Scripture Daily

Context No. 406 of 4322 · Daniel (Greek)

Context · Reflection

Daniel (Greek) 9:7-11: in context

7“Lord, righteousness belongs to you, but to us confusion of face, as it is today—to the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to all Israel, who are near, and who are far off, through all the countries where you have driven them, because of their trespass that they have trespassed against you. 8Lord, to us belongs confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against you. 9To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgiveness; for we have rebelled against him. 10We haven’t obeyed the LORD our God’s voice, to walk in his laws, which he set before us by his servants the prophets. 11Yes, all Israel have transgressed your law, turning aside, that they wouldn’t obey your voice. “Therefore the curse and the oath written in the law of Moses the servant of God has been poured out on us; for we have sinned against him.

This is part of Daniel's great prayer of confession, and its structure is worth studying, because it is a model of what honest confession actually sounds like. Daniel sorts out precisely what belongs to whom. To you, Lord, belongs righteousness, he prays, but to us belongs shame of face, as it is today. And again: to us belongs open shame, to our kings and our princes and our ancestors, because we have sinned against you. And once more, the other side of the ledger: to the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against him. He gives God what is God's, righteousness and mercy, and takes for his people what is theirs, the shame and the sin.

But the detail that should stop us is a single pronoun, repeated over and over: us, we, our. Daniel prays we have sinned, we have rebelled, we have not obeyed. And this is Daniel, one of the most faithful men in the entire Bible, a man Scripture presents as nearly blameless, praying from exile precisely because of the sins of a generation before him. He had every excuse to pray they sinned, to stand apart as the righteous exception who was only caught up in someone else's mess. He refuses the exemption completely. He plants himself inside his people's guilt and confesses it as his own, in the first person, we. And he holds that honest ownership of sin together with real confidence, because to the Lord belong mercy and forgiveness. His confession is neither self-righteous distancing nor hopeless despair; it is solidarity in guilt resting on the mercy of God.

That is a rare and healthy thing, and it exposes how I usually do it. When something has gone wrong in my family or community or church, do I confess in Daniel's first person, we have failed, taking my share and standing with my people, or do I quietly confess in the third person, they failed, exempting myself as the good one who is above it all? And is my honest owning of what is wrong anchored, like Daniel's, in the confidence that to the Lord belong mercy and forgiveness?

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