Great Prayers of the Bible: Daniel 9 — Confessing a Nation
23 July 2025 · 2 min read · Prayer
Daniel 9 begins with Bible study: Daniel, reading Jeremiah, understood by books that the seventy years of exile were nearly complete. His response to the promise was not passivity but prayer — I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting.
And I prayed unto the LORD my God, and made my confession, and said, O Lord, the great and dreadful God, keeping the covenant and mercy to them that love him, and to them that keep his commandments; We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments:
The pronoun that matters
The prayer's power is a pronoun: we have sinned. Daniel — exiled as a boy for other men's idolatry, personally blameless as any figure in Scripture — buries himself in his people's guilt: we have rebelled... neither have we hearkened. Intercessors do not pray down at their people; they kneel among them.
The appeal rests wholly on grace: we do not present our supplications for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies. Then the boldest close in the Old Testament: O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do; defer not.
O my God, incline thine ear, and hear; open thine eyes, and behold our desolations, and the city which is called by thy name: for we do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies.
The answer while speaking
While Daniel was yet speaking, the angel Gabriel arrived: at the beginning of thy supplications the commandment came forth. Heaven had dispatched the answer at the prayer's first sentence.
Daniel 9 is the template for praying over a family, a church, a nation: promises read, sins owned with 'we,' mercy pleaded, and boldness at the close. Pray it over your own people — the commandment may already be going forth.
