Daniel 9. As you know, the Bible is made up of 66 books, but it is one continuous story. Through thousands of years, a great drama of human redemption is unfolding. And this series has been looking at all of these time periods and connecting all of the dots. And we’re going to close out looking at the exile and return. And if you’re visiting, it should be a stand-along message, but it does build on the others, and it may have a drinking of a fire hose effect, but I apologize for that ahead of time. So we look to the reading God’s word if you join with me in prayer. Father, we do thank you for your goodness. We thank you for your word delivered to your people, for the faith which is conveyed from one generation to the next. And Lord, we ask that you’d grant us the same faith today to receive from you your words of life that we, too, might convey our faith to the next generation. Father, that they, too, would know Christ through us, and that we would do so in abounding joy and grace. And this we ask through Jesus. Amen.
Daniel 9, beginning in verse 4, I pray to the Lord my God and make confession saying, ‘Oh Lord, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his Commandments. We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled. Turning aside from your Commandments and rules, we have not listened to your servants, the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us, open shame, as at this day to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to all Israel, those who are near and those who are far away, in all the lands which you’ve driven them because of the treachery that they have committed against you. Verse 18, O ‘Oh my God, incline your ear and hear, open your eyes and see our desolations and the city that is called by your name, for we do not present our please before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. ‘Oh Lord, hear. ‘Oh Lord, forgive. ‘ ‘Oh, Lord, pay attention and act.
Delay not for your own sake. ‘Oh my God, because your city and your people who are called by your name. The word of the Lord. Be pleased to see you. This time period before the coming of Jesus, the names in it read like a world wrestling entertainment performance. We have people like Alexander the Great, Silucus the Victurious, Judah the Hammer, Antiochus the Mad. It’s a crazy time for those living in the land of Judea. All of these events are taking place. Israel being tossed to and fro. In case you’re wondering, Judah the Hammer, he’s one of the good guys. All of this stretches out about 400 years. It’s called the intertestamental period between the Testaments. It covers the time of the last Book of the Old Testament, Malachi, to Matthew, the beginning of the first Book of the New Testament. Many of your Bibles have this little white page here between them. That’s 400 years. We’re going to talk about that. From Deuteronomy forward, God had warned his people that if they remained faithless to him, that he would indeed remove them from the land that he had promised them, that he would send them into exile.
He also promised that he would bring them back at some point. But this greater issue of exile, it actually starts in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. That’s where everything gets rolling. They sinned and they were driven from the garden. They were exiled. From there, we have the start of God bringing about our great return. As I mentioned before, there are two horizons to every biblical account. We see what’s immediately in front of us and then how it connects to the greater story. This greater story, it moves at a much slower rate, so much so that God’s people have always struggled with waiting for God to move. Long periods of history with little seeming to happen. The patience and the long suffering of God can almost make him seem like an indolent parent counting 10 one too many times. And then when he acts, everyone is shocked. How could this have happened? But because the Lord has revealed his will to his people, we are not left in the dark, groping to understand. And what we see is the Lord who is going to bring all the threads together of our redemption. Now, we’re going to start in the Book of Daniel, but it’s just a starting point for us.
After the fall of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire, God’s people were often in a daze wondering, How did we get here? Where are we going? It completely took their feet out from underneath them, even though it shouldn’t have. Well, how did they get there? The Book of Daniel is one of those prophetic books that’s during the time of the exile in Babylon. Of course, we’re very familiar with the Fiery Furnace, Daniel and the Lion’s Den. Favorites of Sunday school. But in chapter 9, we get this great prayer, this confession of Daniel. The time period, it tells us in verses one and two, it’s the first year before King Cyrus lets the Jews return to Jerusalem from exile. That time period, that return, includes the Book of Nehemiah and Esra, includes the prophets, Hagarai, Zecariah, and Malachi. Daniel sits before all that. He knows the word of the Lord. He understands it is redemptively woven together. And in verse 2, he’s thinking about the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who said there’d be 70 years of exile. And he’s like, wait a minute, 70 years seems like it’s about up. And he starts praying. Daniel’s prayer is grounded in God’s covenant with his people.
When the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt, when he brought them into this covenant relationship with him, he warned them repeatedly about turning away from him, about being faithless. Very clearly in the Book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 28, the Lord said, if they were faithless, he said, The Lord will scatter you among the nations for one end of the earth to the other, there you will worship other gods. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, a despair heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread, both day and night, never sure of your life. And even with those warnings, even after prophet after prophet came to God’s people to call them back, they would not listen. And at that point, there was no remedy He left for God’s wrath. Israel got here through their sin. They got here through their faithlessness into exile. And yet we also see God’s great commitment to redeem his people. He would not let them destroy His covenant with them. And to drive this point home, notice in this whole chapter, Chapter 9 of Daniel, he uses the covenant name of the Lord, Yahweh.
