In this enlightening episode, we unpack the intricate narrative within Daniel Chapter Nine. Through a close study of historical exiles and divine decrees, we reveal the timeless relevance of Daniel’s insights. We explore how the struggles and rebellions of ancient Israel provide lessons on obedience, righteousness, and the unchanging promise of restoration from God. Listen as we reflect on divine justice and mercy, and the profound understanding of sin as ‘missing the mark,’ pivotal to comprehending humanity’s eternal journey toward redemption.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Bob and Yart Live. Today, we’re getting into a study of the Book of Daniel done by my father and predecessor, Bob and Yart. And if you want, you do not want to miss this. If you want to get all of Bob and Yart’s Bible studies for just $10, you can get that at nyart.shop that has all of these Daniel studies. You do not want to miss those. But today, we’re getting into this study of Daniel, So exciting. Hey, if you can’t afford that $10, email us, service at kgov.com, and we will find a way to get you those Bible studies. Hey, this is Daniel, Bob Enyart’s study of Daniel. So exciting. I’ll see you on the other end.
SPEAKER 02 :
We are continuing in Daniel chapter nine. Now the New Testament only mentions Daniel by name when Jesus himself was speaking of the great tribulation and he mentioned Daniel and he quoted from this chapter and we should get to the passage that the Lord cited in this session. Also tonight, we’ll see that God responds immediately to Daniel’s prayer in an extraordinary way, promptly dispatching an angel who has to rush to get to Daniel quickly. So let’s begin by rereading the first few verses of Daniel 9, and then we’ll continue. In the first year of Darius, the son of Ahasuerus, of the lineage of the Medes, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans, In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood by the books, that is by the scriptures, the number of the years specified by the word of the Lord through Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish 70 years in the desolations of Jerusalem. And so at that point in our last class, we went back to Jeremiah 25 and Jeremiah 24. 29 to remind ourselves about the prophesied 70 years of Babylonian exile. And just as a reminder, in chapter 25 of Jeremiah, we read that the judgment, which was for punishment, in that judgment, many shall serve the king of Babylon 70 years. And then in Jeremiah chapter 29, “‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all who were carried away captive, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon. For thus says the Lord, after 70 years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform my good work toward you and cause you to return to this place.'” For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. So God punished Israel, but he wants to bless them. So then continuing in Daniel 9, verse 3, And now we get into new territory for this study. Verse 4, And I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession and said, O Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant and mercy with those who love him and with those who keep his commandments. We have sinned and committed iniquity. So this is Daniel’s prayer to the Lord, and he is beginning by acknowledging how great God is, how good God is, and then the reality that they have hurt one another. And sin is when we miss the mark, and God is the mark. You know, if you are shooting a rifle at a target that’s a half a mile away, if you’re a little bit off, like a quarter inch, You’re not going to come anywhere near hitting the target. Well, what if you’re shooting a spaceship to the moon? That’s a quarter of a million miles away. What if you’re almost on target, you’re just off by like one degree? You’re going to miss the moon and be lost in space. So the further away the target, the more accurate the aim has to be. If it’s off by a little and the target is far away, you’re not going to come close. Well, what if the target is eternal life? an infinite future, an everlasting future. And as we proceed toward the eternal future, we want to be loving one another and not hurting one another. What if that is the target? Well, if you miss the mark, that’s sin in the Greek, hamartia, missing the mark. If you miss the mark, then you’re going to hate one another and hurt one another. So how could it be that we could have eternal life and love one another? The only way is to humble ourselves and to agree that God is right and that we should do what God wants us to do. Anything else, any deviation leads to death. And so that’s why in the scriptures, sometimes it appears that God is very harsh. And he says, if you touch the ark, you’ll be dead. Well, that seems harsh, but God is trying to teach the world through his relationship with Israel that it is my way or no way. There’s only one way to eternal life, and that is my way. So Daniel is acknowledging in verse 5, “…we have sinned and committed iniquity. We have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from your precepts and your judgments. Neither have we heeded your servants, the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings and our princes, to our fathers and all the people of the land.” When you read the writings of the ancient kingdoms, they praise themselves and they praise their kings to no end. There’s no humility whatsoever. I am the great king. I am the king