When I first moved to Jackson, I landed a job teaching middle schoolers at Augustine School. The same year that I started there, Brandon Byrd, who used to be a member of this congregation, started teaching the fifth grade class. I remember on numerous occasions, when I would walk by the fifth grade classroom toward the end of the day, as Brandon had his students lined up ready to head to our closing assembly, I would hear them recite altogether a line from J.R.R. Tolkien: “At the end of the day, true education is repentance.” The more I have thought about that statement, the more I have come to see that it is exactly right.
What is repentance? It is a change of thinking and affections that leads to a change of action. It is pulling off the colored glasses that make sin look appealing and seeing instead its true, horrifying, and deadly nature, while at the same time turning our hearts and affections back to God. It is both a definitive action we take when we are first converted to Christ, as well as a repeated action that takes place throughout our lives, as we come to see more and more the sin that resides in our hearts and bring it to Christ. In fact, from one perspective we could say that everything we are aiming for in the whole life of discipleship fits under the label “repentance.” For in the act of repentance we progress more and more in love for God as we turn away more and more from the things God hates. Repentance, therefore, is of massive importance to us.
Repentance can be a painful reality, because it involves coming out of the shadows and taking a hard look at the truth about ourselves. In this passage, we see Daniel fasting, putting on sackcloth (which was rough and uncomfortable), and sitting in ashes, or perhaps sprinkling ashes on his head, all as expressions of his sorrow over Israel’s sin. As unappealing as that may sound, I want you to see repentance, not as something to fear, but as something that brings great joy, like labor pains that hurt for a while but eventually result in the joy of new life.
In 2 Corinthians 7:10, Paul writes, “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.” So there is a kind of grief for sin that is “godly,” which leads to true repentance, salvation, no regrets, but there is also a kind of grief that is “worldly,” meaning it doesn’t lead to true repentance. With that in mind, I want to pose the question: What is it that keeps us from true repentance? I think there are two main things: On the one hand, we may have a small view of God and, as a result, a light view of sin. Sin may become a tolerated part of our lives because we just don’t think it is a very big deal. On the other hand, we may have real grief over our sin, but in our grief we may lose sight of God’s love for us and his eagerness to forgive if we will only turn to him in repentance. As a result, we fall into despair and find we don’t have the will to rise against our sin. Daniel 9 addresses both of these barriers to repentance by showing us first how weighty our sin is and, second, how wonderfully gracious our God is to those who repent. Daniel’s prayer models true repentance for us.
So as we look closely at Daniel’s prayer today, I want to first say a few words about the setting, followed by two words on true repentance. Regarding the setting, we note in the first three verses that Daniel is moved to prayer by putting two things together: prophecies from the book of the prophet Jeremiah and political events that Daniel observed unfolding. So Daniel was reading his Bible (“the books,” in v. 2, the canon of holy Scriptures that had been written and collected by that time), and he likely saw two key passages. Jeremiah 25:11-12 says of Judah, “This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity.” The first verse of our passages says, “In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, by descent a Mede, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans.” Daniel sees that Babylon has fallen to the power of the Medo-Persian Empire, fulfilling the prophecy of Jeremiah and showing that the end of the seventy years of exile is right around the corner. The other key passage Daniel would have read would have been Jeremiah 29:10: “For thus says the LORD: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you (Judah), and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.” Two verses later God says, “Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.” Daniel, realizing that God’s promises are coming to pass, then turns to prayer.
That in itself is significant. Daniel does not read the prophecies of Jeremiah and conclude, “Okay, since God is going to bring us back to the land, I don’t have to do anything. I can just sit back and wait for it to happen.” God’s plans and promises are not a reason for our passivity. On the contrary, Daniel seizes the opportunity to shape his prayers according to what God has already revealed. And in doing so, he models what prayer truly is: it is always a response to what God has already said. When you pray, don’t imagine that you have to make it up on your own. Look to what God has spoken in Scripture, and shape your prayers accordingly. I believe that practice, more than any other, is how you get your heart on board with what God is already doing.