That’s that covenant name God gives to his people, and he uses that in his prayer. What’s interesting is in the whole Book of Daniel, this is the only place where Yahweh is used, and it’s used seven times. In your Bible, you probably know the word Lord in all caps is how in English we translate Yahweh. You see that here in verse 4. You also see Lord with just a capital L in the lower case letters. That’s for Adonai. So Yahweh and Adonai. A few exceptions of this, but generally that’s what it is. Daniel is praying then to his covenant covenant God to Yahweh, and he’s asking him to remember his covenant people. Verse 4, I pray to the Lord my God and may confession. And notice his appeal. Oh Lord Adonai, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant, steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments. He appeals to God who keeps covenant and steadfast love. That word there, loving kindness, in Hebrew, it’s It’s called a special word. It’s this lots of textures and meaning to it. It’s hesed. In translation, it can be faithfulness, love, kindness, loyalty, all those rolled up in one.
That’s why in English translations, it often varies because they’re trying to capture the fullness of its meaning. Lamentation 3, the steadfast love of the Lord, the hesed of the Lord, never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. Whoever thinks that God in the Old Testament is mean and grumpy has never really read it. Because of God’s loving kindness, his people can pray to him. Daniel says, We have sinned and done wrong. Verse 6, We have not listened to your servants, the prophets. Notice Throughout this whole prayer, the we, the we includes me. Think about this. He’s owning the sin of his people for things to happen long before he was born. Daniel is not personally responsible for worshiping false at high places. Daniel did not oppressed the poor or pervert justice. Daniel did not make foolish alliances with pagan kings or corrupt offerings to the Lord. He didn’t do any of these things. But the we includes me. He leads in humility. As Paul reminds us in Romans, we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. He’s recognizing his own sin in the confession of sin to the Lord of his people.
Then he ends in verse 18, Oh my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes. See our desolation and the city that’s called by your name, for we do not present our please before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. ‘ He appeals to God’s mercy, to God’s loving kindness. He goes on verse 19, Oh, Lord, hear. Oh, Lord, forgive. Pay attention and act. Delay not for your sake, oh my God, ‘ because your city and your people are called by your name. He’s saying, God, honor your name. Not us. We’re not worthy of honoring, but your name is, and we bear your name. For your sake, oh Lord. Be merciful. So how did Israel end up in exile? They persisted in walking away from their God. And that’s what we see in verse 5, We have sinned, we have done wrong, we’ve acted wicked nakedly rebelled, turning aside from your Commandments and rules. They mixed worship with the Lord with the worship of other gods that are not gods. And they persisted in oppressing the poor and the needy. They did not practice righteousness. So a side note, the Bible does not separate truth and practice.
We do that all the time. The Bible doesn’t. Concerns for doctrine and concerns the well-being of others, they go hand in hand. I know I said this before. We would really do well to just drop the labels of conservative and liberal to everything that we attach them to. We attach them to everything. As if Conservatives are concerned with what is true and Liberals are concerned for caring for the poor and social issues. No. If you are in Christ, you are called to love what is true and you are called to love others. There is no division between these two. These are realities for God’s people, concerns for social issues, concerns for biblical truth, concern for relationship to God. That’s all a part of our being disciples of Christ. No distinction. Okay, Daniel has prayed and confessed, and he gets an immediate answer. Gabriel appears to him. Some time frames are laid out that are clear to Daniel, but the rest of us scratch our heads a little bit here. Gabriel mentioned, I’m sure you’ve heard the 77s and the 62 weeks. What exactly does all that mean? That’s not our concern for today. What we do know is Babylon is over thrown in a moment without even really a fight.
Just collapses. The new Persian Emperor, Cyrus, he makes a decree, and he lets exiled people return back to their homelands, including the Jews. It wasn’t just them, it was all peoples. And a year or so after Daniel’s prayer, some of these Jewish exiles returned to Jerusalem. But the larger question arises, where are we going? And by that question, I mean, our expectations of our return are much greater than what we got. All these prophetic promises about a new champion, a new David coming in and God’s people and bringing up Israel to rule in the world, a position of prominence and dominance. What happened to all that? Because nothing like that occurred. Most of the exiles actually just stayed in exile and they didn’t bother to come back. There’s all these prophetic words in Isaiah and Ezekiel, Jeremiah and others about what is going to take place and how the new king of David is going to come and rule and the nations are going to be coming to Jerusalem. And they’re looking around going, this isn’t happening. The temple gets rebuilt, but it’s a stripped down iconoversion. It’s disappointing. Israel is getting pushed around by other foreign leaders in countries still.
