If the study of prophecy does not tend to give us a deeper sense of the failure of God’s people upon the earth, I am persuaded we lose one of its most important practical uses. It is because of the absence of this feeling that prophetic research is generally so unprofitable. It is made more a question of dates and countries, of popes and kings; whereas God did not give it to exercise people’s wits, but to be the expression of His own touching their moral condition: so that whatever trials and judgments are portrayed there, they should be taken up by the heart, and felt to be the hand of God upon His people because of their sins.
This was the effect on Daniel, as seen in his prayer (chapter nine). He was one of the most esteemed prophets―as the Lord Jesus Himself said, “Daniel the prophet.” And the effect upon him was, that he never lost the moral design in the bare circumstances of the prophecy. He saw the great aim of God. He heard His voice speaking to the heart of His people in all these communications. And here he spreads all before God. For having read of the deliverance of Israel that was coming on the occasion of the downfall of Babylon, he sets his face unto the Lord God, “to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. And I prayed unto Jehovah my God, and made my confession, and said, O, Lord, the great and dreadful God, keeping 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...”
Another thing observe here. If there was one man in Babylon who, from his own conduct and state of soul, might be supposed to have been outside the need of confession of sin, it was Daniel. He was a holy and devoted man. More than that, he was carried away at so tender an age from Jerusalem, that, it is clear, it was not because of anything he had taken part in, that the blow had fallen. But not the less he says, “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity.” Nay, I am even bold to say, that the more separate you are from evil, the more you feel it: just as a person emerging into light feels so much the more the darkness that he has left.
So Daniel was one whose soul was with God, and who entered into His thoughts about His people. Knowing then the love of God, and seeing what He had done for Israel, (for he does not keep this back in his prayer,) he does not merely notice the great things that God had done for Israel, but also the judgments that He had inflicted upon them. Did he, therefore, think that God did not love Israel? On the contrary, no man had a deeper sense of the tie of affection that existed between God and His people; and for this reason it was that he estimated so deeply the ruin in which the people of God lay. He measured their sin by the depth of divine love, and the fearful degradation that had passed upon them. It was all from God.
He did not impute the judgments which had fallen upon them to the wickedness of the Babylonians, or the martial skill of Nebuchadnezzar. It was God he sees in it all. He acknowledges that it was their sin―their extreme iniquities; and he includes all in this. It was not merely the small people imputing their sorrows to the great, nor the great to the small, as is so often the case among men. He does not dwell upon the ignorance and badness of a few; but he takes in the whole―rulers, priests, people. There was not one that was not guilty. “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity.”
And this is another effect wherever prophecy is studied with God. It always brings in the hope of God standing up in behalf of His people—a hope of the bright and blessed day when evil shall disappear, and good shall be established by divine power. Daniel does not leave this out. We find it put as a kind of front piece to this chapter. The details of the seventy weeks show the continued sin and suffering of the people of God. But, before this, the end, the blessing is brought before the soul. How good this is of God! He takes occasion to give us, first of all, the certainty of final blessing, and then He shows us the painful pathway that leads to it.
Extract From “Notes on Daniel” by William Kelly, p. 150-152.