If you have your Bibles this morning, I want you to turn again to Daniel chapter 9. We’re going to go back and look at some of the verses that we looked at last week, but we didn’t really hone in on a few of them. And I want us to look at Daniel chapter 9, and I want us to begin by looking at verse 5. And we’re going to read from verse 5.
“We have sinned and have committed iniquity and have done wickedly and have rebelled by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments.
Neither have we hearkened unto thy servants the prophets which spake in thy name to our kings, our princes, our fathers, and to all the people of the land. O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto thee, but unto us confusion of faces. As at this day to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and unto all Israel, that are near and that are far off, through all the countries withered thou hast driven them because of their trespass, that they have trespassed against thee.
O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of faces, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee. To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him. Neither have we obeyed the voice of the Lord our God to walk in his laws which he set before us by his servants the prophets.
Yea, all Israel have transgressed thy law, even the departing, that they might not obey thy voice. Therefore the curse is poured upon us on the oath that was written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, because we have sinned against him.”
Let’s just follow the prayer.
Prayer
Dear only Father, I come before you this morning, Lord. I pray that you would just speak to us through your word.Help us to understand why Daniel was crying out to you with this prayer. Help us to understand it is be our prayer as well. Lord, what happened to Israel is happening to our nation and our world. Lord, I pray that you would help us as we look at your word today to see, as Daniel said there, that you are a merciful and a forgiving God.
Help us to cry unto you. Speak to us this day, we pray in Jesus’ name. Daniel mentions twice in his prayer a unique term, but unto us confusion of faces.
Confusion of faces. Have you ever stopped to think a little or just take some words and say, what does this mean? What is Daniel saying to God when he says, unto us confusion of faces? Unto our leaders, confusion of faces? Well, in order to understand a little bit about what confusion of faces means and where it’s from and what Daniel’s looking at, we need to remember the context in which Daniel is being given these visions, where he’s at, what’s happened before him, and how God is going to use Daniel to bring prophecy not only of the day in which he lives and hope to the Jewish people, but also he’s going to bring hope to the world. Speaking of what is going to happen in the last days, and there doesn’t have to be confusion of faces.
Daniel had come, as we shared last Sunday, he had come to Babylon with the first wave of individuals that were taken out of Jerusalem.Ezekiel came with the second wave, and then the final wave of those that were taken from Jerusalem is when the city of Jerusalem was destroyed. A contemporary of both Daniel and Ezekiel was 2.
Jeremiah was older than these men. They were both younger men, and he had been a prophet already for years during the time of King Josiah, and then also during the time of Josiah’s sons and his one grandson that ruled for a short time. Daniel is looking back at what happened before he left Jerusalem, and he’s looking at what’s happening in Jerusalem now, and he’s looking at what God is telling him in these prophecies are going to be the final outcome of Jerusalem, both during his lifetime and then also that God still has not done with Jerusalem and the Jews.
I want you to turn with me and go back to Jeremiah chapter , and I want you to see what Daniel was remembering with confusion of faces. Where did confusion of faces come from, and what does confusion of faces mean? If you ever stop to think about even in the day in which we live, what confusion of faces is all about, and during the time that Daniel lived, the people thought that they were worshiping God. They had the temple.
They went through the motions. They did the sacrifices. They did everything, and the priests were there, but then they began to do different things.
They added different things to it. They brought in different gods. They tried to appease the people.
They tried to appease their own desires, and it became less concerned with following God and doing God’s will than doing what I wanted to do. In Jeremiah chapter , shortly after the call that Jeremiah has been given, and he’s revealed by the Lord that Israel’s sin just isn’t something where I did something wrong today, but it’s a willful choice that they had made, and that they willfully have gone out of their way to rebel against God. At the heart of everything that is being revealed to Daniel in chapter and from that point on, is dealing with this rebellion.
Daniel refers to the rebellion and how it’s impacting the people in that they’ve got confusion of faces. They don’t even realize they’re rebelling, and I want you to take a look at what the consequences of this have been. And let’s begin reading at verse 5. Thus saith the Lord of Jeremiah chapter 2:
“What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me, and have walked after vanity, and are become vain?”
Now the word vain and vanity means empty.
And the accusation that the Jewish people were making was against God. They found something wrong in God, and so they’re turning from Him. And the Lord is asking, what are you finding in me?
“What have you found that’s wrong in me? Neither said they.
Where is the Lord that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, and that led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and a pit, through a land of drought, and of shadow of death, through a land of no man pass through and where no man dwelt? And I brought you into a plentiful country. I eat the fruit thereof, and the goodness thereof. But when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.