So Daniel prays a prayer of repentance, and it is one that expresses a high view of God and thus a weighty view of sin. But it is also a prayer that expresses great confidence in the grace of God toward his rebellious people. It is a model of repentance for us. So let’s unpack now two words of instruction regarding true repentance from this prayer.
First,
In Psalm 51, King David offers a prayer of repentance after he had been confronted with his sins of adultery and murder. In verse 4 of that Psalm, he says to God, “Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.” It is unusual for us to speak of God being “justified.” Normally, when we speak of justification, we refer to God justifying us, or declaring us righteous on the basis of Christ’s righteousness counted to us. What does it mean then for David to say that God is justified in Psalm 51:4? It means that God is in the right in a legal dispute between God and David. We could say that God has a legal case against David, and David in Psalm 51 is saying, “Your case against me is exactly right. Your words of judgment are true, and I deserve condemnation.” After a prolonged period of resisting the truth, David has come around to God’s side on the matter.
Daniel’s prayer expresses the same sense of confession, of joining God’s side against himself and his own people. Daniel expresses agreement with God about Israel’s sin. That is the first step of repentance: looking at our sin the way God does. And how does God view our sin? He abhors it! Yes, he is a gracious and forgiving God, but that is not because he makes light of sin. In showing grace to us, God is always true to himself. Every sin puts out some lie about God. It seeks to dethrone him and makes the claim that he is not the highest good, that his design, his ways, his instructions are not the highest expressions of wisdom. Every sin we commit is a fist we shake at Heaven as a way of saying, “You will not be Lord of me!” And every time that lie is told through our sin, it hangs out there, waiting for God to answer. But what if God never answers? What if he lets it go? Then he would be admitting that it was true. He would become the approver of sin, and would thus deny his own righteousness, name, and supremacy. May it never be! Praise God that we can be sure of this: every single sin ever committed in the history of angels and men will receive a fitting answer, either at the cross of Christ or on the Day of Judgment. God does not play around with sin.
And that is why not only must our sins be answered by God, but our hearts must turn from sin if we want to inherit the blessings of salvation. Imagine a husband who discovers his wife has been unfaithful to him. He loves her and is committed to forgiving her and saving the marriage. Many marriages have been saved by that kind of love and forgiveness. But what if the wife refuses to repent of her unfaithfulness? What if she will not stop running after other men? Can the husband restore a marriage in that situation? No, he can’t, because that would entail settling for an open marriage, which is utterly contrary to God’s design for the husband-wife relationship. The same is true here. God has been betrayed by his wife, Israel, for she has run after many other gods. He is a gracious and loving husband, eager to forgive her and restore their marriage, but it cannot happen apart from her repentance. God will be Israel’s only husband, or he will be no husband at all to her. He will not settle for an open marriage. And that means the pathway from curse to blessing must run through repentance, or else God has denied himself.
In verses 4-14, Daniel lays out what Israel has done (4-11a), followed by what had been the result (11b-14). After addressing God with praise in verse 4, he lays out in vv. 5-11a a chiasm (a pattern that goes in and back out) that highlights the sin and shame of Israel:
1. We have rebelled against your law (v. 5).
2. We have refused to listen to your prophets (v. 6).
3. To you belongs righteousness (v. 7a).
4. To us belongs open shame (v. 7b).
5. To us belongs open shame (v. 8).
6. To you belong mercy and forgiveness (v. 9).
7. We have refused to listen to your prophets (v. 10).
8. We have rebelled against your law (v. 11a).
This pattern makes it easier to recognize and distinguish some key ideas. In verses 5 and 11a, Daniel confesses that Israel has rebelled against God’s law given to them through Moses. In verses 6 and 10, he goes one step beyond that to confess that Israel has added to her rebellion by refusing to listen to the prophets God sent to warn her about the coming judgment if she did not repent. Israel is like the kid in a classroom who misbehaves, and then when the teacher warns him about consequences if he continues, he smarts off to the teacher instead of changing his behavior. The heart of this chiasm is the contrast between God and Israel at the C and D levels: God has been righteous in everything. In fact, he has even been merciful and forgiving, not annihilating Israel but preserving her for a coming restoration in fulfillment of his promises. Israel, by contrast, has been wicked, and thus Daniel acknowledges that the open shame that rests upon the nation conquered by its enemies is well deserved. God is in the right; Israel is in the wrong. And this is true, not only of a part of the nation, but of the nation as a whole, from top to bottom, as Daniel says repeatedly: “our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land” (v. 6); “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 to which you have driven them” (v. 7); “to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers” (v. 8); “All Israel” (v. 11).
So Daniel acknowledges the fulfillment of God’s word threatening the curse of punishment and ultimately exile from Deuteronomy 28 in vv. 11b-14. He speaks of the “curse” in verse 11 and repeatedly uses the word “calamity” to describe it (vv. 12, 13, 14). The curse was severe, as verse 12 says: “He has confirmed his words, which he spoke against us and against our rulers who ruled us, by bringing upon us a great calamity. For under the whole heaven there has not been done anything like what has been done against Jerusalem.” Judah had become a vassal state of Babylon, but King Zedekiah of Judah rebelled, and that prompted Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, to lay siege to the city. The siege lasted eighteen months, during which time the food supply ran out inside the city, and people began to starve to death. Deuteronomy predicted that mothers would eat the flesh of their own children in order to stay alive. Ezekiel foretold that they would use human excrement as fuel for fires to cook over because their inability to bring in more wood. It was a time of intense suffering, followed by an invasion of the city, the capture of King Zedekiah, who watched his own sons executed in front of him before his eyes were gouged out. And then Nebuchadnezzar had the temple plundered and burned to the ground, ending Judah’s religious life as they knew it. Then he deported the majority of her people to live in captivity in Babylon. The curse of the law of Moses that God foretold and had fulfilled was indeed harsh. Was it fair? Was God’s response proportional to Israel’s crimes? Your answer to that question depends on how seriously you take sin. If sin is just one of those facts of life that we accept as no big deal, then we would have to say God overreacted when he sent Judah into exile. But let the Bible define for you the weight of sin. Look to the exile as one indication of how seriously God takes it, because he will always remain true to himself.
In my years teaching at Augustine School, I learned the importance of probing the heart whenever I disciplined students. I had a number of conversations with students who had been acting up in class in which I asked them to think deeply about what they were doing when they disobeyed my instructions. I would say something like this: if I am an authority figure, standing in the place of your parents, you are really disobeying your parents when you disobey me. And who is the one who has given your parents authority over you? God has. So if you disobey me, you are really saying, “I choose right now to disregard God’s authority over me. I want to be my own god.” You see, even the so-called “little” sins reveal a deeper heart condition of which we must repent. So I want to ask all of you: have you given safe harbor to any sin in your life? Are you comfortable with a pattern of lust, or viewing pornography, or engaging in sexual immorality with your girlfriend or boyfriend? Or perhaps gossiping and backbiting in order to make yourself look better than others, or letting anger and resentment linger in your heart? Or going to parties where your primary goal is to drink away your inhibitions? Or is your sin more subtle, like the soft idolatry of a workaholic life that leads you to neglect God and other people? Or do you live to serve the god Money, either because you have grown too fond of what you have, or because you have too strong a desire for what you don’t have? Search your heart, and where you find sin, don’t take it lightly. It must be fought, fought, and then fought some more, and don’t ever give up fighting it until it lies as a corpse at your feet. Sin is a weighty reality, because God is not to be taken lightly.
