Daniel 9:18 Give ear, our God, and hear; open your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears your Name. We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy.

This prayer is often held up as the ultimate example of substitutionary repentance. Daniel was personally righteous, to the degree that He is held up elsewhere in the Bible as an example of a righteous person. (Ezekiel 14:14) However, he identifies with his ancestors and says that God’s judgment on them was just. That said, he still intercedes for his people and for their land, not on the basis of human righteousness but of divine mercy. And from verse 20, we have the record of God’s response to such confession and intercession. Not too many people get a personal visit from the archangel Gabriel! We tend to like to think that our ancestors were good people, but everybody’s human, and as Paul said, all have sinned. (Romans 3:23) It never does any good to try to come before God on the basis of human righteousness. However, coming before Him on the basis of His mercy and grace is a different matter. That’s why personal pride is so deadly: we have nothing to be proud of! God is the source of everything good, not man, even when the good flows through a human instrument. It is when we realize, as Daniel did, that God’s grace and mercy are greater than our sin that we learn to come boldly before Him. Daniel didn’t know about Jesus, unless God showed him the plan of redemption by personal revelation, but he did know God’s character and that’s what he relied on. We have the huge advantage of knowing not only John 3:16, but all of the New Testament, not to mention the flow of Christian history since then. We have every reason to pray as Daniel did, not depending on human righteousness but on the God who loved us enough to send His Son to die for us.

I still remember my father telling me, essentially, that he was as human as I was. He didn’t go into graphic detail, but the message got through. I have every reason to be proud of my ancestors’ devotion to God, but I am quite aware that they were all human, just as I am, and human righteousness is imperfect at best. I am not to be proud, but grateful, because I have enjoyed generational blessings to a degree few can claim. That said, God has had to teach me that it is all grace, because I have done things that should have disqualified me from the succession! I keep coming back to it, but the time when God showed me, just for a moment, the state of my own soul was absolutely devastating. When I pray for America and her many sins, as I do, I must remember that I am in the flow of those sins, and pray in humility as well as in the assurance that God is far greater than all those sins put together, and the cross of Christ cancels them all out, if they are placed under the blood of the Lamb.

Father, thank You for this reminder. Thank You for what You are doing in America even as I write. Thank You for Your miraculous protection for Donald Trump in the assassination attempt, and how that is convincing even some sceptics that You are real. He is certainly a flawed vessel, but then we all are, and You are clearly working on him. I pray that in the next four years and following that much would be done to restore America to the image You had of her at her founding, for the blessing of the world and for Your glory. Thank You. Hallelujah!