiliation, embarrass­ment and a public display of disgrace because of failure to obey God.  So let's look at the six points on the doctrine of shame.  The first point, God brings shame on the believer who continuously disobeys Him.  God actively brings that shame on.  Jeremiah 17:13 says, "O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsake Thee will put to shame.  Those who turn away on earth will be written down, because they have forsaken the fountain of living water, even the LORD."  God will bring them to shame, in that verse it's the shame related to those who have rejected salvation. 

Point number 2, shame is part of an intensification of divine discipline.  There are three stages in divine discipline, warning discipline, intensive discipline and dying discipline.  Jeremiah 6:15 states, "Were they ashamed because of the abomination they have done?  They were not even ashamed at all," that is the condemnation to the generation that went out under the fifth cycle of discipline.

Point number three, shame is public humiliation in order to enforce humility.  God doesn't start with public embarrassment but if we do not respond to warning discipline then that's where it ends up. 

Point number four, the end goal is not shame or embarrassment, that doesn't bring pleasure to God, the end goal is not shame or embarrassment but obedience.  Shame is the 2 x 12 God is going to use to get our attention to confess our sins and get back in fellowship and start walking by the Holy Spirit.  Ezekiel 16:63 states, "In order that you may remember and be ashamed, and never open your mouth any more because of your humiliation, when I have forgive you for all that you have done."

Point number five, the issue therefore is to confess and move on, to admit our guilt, to keep short accounts with God and to say in fellowship and walk by means of the Holy Spirit.

Now point six I want to cover when it's wrong to feel shame.  There are two situations when it's wrong to feel shame.  First of all, when you have done nothing wrong, when you are free from guilt and you're the victim of some crime or some sin by child abuse, rape, or sexual abuse.  Often a person who is a victim of a crime or an abuse like that feels shame.  That is wrong and you need to address that by claiming the promises from Scripture.  A second time in which it's wrong to feel shame is when you have confessed your sin and it is forgiven, and yet you continue to feel guilty over it, you continue to bring it up, you continue to feel shame and embarrassment even after you have been forgiven.  Once we have been forgiven the slate is wiped clean, the sin is removed from us as far as the east is from the west the Scripture says and therefore when we bring it back up we're basically saying God, You really didn't forgive me, You really don't mean what You promised.  So it's wrong to feel shame when we've done nothing wrong and we're the victim of some crime or sin and it's wrong to feel shame when we have confessed the sin and its forgiven.  Then it's time to move on, we may be embarrassed because of physical consequences that we still have to deal with but we need to recognize that sin is always against the Lord and so we can then hold our head up high and move forward and be free from emotional guilt and embarrassment that was caused by our own bad decisions.

Next time we'll finish up with Daniel's confession and the petition in this prayer.