It hardly seemed like the glorious return and the triumph that was promised. Now, initially at the start of this, Israel had three prophets helping them out. Hagar, he got the temple built. They, Come on, everybody, we got to get this done. Zechariah, he spoke to their discouragement and their future hope. Then lastly, the prophet Malachi comes and he challenges their grumbling against God. That’s the last book of the Old Testament because the people think they got a raw deal, that God had not been faithful to their generation. Malachi challenges that. And then we enter into 400 years of silence. No prophetic voice to lead God’s people. In one of the Jewish writings of the time, we read this. It said, The sage has taught that after the last of the prophets, Hagueh, Zechariah, Malachi, died, the divine spirit of prophetic revelation departed from the Jewish people. The Book of Macabes, which covers part of this time period, Macabes, which means hammer, tells us about Judah, the hammer. It mentions that they were waiting for a prophet to come and to give them direction. You’ve heard the name Josephus. He was a Jewish general and historian, and he wrote at the same time, There are no new prophets on hand.
They all recognized it’s quiet. Nothing from the Lord is coming to his people directly. We’re going to take a moment. We’re going to zoom out really large. To take the camera lens, we’re going to zoom out. We’re going to zoom out so large that on one edge of your lens is the expulsion and exile from the Garden of Eden. On the other end of your ledge, Mary is sitting there before Gabriel comes to her with this announcement. What we see is God’s promise to restore his people back in Genesis 3: 15, I will crush the head of the serpent. Who will do that? He, the seed, the seed of the woman. Singular, which Paul tells us is Jesus. Then in Genesis 12, the call of a man, Abraham and his family. But even in that, there’s a few hundred years of milling around, followed by 400 years in Egypt. They get out with 40 years of wandering around, and then 400 years or so of the judges ruling them and Israel self-imploding. Then they get like 400 years or so of a broken kingdom, and now 400 years of waiting and wondering what’s going on.
Put that in perspective. How many of you are super aware of your ancestors, what they were doing in 1600? I don’t have a clue. This time of Queen Elizabeth I, Jamestown, the first settlement in the New World, 1607, that’s how far back this goes. We just breathe through one little page It’s a long time. In Israel, they returned under the Persian Empire, the Book of Esther, Hagar, Zechariah, Malachi. Then they’re still there. Suddenly from Greece comes Alexander the Great, and he tips the whole known world upside down, blows through all of that. Judea is a part of it. And at his death, the empire splits into four directions with his four generals. And one of them. So Lucas, the victorious, he takes over the land that includes Israel. And then down a little bit from him is Antiochus IV, Antiochus the Mad. He comes along and he defiles the temple of Jerusalem By doing what? By sacrificing a pig on the altar. Blows up their entire priesthood. Everything is in disarray. From this, Judah, Macabes, Judah the Hammer, he comes and there’s this Jewish revolt. It frees Israel for a little while. This is where Hanukah comes from.
Hanukah is that celebration of cleansing the temple. But they’re not free for very long because the Romans under Pompei come in and subjugate them. They put Herod the Great in charge. Israel did a serious temple upgrade under him, but they’re still being oppressed. Here, Israel sits. While Israel is sitting here, A teenage Mary is going about her day in Nazareth, getting ready for her upcoming marriage. That’s a big lens. All the while, Israel is saying, Where are we going, Lord? What are you doing? Or better, why aren’t you doing anything? Will you be faithful to your promises for us? Because it doesn’t seem like you’re being very faithful. And that’s such a struggle of faith, waiting for God to move. Long periods of history where little seems to happen. Forget 400 years, we find a few months excruciating. So much of life is lived in the ordinary, and so many of our expectations are for the extraordinary, and those clash. The Lord has a canvas that spans thousands of years, and our lives are not going to really reach 100 of it. A life of faith calls us to surrender to his timetable. It’s never been easy for God’s people.
The problem for Israel is that it was never just about Israel. As the Lord told Abraham, some 4,000 years ago, In you, all the families of the Earth will be blessed. From that moment that God made a special relationship, a covenant with his people, there was a cosmic goal at hand. How would he get there. How would this take place? He’s going to consider one little piece of this. At the Exodus with Moses, God has them celebrate the Passover for the first time, God’s great redemptive sacrament. I will pass over your sins and not destroy you. The blood of a lamb will atone for you. The themes of the Passover pop up from time to time in the Old Testament, not nearly as much as you think. They tend to up at significant movements and moments in Israel’s history. The next time we really see this take place is on the plains of Jericho with Joshua before the promised land is conquered. Then they’re outside waiting and trusting on the promise of God. They’re sitting there ready to go and they celebrate the Passover. Then we read about it again under the two great reforming Kings.