of kings. I am God on earth. Whereas when you read the writings of the Jews, they have the flavor of realism. in that if they were making up a story, they would make their kings look like heroes. They would make their patriarchs look like righteous pillars of strength. But instead, we see in the Scriptures that the apostles were weak and selfish and sinful. King David was tragically guilty of murder and adultery. Abraham wanted to hide behind his wife and made her vulnerable so he could be secure. This is all the flavor of realism. If the Jews were making this stuff up, if the apostles were making it up, they would make themselves look good as is the manner of men. But the Scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit, so this is so typical in the Scriptures. We have disobeyed you, O Lord, our kings and our princes, the fathers of the people of the land. We have all disobeyed. And that’s the lament of truth. Verse 7. O Lord, righteousness belongs to you, but to us shame of face as it is this day, to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, those near and those far off in all the countries to which you have driven them because of the unfaithfulness which they have committed against you. Well, Israel had effectively a civil war like we did in America. And coincidentally, we had the north versus the south. So did they. And the northern kingdom is also referred to as the ten tribes. And the southern kingdom is Judah or two and a half tribes. And the reason you end up with half tribes is because Joseph, who was almost like king in Egypt, had two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, and Jacob blessed them both. with a sibling switch going on, like we’ve talked about frequently. And so if God was angry at one tribe and he wanted to diss them, so to speak, dismiss them, he’d take Joseph and speak of Joseph as two tribes. Or if the tribe of Levites were not included because they didn’t get a patch of land in Israel, they didn’t get their own territory, then you’d still have 12 tribes because you could take the tribe of Joseph and give part of the land to Ephraim and another part to Manasseh. So we have… Judah as southern Israel and the northern part of the country as the ten tribes, and the north part was carried away because of their sinfulness to the Assyrian captivity, the Assyrian exile. They were taken from the land, and as a people group, they never returned. So the ten tribes were removed from the land of Israel, Canaan, the promised land, and they were brought to Assyria, like northern Iraq, and from there they spread out, they were scattered to the four ends of the earth, never to return. until May 14th, 1948, when Israel was restored, reborn as a nation in a day, as the scriptures said it would be. And then Jews from all over the world did return and have been returning. But southern Israel was different. Southern Israel was carried away in the Babylonian captivity, and although many Jews decided to stay in Babylon because they sort of made a pretty good life for themselves there, many returned. And those who returned, like Nehemiah and those who rebuilt the wall, and Ezra and those who rebuilt the temple, they were the remnant that returned, and God used them to reconstitute the nation, to reconstitute tribes, to reconstitute the 24 orders of the priesthood. Remember John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, he was of the eighth order of Abijah. So how did they have the eighth order? How did they have 24 orders? The whole priesthood was decimated, going to Babylon, and only a remnant came back. Well, God reconstituted the tribe for his purposes. Okay, so, by the way, the Jews, they were being scattered across the face of the earth, and this was because of their rebellion against God. by which their national defense was weakened because they lost primarily… What’s the main thing they lost? The main thing they lost was his protective counsel, his wisdom that comes from the humility to search the Scriptures. to know as the ruler of a nation, as a judge, as a general, what should I do to honor God? When you’re in rebellion against God, you lose that. Secondarily, and only secondarily, they lost His mighty hand as their protector. Because God doesn’t have to intervene and do miracles in order to bless an individual, a family, a church, or a nation. He can bless us through our obedience to Him and seeking His face. So we’re up to verse 8. “‘O Lord, to us belongs shame of face, to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, because we have sinned against You.'” To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against him. We have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God to walk in his laws, which he set before us by his servants the prophets. Yes, all Israel has transgressed your law. Now does that mean Daniel also? Well, we have all sinned. Paul writes in Romans 3, and he takes this from the Hebrew Scriptures. He pulls out passages showing that every one of us, given the opportunity, that is, if you grow old enough, not a baby who dies, but every one of us, individually, we have disobeyed God. We have all sinned. We’ve all fallen short of the glory of God. And we all need forgiveness through Jesus Christ. And that includes Daniel himself. As he acknowledges later in verse 20, he too sinned. Of course, only Jesus Christ did not sin. of all those who’ve come to the age of accountability and then adulthood, of all those in human history, billions