To be sure, this was not a new prayer that Daniel began to pray at this time as Daniel 6 suggests, his practice of praying three times a day towards Jerusalem was a regular and longstanding habit.
Therefore, even though it wasn’t quite seventy years yet since the destruction of Judah, Daniel began to pray with greater intensity for the fulfillment of the second half of this prophecy: the gracious restoration of God’s people to his land. God was now judging the king of Babylon and his nation, just as he had promised. What triggered Daniel’s interest in this prophecy was likely the overthrow of the Babylonian empire by the Medes and the Persians and King Belshazzar's death at the hands of Darius, the new ruler. In these oracles, Jeremiah announced that the Lord planned to subject his people to Babylon for seventy years for their sin, but at the end of that time, God would act to judge the Babylonians and to bring his people home. The passages that he was pondering were likely Jeremiah 25:11–12 and Jeremiah 29:10. It is nothing less than the Word of God, the only authoritative and infallible rule for our life and doctrine.Īs Daniel read the Book of Jeremiah, he found in it a reference to Jerusalem's desolation that would last seventy years. This passage is not merely an interesting and informative ancient text, a source of miscellaneous information about the culture and beliefs of antiquity. In doing this, Daniel models for us the attitude we are to have to his own visions: they themselves are the inspired scriptures, the written word of the Lord given through his prophets, to be studied, searched, and submitted to as the living oracles of God.
Here we see Daniel acknowledging the inspiration and authority of a fellow prophet's writings as part of a wider canon of inspired writings, the Scripture, little more than a generation after they were written. Daniel had been reading the words of the prophet Jeremiah, words that he described as “the Scriptures” ( hasseparim), the “word of the Lord given to Jeremiah” ( Dan. The first thing to notice about our passage is that Daniel’s prayer was prompted by reading God’s Word ( Dan. Daniel recognized and acknowledged at the outset the God to whom his prayer was addressed.
0 kommentar(er)