When everything is falling apart, King Josiah, King Hezecaiah, it says they celebrated the Passover in a way that hadn’t been done all the way back to Samuel the Prophet. The next Passover we read about is in Esra. They come out of exile for the first time and they celebrate the Passover. Four hundred years of silence, and suddenly angelic and prophetic chatter comes up once more. The visitation of the angels, to Zechariah, to Mary, to the shepherds. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. They’re all wondering, a savior? A savior of what? Surely against our oppressors. Then we get John the Baptist, the one who Malachi prophesied about the Elijah that was to come. Jesus is walking along and John sees him. What does John say? Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. That wasn’t quite what they were thinking. Then Jesus to his disciples, The Passover is coming and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified. The Pascal Lamb is Jesus. Jesus is the new Adam, we’re told. Jesus is the true son of promise.
Jesus is the greater Moses, the greater Joshua, the true David, the true high priest who comes to establish the new covenant. He is our prophet, our priest, our king. He is the one who pulls all of these redemptive threads together. And that is good news for us. Think about it. Universually, we have this sense of alienation. Our poets write about it. Our songwriters sing about it. We feel it, we know it. And alienation is what? It is exile. The long, deep-seated feelings of exile. Alienination from what? We feel it from creation. We feel it from one another. We feel it from ourselves and from God. How is this alienation, this exile, overcome? When you are wondering about where you are and how you got there, quiet your heart and allow the sound of Christ calling you to be heard. Because Jesus took exile to its lowest point so that we would return home in him. The silence of God broke into the night with the sound of the cry in the manger. And we hear then of that silence once more from the cry of the cross as it rises up to what seems like an impenterable heaven that doesn’t respond.
And it’s because Jesus took to the drags our exile that we can return. This is the at one moment. This is the atonement that the Lord brings to us that unites us to him. This is the story of the Bible in its totality. Jesus, the God man, brings together both sides of the covenant that we can now partner with God. And we now enter into that good news. That our alienation, our exile is broken. And we then are called to be a blessing to the world. We wait that day when it will be fully restored at Christ’s second coming, his return that yet awaits. But as we wait, we have the true and the real, the substantive truth and reality that we have been made right with God. Every one of us, every person, you live a white page somewhere in your life where you’re waiting, you have expectations of what is God to do. I don’t see how this is going to change. And you’re wondering and you’re left there. And in those places, God, as he is calling you to wait, has not left you by yourself. Our savior, his son, has gone ahead of us.
He has absorbed that exile. He has broken the back of our sin that we truly, in our repentance, can receive forgiveness, restoration and wholeness. That’s the good news that we have, because everybody is waiting. Everybody is struggling with some sense of being alienated, alone, separated. Jesus comes and unites us once more to the Father. That expulsion from the garden, the door has been opened up through the sun. The great promises that awake the people of God are being lived out and fulfilled in us. Promises yet to come. Yes, true and wonderful. Amen. But what we have now is sustaining us from one generation to the next. We are here because of God’s faithfulness to a previous generation. We rest upon them who rest upon them who rest upon them, and it all It goes back to Jesus. As the Lord tarries, that faithfulness of God is going to go to the next generation, to the next generation, to the next generation. Why? Because he’s promised to, and he keeps his promises. Our God keeps his promises. He is faithful through and through. And what we have been unable to do, he has completed that we would have life and life abundant in him.
And he simply tells us, Now, go, go. Make disciples of the nations. Go. Tell them. Live this, not perfectly, not sinlessly, but empowered by the Holy spirit dwelling in us. We are no longer waiting for a prophetic voice to tie all the things together. He has come. He has risen, and he has given you life in him. Pray with me. Father Almighty, as we come before you, we just say thank you. Thank you for the goodness that we have received through your son Jesus. Thank you that you bring all of the threads of redemption together in him, and in him is a yes and amen. Father, we thank you for those white pages in our lives which we find so difficult because you are there and you are working in us through them. Lord, I again would ask, is there any here who do not know you, Father, that you would open their eyes to see the realities of Jesus, that you would open them, that you would call them the saving faith in our savior Jesus? Father, for all of us, that you would continue to encourage us to walk boldly in the truth, in the practice of righteousness, because it’s pleasing to you.
And we bear your name. We bless you, Father, Son, and spirit, one God for.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.