"Then I set my face before the Lord God to make request in prayer and supplications, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.” (v.3)
This is one of the great chapters of prayer in the Bible. Here Daniel is interceding for the nation of Israel, asking God to have mercy on them and forgiveness for their rebellion and disobedience. By all indications this prayer may have taken days, as we see in the latter part of the verse it was done with fasting while wearing sackcloth and ashes.
Interestingly enough, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national fast in the midst of the Civil War. He said of this nation, “We have forgotten God, we have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, multiplied, enriched, and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, and too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
Daniel did precisely that. His prayer offered during the Exile, is one of the Bible’s great intercessory prayers. To demonstrate his humility and sorrow for the sins of the nation, he fasted and put on sackcloth and ashes. His prayer revealed; faith in Jeremiah’s prophecy that the Exile would last seventy years, it showed humility and a submissive knowledge of God’s person and Law, along with an understanding that God’s punishment was just.
Today, the most important area of service that we can do for the state of our country, is to pray – and more so as we see the Day of the Lord approaching. For His punishment will be just.
The Truth: “Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man.” (Luke 21:36”)
