Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
No court of law will permit a person to confess guilt which is not a fact. But here in Daniel 9 we have a man confessing guilt in enormous sins for which he is utterly innocent! And God righteously let him do it!
He painfully enumerates the sins of his people, the Jews, and calls it "My confession" (vs. 4), "We have sinned and committed iniquity, we have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from Your precepts." He goes back in history and assumes guilt for the sins of "our kings, our princes, and our fathers," and of "all Israel." He even confesses that "we" deserve "the curse" that has "been poured out on us" (vss. 4-11).
Yet Daniel did not take part in any of these sins that led to the captivity in Babylon. The Bible records no sin against him. Why then did he make this abject confession, and why did the Lord let him make it if it wasn't true in fact?
This was the same kind of "confession" that Jesus Christ made when He asked John the Baptist to baptize Him; John refused for he was authorized to baptize no one except sinners, and he knew that Christ was sinless. Christ was innocently taking the sins of the world on Himself, numbering Himself with the transgressors where He didn't belong. Daniel was so close to Christ that he was voluntarily partaking of the corporate repentance that Christ experienced for the world.
In the end of time there will be "144,000" people who also will voluntarily confess the sins of the world as their sins but for the grace of a Savior who has saved them from those sins. They will fully realize the truth that "in [their] flesh nothing good dwells" (Rom. 7:18). They will finally understand "the message of Christ's righteousness."
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: December 13, 2004.
Copyright © 2016 by "Dial Daily Bread."
