Daniel 9 sent me looking for how God shows up for people who struggle the way I do. These notes follow that question through the Old Testament, beginning with Daniel’s own confession, then three men who struggled long before him, then Jeremiah, since Daniel was reading him when he prayed.
I’m not reading as a scholar. I’m reading as someone whose heart was ready to receive this, asking what God does when his people fail, grieve, and doubt him.
Daniel: The Confession
The thread starts with Daniel on his knees. In chapter 9 he confesses, and the way he does it stopped me. He says we have sinned, never they. He uses four overlapping words: sinned, done wrong, acted wickedly, rebelled (9:5). He names the prophets they ignored (9:6), the covenant they broke (9:11), and hearts that still hadn’t turned (9:13). He says righteousness belongs to God and open shame to us (9:7).
What he doesn’t do is argue his case. He says they aren’t pleading because of their own righteousness but because of God’s great mercy (9:18), and he asks God to act for his own sake (9:19). Then, while he is still confessing (9:20), Gabriel arrives to say an answer went out when he began, and that he is greatly loved (9:23). The confession didn’t earn that word. It’s simply what Daniel was doing when the word came.
What would change if I treated confession as the place where I’m met, not the place where I’m graded?
Joseph: The Lord Was With Him
Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers (Genesis 37:28), falsely accused, thrown in prison, and forgotten by the man he helped there (40:23). Through all of it, the writer keeps saying the same thing: the Lord was with Joseph (39:2, 21, 23). It’s said in the pit of injustice, not after he got out.
At the end, when his brothers are afraid he’ll finally pay them back, Joseph weeps and says what I most want to be able to say: you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good (50:20). Twice he tells them not to fear (50:19, 21). Their confession came first: they asked him to forgive their transgression and sin (50:17), and he wept.
Where do I only see the pit, and what would it mean to hear “the Lord was with him” about my own?
Moses: Who Am I?
Moses killed an Egyptian and ran, and he spent forty years in exile in Midian (Exodus 2:11-15; Acts 7:30). When God finally calls him at the burning bush, his answer is Who am I? (Exodus 3:11). I know that question.
God doesn’t answer it with a résumé. He says I will be with you (3:12). Moses argues with him again and again through chapters 3 and 4, and God keeps staying in the conversation. Later, after the golden calf, God tells him I know you by name, and you have found favor in my sight (33:12, 17). Identity here isn’t something Moses earns back. It’s something God says over him.
When I ask “who am I?”, am I waiting for an answer about what I’ve done, or about who is with me?
Job: What a Man Does With His Grief
I first read Job with my brother in the late 1980s, and what stayed with me was what a man did with his grief. He lost nearly everything in one day. He tore his robe, fell to the ground, and worshiped (Job 1:20-21). Then, as the book goes on, he does something I didn’t expect: he brings everything to God, the pain, the questions, even the accusations (chapters 3, 7, 10, 13).
Two things stand out now. First, God’s verdict on Job comes before the accusation. He calls Job blameless and upright (1:8) before the accuser ever opens his mouth, which echoes what Gabriel said to Daniel before the vision. Second, when God finally answers, he doesn’t explain the suffering. He shows up (38:1), and Job says that his ears had heard of God, but now his eyes see him (42:5). God even says Job spoke rightly of him, unlike his friends (42:7).
Do I take my grief and my accusations to God, or only to myself?
Jeremiah: A God Who Yearns
The promise Daniel was reading is a love letter to people in exile. In Jeremiah 29, God tells them that after seventy years he will visit them, that his plans for them are for welfare and not harm, and that when they seek him with all their heart they will find him (29:10-14). Nothing in it asks them to get their act together first.
Chapter 31 goes further. God says he has loved them with an everlasting love (31:3). Then he asks about Ephraim, a nation that had failed him: Is he not my dear son, my darling child? However often he speaks against him, he still remembers him, and his heart yearns for him (31:20). In 32:41 he says he will rejoice in doing them good. It’s the same delight Gabriel names in Daniel, a God who wants his people.
Which line here would I have to believe to stop beating myself up?
Ezra: Shame, and Then “Yet Now There Is Hope”
Ezra’s prayer in chapter 9 sounds like Daniel’s. He is ashamed to lift his face to God and owns the people’s guilt as his own (9:6). But the book keeps saying something else about him: the good hand of his God was on him (7:9, 8:18, 8:22, 8:31). The man praying the shame prayer is also the man covered by God’s hand.
Then, in the middle of the mess, a man named Shecaniah says the line I want to keep: yet now there is hope for Israel (10:2). Earlier, when the temple foundation is laid, the people sing that God’s steadfast love toward Israel endures forever (3:11). They sing it before the work is done.
Can shame and hope sit in the same room for me, the way they do in Ezra 9 and 10:2?
Nehemiah: Told Again
Nehemiah’s prayer opens almost exactly like Daniel’s: the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him (1:5, compare Daniel 9:4). Like Daniel, he says “I and my father’s house have sinned” (1:6).
The part I most want to remember is chapter 8. The people hear the Law read and begin to weep, and their leaders tell them not to grieve, because the joy of the Lord is their strength (8:9-10). Conviction doesn’t get the last word. Chapter 9 then retells the whole history of Israel’s failure and lands on God as gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and one who did not forsake them (9:17, 9:31).
This is the “told again” pattern. Who tells me the joy of the Lord is my strength when I’m weeping over what I see in myself?
Zephaniah: He Sings Over Us
Zephaniah spends most of his book on judgment, then ends with one of the tenderest pictures in the Bible. In 3:14-17 God tells his people to sing, because the Lord is in their midst. Then he flips it: he rejoices over them with gladness, he quiets them by his love, and he exults over them with loud singing. Some translations say “renews you in his love” for the quiet part, and it’s worth comparing a few.
Daniel was told he is desired. Zephaniah says that desire has a sound: God singing.
What would change if I took 3:17 as a literal picture of what he is doing over me this morning?
More to Come
I’ll add what I find as I read the rest of the Old Testament, asking the same three questions each time: who is struggling, what do they do, and how does God show up?