The priests said not, where is the Lord? And they that handled the law knew me not. The pastors also transgressed against me, and the prophets prophesied by Baal, and walked after things that do not profit. Wherefore I will yet plead with you, saith the Lord.
And with your children’s children will I plead? For pass over the isles of Chidim and sea, and send on to Kedar, and consider diligently in sea if there be such a thing. Hath a nation change their gods, which are yet no gods. But my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit.
Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid. Be very desolate, saith the Lord. For my people have committed two evils.
They have forsaken me the fountain of living water, and hewn them out, cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. Is Israel a servant? Is he a home-born slave? Why is he spoiled? The young lions roared upon him, and yelled, and they made his land waste. His cities are burned without inhabitant.
All for the children of Noth and Tephenas have broken the crown of thy head. Hast thou not procured us unto thyself, in that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God when he led thee by the way? And now what hast thou to do in the way of Egypt to drink the waters of Sheor? What hast thou to do with the way of Assyria to drink the waters of the river? Thine own wickedness so correct thee, and thy backsliding shall reprove thee. Know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God, and that my fear is not in thee, saith the Lord the God of hosts.”
Daniel is praying about the fact that the nation of Israel has a confusion of faces. The confusion of faces lies in the fact that they’re not looking at God, and their confusion is driven by all of the things that they put in God’s place when they had that which was real. It’s interesting as I read that particular passage out of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah talks about lands that the nation of Israel should be astonished at because he talks about these lands and he gives examples of the two nations that worship false gods, but these nations don’t put aside their God. Now Jeremiah later on tells the nation of Israel what these gods are that these other nations worship. They’re idols, they’re gods of their own making, they take a piece of wood, they carve out this beautiful idol, and then what they do is they cover it with silver and gold and they put crowns on it, but it can’t speak, it can’t talk, it can’t move, it can’t handle, it can’t do anything.
And if they want to take it anywhere, they’ve got to pick it up and carry it because it can’t walk, and it can’t answer their prayers, and they can’t do anything for them. But yet they do not set it aside to hang on to it. The Lord has come to Israel, and He is the true and the living God.
He’s revealed Himself to Israel. He’s revealed His power, His authority. He is the God who has created all things.
He is the one who created the earth. He is the one that gives man his life, his physical life. He is the one who upholds and sustains all that He has created.
And He is the one that can hear and answer prayers. He is there in our time of need. Even as we read about David this morning when he was on his bed weeping, because he understood the sin in his heart and his life, and the circumstances were not going well at that time.
And he was weeping on his bed, yet he could cry out to God, and he said, God hears, and God not only hears, but He deals with my problem, and He drives my tears. So what’s the astonished faith is about? The nation of Israel can understand. We thought we’re doing everything right.
We’re religious people. We’ve got the temple. We’ve got all the instruments of the temple.
We’re doing the sacrifices, but we’ve forgotten our heart as far from God. And we introduce the idols because we see that the pagan nations, they hang on to their idols, so there must be something in them, and so we want them too. You know, the nation of Israel, one of the things that it did is they often envy after the pagan people around them.
And they wanted to be like them. Remember when they first had, were under the tutelage of Samuel the prophet, and they said they wanted a king. And the reason they wanted a king is they said, we want a king like what? Every other nation around us has a king, and we don’t have a king.
We want a king. God told Samuel they’re rejecting you. They’re not rejecting you rather, they’re rejecting me.
It’s not the fact that they don’t want you to be there to judge them, to help them, to direct them, but they’re really rejecting me, and they want to be like the world instead of be my people. What was happening, there’s a lot of confusion going on in Israel at the time that Daniel is praying this prayer. Remember there were false prophets? We read about that, that there were false prophets, and there were false pastors and false priests that were in Israel.
And as the Babylonians had come down with the first wave, and they carried away Daniel and the other young, intellectual Jewish young men that were taken back to Babylon, the false prophets started coming out of the walls. And they started prophesying saying, don’t worry, God’s going to deliver us. Don’t worry, Babylon will be dealt with.
Don’t worry, we won’t be taken. Jerusalem won’t be destroyed. The temple will remain.
Don’t worry. Then the second wave comes, and Nebuchadnezzar begins to dismantle the political power of Jerusalem. And the prophets say, don’t worry, we still have the temple.
Remember during the time of Hezekiah, when Hezekiah was here, the Assyrians were coming against him, and as they were coming against him, what he did is he cried out to God, and the temple was here, and the Lord delivered him, and the temple remained. So don’t worry, the temple’s still standing. Don’t worry.
Then the third wave came. The temple’s destroyed. The walls of Jerusalem are destroyed.
