This desire is reflected throughout this beautiful prayer. When Daniel learned what God's program was he prayed that he might be involved in it, that he might have a part in it and thus to cooperate with what God was doing.
Prayer is not merely an exercise in asking God for things prayer is primarily a means by which we get involved in God's program. That is very revealing, and it tells us an awful lot about prayer. Now, almost seventy years later, he realizes that the time of predicted deliverance was near, and so he begins to pray on the basis of the promise of God.
Daniel himself had lived through this whole period for he was but a teenager when he was captured and taken to Babylon. From his study of Jeremiah, Daniel realized that he was nearing the time of the end for the predicted seventy years of Babylonian captivity. Where God has spoken in writing, he does not add a vision. Though he was a prophet and God spoke to him directly, yet he learned many things from the Scriptures. It is interesting to note that Daniel also studied the Scriptures. He had been reading, as he tells us, the prophet Jeremiah. It occurred, Daniel tells us, "in the first year of Darius the king, the son of Ahasuerus, by birth a Mede." Therefore, at this time the Medes and the Persians had taken over the former empire of Babylon.ĭaniel was himself an old man, almost ninety years of age. The first part of the chapter is taken up with that prayer, which we shall not repeat here, for we want to focus on the prophetic elements of the chapter, but do read the prayer through. The angel Gabriel was sent to the prophet Daniel to give him a clear and undisguised look into the future in answer to a prayer of the prophet. This is the same angel that appeared to Joseph and to Mary, as recorded in the opening chapters of the New Testament. It was not given to Daniel through means that we have seen already in the book, but it is a direct message to the prophet from the angel Gabriel. This prophecy is not a vision nor a dream. The moderator of the debate was a learned rabbi, and as the Christian pressed the claims of this passage home it became so clear that the passage was pointing to Jesus Christ that the rabbi closed the debate with these words: "Let us shut up our books, for if we go on examining the prophecy we shall all become Christians." In the preface to the book he told how he himself had been converted by listening to a debate between a knowledgeable Jew and a Christian convert from Judaism over the meaning of this passage in Daniel 9. In the seventeenth century a very learned Jew published a book in which he set forth the claims of Jesus Christ to be the Jewish Messiah. It is so plain and detailed that it has always been an acute embarrassment to Jewish commentators.
It pinpoints the exact moment in history when the Jewish Messiah would present himself to the Jewish people, and it does so over five hundred years before the event took place. The passage we are looking at is that kind of passage. Many of you are frequently asked why you believe the Bible to be the Word of God, and it is helpful to know certain passages which clearly set forth predictive elements that are unmistakable and which do indicate the ability of the Bible to predict events far in the distant future. This passage is therefore one of the strongest evidences to prove the divine inspiration of the Bible. The ninth chapter of Daniel centers clearly upon the person of Jesus Christ and is one of the few places in Scripture where God ties himself to a definite timetable of events.
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