Blameless

As I read through Daniel, my respect for that man is growing tremendously. When reading Ezekiel, I had to do a double take. Two times in Ezekiel, it holds up Daniel as the epitome of Righteousness next to Noah and Job. Another time it holds him up as the epitome of wisdom.

What struck me upon finding that was that Daniel and Ezekiel were contemporaries. The events of Daniel were going on during the writing of Ezekiel. Ezekiel began writing only 12 years after Daniel was sent into Babylonian captivity. If it is true that Daniel was only 15-16 (as some have suggested) when he was sent into captivity, this would mean that he could have been about my age or just a little older when God, through Ezekiel, compared his righteousness with that of Noah and Job.

Equally impressive is the fact that even though the 120 or so satraps were doing their best to find some dirt on Daniel, they came up empty handed and said, "We will never find any basis for charges against this man Daniel unless it has something to do with the law of his God." (ch 6:5)

This contrasts starkly with political candidates today. No matter how good a candidate appears, there is always some dirt that can be dug up against him/her. But not with Daniel, he was truly blameless.

I sometimes wonder what they would dig up on me if I ran for office. I can certainly think of several things that would be shameful enough to get me disqualified from running, but I wonder how they could find it.

There is one who can always find the dirt on me. He always throws it in my face to discourage me from running my race. He even points these fallacies out to God so that I will lose my election.

However...

I have one who stands in my defense, one who is blameless in every way. He does not listen to the accusations, not because he thinks I would never do such a thing, he knows, he just refuses to let me be bound by my failures. He has set me free, he has washed me, he has declared that I am BLAMELESS.