Israel would not take her sin seriously, so God made her feel the weight of it in the event of the exile. And yet, we see this shocking statement in verse 13: “As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this calamity has come upon us; yet we have not entreated the favor of the LORD our God, turning from our iniquities and gaining insight by your truth.” What?! Even after experiencing the wrath of God poured out on their heads, Judah did not turn from her sins and seek God’s favor? Why not? It’s because something was still missing. It’s possible to feel the weight of your sin and still not be moved to repentance. So that brings us to our second word about true repentance:
If we turn away from sin in repentance, we must necessarily turn toward something else, just like turning away from one wall entails turning to face another one. And the only other direction we can turn from sin is toward God. And this turning toward God in reliance, embracing him for all that he promises to be for us in Christ, is what the Bible calls faith. Repentance and faith cannot be separated. They are two sides of the same coin.
So it is possible to know how terrible sin is, and yet not have the confidence that if you do repent, God will be there waiting with open arms. And if you don’t have that confidence, you won’t have any motivation to repent. Sin will have deceived you into thinking that God isn’t for you, and so you would conclude, “God can’t accept me, at least not before I have gone through a long period of condemning myself and atoning for my sin. So how can I even begin?” Sin deceives us into thinking that God is distant, leaving us without hope that repentance can really do us any good. Daniel’s appeal to God in verses 15-19 blows that kind of thinking out of the water by showing us God’s heart toward us.
Daniel appeals to God to fulfill his promise and restore the people to the land as well as the holy city, Jerusalem. And he prays for this, confident of what God’s purpose for Israel is. That purpose is, and always has been, that God would dwell with his covenant people in the place that he graciously gives to them, that they would live under his favor and blessing, and that as a result they would praise, glorify, and enjoy him forever. This purpose is alluded to in several ways in vv. 15-19. Notice three:
First, Daniel refers to the exodus from Egypt. In verse 15 he prays, “And now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand.” When he refers to “all your righteous acts” in verse 16, the deliverance from Egypt would have been preeminent among them. Daniel prays to the God who has delivered Israel before. But why did he deliver them? It was so that he could enter into covenant with them at Mount Sinai, become their God, bring them into the land he had promised to Abraham, and dwell with them there as they lived under his favor and blessing. There they would worship him and demonstrate his glory to all the nations of the world who could witness the distinctive way of life of God’s people. So God expressed a particular purpose to bless Israel in the exodus. The exile has not nullified that purpose.
Second, Daniel refers to God’s choice of the city of Jerusalem to be his dwelling place. Notice all of the references to the word “your” in these verses: “your city Jerusalem, your holy hill” (v. 16), “your sanctuary” (v. 17), “the city that is called by your name” (v. 18), “your city and your people are called by your name” (v. 19). God elected Israel among all the nations of the world to be his people, and within the land he gave them he elected Jerusalem to be the site where his house would be built, where heaven and earth would meet, and where he would dwell with his covenant people. Again, God’s sovereign election of a dwelling place expresses a purpose to bless Israel and to glorify his name through them. That purpose has not gone away.
Third, Daniel makes numerous appeals to God’s passion to exalt his own name. In verse 15 he says that God “made a name” for himself in the exodus, showing his glory to all the nations by triumphing over the Egyptians. But the exile has threatened God’s name among the nations, as verse 16 says: “your people have become a byword among all who are around us.” Israel’s sin and exile from the land could give the impression that Israel’s God is weak and has been conquered by the god of the Babylonians. So Daniel appeals in verse 17: “for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary.” In verse 18 he says, “For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy.” In verse 19 he prays, “Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name.” God chose Israel to be his people so that they could live with him, delight in him, and glorify his name. Again, the exile has not nullified that purpose. What is true of Israel is true even more so for God’s new covenant people, embracing not only Israel but the nations of the world, including us.