The city’s destroyed. There’s just a remnant of people, but most of the people that are left in the land of Jerusalem, in the land of Judah, are the poorest of four. There can be no threat to Babylon.
And the other ones have escaped and tried to go to Egypt, where they met their death. And the prophets still want to prophesy. But now there’s confusion to faces.
What did God say? Didn’t He say the prophets said He was going to deliver? The priests said they were going to continue with the services. Everything was going to be great. Babylon was going to be defeated.
What’s going on? I don’t understand. I thought we were doing the right thing by combining our focus and worship with the world and with God, we kept giving some homage to the Lord, but we really put our trust in the world and its systems. And we can’t figure out what’s going wrong.
A confusion of faces. I think there’s a lot of confusion of faces in the world today. There are people that prophesy in the name of the Lord, but the prophecies never come true.
And they claim to be prophets. And you’ve got the church that looks to false prophets and looks to the fact that we can somehow turn to the world’s way of dealing with situations and not see what’s really happening in our world today. And in the church, there’s much confusion of faces.
There are people in the church today that say, why can’t I do that? The world does. What harm is there in it? And you see a whole shift in direction and purpose and focus from looking to the power of God and looking to the deliverance of the Lord for our sins and shifting to relying on a world system that somehow will deliver us if we just give it the right means. During the time of Daniel, the people that were with Daniel kept believing that the Lord was going to deliver us out of Babylon.
They were going back. And it could be any day. The only thing is, Daniel had been given a vision, or was going to be given a vision that would reveal the time was in the Lord’s time and the Lord’s purpose.
And it all began back here in Judah with a rebellious spirit against the Lord even before when the people first came into the land and God established how they were to live, and yet they continually chose not to live that way. And rebelled against them. And they wouldn’t listen to the prophets.
They wouldn’t listen to Moses and Joshua. They wouldn’t listen to David. And they wanted to do their own thing.
And so what the Lord says is they had a living system. And they exchanged it for a broken. They had living water, rather, and they exchanged it for a broken system.
They had that which could give them life. They had that which would reveal to them a wonderful relationship with God and would show them His purpose for them as a nation and show them how they were to be the light to the world of who He was, that the whole world could realize that God was real. Because they all had their false gods, but instead they traded living water for broken systems.
When I grew up on the farm, the reason I’m missing a finger is because it’s got a system. Our well on our farm was not good. The water was terrible.
But my uncle, who lived about three miles away, had a really good way. And so my dad put in a cistern, and he’d haul water to the cistern from my uncle’s well and pour the water in the cistern. The only problem with a cistern is there’s not fresh water coming in there on a consistent basis.
I remember as a kid you’d go out by where the cistern was and you’d find salamanders. There’d be salamanders crawling around out there. And I didn’t think about it as a kid.
I think about it now. Those salamanders were probably in the cistern. There’s other things in the cistern.
And that’s the water that we were drinking. We didn’t have a good well. Israel had a good well.
Living water. God would set them free from their sin. God was revealing to them the coming Messiah.
God was going to show them through Daniel how all of the wickedness in the world would be dealt with on a final day of judgment. And then his righteousness would rule forever. And they were the beginning to show the world all of this.
And they had it. But they traded that living water for a broken cistern that couldn’t even hold water. Worse than the one we had on the farm that just had salamanders.
So if you go back to Daniel, he said it’s interesting. In the first place, in verse 7, he says, “O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto thee, but unto us confusion of faces, as at this day to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to all of Israel.” Why did it belong to them? Because all of them had rebelled against God.
To all of Israel, the northern kingdom rebelled first. The northern kingdom embraced, they, throughout the history of the northern kingdom, when the kingdom, when they had the civil war and they had Judah and Israel, the northern kingdom of Israel never had one good king. Every king introduced greater and greater degrees of depravity and false worship and false gods and occultic things and doctrines of demons than the last king.
And he led the people away from worshiping the true.
And they were observing what was happening to Israel. They were observing how God’s judgment was coming down. And ultimately the Assyrians came as God’s judgment to take them away and there was no deliverance.
They saw it all. Yet what did they do? They did the same thing. They embraced false gods, but they did one even worse.
They took their gods and synchronized the true and the living God with the false gods that they brought in and tried to make these false gods part of their religion in worshiping the true God. It got so bad that during the time of Manasseh, they actually put idols in the temple and had worship to false gods going on in the temple. And he’s saying, you can’t understand what the problem is, but yet you saw what happened to Israel and you can’t understand that it’s happening to you as well.
And he goes on and he says in verse , O Lord, to us belong confusion of faces to our kings, to our princes, to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee. He’s saying the ones that should have been there to protect us weren’t there to protect us. Notice the three groups that he says belong confusion of faces? Kings, the political leaders, prophets, the religious leaders, fathers, the family leaders.
