God’s Word for You
Daniel 9:17-18 Plea for mercy
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Wednesday, December 17, 2025
17 Now O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his cry for mercy. For your own sake, O Lord, let your face shine upon your desolated sanctuary. 18 Turn your ear to us, O my God, and hear. Open your eyes and look at our desolation and the city that bears your name. It is not on account of our righteousness that we fall to the ground to plead for mercy, but on account of your great compassion.
Daniel describes his prayer in two ways. It is a tepillah, a special prayer of intercession, prayed on behalf of someone else. This is the word that is used twice in Psalm 102:17, “He will respond to the prayer of the destitute, he will not despise their plea.”
His prayer is also a tachanun, a supplication or plea for mercy, as in Psalm 86:6, “listen to my cry for mercy.” We also hear this in Jeremiah 3:21, “the pleading of the people.”
Both of these are prayers for the nation. This includes the people of the exile, but also the people back home who were the remnant left behind by Nebuchadnezzar to scratch out a living from the ruins of Judah. He asks God to looks at the desolation of the sanctuary and the desolation of the city—the city that bears God’s name. He happens to use language that might be called wordplay elsewhere, but here he is so passionate and so humble that I strongly resist using such a term here. He says “desolation” (shamem) and the city that bears God’s “name” (shem). Today I think we would add, “no pun intended.” This is no place to look for such things the way that we do when a prophet is showing contempt for the sins of the nations, the way Micah does in the first chapter of his book (Micah 1:10, 1:11, 1:12, and so on). Daniel is pouring out his heart.
Paul urges, “At every opportunity, pray in the Spirit with every kind of prayer and petition. Stay alert for the same reason, always persevering in your intercession for all the saints” (Ephesians 6:18). For the people of God have trials and trouble today just as they did in Daniel’s time. He might have thought, “No one has ever known grief and sorrow like this!” And we might dare to say, “No one has ever been as crushed, troubled and frightened as we are!” And to get our attention where it needs to be, God strikes us with trials, so that we will not be tempted to try and accomplish anything for our souls with our own effort or strength. Luther went as far as saying, “For that reason there is need of Satan, trials, heretics, and the cross. Here you see the reason why God besets his saints with so many trials, so that they may learn to put their trust in God. Indeed, he cannot do otherwise. ‘I need to teach them thus by my alien work’” (LW 17:50). His “alien work” is the work that is alien to us, to our reason, to our flesh, to our way of thinking or of doing. It is completely outside of us; this is why he calls it “alien” work. Daniel already understood this, which is why he prays the way he does. He knows full well that neither he nor any other person in Israel could do anything to reverse their plight, and so he prays: “Help us!”
All of our safety and protection in spiritual matters consist in prayer alone. “We are far too weak to cope with the devil and all his might and his forces arrayed against us, trying to trample us underfoot. Therefore we must carefully select the weapons with which Christians ought to arm themselves in order to stand against the devil” (Large Catechism, Lord’s Prayer III:30). Consider the man staring at the temptation that nags most at his flesh—bottle, pill, needle, woman who is not his wife, shady business opportunity, or whatever temptation there might be—what defense does he have against what God rightly and wisely calls the “inclination of his heart” (Genesis 8:21), which is to say, the way his body and desires and appetites lean? What has worked in the past against such temptations? Nothing from the flesh. We fall and we fall and we fall again. And so our great pastor, Dr. Luther, asks: “What do you think has accomplished such great results in the past, parrying the counsels and plots of our enemies and checking their murderous and seditious designs by which the devil expected to crush us, and the Gospel as well, except that the prayers of a few godly men intervene like an iron wall on our side?” (III:31). Whenever a good Christian prays, “Dear Father, your will be done,” God replies from heaven, “Yes, dear child, it shall indeed be done in spite of the devil and all the world.”
And the Father does not say this alone. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are always in perfect agreement in everything. We see this most clearly in the will of the Trinity regarding our salvation. “The entire holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, directs all people to Christ as to the book of life in whom they are to seek the Father’s eternal election. For the Father has decreed from eternity that whomever he would save he would save through Christ, as Christ himself says, ‘I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved’ (John 10:9).”
Therefore we plead for God’s favor through Christ alone. We beg his favor to forgive our private sins first, so that we may bring cries for mercy for the sins and troubles of other people next. “Each of us should form the habit from his youth up to pray daily for all his needs, whenever he is aware of anything that affects him or other people around him, such as preachers, magistrates, neighbors, servants; and, as we have said, he should always remind God of his commandment and promise, knowing that he will not have them despised” (Large Catechism, Lord’s Prayer III:28).
Let us never be “untaught to plead for favour,” but to practice every day after our own confession of sins to intercede for the sins of our loved ones, as Job did (Job 1:5), with the result that when we must kneel to beg God’s mercy for still more, whether a church, an army, a nation, or the whole human race, we will find that we are in good practice, in both knees and words, to say what must be said. For in all things, we pray first of all (as the preacher does when he steps into the pulpit) for ourselves, and next for all those we love.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.