So shall I have wherewith to answer him that reproacheth me: for I trust in thy word Psalm 119;142

Corporately One

In Daniel 9 we climb up out of the smoggy valley of usual thinking into a mountain-top vista. Daniel sees something we normally don't see. He is confessing the sins of other people as though they were his own and yet he hasn't done any of them! Skeptics dismiss the miracles of the Old Testament yet here is one they cannot evade an innocent human being is taking upon himself the responsibility of shocking sins and crimes perpetrated centuries before his time. He is praying, O God, forgive ME of all those awful things that King Manasseh did! Cleanse ME of King Zedekiah's crime when he broke his solemn oath to Nebuchadnezzsar! "WE have sinned and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled. . . Neither have WE obeyed the voice of the Lord our God" (vss 5-10).

Normally we feel that each of us has enough sins of his own to worry about; why take upon ourselves those of others? How and why did Daniel come to this unusual insight?

(1) He had caught a glimpse of reality: the sins of other people are indeed our sins because we share the guilt as members of a common fallen human race. What's involved in Daniel's thinking is the idea of the message of Christ's righteousness; not one of us has any of his own. Wow! is this ever a bitter pill for self-righteous Christians to swallow!

(2) If we had no Savior from sin, we would be capable of any sin or crime because of our corporate oneness with the human race. In Bible thinking, the human race is one man and his name is Adam. No one has even 1% of innate righteousness; it has to be 100% imputed from Christ, the second Adam. What saves us from being one of those head-hunting Dayaks of Borneo or one of those Nazis is not merely the lucky accident of being born and reared in a different culture; the truth is that we all need a Savior from the sinful nature that all humans have "in Adam."

(3) Daniel broke through the fog enough to see this. He sang Watts' hymn, "I pour contempt on all my pride!" He sincerely thanked God for the Savior's righteousness.

(4) Daniel's prayer expressing corporate repentance anticipated Christ's taking upon Himself the guilt of the sins of the whole world. How can an innocent Person do that? Well, you and I have only just begun to live when we can climb out of the smog and pray Daniel's prayer in fellowship with Christ. Today we can sense that the sin of those who wrong us is in reality our own sin also but for the grace of Christ.

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