God had established them to always give proper direction to the nation of Israel. Yet we see they didn’t. They were confused.
They couldn’t understand why the false prophecies weren’t coming through, why their deliverance wasn’t coming, even when they were taken into captivity. Well, the Lord’s coming tomorrow. He’s going to send our deliverers tomorrow.
That’s what the prophets are saying. I want you to see that the church is following the same direction. We have political leaders today that promise us deliverance.
And it appeared that things are going the way that the Bible would say, but all of a sudden, instead of honoring Israel who God loves, we’re making deals with the enemies of Israel who want their sole goal is to destroy Israel. And our political leaders are making alignments where we’re going to protect these governments. But what about our religious leaders? Our religious leaders talk about revival, which is a good thing.
The church needs revival. But then they introduce false religions and say that they are true Christianity and say revival’s occurring. And yet you see today that the average church is no different than it was before this revival was supposed to happen.
And nobody speaks out against things. Did you know that I saw a video that this one church after Charlie Kirk was killed, they went to AI and had AI give a message from Charlie Kirk from heaven via AI. You know what that’s called? It’s called necromancy.
Necromancy is the AI. We can be tech now. We don’t just go to a medium any longer to get involved with necromancy.
We go to AI. You know what was really sad? This was a supposed Bible-believing Baptist church, a large one down south that did this. Their pastor played it for the people on Sunday morning.
And it sounded just like Charlie Kirk. And he said, don’t worry about me. I’m in heaven.
I want to tell you, my Bible tells me I am not supposed to be speaking with the dead. It’s called necromancy. It’s an abomination to the Lord.
Do you know what happened? The church stood up and gave a standing ovation at the end of this AI speech. That’s our religious leaders saying Catholicism is biblical Christianity, saying Mormonism is biblical Christianity, and saying biblical Christianity’s got a problem because they’re too narrow. But what about the people? What about the fathers? You know, the church today needs to get its act together in the family.
And I’m thankful for the young men of our fellowship who want to take seriously the responsibility of raising their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. But I haven’t heard too many people out there talking about, well, maybe it’s more important that I keep my kids home on Sunday to take them to church than to go to another hockey or football or basketball camp or tournament five states away for the weekend. And then what’s happening is you look at what’s happening in our culture.
And we have a mayor that’s elected in New York who’s a Muslim, who hates Israel, who has avowed that if Benjamin Netanyahu comes to the United Nations to speak, he will have him arrested and turned over to the Hague for criminal charges. And his ultimate goal is to implement a form of Sharia law. And you’ve got corruption throughout the land, and people can understand why it’s happening.
Confusion of faces. Just like Israel. Why are we being attacked by Babylon? Why is he carrying us away? Well, he’s going to come and deliver us.
God will not deliver you if you’re truly not repentant and truly seeking him and walking with him. Deliverance was going to come when Israel would turn to the water. When we get back into the last portion of chapter nine, we’re going to be looking at the weeks of Daniel.
And God reveals to Daniel this whole weeks of years, which is years, which are to come against the nation of Israel because of the rebellion. And it’s not going to be completed until the end of the years. And we’re going to be looking at that years in depth.
But the nation of Israel thought it was coming tomorrow. And the amazing thing is, as they were looking and listening to the false prophets, they kept going about doing their normal thing and their normal rebellion. When rebellion was the whole purpose that they were being placed under this year period before God would finally deal with the rebellion of the world and deliver the Jewish people completely.
The Christians of America need to understand we are not Israel, but God deals with sin the same way. And he takes it seriously when we place other gods alongside him. And when we trust in false prophets and false religious leaders and false religious systems and do that which is an abomination to the Lord and then expect God’s deliverance and blessing, I fear for our nation.
If the Christians of America do not get serious and understand it, there is no hope for America if people really don’t repent and turn back to God. And God is the one who’s the power, not the political leaders, not the religious leaders, but God. I trust that you do not have confusion of faces this morning, but that you are following the Lord and understanding and listening to the words of the Apostle Paul where he says that we are to understand the day in which we live.
We are to be like those that know what’s happening in the day. We are to walk circumspectly, observing what’s happening around us and understand the deceits of Satan that he comes to try and get us off track and off focus and not following the Lord. And if you listen to the Apostle Paul and realize that every one of us has been called to run the race, to keep our eyes on the mark, and to hear the words at the end, well done, thou good and faithful servant, and that our faith and trust is in God and not in the gods of this world.
Let’s just close in prayer. Father, I pray that you just help us understand this, help us to apply this to our lives. This we ask in Jesus’ name, Amen.