of us, only Jesus did not sin. But that’s not what Daniel is referring to here, I don’t believe. He’s referring to hard-hearted continuation in open rebellion against God. When he is saying that all Israel has transgressed your law, There are different sins, of course, right? There’s not only one sin. There are different sins. And Jesus said to Pilate, the one who delivered me to you has the greater sin. Jesus used that term, the greater sin. And God speaks of judgment that will come to some with few stripes and to others with many stripes. Because to whom much is given, much is required. And to whom less is given, less is required. So if you sin, a single sin is sufficient to separate us forever from God, angels and men. And we human beings, one sin of rebellion against God will separate us forever unless we turn to God and ask him to forgive us. and we trust in Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection, then we could be forgiven of a lifetime of sin by the blood of Christ appropriated by faith in him. But the sin of open, continuous rebellion against God is a different sin. It’s another sin. The sin of covetousness is one sin. Stealing is another sin. Hatred of the innocent, that’s another sin. Murder is another sin. Idolatry is another sin. There are many laws and many sins. Well, if someone sins, that’s terrible. If they pull others down with them so they get little ones in Christ and they get them to turn against God and sin, that’s even worse. So when you sin, it’s bad. When you encourage others to sin, it’s worse. When you brag about your sin, it’s worse. So this is the continuous rebellion against God. in a blatant series of public sins, a lifestyle wickedness that Daniel and the rest of the remnant were not guilty of. They were not openly advocating rejection of God’s law. But many in Israel, including their leaders, kings and princes, were guilty of this kind of sin, and that’s what brought the judgment of God. So this is standard hyperbole. It doesn’t mean all without exception. All Israel has transgressed. We’ve done a Bible study on the word all in the Bible, whether it comes from the Greek pas or panta or Hebrew terms. And frequently all means, just like it means in English, many. Like all of Judea went to John to be baptized. All. Even the Pharisees and the Sadducees, even Pilate and Herod, all, not all. In fact, John says that Jesus, his disciples baptized more people than John did. And that’d be a trick if everyone went to John. And then how do you get more than everyone? So this is standard Hebrew and in Greek, we find hyperbole. meaning many. And in this instance, it probably means most. So let’s continue with verse 11. Yes, all Israel has transgressed your law and has departed so as not to obey your voice. Therefore, the curse and the oath written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out upon us because we have sinned against him. So Daniel speaks of the curse as written in the Law of Moses, and this is the thematic element of the first five books of the Bible. I’d like to quote one example. You don’t need to turn there, but if you want to, Leviticus 26.13, we’re looking for the curses that God said would come upon those who disobeyed him. I am the Lord your God. I also will do this to you. I will even appoint terror over you, wasting disease and fever, which shall consume the eyes and cause sorrow of heart, grief. And you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. I will set my face against you, and you shall be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you shall reign over you, and you shall flee when no one pursues you. So that’s one example of many. Many of the examples have the words cursing and blessing. God says, choose life because I want to bless you. But if you disobey me, you are cursed. Now these curses, are they somehow metaphysical? Are they mystical? Or are they primarily the natural consequences of sin? I believe they are the latter primarily, the natural consequences of sin. So that if a man is an alcoholic and he’s not loving his wife and raising his kids in a godly way, and his children rebel, It’s as though he’s cursed for his drunkenness. Now, is God micromanaging his children to get them to be alcoholics and drug addicts as a way of punishing the father? I don’t believe so at all. I believe that that’s a gross perversion of the understanding of Scripture. We are cursed when we disobey God. There are times when God came into Israel and physically intervened and even opened up the earth and sucked down alive into hell those who were rebelling against him, like with Korah in the book of Numbers. But that’s not God’s standard way of operating. His standard way is he loves the spiritual laws. When you obey him and humble yourself, that leads to life and blessing. And when you rebel, that leads to death. And he loves the physical laws because he created a physical universe that he said was very good. And so there’s the natural cause and effect. You reap what you sow. You sow to the wind, you reap the whirlwind. So this is primarily what is meant in Scripture of cursings and blessings. And so in Daniel 9, verse 12, and he has confirmed his words, which he spoke against us and against our judges who judged us by bringing upon us a greater disaster. Notice Daniel is saying not only were our kings bad and our princes bad, our judges were bad. And those who want to change the law, as we’ll read later, those who are anti-Christ, those who are