So God is after something: a people among whom he will dwell, for his glory, forever. Will anything stop him from getting what he is after? Of course not! So then, let me put it this way: Will your past sins (even sins you committed last night or this morning) thwart God’s purpose of grace for you? Are your past sins somehow beyond God’s ability to forgive through the cross of Jesus Christ, so that he can embrace you in love and blessing and be glorified by your eternal delight in him? No! You don’t have to self-atone for your past sins. All God wants is your heart, right here, right now. Repent. Agree with God about your sin, ask him to forgive you, turn from it, and trust that he is waiting there for you with open arms. As Paul writes in Philippians 3:13-14, “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Yes, the sins of the past (even the very recent past) are wretched. All sin is. But you cannot allow the past to have tyranny over the present. God’s incredible mercy and unwavering purpose to glorify his name through the blessing of his people will not allow it.
I am now in my eighth year of teaching Latin in some capacity. In those years of teaching a difficult subject, I have encountered a number of students who start to fall behind, and when they do, it becomes a vicious cycle. They get behind, so when the class moves ahead, they have the added challenge of trying to process new concepts that are dependent on them knowing old concepts that they really never learned. So they get discouraged because it becomes difficult, and that in turn leads to them giving less and less effort over time, so that they fall farther and farther behind. What happens to these students is they feel like there is no hope, so why should I even try? They’re actually wrong; there is hope for any student who will put forth the necessary effort, but if they can’t see that, there really can’t be any motivation without hope.
What greater hope do you need to motivate you to repentance than God’s promise of grace to those who repent? In the words of the hymn “How Firm a Foundation”: “What more can he say than to you he hath said to you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?” As long as you draw breath, don’t ever assume that your sin has left you without hope. As long as you draw breath, it is never too late to repent.
Perhaps some of you here today have never repented of sins at all. You have never turned away from your sin to embrace Jesus Christ by faith. If that is you, I want you to know how weighty your sin is. Your defiance of God has left you exposed to an unimaginable judgment to come, a judgment that will make the siege and destruction of Jerusalem look like child’s play. I am speaking of the day of judgment that is coming when God will give a definitive answer to all of the lies your sins have told about him, and if you are found outside of the refuge of Christ on that day, you will answer personally for your sins in the unending torment of hell, the final exile from God’s presence. Know that your sins deserve every bit of that. But know also that God’s mercy is abundant, and in his grace he holds out to you the promise that if you stop relying on yourself and rely instead on his Son Jesus Christ, his death under the wrath of God on the cross will answer for your sins, and his resurrection from the dead will become your resurrection one day when God shows before the whole world that you are his righteous son or daughter, clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ himself. God doesn’t ask you to atone for your own sins. Jesus did that. He only asks that you repent and believe the good news. Call out to him in repentance and faith today, and tell us that you want to be baptized as a testimony to your faith.
If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, does repentance still matter for you? Absolutely! When Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church 500 years ago this October, sparking the Protestant Reformation, the very first of his theses said this: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” That is exactly right. As long as we are in this present age, sin remains a threat to us. It no longer has mastery over our hearts, but it has not yet been eradicated. So it must be searched out, exposed, and brought before the Lord with full confidence that he receives us in grace.
So if you are a baptized believer in Christ, and you are a member in good standing with a church, we invite you to respond to this message by demonstrating your faith publicly through eating and drinking at the Lord’s Table. As we do so, let me address one issue in particular about this. I know that it is a tradition in many churches to treat the Lord’s Supper as a somber occasion to heap condemnation on yourself. Some have misunderstood Paul’s command to examine yourself before eating in 1 Corinthians 11 as a command that means, “Don’t eat if see any sin in your life.” I don’t think that’s what Paul means. If you are a believer who has been invited to eat, and you choose not to, you are basically saying with that action, “I refuse Christ.” But what if, when you examine yourself, you do see sin in your heart? What do you do? You repent of it, and then you eat with us. Do not allow unrepentant sin to keep you from Christ, who offers himself to you now. Amen.