Gabriel Answers Daniel

An old man sits with a scroll open on his knees, running his finger along one line again and again. Seventy years. He counts on his fingers. Then he puts the scroll down, and he begins to pray.

His name is Daniel. He was taken from Jerusalem as a teenager, carried hundreds of miles to Babylon, and he has lived his whole adult life far from home. He has served kings. He has survived a den of lions. Now Babylon itself has fallen, and Daniel is an old man. It is the first year of Darius, a new ruler over the Chaldeans. And Daniel has been reading the words of the prophet Jeremiah, written long before. Jeremiah had said that Jerusalem would lie in ruins for seventy years. Daniel looks up from the page. The seventy years are nearly over.

So Daniel turns to God. He fasts. He puts on sackcloth and sprinkles ashes on his head, the old signs of grief. And then he prays one of the most honest prayers in the whole Bible. He does not say, look how good we are. He says the opposite. We have sinned. We have done wrong. We did not listen to your servants the prophets. Notice the word we. Daniel has been faithful for decades, yet he stands with his people and confesses their sin as his own. But he also knows who God is. You are righteous, Lord, he says, and you are merciful and forgiving. And he ends with a plea that almost tumbles out of him. “O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do; defer not, for thine own sake, O my God.” He does not ask because Israel deserves it. He asks because of God's great mercy.

And while Daniel is still speaking, still confessing, still praying, someone is there. It is Gabriel, the same messenger Daniel had seen in an earlier vision. He comes swiftly, at about the time of the evening offering, the hour when sacrifices used to rise from the temple in Jerusalem. That temple has been rubble for decades, but Daniel still keeps its hours. Gabriel speaks gently. Daniel, I have come to give you understanding. At the very beginning of your prayer, the word went out, and I have come to tell you. Why? Because, says Gabriel, you are greatly loved. Imagine hearing that. Before you finished asking, heaven had already answered.

Then Gabriel gives Daniel a message that is bigger than the one he was praying about. Daniel had asked about seventy years. Gabriel speaks of seventy sevens, seventy weeks of years. In that time, he says, God will finish dealing with wrongdoing, make an end of sin, bring in everlasting righteousness, and anoint a most holy place. Jerusalem will be rebuilt, in troubled times. And then he speaks of someone. An Anointed One, a prince, will come. But this Anointed One will be cut off, and not for himself. The message is full of mystery, and Gabriel does not explain every detail. Daniel is left holding a promise much larger than his own lifetime. God's answer was not only, your people will go home. It was, I am sending someone.

History backs up the world Daniel was living in. In the British Museum today sits a clay barrel covered in tiny wedge-shaped writing, called the Cyrus Cylinder. On it, Cyrus, the Persian king who took Babylon, describes returning peoples and their gods to the places they had been taken from. It does not mention the Jews by name, but it fits the policy described in the book of Ezra, where Cyrus lets the exiles go home to rebuild Jerusalem.

Daniel's prayer and Gabriel's answer are in Daniel chapter nine. Centuries later, the same angel Gabriel would visit a priest in the temple and a young woman in Nazareth, with news that the promised one was finally coming. So here is a question to carry with you. When you pray, do you pray only about today, or are you ready for God to answer with something bigger than you asked?