in rebellion against God, they seek to change the law. So the law says, do not kill the innocent. They say, unless the baby’s not born yet, then you could kill him. Or if it’s an elderly person who… Maybe it costs a lot to keep them alive and we think we could deny them food and water and starve them to death and we think it’s okay then to kill that person. Or God said thou shalt not commit adultery and they say unless there are consenting adults. And so they want to change the law, and they approve of what is evil, and they disapprove of what is good. That’s what Daniel is warning us about here, in a sense, in retrospect, in his situation. Evil kings, evil princes, evil judges. And as we read through the Scriptures… wicked prophets and evil priests i mean who would have predicted that when god establishes the priesthood and handpicks aaron and his four sons who would predict that god would kill two of the four sons who are supposed to be priests to serve him forever who would guess that god would pick saul and god would end up killing saul because of how wicked he is The sacred history of Israel is not the neat package that I had thought it would be when I first began to read the Bible in 1973. I thought because they were the chosen people, everything would be beautiful. Boy, what a rude awakening. Because love has to be freely given. You cannot force a woman to love you And God cannot force Israel or the Gentiles to love him. So this is sacred history, not because it’s all rosy, but because it’s true and God worked through the people of Israel. So God spoke against us and against our judges by bringing upon us a great disaster, the Babylonian captivity. For under the whole heaven such has never been done as what has been done to Jerusalem. As it is written in the law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us, yet we have not made our prayer before the Lord our God that we might turn from our iniquities and understand your truth. Therefore, the Lord has kept the disaster in mind and brought it upon us, for the Lord our God is righteous in all the works which he does, though we have not obeyed his voice. This is such a contrast from the gods of the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians and where the ancient world had a pantheon of gods who were arbitrary, cruel, they were capricious. This is in complete contrast to the God of Scriptures. For Jehovah, the God of Abraham, did not fling lightning bolts at people for entertainment. There were not battles within the Trinity where God the Father and God the Son were fighting with one another and using the people on earth as pawns to spite and hurt each other. That is the opposite of what we read of God in the Scriptures. So the pagan world and its conception of God was in a sense true to the reality that they were thinking up false gods and idols. The pagans were. Whereas in Scripture, we read of God doing all things according to the counsel of His will. Notice how different that is? God does everything deliberately. And His thoughts toward us are good and not evil. That is completely the opposite of what you get with Zeus and all those Greek gods. It is the opposite. Verse 15, And now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and made yourself a name as it is this day, we have sinned, we have done wickedly. Now notice Daniel’s reference to the Exodus, God delivering his people from Egypt. We also saw that a few minutes ago when we went back to review Jeremiah 29, God who delivered us from Egypt. The Exodus is iconic in the history of the nation. A moment in time referred back to repeatedly when the Israelites were delivered from Pharaoh. and his army, and the bondage of slavery. And this is brought up time and time again in remembrance that God is a God of salvation, of mighty power and deliverance. And God went to war against the gods of the Egyptians. For they had the god of the Nile River, and they had the sun god, Amun-Re, and they had the insect gods. They worshiped locusts. These are sick things that pagans will do. And so God turned the Nile blood red and he darkened the sky and he sent the plague of locusts.
SPEAKER 01 :
And so the God… Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time here on KLTT Radio. If you want the entire thing, you can find it in two different ways. One, you can go to kgov.com. Click on the store and purchase the Daniel Bible Study, which is a little bit expensive. I’ll be honest. It’s a little bit expensive. Or for way cheaper, you can go to enyart.shop and get all of Bob Enyart’s Bible Studies for just $10. You do not want to miss that. That’s decades of Bible Studies for just $10. $10. What a steal. If that’s too expensive for you, reach out service at kgov.com and we will find a way to get that to you. No charge. We want to be a blessing to you. Again, nyart.shop. That’s E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P. Hey, may God bless you guys.
In this enlightening episode, we unpack the intricate narrative within Daniel Chapter Nine. Through a close study of historical exiles and divine decrees, we reveal the timeless relevance of Daniel’s insights. We explore how the struggles and rebellions of ancient Israel provide lessons on obedience, righteousness, and the unchanging promise of restoration from God. Listen as we reflect on divine justice and mercy, and the profound understanding of sin as ‘missing the mark,’ pivotal to comprehending humanity’s eternal journey toward redemption.
